Evershore (Skyward Flight: Novella 3)

We flew along the shoreline and landed beside the Swims Upstream on another beach below the cliffs that sheltered the towering city of Dreamspring. The stone cliffs had clearly been worn over time into fins and ridges by the wind, the sandstone striped with hundreds of red-orange layers. I directed the flight to leave their taynix in the boxes in their ships—the kitsen knew about hyperdrives, but I still didn’t want to advertise that we had so many of them. I left Snuggles and Boomslug out of their box, but gave them a stern instruction to stay. I wanted at least one hyperdrive we could access in a hurry if things went wrong, so it was worth the risk that they’d disobey.

I joined Kauri, and my flight and the medtechs followed after us around a bend in the cliffside. The beach down the way was covered in kitsen who appeared to be playing in the surf and relaxing on the sand, at least until they spotted us. We were giants to them, and I watched carefully where I stepped, not wanting to flatten any picnic spots.

These kitsen were enjoying themselves, completely oblivious to the war with the Superiority. We were interlopers, bringing the conflict with us.

It was coming for them regardless, but it still felt tragic to disturb the peace. I wondered what it was like to live that way, in a place where taking a trip to the beach to sit and enjoy yourself was an option on any given afternoon.

The concept seemed alien, but stars, it must be nice.

The kitsen gathered together, watching us. Some appeared frightened, others curious, but none attacked us. Kauri floated out in front, waving both paws at the other kitsen. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but they seemed to believe she had us under control, because no one else came after us demanding that we duel their champion to the death.

We walked up a narrow path toward the city—no, it was a wide road to them. The path was lined with small mound-shaped structures cut into the rock or formed out of intricately worked sandstone. The structures had arched doorways with tiny stone or metal doors affixed to them. Some had signs in a language I couldn’t read, while others had little pots of flowers sitting on the doorsteps or in boxes hanging from circular windows.

“Saints and stars,” Sadie said somewhere behind me. “This is so cute!”

She wasn’t wrong. It reminded me of a story my mother had told me when I was a child, about a man named Gulliver who traveled to a land full of little people who were wary of him because of his size. He befriended them, but was later kicked out when he doused a fire in the palace by peeing on it.

As a child I’d found that part of the story hilarious. Now I thought maybe the little people had a point.

I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked up the hill at the mountainous city. As the road ascended, the little burrow structures began to pile up, dug into the walls of the cliff or sculpted one on top of another into tiny hills with doors on all sides and at all levels. I wondered if they opened into tiny multi-floored houses, or if each entrance went to a separate room isolated from the others. As we walked, little kitsen hovercars pulled over to the side of the road to allow us to pass. They chattered at each other, some too far away or faint for the pin to translate, though I did catch a few words.

“—humans returned!—”

“—don’t look threatening—”

“—can’t trust them, look how they—”

“—dione with them, does that mean—”

I glanced back and found that Kimmalyn had stopped, bent down beside what looked like a landscaping shop with barrels and stacks of bricks and groundcovers, all organized by type. A kitsen waited out front while two others used a large metal winch to load a huge decorative rock into the back of a hovertruck.

I couldn’t hear what Kimmalyn said—she didn’t have a translator pin, so she wouldn’t have been understood anyway. But then the kitsen stepped back and Kimmalyn lifted the rock—which was only half the size of her palm, but still enormous for the tiny creatures—and set it in the rear of the truck.

One of them tipped its nose up at her, and I hoped that was a gesture of thanks. We didn’t need to be accused of property damage or delivering insults. The kitsen we’d met so far didn’t seem like they’d appreciate being condescended to.

“Do you think she should be doing that?” I asked FM.

“She’s not hurting anything,” FM said.

Cuna walked up behind us. “Compassion is universal,” they said. “It’s seen in all cultures, though it is communicated differently.”

FM sighed. “I suppose there might be some cultural norm we’re not aware of, but any of us could break one of those at any time and cause an interstellar incident.”

“Scud, our lives have gotten weird,” I said.

“That’s the truth,” Arturo said, following us up the road. “It was simpler when we were fighting the Krell.”

Simpler, but also stagnant. Our people had spent eighty years fighting for our lives, which meant we had very specialized skills. We were a well-oiled survival machine, but we lacked something these people had. It wasn’t happiness exactly. We had that, even if it was tempered by pain and fear.

Prosperity maybe. Peace. I wondered if this was what we would have seen on ReDawn, if we’d spent any time in their cities.

Kauri had drifted ahead of us a bit, and she hovered back, watching us. “Do you need to stop and rest?” she asked. “I’m sorry if I’m outpacing your human endurance.” Her shipmates were walking up the path on foot, and they seemed fine. They ran many steps to our one, but they didn’t seem to be tiring.

“No, we’re fine,” I said. “Just appreciating your beautiful city.”

“This used to be the home of Hesho, the Most Honorable and Magnificent One Who Was Not King. He died in the battle with the delver at your planet.” She gave a little sigh. “We miss him. The Superiority insisted that we needed to transition to a democracy in order to advance to primary citizenship, and I think that change was good for us. But I wish Lord Hesho had remained here with us to see the initiative of his people. He and his ancestors before him served us well for centuries.”

Kauri continued to lead us up the path, and the pinnacles of the city of Dreamspring came into view. The cliff had been split into little vertical ridges, the effect uneven enough to be natural rather than kitsen-made. The rock was full of holes and walkways so the kitsen could duck from tunnel to tunnel all across the cliff face of the upper city. The city only rose in height along the cliff face; in front it opened into a sprawling urban landscape that filled the stone area between the sheer cliff and the sand of the beach.

Here along the wall, our faces were even with the higher stories of pathways and tunnels. Scud, we wouldn’t fit in their buildings. We couldn’t sit down in their homes with them or enter their shops. I imagined what we would feel like on Detritus if ships full of sixty-foot giants suddenly arrived. They’d be unable to fit in our elevators, unable to visit our caverns.

We’d be terrified. It was a miracle that the kitsen had welcomed the humans in the past. And those humans had taken advantage of their trust—that wasn’t our fault, but we were responsible for overcoming that history now.

“Kauri,” I said, “I know you need to speak to your senate, but where will we even be able to meet with them?”

“Our senate meets in a large auditorium,” Kauri said. “We can welcome you there, but you’ll have to remain on the floor. I’m afraid we don’t have any chairs that will accommodate you. We destroyed all the humans’ dwellings after they were expelled from our planet in the Second Human War. Perhaps we could find some sturdy tables for you to sit on.”

I worried about our ability to sit on even the sturdiest of kitsen tables. Like FM said, we didn’t want to cause any interstellar incidents. “We can sit on the ground,” I said. “If there’s room.”

“As long as that wouldn’t be too much of an insult,” Kauri said. “We wish to meet with you as equals, but we do not know your customs.”

“No,” I said. “No insult. Where exactly are Cobb and Gran-Gran?” They wouldn’t have fit inside these buildings either. And if they were unconscious—stars, they wouldn’t fit inside a kitsen hospital.

“Our feasting grounds are just beyond the turn of the cliff, and the tent with your people is beyond those,” Kauri said. “We might be able to put up another tent large enough to shade you while you eat, but the first one took us quite a bit of effort to construct.”

“It’s not necessary,” I said. “Please, take us to Cobb and Gran-Gran.”

We took a narrow road across the clearing in front of the cliffs, the roads continuing to empty as we passed through. When we reached the other side of the city, the road turned toward the beach again, and Kauri presented the feasting grounds, which were basically a wide stretch of sand with stone tables and small gazebos set against the cliff. Some of Goro’s people—I recognized them by their armor—were filleting fish as big as they were and loading them onto conveyers that rolled into ovens carved out of the cliff face.

“Scud, I don’t know if we can eat the food here,” I said.

“What are those things?” Alanik said, staring at the fish. “They look…slimy.”

Huh. They wouldn’t have fish on ReDawn, I supposed. We had some that we raised in vats, and a few that lived wild in underground lakes.

“Those are fish,” Cuna said. “They pull them from the ocean and eat them. You will be better off trying the fruit.” They gestured to the bowls and platters being laid out on the banquet tables. “It should be palatable to your people.”

Alanik did not look thrilled, though she’d been polite about the food we’d given her on Detritus, despite most of it being made out of algae.

“If you want to leave some of your people here you may,” Kauri said. “The tent near the hospital is up ahead.”

“That sounds good,” I said. I waved to Kel and Winnow—our medtechs—to join us.

I looked over at Alanik. The kitsen seemed to react better to her, since she wasn’t human. “Come with me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Do you want me to come?” FM asked.

“No,” I said. “Stay here and maybe do some diplomacy?”

FM gave me a withering look.

Cuna wandered over to the kitsen, observing their cooking. I lowered my voice. “Try to make sure Cuna doesn’t insult them too much,” I said. “And that Nedd doesn’t volunteer to duel creatures one-tenth his size, all right?”

“I can try to make sure he doesn’t volunteer again,” FM said.

“Good. I do not need that on my conscience.”

FM turned to the others and directed them out onto the beach.

The burrow that Kauri said held the hospital was enormous, towering up into the air. There were many small doors into the complex itself, none of which an adult human could fit through. The kitsen only needed a small fraction of the head clearance humans did.

Kauri led us to a tent that had been erected out front. It looked like many smaller tents had all been affixed together on long poles, creating a structure perhaps three meters long by two meters wide. The roof was about the height of my shoulders, so when Kauri maneuvered her platform near the entrance and pulled back the tent flap, I had to stoop to look inside.

There, on two platforms so low to the ground that I thought they might originally have been kitsen banquet tables, lay Cobb and Gran-Gran. Their bodies had been covered with many blankets layered over each limb and across their torsos.

Kel and Winnow both ducked inside, and Kauri continued to hold the tent flap open as they examined Gran-Gran and Cobb. They were both breathing, I was relieved to see, but their eyes were closed, and one side of Cobb’s face was covered in bruises. Some medical equipment was attached to the side of the tables, and kitsen wearing little white robes and hats were surveying it. One stood on a ladder that reached to about the height of my knee, changing out the tiny bottle on what looked like a makeshift IV pole.

At least they were alive and had already received medical attention. “You’ll want to get them home to your people, I imagine,” Kauri said.

“Yes,” I said. “We brought a medical transport ship, and our medtechs will supervise the transfer.”

Alanik was watching them both with concern on her face, and she shook her head. “I’m still not sure that’s Becca Nightshade.”

I blinked. The person in the bed looked like Spensa’s grandmother. “Why do you say that?”

“Because she isn’t cytonic,” Alanik said.

I reached out, trying to sense the vibration I always felt near another cytonic. I could feel waves of it rolling off Alanik.

But she was right. Nothing from Gran-Gran. Farther out, I could feel our taynix still in our ships, but no other cytonics.

But there was something, a vibration coming from the cliffs behind us. Not the concentrated frequency of a cytonic mind, but more like a…cloud of something.

“Do you feel that?” I asked. “The strange buzzing from behind the cliffs?”

Alanik frowned. “No,” she said. “I’m not finding any cytonic presence here.”

That was odd, and I had no idea what it meant. I moved past Winnow to Gran-Gran’s bed and brushed the blanket off her hand on one side and then the other, checking for hologram bracelets.

There weren’t any. And if the Superiority were trying to trick us, where was the spring for the trap? I reached up and brushed Gran-Gran’s hair with my hand. It moved exactly as I expected it to.

“I think that’s her,” I said. “But you’re right, her cytonic abilities seem to be gone. What happened to them? And why did they end up here?”

“Gran-Gran was behaving strangely before she hyperjumped,” Alanik said. “She told me she could tell where Cobb was on the ship, which doesn’t make sense. He’s not cytonic, so she shouldn’t have been able to find him through the negative realm.”

That was strange. “But you knew it was her then,” I said. “Because you were familiar with her mind. So was I. She wasn’t a Superiority fake.”

“She also said she was hearing voices calling to her, asking her for help,” Alanik said. “She asked if they were my people.”

I narrowed my eyes. That could have been the Superiority interfering with her cytonics. Like what happened to Spensa’s father.

I looked at the medtechs. “What is their condition?”

“They seem stable,” Kel said.

“We’ve focused on keeping them nourished and hydrated,” Kauri added. “Our lorekeepers have some records of what nutrients your people need.”

“Cuna said that your people don’t have cytonics,” I said, “but that you still have information about them.”

“Yes,” Kauri said. “Our lorekeepers have preserved the records, and they study and understand them, but we have not had kitsen cytonics for centuries. Some of my people believe it’s a curse, that we haven’t proven ourselves worthy to regain the powers.”

That was unfortunate. Still, detailed records of cytonic powers would be useful. “We would love to speak to your lorekeepers,” I said.

“Of course,” Kauri said. “I will send a message saying that you’ve requested an audience with them.”

“In the meantime, we can load Cobb and Gran-Gran into the transport ship.” Something strange was happening with Gran-Gran, possibly with both of them, and they needed better medical care than our medtechs could give here in the field.

“I think you should meet with our senators first,” Kauri said. “If you remove your people from the planet before the meeting, Goro may try to use that as evidence that you’re trying to sneak away, or that you’re preparing to attack.”

I hesitated, looking to Winnow.

“I don’t think a few hours are going to make a difference,” Winnow said. “Unless their conditions worsen.”

That was fair. I looked at Cobb one more time. His face was pale, but he was breathing. He was alive.

We’d wake him up. We had to.

He had to find us a way out of this mess.