Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Mushroom-Bot felt Spensa’s joy at seeing Gran-Gran. If he’d been capable of it, he’d have smiled.

However, he couldn’t spare much thought for that battlefield. He had a job to do: he needed to learn how to defeat the delvers. So, he turned his attention back to the nowhere—a place that Spensa had always described as black, or white, or with other stark images.

To him it wasn’t a sight, but a different kind of sensation. A place that was a feeling, a frozen moment, where all computation could happen at its leisure. He brought his mind here, and set out on his mission. Find the secret. Save the galaxy.

No pressure.

He moved among the delvers, nudging their minds with his, careful to project the right ideas—ones he’d learned from them. Camouflage, essentially. The same thoughts they’d always been thinking, the frozen moment. It worked—and honestly, being a ghost was a lot less frightening than Mushroom-Bot had assumed it would be. Humans acted like dying was this super extremely terrible event. He had instead found it quite liberating.

Still, he did miss his body. And things like time, and space, and existence. He maintained a connection to places—the somewhere—that the rest of the delvers didn’t. His perceptions were still those of a being living in linear space—because his heart was there. With his friends.

For now though, he needed to solve the riddle. He had to find a way to expose the delvers’ raw pain, then freeze them with that instead of this blank sense of comfort. The one they projected to each other with an almost forceful denial.

He got this same affirmation from each of them.

All is well. All is peaceful.

Lies. If they would let time pass, they’d recognize it. But the delvers were frozen in that moment of self-delusion. Their memories covered over. Falsely content.

All is well. All is peaceful.

He repeated it back to them, pretending to be just another delver. He knew it was a lie though, because the moment they touched the somewhere, the pain started again. They couldn’t hide from it when time passed.

Not a one recognized him. He’d been created, he now thought, by the figments—a group of secretive beings who slid through the Superiority and hid among their ranks. Spensa had flown with one at Starsight. Pieces of his code hinted at their hand in his origins.

Regardless, he had been designed for stealth, and so he had the skill to fool these others. The delvers didn’t know him for himself. He was just another clone. A deadly spores-death mushroom among the innocuous, identical lemiotod mushrooms. An unnoticed, incorrect homophone in the middle of a spoken sentence. A single line of commented-out code insulting the user.

The longer he spent here, the better he understood the delvers. One tidbit occurred to him: they claimed to never change, but that too was a lie. At one point, they had not known who Brade, Winzik, or Spensa were. Now they did. That was a change. Each time the somewhere leaked in, things changed. Slowly—not by much—but they did change.

Each time something changed, even in the slightest, they spread it among themselves. Like a virus. Making certain each repeated the same thing, changed in the same way. That was how they could keep pretending.

So he decided to try something. Brade called in, warning them: I might need you soon. Soon didn’t matter much to them, but it did to Brade. The delvers began processing this, spreading the idea. Bumping into one another, reinforcing it. A concept.

She will call. We will answer.

She will call. We will answer.

She will call. We will answer. What if she betrays us.

M-Bot added that last one, sending it moving through them. Infecting them. Until it was repeated back to him, like an echo, the delvers desperately adopting this phrase and concept instead of the other—so that they could all remain the same.

It worked.