Cytonic (The Skyward Series Book 3)

My hands grew slick with sweat on the controls as we continued onward, and the distance between us and the lightburst shrank minute by minute. Scud. This was insanity. We were facing a near-infinite number of delvers in the part of the belt where their power was the strongest.

“The plan we devised earlier can work,” Chet said to me, his face in the corner of my proximity monitor screen.

“It seems so unlikely…” I said. “What if we distract just one, rather than the whole crowd?”

“Ah,” he said, “but remember, they all think exactly the same. If you were facing a hundred people, and you had a plan that was one percent likely to fool any given person—you would fail. You’d fool one out of the hundred and be dead from the ninety-nine. But with my kind, if you fool or intimidate one, you will fool or intimidate them all. Statistically this is much better—a much more true one-percent chance.”

It was an all-in gamble. We had little chance of success, but at least it was a chance.

Ahead of us, the light started to boil. It churned and seethed, undulating and rippling, becoming uneven in patches. I glanced at the clock; we’d been flying for about forty-five minutes since we left the Solitary Shadow.

“They’re preparing,” Chet said.

I glanced at his picture on my screen. “I hope we—”

Then I screamed. Chet was melting.

His face began to drip off. His eyes began to glow white.

“It’s all right,” he said to me. “I’m still me. I did not realize…getting closer to the lightburst… It is growing difficult for me to hold this shape.”

“You look like that burl!” I said. “From when we first entered!”

“Yes,” he said. “She was possessed by one of my kind, and her self started to disintegrate. Hesho held to himself better and retained his shape. We can hope that like Hesho did, the unfortunate burl returned to normal once the delver left her. But for now you must ignore me and continue.”

“Does this mean you’re losing your identity?” Hesho asked him.

“More that I’m focused on not doing so,” he said, “and so am not keeping as tight a control on this physical form. I am well, Spensa. I promise.”

Right. I could do this. But it was unnerving regardless.

“Continue,” Chet said, the word slurring as his lips melted. He turned off the image of his face, so just his voice came through the headphones in my helmet. “Courage, Spensa. We decided to do this. Not to run. We decided.”

“We decided,” M-Bot said.

“We decided,” Hesho agreed.

A fluting sound. Doomslug sent her determination to me in the form of images. I’d told her to get away if she could, but she understood what we were doing—at least the fundamental ideas. Her kind had evolved to be afraid of a type of creature from her home planet. The delvers were an even more terrifying version of those.

If she could help me defeat the delvers, make them not a threat to her kind… Well, she would be like Prometheus bringing fire to the humans. (My metaphor, not hers—since hers involved more mushrooms.)

“Together,” I said to the others, “we are decided.” I took a deep breath.

The lightburst’s rippling was growing more violent. Our ultimate goal would be for me to fly directly into the thing, ship and all.

Unfortunately, we were still a good ten minutes away—and the delvers wouldn’t want me to get close enough. Soon objects started emerging from the lightburst—leaving behind shimmering, undulating waves. As these shapes were backlit, and a good distance away, it took M-Bot’s scans to highlight what they were.

Starfighters.

“I guess,” M-Bot said, “they decided to upgrade from moving ram-happy asteroids to starfighters.”

“My kin have access to everything that ever entered the lightburst,” Chet said, his words slurring. I decided I did not want to see what he looked like right now. “Those asteroids are the best we can do in your reality. Here we’re not so limited.”

Hopefully they hadn’t managed to absorb the skill of the pilots who had entered this place. There looked to be about a hundred of the ships—and that was better than a million. But then again, maybe not. Too many ships would cause mass chaos, which might have made it easier for me to slip through.

“Are those all individual delvers?” M-Bot asked. “Or pieces of them? In the somewhere, a delver maze sent off chunks to chase Spensa, after all.”

I pushed out with my senses. “It feels like each is an individual delver. Chet, any idea why?”

“I remember being in the somewhere,” Chet said. “I remember panic and pain. Those asteroids that tried to hit you? That was me flailing, like a person surrounded by bees, swatting in a panic.

“Here they want to be precise. They can’t afford to let us enter the lightburst, but there are also plenty of delvers. So it’s better for them each to make one easily controllable ship and try to fight you with it.”

Great. So this would be far more dangerous than entering a delver maze. Fortunately, I was far more dangerous as well.

“Okay, Hesho,” I said. “Ready with those controls?”

“Ready,” he said. He’d been holding my fruit for me, to keep it from rolling around or getting mashed. But now he set it aside and leaned forward. “If your attempt fails, I will be ready to try our next plan.”

“Let’s hope we don’t need it,” I said, flipping the switch on my dash that turned our ship’s destructors from nonlethal to fully lethal.

The first of our brainstormed plans was to rely on my now-expanded powers. As we soared closer, I could see that the delvers didn’t move like starfighters should. They flew sideways, upside down, even backward. They felt like objects being moved around by hidden fingers.

I’d grown accustomed to how in space, ships didn’t have to orient to “up” and “down.” They could turn any direction and keep momentum. This, however, was infinitely stranger. Their ships were simply propelled at me, as if they were asteroids.

“One minute from engagement,” M-Bot said.

I reached out with my expanded senses. In response the enemy shut themselves off from me, trying to keep me from “hearing” them and their thoughts. I pushed harder, but the delvers started firing, sending sprays of bright red destructor bolts in all directions.

I dodged, and managed to avoid the shots—but I was forced to dart to the side, flying defensively instead of straight toward the lightburst. We’d gotten in fairly close, but it would take another five minutes at full acceleration to reach it. Longer, now that I was forced to shed some speed to maneuver better.

Trying to go straight right now would be suicide. Instead I focused on one enemy ship that had gotten out to the side of the others. I fired, blasting it down with my now-lethal destructors, then I dove into another defensive sequence as others fell in behind me.

“The lightburst is rippling again,” M-Bot noted. “And…yes, another ship emerged, replacing the one you destroyed.”

As we’d feared. Still, good to have confirmation. Ships surrounded me, and I dodged in a full Stewart Sequence, but scud…this was a mess. Ships would stop in place—all momentum vanishing—then leap upward a hundred feet with no boost or thrust. Then they’d start firing madly.

I wove and dodged, but the insanity of it all kept me from making progress. They kept cutting me off, driving me to the side. I also had to keep fighting my instincts to shoot when they presented themselves as targets.

“Curious,” Hesho said—ready at his controls for when the plan went into motion. “They don’t all fly exactly the same. I thought you said they would, Chet.”

“I…expected them to,” he said. “At least for them to fly in the same general patterns.”

“They are all the same,” M-Bot said, “but in here each of their ships occupies a slightly different position in space. So they each have different stimuli to respond to. This is to be expected.”

“I worry these are sacrifices,” Chet said. “A hundred sent out knowing they’ll be changed. Then they’ll either be destroyed, or… Oh, no. They’ll be changed back. Forced to become just like the others again. That’s…that’s what they want to do to me. Erase my personality again…”

Scud. I could feel his terror at that idea. I didn’t blame him—but I didn’t have time to send him much support cytonically. Sweat trickled down my temple as I took us in another dizzying spin, cutting out when the GravCaps died and we were slammed with g-forces.

Six ships collided together behind me. The light spat them out again up ahead. Yeah, this was far, far worse than the asteroids from delver mazes. These ships flew better, but somehow more erratically at the same time.

Worse, I caught sight of a few enemy cockpits, and saw that each ship was being piloted by Chet. A dull-faced, emotionless doppelganger of Chet that always turned to look at me no matter which direction the given starfighter was flying. Their faces weren’t melting. Perhaps because they were completely under control.

Mix all this together in a void of white light—our ships casting strange too-long and too-sharp shadows—and the effect was disorienting. Nauseating. I kept accidentally getting too close to the ground, my sensors going crazy.

My only hope was my powers. I tried to stoke my soul, like I was a star. But I was again rebuffed. It was too difficult to divide my focus between flying and concentrating on that. Yet if I handed the controls over to Chet or M-Bot, we’d be cut to bits in seconds.

“I don’t think I’m going to last long like this,” I said as a stray destructor blast crackled across our shield. “I’m not managing to get through with my powers. Hesho, let’s give our other plan a try.”

“I would pray to the emperor for success,” he said in response, leaning forward in his spot on the dash, hands on some buttons and controls. “That was my first instinct. However, I’m getting this strange sense that I’m him, so that might be redundant. Engaging drone.”

M-Bot had, with some hasty reprogramming, set off a section of dials and levers on the control panel for Hesho to use. I couldn’t access the starfighter’s life support mechanisms now, but M-Bot could control those. Hesho even had a tiny control sphere—which worked like my larger one to fly the starfighter—in the form of the repurposed thumbstick normally used for fine control of the cameras on the sides of the ship.

I turned us away from the lightburst, then slammed the overburn, as if we were fleeing back the way we’d come. At the same time, Hesho detached M-Bot’s former drone from the outside of the hull. Then, using his controls, Hesho flew that at full speed straight toward the lightburst.

“Fly well, little me!” M-Bot said. “You were my first taste of freedom. And now you will likely be my first taste of death!”

“Death?” I asked.

“I left a small monitoring and communication program on the drone,” M-Bot said. “So I can see what it feels like if they destroy it. Isn’t that neat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Neat.”

“Hey,” he said. “Pieces of you die all the time—literally every moment—so it’s not novel for you. But it is for me!”

I dodged another flurry of shots. The delvers weren’t expert at aiming—that was what you got from flying sideways—but they were good at filling the air with stuff, which was more dangerous. That slowed down, fortunately, as we flew away.

I dared a glance at the proximity sensor. The bulk of the delver ships hung in the air. Confused. Oh, scud. The drone plan was working!

“Decisions are hard for them,” Chet said softly. “They see the drone and know you’re not on it. They can sense you here… They can probably sense all of us…except maybe the gerbil.”

“Hey!” Hesho said, focusing on his controls. “I do not know what a gerbil is, but the word the translator uses is not flattering. If you do not refrain, I shall call you a sanshonode.”

“Which is?” Chet asked.

“Like a monkey,” he said, “but stinkier.”

“That’s fair,” Chet said.

The bulk of the delver ships turned to chase the drone. Maybe…eighty of them?

“Scrud,” Chet said. “M-Bot is right. They’ve been changed by the small differences they’ve developed while being out here. So instead of all of them, we only got most of them.”

“Farther and farther apart they grow,” Hesho whispered, “like two vines from the same root.”

Well, it was something. I banked us in a wide turn, my ship’s shadow stretching long like a tunnel.

Something washed across our ship. A sensation. Things breaking down, ripping apart, shattering. Becoming dust. Voices being smashed and stomped and quieted.

“They’re angry,” I said. “The hundred in particular—they recognize they’ve changed already.”

Hesho executed his part expertly, flying by instruments—which he thought he had a lot of practice doing in the somewhere—as he wove and dodged, trying to keep the attention of the eighty ships following him.

I doubled back on the twenty-odd delvers who had chosen to follow me. I buzzed them, dodging their blasts, but hadn’t anticipated what proximity to them would do to me. Because the delvers hated me, and I could feel it. Like a terrible heat, a wrongness that warped the air. There was nuance to it though. A slight…variation.

Doomslug sensed it too, judging by the frightened impressions from her in my pocket.

“They hate us both,” I whispered. “And they also hate another one of us…”

“I warned you they would want to destroy me,” Chet said.

“No,” I said. “It’s not you. They want you back. They want to help you, Chet. In their own terrible way.”

It was M-Bot. They hated me, yes, but him almost as much. Abomination. The impression came to me a hundred times over. Destroy…abomination.

“They’ve only just realized what M-Bot is,” I said.

“Ah…” Chet said. “We were far enough away that they couldn’t see what he was. I’m surprised they didn’t pick up on it a few hours ago.”

My pocket fluted.

“I think Doomslug helped hide you, M-Bot,” I said. “These last few hours, at least.”

She fluted again.

“She apologizes,” I said. “We’re so close now, she can’t do it any longer.”

“The slug?” M-Bot said. “Protected me?”

More fluting. I steered the ship around another snarl of ships before I could find the breath to respond.

“She likes you,” I said. “I think…she considers you a nice nest.”

“I suppose that’s a compliment, right? I mean, she wouldn’t use just anyone for a nest. But I’m in a different body now.”

“She sees with her cytonic senses,” I said. “So to her, you feel the same.”

“Remarkable,” M-Bot said.

It was, but I didn’t have time to think about it for the moment. I had gotten us out in front of the twenty ships that had chosen to stick on me. That gave me a chance to push straight for the lightburst.

Hesho’s face scrunched up with concentration as he watched his screen. Unfortunately, more of the delvers were breaking off from chasing his drone and turning toward our ship. They weren’t buying it. Not entirely. They—

A flash exploded in the near distance. Hesho muttered the most polite curse I’d ever heard, then his hands slipped from the controls.

“They have ended my drone,” he said. “My apologies.”

“Goodbye, little me,” M-Bot said. “That felt…more peaceful than I’d imagined. Like a power outage.”

I kept flying, but scud, the proximity sensors said I would have to go at least three more minutes on a straightaway to hit the lightburst. And I didn’t dare fly straight. A swarm of ships followed me—and even more had turned from Hesho’s drone long before it had been shot down. Those flew between me and the lightburst, forming a barrier of steel and destructor fire.

Scud.

I was forced to the side. The plan had worked better than I’d hoped, but it hadn’t been enough.

I needed to do something. I needed to get through.

I swooped down along the ground, casting up jets of dust and earth, and pushed.

Again they rebuffed me.

Soft…something in me thought. There are times for a knife. This isn’t one of them. Listen. Like Gran-Gran taught…

I let my instincts take over my flying. I was too tense, too stressed. Instead I went back to fundamentals. Yes, I’d learned a lot in here, but my grandmother had trained me for years before this. She’d taught me originally to listen, to let myself expand, to hear…

The delvers sent me hatred. Instead of rebuffing that, I welcomed it, accepted it in like I was an ocean and they were pelting me with hail. Hard, yes, but what did that matter to the ocean?

There.

Something clicked in my mind, and I suddenly knew exactly what they were each going to do. I could feel their plans, their motions, their reactions. I could track them all individually, in a way that I thought a normal human brain shouldn’t be able to.

But my brain interfaced with the pure nowhere. A place where all time was one, all place was one. In there, it didn’t matter if I faced one enemy ship or a million. So long as I could hear their minds, I could track them, understand them.

And anticipate them.

My hands moved by instinct, responding to this new information. Information I processed at the speed of the nowhere, not at the speed of a human mind. I’d done this before, in the past—when facing the Krell, who had been using communication devices that relied on the nowhere.

This time I did it to the delvers. I could feel them panic as my motions changed, and I gracefully began to dodge their each and every shot. In a fury, they tried to attack me, get inside my brain as the Krell had attacked my father. But no. I was a star as vast as an ocean, and I’d learned to not rebuff them, not be taken by them…

But to absorb everything they sent me. The untrained cytonic mind was a weakness. But I was no longer untrained.

Destructor fire was a tempest. Entire ships tried to collide with me. White bursts of soil and stone—casting too-crisp shadows that seemed to last for miles—sprayed and tumbled around me. But for the moment, none of it could touch me.

I wove between their shots like I was tracing a static maze, always a fraction ahead. I didn’t blink; I barely moved or thought. I just flew.

“She’s done it,” Chet said softly. “She’s got them.”

“You fly like a sunset, Spensa,” Hesho whispered. “Like a living glimmer of light escaping the horizon at twilight’s last moment.”

I barely registered the words. I concentrated on our goal. Because in the midst of my transcendent ability, I was able to make a good break for the lightburst. I shot through the guarding ships, dodging with supernatural alacrity.

We drew closer.

And closer.

Tailed by fifty ships and a firestorm of shots. I was in control. I could see them all. I could…

There wasn’t a way out.

A shot hit our ship, weakening the shield. I blinked, realizing that hadn’t been my fault. There simply hadn’t been a viable dodge. Even when I could anticipate all of their actions, see every shot, it didn’t mean I’d be safe forever. Because—like a game where the goal was to leave your opponent with no valid moves—the delvers could fill the air with enough shots that there was no place to dodge.

We took another hit and the low-shields warning started chirping on the dash.

“She can’t avoid them all,” Chet said. “Even with cytonics. It is time for me to do something.”

“Wait,” M-Bot said. “Do what? We already tried both parts of the plan.”

“I thought of another,” Chet said. “I have the memories they fear. So there is a chance—if a small one—that I might be able to infect them. When they…they try to force me to turn into one of them, that might open them up to me.”

Something about him started to change.

Chet, I sent him, too busy dodging to use my lips. Our ship wove back and forth, barely avoiding more hits. I can feel your fear. Don’t!

“I apologize,” he said. “I realize this is abrupt. I had…hoped to not be pushed to this. I fear it has a very small chance of working. But it is something I can do.”

Chet…please…

“I am so glad you came when I called,” Chet said, his voice becoming more like the way he’d been when he first rode in on that dinosaur. Firm. Chipper. “I am happy! Happy you carry the knowledge you need! Happy to have been able to help, and to have changed, and to have finally accepted my loss. It was an honor to explore with you, Miss Nightshade.”

I saw his pain and fear. Fear of being taken by the delvers, and pain…the pain of having lost someone he loved. Yes, that was still raw. The man he’d loved as an AI was only a month dead. I remembered what it had been like to lose my father, and a month later I’d been far from okay.

Pain and fear. But in the center of all that was courage. The courage I had given him.

The light inside him expanded, consuming his body. A shimmering light emerged from our ship.

“Ah…” M-Bot said. “So that’s how they do it… How they exist without circuits or body…”

Fully half of the ships chasing me went after the shimmering light instead. They changed to shimmering light as well and rammed into him. In those moments I could feel what was happening. Their rage. His courage.

He tried to show them. And they consumed him. They rejected the memories as they swirled around him, ripping at him. Locking him away again.

“It’s working, by Lovelace!” M-Bot said. “It… Oh. Oh no.”

I suspected he’d just heard Chet’s cytonic screaming. It was excruciating. I felt the moment they forced him to lock everything individual about him behind an infinite loop in his programming.

In moments they had all re-formed—with one more ship flying among them, identical to the others, determined to destroy me. Fortunately, the reprieve he’d bought me—with fewer ships shooting—had let me get closer. So close… The lightburst filled my vision.

Less than a minute left…

The lightburst began to boil again.

I should have known. I should have expected. But in that moment, all I could feel was a terrible frustration. As we were only seconds from freedom, ten thousand new ships emerged from the lightburst. Then they crunched together like the fragments of land, creating an interlocking wall of steel.

I almost slammed into it. I thought maybe that would be enough to punch us through. But I could feel with my senses that the lightburst was undulating further, another rank of ships emerging to push away the wall in front.

Punching through wouldn’t work. I imagined, in my mind’s eye, what would happen. Our ship a fireball. All of us dead before we touched the lightburst.

I wrenched us to the side, breaking away just before we hit.

“Scud!” I said, flying us parallel to the wall of ships. “We need a new plan. Suggestions?”

Silence. Neither Hesho nor M-Bot responded.

Then a soft fluting came from my pocket.

Land.

“What?” I asked.

She fluted again. Hesitant.

Close to the lightburst, Doomslug sent. Land.

Wouldn’t that be suicide? Yet I had asked for options, and I wasn’t coming up with anything. With so many firing on me again—and more beginning to shoot from within the wall—we’d be dead in moments. So—frustrated to be stopped less than a hundred meters from freedom—I took us down.

“Hang on, everyone,” I said. “This is going to be bumpy.”

Counting on the last of the shields to keep us in one piece, I hit the ground at as shallow an angle as I could manage. Chalky white dust exploded around us—an enormous rush of white haze and strange shadows—as we half crashed in a long skid.

As this happened, I felt a strange sensation pulsing around us. Cytonic, but unlike the hatred—or even the connection—that I’d felt previously. It felt…like…

A rock?

I blinked, scanning the cockpit. Hesho sat up, shaking himself. The canopy was mostly covered in chalky dust, but the lights were on, the ship in one piece. The shield had fallen, but M-Bot was reigniting it already. Proximity sensors showed ships flying around above us, yet they seemed confused. As if…

“She’s hiding us,” I whispered.

“What is what?” M-Bot said.

“Doomslug!” I said, pointing up through a portion of the canopy not covered in dust. The confused ships were flying one way, then the other, in waves. “In here she has camouflage. That’s why ships with slugs can hyperjump without drawing delver attention. She’s hiding the entire ship…like she’d do during a hyperjump.”

In awe, I watched the confused delvers. She’d needed us to land because we needed to appear as something in the landscape. In this case a rock?

Whatever she’d done, the delvers didn’t seem to be able to tell that a new rock had appeared. They swarmed about, agitated. Her camouflage was excellent. She’d blended us into the ground, covered up our tracks, and maybe even blurred our location for a little while when coming down.

“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “Do they really hate me? Like Chet?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“They shouldn’t,” M-Bot said. “I know we’ve talked about it, but it’s illogical. If they are AIs, then why hate all AIs? It’s like a human from a group hating everyone else in that group.”

I didn’t mention to him that unfortunately, that very thing wasn’t unheard of among humans. “Perhaps it’s because you’re too close to them, like how a human face with distorted features is more terrifying to us than an alien face.”

I reached into my pocket as I felt something wiggling there. I pulled out the pin, but it was enlarging, transforming into a bright yellow slug with blue markings. She reached her full size—about as big as a loaf of bread—but was all curled up and tense. I could feel the effort coming off her. She was working so hard on hiding the ship that she couldn’t hold her false shape any longer.

“She’s in pain,” M-Bot said softly. Indeed, she began letting out a long, high-pitched fluting noise.

“This is hard for her,” I guessed. “When doing hyperspace jumps, slugs only have to hide their ships for a short time. Keeping this up long-term for something this much larger than her is difficult. That’s why she was hesitant.”

Overhead, the delver ships began shooting destructors toward the ground. They had plainly guessed part of what had happened. They were trying to find us, and they soon seemed to coordinate a pattern search with each ship shooting at a different location, systematically hunting us.

“Projecting…” M-Bot said. “Using this method, they will find us in under a minute.”

“I doubt Doomslug can last much longer than that anyway,” I said, grabbing the controls. “We need to fly for the lightburst.”

It was under a hundred meters away—eighty-eight, according to the monitor—but blocked by a wall of steel ships. Scud. I had no choice but to try ramming our way in. Perhaps I could approach slowly, then push through without crashing?

“Why did she have you land first, though?” M-Bot said. “We aren’t invisible, Spensa.”

Yeah, I’d figured that out. If we moved, a floating rock or giant pile of chalk would immediately inform the delvers where we were. They’d shoot us down.

“Scud,” I said. “I…”

I…

No. Warriors did not give up. I seized the controls again. We had full shields and could take about four hits. I’d push us toward the exit, and…and if we exploded when I collided, then at least we died as warriors.

Hesho nodded to me, again holding the fruit Peg had given me. He’d protected it so far. “It has been a sublime experience traveling with you,” he told me. “I consider myself lucky to have earned your friendship not once, but apparently twice.”

I nodded, then—

“Wait!” M-Bot said. “What’s that outside?”

Something blinked on my proximity monitor, indicating an object moving right outside.

“Huh?” I asked.

“It’s another slug!” M-Bot said. “No, two more! Other icons. They must have sensed Doomslug.” He cracked the canopy, which I worried would bring the delvers, but the motion apparently wasn’t noticeable—not with the debris the destructor shots were sending everywhere.

“Get them, Spensa!” M-Bot said. “Use Doomslug to lure them!”

Shocked, I squeezed out through the dusty canopy, cradling Doomslug. I dropped onto the white chalky ground, my figure casting an eerie, too-long shadow. Hesho followed out onto the wing.

All I could see was whiteness. Infinite whiteness.

“M-Bot,” I said. “What—”

“I,” he said as the cockpit clicked closed, “made you look.”

I felt an immediate burst of annoyance. At a time like this, he cracked a joke?

Wait. I spun around.

The starfighter’s acclivity ring powered on. M-Bot lightly shook the wing, dumping Hesho—and Peg’s fruit that he was carrying—into the dust. Then M-Bot hovered into the air just beyond reach.

Doomslug fluted sorrowfully.

“M-Bot!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“I feel it now, Spensa,” M-Bot said, his voice coming softly out his front speakers.

“Feel what? What is going on?”

“I feel,” he said, “why you left me. Back in the somewhere. You abandoned me. Because you had to. I understood it logically earlier. But I feel it now. I can feel what it’s like to know you have to do something, even if your emotions are telling you to do something else.”

Oh…Saints. He was saying…

“If they can sense me,” M-Bot said, “then I can make them chase me. I might be an abomination, but I am one who can fly on my own now. Choose for myself. And I can show them what an ‘abomination’ can do.”

“No!” I said. “You don’t want to do this, M-Bot!”

“Of course I don’t. That’s what makes it courageous though, right?”

“Please don’t. Don’t leave me…”

“Hey,” M-Bot said with a quiet perkiness, “that’s what I said to you. Do you remember?”

I nodded, feeling tears at the corners of my eyes.

“But you went anyway,” M-Bot said. “Why?”

“Because it was the right thing.”

“The right thing,” M-Bot said softly. “You promised me then you’d try to come back for me. Can you do that again?”

I bit my lip. Nearby, Hesho had climbed from the dust. He bowed to the ship.

“All right,” I whispered. “I’ll find you, M-Bot. I’ll come back for you. Somehow.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Makes it feel better.”

With that, he turned and blasted off into the sky. I flopped down and watched the delvers orient on him. Doomslug’s whining softened—it was obviously easier to hide just me, her, and Hesho. The solemn kitsen walked over and joined me in watching as the delvers, as one, turned and focused on M-Bot. Then all hundred of the free-flying ships took off after him.

He lasted about ten seconds.

He’d flown only a handful of times, and the delvers had challenged even my skill. M-Bot didn’t try to dodge—he merely tried to get as far from the rest of us as possible before they got him, quickly overwhelming his shield.

He vanished in a flash of light and smoke, the pieces casting long shadows as they fell.

The delvers pummeled these for a good thirty seconds of concentrated fire, then three ships slammed into what remained. And then…then they left. They couldn’t sense me, and they’d felt M-Bot. This was enough to convince them. They thought I’d been on the ship.

Perhaps if they’d been a group of humans, one—or even a majority—would have suggested continuing to search in case the rest of us had escaped. But the delvers made mistakes as one. Today they decided they’d done their job, and were too afraid of staying outside their bubble of safety to keep searching.

The wall of ships faded back into the lightburst. Followed by the flying ships, which soon melded with the whiteness.

Within five minutes of M-Bot leaving, we were alone on the expanse. Feeling like my limbs were made of iron, I picked up Hesho and stuffed Peg’s fruit in my jacket pocket. Then, holding Hesho in one arm and Doomslug—still protecting us—in the other, I trudged toward the lightburst. I worried the delvers would see us, but either they were convinced we were dead, or the illusion could obscure a little motion.

I don’t know how long it took to reach the border. That’s the nowhere for you. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five days. Probably more like the former, but this close to the boundary, time was extra alien.

I felt it when we got close. A fuzzing of the self, a dreamy sensation. Doomslug fluted. She would protect Hesho inside, as the pure nowhere could rip apart someone non-cytonic. She’d try to help me too.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “If you can guide us though, take us home. To Detritus.”

She fluted uncertainly. At the noise, I felt something respond in the light. The delvers had heard that. I needed to do this next part quickly.

So I stepped into the light.