Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

I floated in a void of nothing.

And felt like I belonged there.

So strange. I was a creature of flesh and blood. I knew that. Yet my soul—part of it at least—felt more at home here. In a vast void of meaningless time. The nowhere.

I was a person of two worlds. Spensa, the girl from Detritus, a warrior. Chet, the delver, a being outside space and time. We had become one.

We’d become a weapon.

I still didn’t know how that worked. But I had some connection to this place that I believed would let me attack the delvers. Delvers—the terrible, strange beings that had destroyed planets and threatened my reality. I could hurt them. I didn’t know how yet, but the thing I’d become…it could destroy them.

They were frightened of me. So they hid.

How can they hide? I thought. All time and space is one single point here.

They are looking inward, Chet responded. Part of my soul, yes, but we were still two individuals. It had been just over a week since I’d returned from the nowhere, and I was still learning how all this worked. But I did feel much more like myself now than when I’d first arrived.

I don’t understand, I sent to him.

We have no bodies, Chet explained. So you can only see us—what you call the eyes—when we are looking. It is complicated…as light only becomes visible when you interact with it, when it hits your eyes, you can only be aware of us when we are aware of you.

Yeah. He might have been stapled to my soul—and I might have felt like I belonged in this void—but a ton of this still broke my brain to think about.

How do we fight them? I asked him.

I don’t know, he replied. We need to learn. For now, isn’t it enough that they’re afraid of us?

It should have been. But something about that bothered me. An issue with their fear that I couldn’t quite explain yet. So for the moment I hovered, considering. Worried, but unable to explain why. Alone. In a place that was populated by thousands upon thousands of my enemies.

M-Bot? I thought, questing out with my cytonic senses.

No response. I didn’t know what had happened to him. Chet said he’d survived somehow, but despite searching each day since my return—coming here to the nowhere via cytonic mental projection—I’d not been able to find any sign of my friend. The ship I’d once flown, a delver in embryo.

I sighed and tried experimenting with my powers. Melding with the delver had changed me in two significant ways. First, in my vicinity the border between somewhere and nowhere seemed more…flimsy. Second, I had a connection to the delvers—and to others. I could enter minds more easily. I could feel emotions more easily.

Here in the nowhere, time was meaningless. Each person entering it, however, pulled a little bit of the somewhere in with them. Left an imprint, like a picture. On my journey, I’d been able to touch similar pictures left deliberately for me. Now I began to get glimpses of ones left unintentionally. Traces of what my friends had experienced while I’d been gone.

As I reached out, I found images. Impressions. Residual bits of emotion and experience left as my friends hyperjumped in and out of the nowhere. Bread crumbs that helped me experience what they’d been through while I was gone. They’d told me, of course, but now I saw it.

I saw their panic when I vanished to go to Starsight. I saw them befriend Alanik, the purple-skinned alien who had crashed on Detritus. With her, they’d eventually gone to rescue her world from the Superiority, bringing a small planet’s worth of people to our cause.

I saw the National Assembly, my people’s political leaders, try to make a deal with the enemy. And I saw a tragic betrayal as Winzik gleefully turned that summit into a trap—setting off an explosion that killed most of our leaders. I saw Gran-Gran and Cobb vanish into the nowhere, propelled by her talents, to protect them—and I saw them get trapped there.

Finally, I saw the kitsen. Small foxlike aliens who walked on two feet, and whose entire planet was in danger when the Superiority decided to attack. I saw interactions between them and my people, with Skyward Flight doing hard work to forge an alliance. Jorgen reluctantly taking up leadership not just of our flight, but of the entire military. Using his powers to rescue not only Gran-Gran and Cobb, but the kitsen cytonics, who had been trapped in an interdimensional prison for centuries.

These were mere glimpses—likely only possible because of my deep ties to my friends. When I tried to use the same abilities to spy on my enemies, I got nothing. But these images helped me fill in what had happened in my absence, and also left me feeling sorrowful. Because I hadn’t been there to help. Because they’d all learned so much, accomplished so much, and I was left as an observer to their lives.

What you were doing was important, Chet said to me. I nodded, as I knew it was true, but still…

I left the nowhere, coming aware in my bunk back on Detritus. I still had a problem, one bigger than my own emotional baggage: I didn’t know how these new powers would help me defeat the delvers. It was my job to protect my people from them. It was why I’d gone to the nowhere; I was supposed to become the weapon that could defeat them.

Despite all I’d learned, all I’d accomplished, I felt like I was still so very ignorant. I had no idea what I was doing.

Chet vibrated my soul in a way that was comforting. He was doing his best to help. I sighed, climbed out of my bunk, and prepared for the day. By all accounts, it was going to be a doozy. Fortunately, for the time being all I had to do was stand in place and try to look imposing. I stumbled to the mirror, and what looked back was anything but imposing. Frizzy hair, down past my shoulders now. Bags under my eyes.

And something within those eyes, something haunted. Something dangerous. Something I didn’t understand.

Myself, and what I’d become.

I shook my head. Heaved a long sigh.

Then took out my dress uniform.