Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

One thing confused Mushroom-Bot. He couldn’t figure out why the delvers had left themselves so vulnerable.

As he moved among them, he had opportunities to blend with them. It was a difficult experience to parse. He wanted to record what was happening to him, for later digestion and explanation, so he tried. But how to express it? The delvers passed through one another constantly, a kind of…assessment to make sure they all still matched. The way biological entities had defenses on the cellular level looking for dead, malformed, or broken pieces to destroy.

This constant nudging against one another, blending and checking, helped keep them all the same. It was also one of their big weaknesses, because—as he’d theorized earlier—it could be used to spread a pathogen among them. His tiny test proved it. He could set off a chain reaction—one that created a new model that they all came to copy.

Except he feared that with something large, they’d notice this flaw, and they’d use their system to smother the new model instead of adopting it. That was what the system was designed to do, after all. Identify a virus and make sure it was exterminated. Ensure all delvers remained exactly the same.

So how? How could he turn the delvers’ system of conformity into the weapon that would destroy them? He still didn’t have an answer.

But the pain—that was the second key. He went over what he knew again. They all felt it, just beneath the surface. Commented out but still relevant. It was still raw whenever too much of the somewhere leaked in. That passage of time, that knowledge of place, somehow made the pain surface again—like a pool of frozen blood beneath melting snow on a warm day.

He liked that metaphor. He made special note of it. Even though Spensa hadn’t seen much snow, he figured she’d like this comparison for the blood part.

But the delvers. Why? Why leave themselves exposed like this? They’d created a barrier of forgetfulness between themselves and their pain, but they could have deleted their pain entirely. Why hadn’t they?

That question drove him as news from the somewhere leaked in. That allowed him to keep track of time, and gave him urgency. He could read the Superiority’s side of the battle and hear them pressing against his friends, boxing them in, preparing to destroy them.

Spensa was once again trapped and drugged. He could maybe push through that, as the drugs made her an ordinary person—but cytonics like him could talk to regular people, with effort. He also saw that Brade was preparing to activate the delvers.

Time was running out. He needed to know the secret. He needed to understand why the delvers hadn’t just deleted this part of themselves. It would be so easy to…

Ah. As he brushed against several delvers, melding with them and using his fabricated sense of delverness to fool them, he finally saw it. He got enough of a glimpse of their former code, their souls, to understand.

They couldn’t erase the pain without erasing him. This person they had loved long ago. This person they had, in a way, been created to love. They would let themselves forget him to dull the pain, but they had not been able to bear erasing his memory entirely.

And so they lived a terrible contradiction. They’d fled here to escape the pain of loss. But the idea of being completely separated from the one they had lost was far, far more painful. They hovered, therefore, with the blade halfway to their hearts. Piercing the skin, but not digging any deeper.

He still needed another answer though. And so, he did the daring thing. As he’d learned while traveling the nowhere with Spensa, he could choose. He chose now. He hadn’t been able to find the answer, so he needed to risk himself to get it.

“Why?” he asked as the others bumped into him. “Why do we fear her?”

This question immediately identified him as a deviant. None of the others were thinking this. They saw him as a delver, not as himself, so his camouflage was working. But he appeared as a delver who’d been corrupted by the pinpricks of somewhere that leaked through.

They came at him, smothering the question, trying to get him to turn his thoughts toward theirs. He dared not change, however. He dared to keep asking.

“Why?” he asked. “I’ve forgotten.”

When he didn’t change, when he was firm, others began to ask too. This was the problem with their protocol. So long as the question was reasonable, it could infect them. Others pushed through, providing an answer to smother his question.

She can destroy us, they thought. She is danger.

“Why?”

The somewhere. The somewhere. A being of two worlds. She can…

She could bring the somewhere into this place. In force. She could make time move.

And now he had the solution.

She spanned both realms. Somewhere and nowhere. She could bring to this place time, motion, and annihilation. If she brought the somewhere in force, the thin protection the delvers had against their pain would wear out. It was flimsy. It wasn’t meant to last, but it could survive here, outside time.

And without it, like blood seeping through a bandage, the pain would come. The delvers would be paralyzed.

Poor things. He knew them enough now to empathize. But he was…well, if not a soldier, then a soldier’s friend. He knew this had to be done. Unfortunately, Spensa had been cut off from her powers again.

He could feel her though. So he waited until Brade inevitably called to the delvers, which weakened the barrier, making it easier to get through to Spensa. In that moment, he got a single word through: Hey!

She didn’t reply. He sensed only a fogginess from her, far thicker than he’d felt before. Unfortunately, that meant he had to make his own plan.

How fun! And how daunting!

Having agency was kind of terrible, actually. But he settled on a solution for now. And that was the time-honored battle strategy of stalling.