Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

That night, I left on my secret mission.

I miss having a body, M-Bot thought to me as I snuck—Doomslug on my shoulder—through the corridors of Platform Prime. Even the little drone body was fun. But I really miss my old body. I was a handsome ship, wasn’t I?

“Best I’ve ever seen,” I whispered. “Most wonderful I’ve ever piloted.”

And now it’s scrap. That makes me sad.

Chet quivered inside me.

It’s okay to be sad sometimes, M-Bot said to Chet. It’s part of being alive.

Chet sent back that he was learning, but the delvers—they didn’t believe that learning or changing was good. Which was the problem.

I tried to ignore the full-on conversation happening between my soul and the spirit of my dead starfighter. Scud, my life was weird. At least sneaking around like this was easier now that I could hyperjump at will. Hearing someone coming up behind me, I hopped into another corridor, pressing up against a cold steel wall.

Back before I’d left for the nowhere, I’d needed specific directions in my mind in order to hyperjump to a specific location. Since my return, that hadn’t been an issue. Granted, I still needed coordinates or some kind of visualization to get anywhere, but I was learning to do most of this by instinct.

I didn’t know if this newfound ability was due to the delver in my soul, or was the result of practice—the familiarity with my powers I’d gained through hard work in the nowhere.

Regardless of the reason, now I could glance into the flight deck from where I stood. It was empty, as most everyone was asleep, so I popped right past the wall at my back and straight to my ship.

Strange, how a day-night cycle still dominated our lives, even with no distinct difference between the two. So far, I’d lived on Detritus (a planet that couldn’t see the sun), Starsight (a platform in space far from any star), and the nowhere (where time barely passed at all). Yet I still considered this “night.” As did everyone else. Human physiology just had that hardwired in.

I began priming my starship for flight. I could do everything on my own except open the flight deck bay doors, but I planned to hyperjump out anyway. So I checked my ship’s external fuel readings, double-checked the maintenance log, then pushed a ladder over and climbed up, popping the cockpit with the manual release on the outside.

Only somebody was sitting inside. And she was knitting.

“Gran-Gran?” I said, utterly floored.

The elderly woman had a certain earthen look to her. Like an obstinate stone, or a tough old bunch of lichen grown in one spot for hundreds of years. It was dark on the flight deck, but that didn’t matter to a blind person like Gran-Gran. She’d always had an uncanny ability to perceive the world around her regardless—a sign that her cytonic abilities had been developing. The fact that she’d probably hyperjumped straight into my cockpit was another.

“Ah, Spensa,” she said. “Took your time. Had to make sure the ship was flightworthy, I suppose.”

“What are you doing here, Gran-Gran?” I asked.

“Knitting.”

I projected annoyance at her, which made her chuckle.

“You never visit,” she said. “Grandmothers always say that sort of thing. As if we don’t have legs, and can’t just go visit on our own. So I decided to.”

“Now, of all times?”

“Think you’re so good with your powers, don’t you?” Gran-Gran said. “All fancy and grown up. Well, I’ve been listening to the stars since I was younger than you, girl. And I can tell when my granddaughter is having a rough day.” She pointed at her yarn, indicating I should feed her some more.

“Rough day?” I muttered.

“Week. Month. Year. Life.” Gran-Gran pointed more vigorously. “Feed me some blue. I have trouble distinguishing colors with the powers.”

I sighed, reaching into the cockpit and undoing some yarn for her.

“So,” she said. “Going off on your own. Again.”

“It’s always worked in the past.”

“You didn’t have any other options in the past.”

“Gran-Gran, I don’t have time for this.”

“No time for your family?” she asked. “That’s not how your mother raised you, girl. A little more yarn than that, please.”

I obeyed, stifling another sigh. Gran-Gran would be ready when Gran-Gran was ready. I just hoped I wasn’t discovered in the time it took her to say whatever it was she’d decided I needed to hear.

She just kept knitting. With frustrating calmness, needles clicking.

“How did you know what I was going to do?” I finally asked.

“I have a helper on the inside.”

“Inside what?”

“Your head.”

Sorry, M-Bot said. But you’ve been so…pressurized lately, Spensa. I went for some advice.

I growled softly. Betrayed by my own faithful steed?

“Stop that,” Gran-Gran said, rapping her knuckles against mine. “I trained you to be a bold warrior. Not a Chihuahua.”

“What’s a chihuwhatever?”

Oh! It’s a kind of dog, M-Bot said. A little one that is also very big inside! Like me! Oh…Hum. Maybe you don’t want to hear from me right now. I can feel it. I’ll just hide back here…

Gran-Gran went right on knitting. It seemed she wasn’t going to move unless I started talking.

“I need to do this,” I told her. “I have a plan, and it’s going to work. And it will spare Jorgen from having to order everyone to do something that’s worse.”

“He is a nice boy,” Gran-Gran said. “He’s good for you, like a good pommel stone for weighting a sword. Also, his bread is quite tasty. He can follow instructions better than a certain someone.”

“My mission will help him, and all of us.”

“Well,” Gran-Gran said, “I do not doubt your heart, Granddaughter. Or what you’ve accomplished. There’s no one I’d prefer to entrust our safety to than you.”

“Great,” I said. “So why are you blocking me?”

“I just like being in a cockpit.”

“Gran-Gran…”

She smiled in her devious way, continuing to knit.

“What are you making anyway?” I asked.

“Seat cover,” she said. “Starships are so cold and utilitarian. They need some comfort. With flower patterns.”

“Do you at least have a story you’re going to force me to listen to?”

“Nope,” she said. “You know them all.”

“You sure?” I said. “I was hoping there might be one where the heroine roasts her ‘trusty steed’ and eats him in punishment for being a blabbermouth.”

That earned me another rap on the back of the hand. Not a painful one, just a pointed one. “Always treat your mount with respect,” Gran-Gran said. “Even if he’s a blabbermouth. A knight’s steed is there to help her when she’s at her weakest.”

“Fine,” I said. “But if you’re not going to tell me a story, and we’re both agreed this is the best course for me to take, then why are you still sitting in my seat?”

Gran-Gran smiled and lifted her chin upward, closing her milky-white eyes. “Do you still take time to listen to the stars, like I taught you?”

“There’s nothing to listen to lately,” I complained. “We don’t have the Krell in orbit any longer, trying to fight us. All I heard was their cytonic communications anyway.”

Gran-Gran just sat there, chin tipped upward, eyes closed. So, with an exaggerated sigh, I did as she’d taught me. I closed my eyes and opened myself to the sounds of the sky. It was far, far easier now. Things I’d struggled with when I was younger—activating my cytonic senses, reaching out with them as if they were a new set of arms—were second nature to me now.

The sky was silent today. We tried to limit our cytonic communications. Cyphers and codes were impossible in cytonic communication—or at least they were easy to break. Because language barriers meant nothing in the nowhere, where communication worked through impressions. So a cytonic could break any code. They intuited the meaning of your message.

With the kitsen, we might now have more cytonics on our side than the Superiority. They’d spent centuries suppressing the abilities, as they were a threat to their slug-based rule. But they did have some cytonics, and so we had to be aware that anything we sent to one another could theoretically be intercepted.

The short version of all this was: silent stars. A vast emptiness.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“I didn’t mean those stars, child,” Gran-Gran said. “I meant the ones down here. Listen.”

The ones down here? What did she mean? I felt a tugging on my senses, like Gran-Gran reaching out and giving them a soft redirection. My thoughts expanded, and I saw—in a moment—all the things I’d been ignoring to focus on the sky.

Not things. People. Thousands of minds surrounding me. Bright and brilliant like flares—each burning with its own passions, stories, ideas. Some were brighter to my senses, not because they were more alive, but because they were cytonic themselves.

I could sense them all, if I looked. All the taynix too—the slugs of a multitude of varieties. The sky was empty, but the platform and the planet beneath were set aflame with the souls and minds of those who occupied them. It was beautiful.

Chet leaped at the sensation. This was…this was what I’d shown him at Starsight. It was what had sent him into the nowhere to become Chet. This simple realization had changed everything: the knowledge that all those points of light, the ones that he had found so annoying, were alive.

It was painful, thought the part of me that was also him. Because I’d intentionally forgotten this fact. I didn’t want to know that the points of light were alive. I wanted them to represent pain, because that would keep me away. Safe from remembering the truth, which was an even greater agony.

In deliberately forgetting all of their pain, in seeking a place outside of time and normal reality, his kind had become the delvers. Unknowable. By design.

No, that part of me thought. Not completely unknowable. You and I prove that.

“Do you feel them?” Gran-Gran asked. “The people we protect. Our families, and their families, and their loved ones. A vast, grand constellation.”

“I feel them,” I said.

“We are the people of the engines,” she said. “Clan Motorskaps. Once, we moved the Defiant—the ship that was our home. Now we live here, but our duty is the same. To keep them safe. To be the engines.”

“How does an engine keep someone safe?” I asked. “I still think I’d rather be the ship’s destructor.”

Gran-Gran chuckled, perhaps because I’d said basically the same thing when I was a child and she’d first talked to me about our heritage aboard the Defiant.

“How useful is a weapon that cannot move?” she said. “How long would an army last if each of its soldiers were rooted in place? The sword is only useful if the body that holds it is nimble, capable, fleet. When our people needed safety, we carried them there. When it was time to fight, we brought the weapons to bear. Without the Motorskaps, the Defiant would have been a lifeless hunk of metal floating in an infinite void. We were its blood, its life. The same is true of you, here.”

I nodded. I thought I understood.

“I want you to remember that you’re part of something grand,” Gran-Gran said. “Back when we lived on the Defiant, even the children were assigned ranks. Not out of some jingoistic militarism, but to make them feel they were part of something greater. We were all the crew of the ship, no matter how old.

“And as a ship is useless without an engine, what is an engine without people to move and protect? You act like the lone spear, Granddaughter. But a spear is always stronger as part of a phalanx.”

“So you’re saying…”

“Where are your friends? Why do you seek to do this mission on your own?”

“I can’t tell Jorgen,” I said. “He’s determined to be the one who pays the emotional toll for this.”

“So you want to do it instead?”

“Would you expect anything different of me? Isn’t that what you trained me for?”

She didn’t respond to that, though I could feel her worry. Yes, that was what she’d trained me to do. In a way, all of this was because of her, and the ideas she’d stuffed into my head. She knew it.

“If you don’t tell him,” she said, “then at least you should tell the others. A few of them. Spensa, child, don’t bear it all. Let some of the others have a little glory.”

It wasn’t glory I was interested in, but I could feel the meaning behind her words. The worry that I was spreading myself too thin, like a ship trying to use one charge of gunpowder to fire twenty-one guns. She worried that as determined as I was, I’d rush into things without the wisdom my friends could offer. Mostly she worried about me being alone.

I kept my emotions in check, hoping that I didn’t reveal too much to her. Because she was all too correct; I shouldn’t do this alone. I should have at least one other person to keep me in check. To warn me if I was being crazy. To watch my back.

That was what Skyward Flight had been all about. I’d found a family among them. A place. And though I’d learned many wonderful things during my time at Starsight and in the nowhere, perhaps sometimes I’d learned the wrong lessons as well.

“If I go and get a little help,” I said, “will you get out of my seat and let me continue?”

“Am I in your seat?” Gran-Gran said. “I’m sorry, dear. I’m an old blind woman, and I get disoriented sometimes.”

“Gran-Gran, you’re the most stubborn little ball of fire I know. Don’t give me lines like that.”

She chuckled. “Just trying to let you know how others feel when dealing with you, dear. It’s the least I can do, considering the genes I handed you. Go, do as you—so wisely—suggested. I’ll be gone when you return.”

“Fine,” I said, starting to climb down the ladder. I hesitated though. Trying to find the words.

“You’re welcome,” Gran-Gran said in the silence. “Be bold. Do as I taught you. Just don’t you ever feel you have to do it alone.”

I nodded and hyperjumped away—to appear in front of Kimmalyn’s rooms.