Cytonic (The Skyward Series Book 3)

I grabbed my makeshift club, which I’d dropped near the front of the cavern, and stumbled out onto the loamy ground. Chet joined me, unsteady on his feet, holding on to the wooden supports at the mouth of the cavern.

Another fragment had collided with the one we were on. It looked smaller than ours, but thicker and more dense. Like a battleship made of stone.

“How did you miss that?” I demanded of Chet, pointing across the green field to the place where the two fragments were mashed together.

“I have no idea!” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!”

The ground shifted again as the “battleship” fragment shoved farther into ours, causing dirt to roll and stone to crunch. Our fragment was pushed along with it, like an old ship being pushed by a tug—a really aggressive tug with its boosters on overburn.

The chaos sent me to my knees. Scud, the entire fragment was shaking terribly. On Detritus I would have thought a thousand meteors were striking at once.

Chet grabbed me by the arm and helped me to my feet.

“How do we get off!” I shouted at him over the noise of rock crushing.

“I don’t know!” he yelled back. “There aren’t any nearby fragments!”

I struggled for balance but pointed at the “battleship” fragment. “There is one other place to go!”

“It’s trying right now to destroy us,” Chet yelled. “I don’t know that I consider it an option!”

“I’m very angry too!” M-Bot shouted from behind me. “I thought you should know, since it seems like we’re sharing!”

“Options?” I shouted at him.

“For being angry? I’ve always liked raw fury, but indignation has a certain bold flavor too, don’t you think?”

“M-Bot!”

“Sorry!” he shouted. “My databases say the proper behavior during an earthquake is to either get outside—which we’ve obviously scored good marks on, since we’re literally outside our own universe—or get to a place where nothing can fall on us. This seems to work. Yay us. Oh! And I’m not mad any longer. Wow. Do emotions always pass this quickly?”

Well, maybe the collision would subside now that we’d survived the initial impact. I looked up across the grass. The ground continued to tremble, and something else bothered me. Something I couldn’t immediately define. It was…

“The water,” I said, pointing. “The lake is empty. What happened to the water?”

“It must have drained out the bottom!” Chet said. “The fragments aren’t made entirely from acclivity stone—some have more, others less. I have hypothesized that it influences how fast they move.”

“The one crashing into us is more solid then?” I said. “It must have come up quickly, if you didn’t spot it.”

“Precisely!” Chet said. “Our current one looks to be mostly soil, so the bottom of the lake must have given out.”

That bothered me. I mean, these fragments were already playing with my brain. I perpetually felt like I was walking across unstable footing. As I scanned the fragment, my fears became manifest.

Rifts appeared in the soil. Widening cracks like bolts of lightning moved across the once-tranquil prairie. In these lines the soil and grass vanished, sinking out of sight.

“It’s breaking apart,” I said, forcing myself to keep my feet despite the shaking.

“Scrud!” Chet said. Ahead of us an entire section of the grassland fell away, leaving a gaping hole. “I suggest a hasty actualization of your earlier plan. We must get onto that more solid fragment!”

We dashed away from the tunnel with the portal, and it collapsed in a roar behind me. The ground, which had once felt soft and springy, now felt treacherous.

“M-Bot,” I shouted. “Stick the light-line to my back. If I jump or fall, pull upward with every bit of lift you’ve got.”

“I’m not powerful enough to carry you!”

“I don’t expect you to!”

As he complied, I tried to maintain a jog, but the tremors kept knocking me off balance. Chet wasn’t faring much better; ahead of me a particularly violent quake sent him sprawling, and then a rift opened between us.

He glanced toward me with alarm.

I jumped.

Obligingly M-Bot moved upward, pulling the light-line taut. While he couldn’t lift me completely, his efforts did add to my spring. I’d trained in low-g, and this wasn’t much different, so I knew how to compensate. I spanned the widening chasm and landed next to Chet.

“Marvelous!” he said as I pulled him to his feet. Together we charged toward the fragment that was causing all of this. But abruptly Chet grabbed my arm and hauled me back, halting my run as a hole opened up right in front of us, dirt pouring down like it had liquefied.

Scud. I glanced to Chet with thanks, and he pointed to the side. We scrambled that direction, rounding the hole, and reached the far edge of the fragment.

Here the ground was bunched up, the earth piled in an enormous furrow. “Get that light-line off me and attach it somewhere up above!” I shouted to M-Bot.

He zipped up to the top and attached the line, then returned trailing the red-orange rope. I looked to Chet, who nodded, grabbing the light-line. “Just like climbing to the top of Mount Rigby!” he said. “Highest point on the fragments!” He glanced at the bunched-up soil. “Only perhaps more squishy!”

“Less heroic explorer talk!” I shouted. “More climbing!”

As if to punctuate my words, a vast section of the ground behind us fell away.

“Point taken,” Chet said, then began ascending the high furrow of trembling soil. His feet sank in, making it an obvious struggle. Fortunately, there were chunks of stone to use as footholds; he proved his skill in climbing as he located them.

I followed him up, and my lighter weight was an advantage. When I’d been younger I’d imagined growing to Amazonian heights to become a fierce swordswoman—and then I’d run out of centimeters. Instead I’d taken to imagining myself as so small that giants underestimated me, so I could therefore scamper up their backs and stab them in the ears.

There weren’t many giants to slay, but I got mileage out of my size today as I limberly scrambled up the mound of dirt, barely needing the light-line. Then I helped pull Chet out of a mire—it was tough with the dirt sliding around us. But together we managed to reach the top.

M-Bot hovered up from below. Worn out and filthy, the three of us stumbled up to a high point on the new fragment. It looked like a blasted-out landscape, ashen and cracked—but it was solid.

The fragment we’d left was in utter turmoil. Little patches of grass peeked through the churning dirt—like sections of unburned skin on the face of a pilot who had died in a crash. Those were quickly vanishing as our current fragment pushed forward. Dirt fell away in vast swaths, with chunks of acclivity stone drifting off to the sides.

In minutes, the entire fragment was gone save for some chunks of dirt stuck to the front where we stood.

“I would not believe this if I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand,” Chet whispered. “Miss Nightshade, I’ve never seen such an event.”

“Fragments don’t often collide?” I asked.

“On occasion, they bump at speed,” he said, “but I’ve never experienced anything more fearsome than a short jolt.” He put his hand to his head. “It’s as if the nowhere itself is trying to kill us.”

Great. Jumping into a dimension literally controlled by beings that hated me might not have been my smartest decision ever. Then again, I had genuinely needed to see that vision at the portal. So…yeah. Frying pans, fires, all that. As long as there was some warmth and I could roast some rats.

“I feel bad about the portal,” I said. “Those memories, lost…”

“All memories are lost eventually,” Chet said. “I agree this is a tragedy—but I prefer to keep my head high.” He dusted off his trousers, shook some dirt from his jacket, then smiled at me. “Think of it this way. We survived again, and we began the Path. I shall count it as a grand victory!”

“We need to get farther into pirate territory to get to the next stop though.”

“Indeed,” he said, pointing. “That direction.” Our current fragment floated perpendicular to that, so I supposed it could be worse. “We’d have to cross dozens upon dozens of fragments, however, to reach those ruins on foot.”

“So…” I said. “Time to restart Operation Ship-Steal?”

He smiled, turning and pointing a slightly different direction. “The Broadsider home base is perhaps two days’ travel. I shall need a short time, Miss Nightshade, to use my powers and devise a path forward. We may not be able to go directly; it will depend on the timing of the intersection of the fragments.”

“Let’s hope,” I said, “that no more of them intersect as violently as this one.”