Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

I went on a walk.

Growing up, that had been my go-to solution for any issue. There were endless caverns on Detritus, full of nooks to explore. I’d mapped as many as I could, enjoying the solitude, working through my anger at how society treated me. Maybe I should have focused a little more on what my anger was doing to me.

I liked to think that all of my problems had come from how I’d been treated when I was younger. The way people thought of my father, and the bullying they’d shown me in turn. Their prejudice had made a fighter of me from a young age. Yet even as a child, I’d often barreled forward—doing whatever I wanted, without bothering to think what it might cost my friends and family.

Walking had always helped. Today I tried to find the same solace as I walked Platform Prime, asking the illuminated hallways to allow the same meditative peace I’d once found in dusty darkness. There were some similarities. The tight enclosures felt like tunnels, and they made unexpected turns, with a variety of corners to explore.

On Detritus, sometimes I’d take a path only to discover a cavern covered with quartz, glittering in the dim light. Here, I instead discovered a room full of blinking lights of a dozen varieties. I even found a rat hiding in a corner. What did it live on up here? How had it even gotten here?

I left it alive, granting it a battlefield pardon, as one might a worthy foe. After all, this was either a rat from a population that had somehow survived for centuries up here—or it had managed to stow away on one of our ships. It was the Spensa version of a rat, hiding out among the enemy and gathering their secrets.

The further I explored—entering areas of the platform that I hadn’t even known existed—the more wondrous I found it. A swimming pool. An observation room where you could stand over the planet and look down at its surface, as if you were hovering in the stratosphere. A room with dozens of tables…which looked like they were for games. The people who had lived here had played ping-pong, and billiards, and other Old Earth leisure activities that I’d only read about.

The ancient humans had made time for games, for frivolity, in ways we never had. For the first time in my life, I wondered what kind of world my children would grow up in.

Would I have children? I’d always assumed I’d end up dead in battle before that happened. I’d make a terrible mom, wouldn’t I?

Spensa? M-Bot said in my head as I rounded one of the ping-pong tables. I’d always preferred reading about baseball, where you used giant clubs instead of little paddles. Can we…talk please?

“Absolutely,” I said, glad for a distraction from my own troubles. “What’s on your mind?”

Well, I think you know, but I should say…I’m not actually a ghost. I’m quite the opposite. I’m more alive than I ever was in the somewhere. Free from the constraints that forced me to think of myself as something false. Allowed to steer my own destiny. Capable of understanding, and starting to manage, my own emotions.

“That sounds awesome,” I said. “You’ve come a long way. And I don’t know if I thanked you properly for sacrificing yourself for me.”

It turned out to be less of a sacrifice, and more of an ascension.

“Still,” I said. “You didn’t know what would happen, and you did it anyway. After being angry at me for weeks for abandoning you, when it came time, you saved me.”

I…did, didn’t I? That sounds heroic, doesn’t it?

“Scud, yes.”

That’s terrifying, Spensa.

“Wait. Terrifying?” I wandered out of the game room, back into a hallway.

Yes, terrifying. Spensa, I am no longer bound by programming. I no longer have an excuse. Before, I did what I was designed to do. Now, I’ve acknowledged my free will. That means I have to worry about things I never did before. Things like morality.

“I think you’ll do fine,” I said. “The people who brood about their moral compass in stories tend to be the strongest at making decisions.”

Really?

“Yup. Well, them and the tortured antiheroes, but I don’t think that’s you. You’re a little too…”

Noble?

“Bubbly,” I said. “But also noble. Yeah, I probably should have just said noble. You’re a good person, M-Bot.”

Person. I’m…a person. That’s strange when I don’t even have a body. Is it wrong that I miss it? I couldn’t control it, and the circuitry was literally designed to imprison me. But that ship was me. Mine. I miss it.

I tried not to feel guilty. I already had enough to feel bad about—remembering how I’d left him to be ripped apart, his ship dissected and then destroyed by the Superiority, wouldn’t help.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t rip me apart. See? I understand that and I feel it. But Spensa, I’m still worried. Because of morality. I feel like…like I need to be helping you. Protecting our friends. Doing what I can from in here.

“Great!” I said. “That’s what I need you to do. You were a huge help with Peg. And you’re keeping an eye on the delvers.”

Not much to watch. Something’s odd about them, Spensa. More odd, I mean. They’re emerging from hiding, and—while imitating one of them so they don’t know what I am—I’ve been able to listen in on a few things. They’ve been talking to Winzik and Brade again. It seems the deal between the delvers and the Superiority is still in force. A treaty.

I nodded, feeling daunted, but this was no more than what I’d expected. The delvers were willing to work for Winzik in exchange for him promising to exterminate the cytonics—me in particular—and to move to using slugs alone for hyperjumping. I didn’t know how Brade fit into that deal.

At any rate, if not for their timidity about me, Winzik would already have used them as a weapon against us. Worryingly, if the delvers were still talking to him, it might not be long before they decided to move. Regardless of their fear.

The delvers are no longer willing to hide, M-Bot explained. I can feel them seething. Trembling with emotion.

“Keep an eye on them,” I said. “Let me know if you think they’re about to move on from stewing about me to actually attacking us.”

I will. But…Spensa…do you mind me asking—why do you fight? Is it still for the chance to murder your enemies?

“It was never about that, not really,” I said. “It was about proving myself.”

You did that though. Didn’t you?

I supposed I had. Ever since I’d chosen to eject from my ship back in flight school, I hadn’t worried if I was a coward or not. I’d proven myself—to myself.

Why did I fight now? “It’s for the reasons you gave earlier. For my friends. For my people.”

And at the end of it…what do you want?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really think that far ahead.”

I do, and that’s what worries me. Spensa, everything in my existence was pushing me toward that moment when I decided. When I went against programming, self-preservation, and reason to protect my friends. I came of age in that moment, Spensa.

Now…now that I’m the equivalent of an adult, shouldn’t I want to do the right things? Shouldn’t I enjoy what I’m doing, because it’s the proper choice? The moral one?

“You don’t enjoy it?”

No. I’ll do it. But I’d rather be doing something else.

“Collecting mushrooms?”

Yes. Or other things. Does it really matter if it’s not the thing I should be doing?

“I suppose it doesn’t,” I said. “But M-Bot, if it helps, I don’t think most people want to do what’s right. That’s what makes doing the right thing noble. It’s a conscious choice. A hard one. If it were easy, then why would we respect it so much?”

I’d never phrased it that way before, not even to myself. Simple though the concept was, it struck me powerfully right then. I nodded, trailing through the hallway, walking—without consciously realizing it—back toward the observation room with the glass floor. I found an odd sense striking me as I walked the hallway. A familiarity? Or maybe just a kinship.

When I’d first come to these platforms, I’d found their sterile corridors to be too clean, too slick, too…inorganic. I felt a little of that again now. But also something else.

“Huh,” I said, resting my hand on the corridor wall. “I’m actually growing to like this place. I would’ve thought I’d find it even more unnatural, after traveling the landscapes of the fragments.”

M-Bot didn’t respond immediately, and I felt an unusual disconnect from him.

M-Bot? I sent.

Sorry, M-Bot said, what was that? Something about liking the corridors now?

“Yes. Are you all right?”

Yup. Just processing something. But I’m not surprised you find that place more homey than you once did. You’ve been away, and returned. Humans are often nostalgic for the past. Plus they form bonds of familiarity with the oddest objects and sensations.

“Says the robot who for some reason loves mushrooms,” I said.

Hey, mushrooms are at least alive! And they’re fascinating. So many varieties, growing in the harshest locations. Did you know some fungi can puppet the bodies of insects like zombies?

“That’s hardcore,” I said. Who’d have thought mushrooms could be that cool?

But back to you being strange, M-Bot said, maybe…maybe you just like those hallways because they remind you of a cockpit? And of flying with me.

I loved that idea, though I didn’t think it was accurate. Still, it made me smile as I continued walking, rounding the corner and stepping into the room with the glass floor. This time though, it was occupied. A lanky young man with red hair lay on the floor, a bunch of schematics spread out around him—though he was lying face down and looking through the glass.

Rig jumped when he heard me, looking up—then relaxed when he saw it was just me. “Hey,” he said. “Hear you had an exciting day.”

“Yeah. Exciting.” I yawned. “Isn’t it morning, on standard schedule times? Shouldn’t you be at breakfast?”

“Hmmm?” he said, then checked his watch. “Eh, I don’t really care about schedules. I’ve been up all night anyway.”

“Rig,” I said, hands on my hips, “you spent years complaining when I woke you up—or kept you out—for one of my brilliant and interesting plans.”

“Fortunately, the windows here lead into a vacuum,” he noted. “So I don’t get woken up by you rapping on mine, convinced we need to go hunting for lost treasure in yet another empty cavern.”

“I eventually found treasure, I’ll have you know,” I said, folding my arms.

I expected M-Bot to pipe in at that. But he didn’t—and when I nudged him cytonically, he felt distant again. Was something going on with him?

“Anyway,” I continued, “I am offended by your suddenly deciding to stay up all night without me.”

He shrugged. “FM stays up late. So I’ve found myself doing it more and more…”

“Of course,” I said, walking over. Around Rig I felt…not immature, but more like my old self. I flopped down beside him on my back, ruffling a few of his schematics, and looked at the ceiling. Then I rolled over to look down like he was. Through the glass, toward Detritus below.

“Scud,” I whispered, “that’s disorienting.”

“I know, right?” Rig said, excited.

“I feel like I’m falling,” I said, staring down. “Like I’m plummeting toward the surface.”

“I feel like I’m floating,” he said. “Like I get to see everything, take it all in for once. Maybe understand it, rather than being afraid of it.”

“You’ve been doing a pretty good job of not being afraid of things lately,” I noted.

“It’s not that I’m not afraid,” he said. “It’s that…well, I’ve got a good support structure. That helps.”

Huh. That wasn’t how I would have put it. As a kid, I’d have said that courage destroys fear. Now, I’d have said that fear is what lets us be able to be courageous.

“I’m glad that it’s working with you and FM,” I said. “That you have a support structure. That…you’re no longer just that boy with the weird friend you can’t get rid of.”

“Oh please,” he said. “We both know that no one was pounding on my door, demanding my friendship. You didn’t scare people away from me, Spin. You befriended me when no one else paid me any attention.”

“Outcasts sticking together,” I said, staring down at the planet—which glowed under the enormous lights moving up here. I could see the shadows and strips of brightness they made, the lights leftover from a time when Detritus had grown more than dust and fungus.

“Rig,” I said softly, “how bad a friend am I?”

“You’re not—”

“Be straight with me, please. I…really hurt Jorgen today. I need to hear from someone I trust. How bad am I at this?”

“You’re not bad at being a friend,” Rig said, “you’re just hard to be friends with. That’s different.”

“How?”

“You try,” he said. “I know you do. You always looked out for me. Scud, I doubt you would normally have chosen the quiet, occasionally panicky guy to be your best friend. But I needed someone, and you saw others picking on me, and…well, here we are. You’re loyal, passionate, and inventive.”

“But…”

“But you are really, really bad at seeing things from other people’s viewpoints. You just go and do stuff, Spin, and believe everyone else would have done the same thing if they’d only thought of it and had the guts.”

“Fair,” I said. “I know I pushed you into flight school. But I can’t see things as if I’m someone else. I’m me. Shockingly, I see things like me.”

“It’s a skill to practice, like any other,” he said. “You love stories. Maybe ask yourself, what if the story weren’t about you for a change? What if it were Jorgen’s story? How would he feel about what you’re doing?”

Scud, that hit me right in the gut. He made it sound so easy, and maybe for him it was.

But I’d done what needed to be done. For Jorgen. For Detritus. And given what was happening to me…the powers I was displaying…well, what if alienating Jorgen and the others was the only way to protect them?

It twisted me up inside. Made me start to tremble. Made me think of my friends dying, graphically, over and over in my mind. To escape those images, and another potential episode, I rolled back over and snatched one of the schematics.

“You know, Rodge,” I said to him, “you’re a weird guy.”

“True, true.”

“I walk in here to find you lying face down among a bunch of pieces of paper?”

“You immediately flopped down beside me.”

“Practicing empathy,” I said. “What is all of this?”

“Detritus has several enormous shipyards among these platforms,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I had a battle in one, remember?”

“Right, while it was crashing. Nedd’s brothers…”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see, as he was still face down. Yeah, he really was weird. Maybe we had always been destined to become friends.

“You think you can build me a ship with one of these fabrication plants?” I asked.

“Depends, really,” he said. “Do you have designs for what you’d want? And by that I mean accurate, detailed schematics created by an actual engineer? Not something hand-drawn on a scrap of paper, depicting a catapult for launching Stacy Leftwire into a furnace.”

I smiled. “I forgot about that.”

“I didn’t. You wrote it in blood.”

“Rat blood,” I agreed. “It makes a terrible ink. Kept congealing. Not sure how the old necromancers ever made use of it in their arcane tomes.”

“Can we change the topic?”

“I’ll get you schematics,” I said. “Real ones. They were in the data dump we stole.”

“Great,” he said. “I wanted to do some tests anyway. Been thinking, though, that we don’t really need more fighters. We have plenty for our trained pilots. Maybe we need something else.”

I myself wasn’t so certain we had all the fighters we needed. Now that we had a hyperslug ejection system for pilots, we might start chewing through ships faster. It was a mindset change. We’d always had ejection systems that worked in atmosphere, but the culture of the DDF had trained pilots to protect their ships—ostensibly harder to replace—over their own lives.

I often wondered how much that short-sightedness had cost us. We hadn’t acknowledged the importance of skilled veteran pilots. Half the reason my friends and I were in such high positions was the fact that we’d managed to survive long enough to actually get some useful combat experience.

I was about to explain to Rig what I wanted him to fabricate, when the door swung open and FM strode in. She was faintly flushed, tense. Still poised of course, but for FM this was the equivalent of being in a panic.

“What is it?” I said, immediately sitting up.

“Emergency conference called by command,” she said. “The enemy is doing something. I was looking for Rodge, but Jorgen will be glad you were here too.”

I wasn’t so certain about that. Not today. But as Rig scrambled to gather his schematics, I stood up. “Do you know anything more?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Shutting down the enemy’s access to acclivity stone really got their attention.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, meeting my eyes, “they’re changing tactics. We can’t be certain; it’s probably too early to tell, but their troop movements indicate…well, they’ve realized they can’t win a long war as easily as they could have before. So instead…”

Instead? I frowned, trying to think what I would do in their situation. They would realize we were going to try to bleed them over time, but they still had vastly superior numbers. So in their place, I’d…

Scud.