Starsight (The Skyward Series Book 2)

I streaked toward the delver, Vapor and the kitsen on my wings. In my mind, the lingering horror of the nowhere shadowed my memories—that had been a bad jump, with so many of them watching me. But the one specific delver that had been so close lately hadn’t been there. I could somehow tell the difference.

It wasn’t hard to guess exactly where that delver was. It loomed just beyond Starsight, and had already begun launching embers by the hundreds into the shield. Chaotic emergency information channels said the city had opened the shield on the side farthest from the delver, allowing ships to escape.

“Kauri,” I said, glancing at the flagging kitsen ship. “You’re trailing smoke.”

“Our boosters are barely working,” she replied. “I’m sorry, Alanik. I don’t know how useful we’re going to be in a battle against those embers.”

“Vapor and I should be able to manage it,” I said. “Fly back and see if you can get anyone’s attention on the military channels. We need the city to go silent. The delver can hear their radio signals. I don’t know how we’re going to drive the thing away, but I suspect it will be a lot easier if this city isn’t screaming at it.”

“Understood,” Kauri said. “We’ll do what we can. Good luck.”

“Luck is for those who cannot smell their path forward,” Vapor said. “But . . . perhaps today that is us. So good luck to you too.”

The Swims Upstream broke off from us and started back. Vapor and I continued along just outside the atmosphere bubble. Beneath us, ships were swarming and trying to escape.

“M-Bot?” I asked, trying the secret line the two of us had been using, connected via my bracelet.

There was no response, and using my onboard sensors I was able to get a zoomed-in picture of my embassy building as we passed. The rooftop was empty. So maybe he’d gotten away somehow? Scud, I wished I knew.

Together, Vapor and I approached the delver itself. It evoked an awful sense of scale—and was far more daunting than a mere planetoid would be. Embers emerged from the dust, then smashed repeatedly into the city’s shield, exploding soundlessly in the void—but some of the blasts were the size of entire battleships.

“I can’t help churning upon myself a little,” Vapor said as we approached, “and thinking our training was horribly incomplete.”

“Yeah,” I said. No training in a simulation could approximate the strange sensations the delver sent at me, a kind of crushing feeling upon my mind. It somehow heightened my fear, my anger, and my sense of horror. It was getting worse the closer we got.

A small blip flashed on my proximity sensor.

“What’s that?” Vapor asked.

“It’s her,” I said, noting the ship flying ahead of us. I quickly opened a line. “Brade. You can’t take this thing on by yourself.”

“I’m not going to let it destroy my home,” she said back. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was supposed to go after you.”

“Ignore that,” I snapped. “Work with me for once.”

“Alanik . . . you realize what I’m going to do if I reach the center? The only thing I can do?”

Use the diversion weapon, I thought. Send it back toward Detritus again. “We have to send it somewhere else, Brade. We have to try.”

She cut the line.

“That one has always been a foul wind, Alanik,” Vapor said. “She’s . . . Oh. Um.”

She’s human.

“Cover me as we get close,” I said, hitting my boosters.

We flew out from over Starsight, nearing the delver’s dust cloud. The only hope I had for a plan was to try to send the delver somewhere unpopulated. I’d established three hyperjump locations in my mind: Starsight, Detritus, and the deep-space location of the delver maze.

So I only had one real option. I’d have to send it to the maze. But . . . surely it would just find nothing to destroy there, then immediately return to Starsight. What else could I do though? Maybe it would see the maze and be distracted by it? That seemed a frail hope, but it was the only one I had.

Vapor flew out ahead of me and started shooting down the embers that approached. I slowed, and tried to reach out with my mind to the delver.

It was . . . vast. The sensations coming off it smothered me. I could feel how it regarded us. The anger at all the buzzing noises we made. Those same emotions threatened to overwhelm me, alienate me, make me feel the same way it did.

I fought against that, feeding it the location of the maze, trying—as I’d somehow done before—to distract its attention. Unfortunately, before it hadn’t just been me. It had been a mixture of my emotion, the silence on Detritus, and the sound out in the void. The singing stars.

The delver had come here because it knew the noises were greatest here. My current efforts to distract it were swallowed up by the emotion it radiated. I felt like I was screaming into a tempest, and try as I might, I couldn’t pierce the noise.

I cursed, cutting off my attempts and boosting after Vapor, blasting an ember that almost hit her.

“We need to get inside,” I said. “We need to find its heart.”

Vapor fell in next to me, and together we hurtled into the dust. Visibility dropped to nearly nothing, and I had to fly by instruments. We’d been warned we would need to do that, but nothing in our training had indicated how creepy it would be to enter this dust.

As we flew through that silent cloud, which flashed periodically with red light, my sensors started to go out. My proximity screen started to fuzz, giving me only the briefest warnings when something was drawing close. Embers emerged as burning shapes, indistinct and terrible.

Vapor and I stopped fighting the embers, instead just trying to dodge as they attempted to slam into us. They’d fall in and trail after us, occasionally streaking forward with bursts of speed. I felt like I was trying to outrun my own shadow.

The pressure on my mind grew worse and worse the closer we drew to the delver itself. Soon I was gritting my teeth against it—the sensations were so overpowering that they affected my flying. I barely got out of the way of one ember, but put myself into the path of another.

Frantic, I speared a third with my light-lance, which fortunately pulled me out of the way. But when I looked up, I couldn’t see Vapor. My sensors were a jumble of static, and the only things I could make out around me were moving shadows and bursts of red light.

“Vapor?” I asked.

I got a jumbled response. Was that her over there? I followed another shadow, but only got further lost in the dust storm. I glanced the other direction, and saw what I was sure was an explosion.

“Vapor?”

Static.

I dodged away from another ember, but my fingers had started to tremble from the force of the thoughts pressing upon my mind.

Buzzing . . . buzzing insects . . . Destroy them . . .

Oppressive thoughts, weighing me down. Nightmare visions started to appear in the dust. Monsters from Gran-Gran’s stories, appearing and vanishing. My father’s face. Myself, but with burning white eyes . . .

This wasn’t anything like the carefully designed illusions of the training maze. It was a horrific cacophony. No secrets to uncover, just noise slamming against me. Being a cytonic here was a huge disadvantage, because the delver got inside my brain.

I was barely controlling my ship. Reality and illusion melded as one, and I took my hands off the controls and pressed them against my eyes. My head had begun to throb in agony. I tried another weak effort to whisper back—to divert the thing toward deep space.

That seemed to open me further, and the noise invaded my mind. I screamed, and something smashed into my ship, ramming it to the side, nearly bringing down my shield. Warning alarms from my dash were just another noise. I . . . I couldn’t fly in this. I . . .

A shadow emerged from the dust. My heart leaped at the shape of a ship. Vapor? M-Bot?

No, a shuttle, with no weapons except an industrial light-lance for moving equipment. It speared my ship and pulled me after it, away from the churning shapes. An ember—I thought it was real—roared past, narrowly missing my ship.

“Alanik?” a voice said on my comm.

I . . . I knew that voice. “Morriumur?” I whispered.

“I’ve got your ship tethered,” they said. “You were just sitting there. Are you all right?”

“The heart . . . ,” I whispered. “You have to get me to the heart. But . . . but Morriumur . . . you can’t . . . The illusions . . .”

“I can see through them!” Morriumur said.

What?

Morriumur towed me through the dust, approaching one of the spines of the delver—a large spike leading down to its surface. We flew along it, Morriumur dodging some of the nightmares, but completely ignoring others. They smashed into us and puffed away. Just . . . illusions.

“It shows different things to everyone,” Morriumur said, expertly towing me into a hole in the surface.

“Two people . . . ,” I whispered, holding my head. “You need—”

“That’s the thing, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “I am two people.”

I whimpered, squeezing my eyes shut at the assault, which only grew worse as we flew inside. Fortunately, Morriumur’s voice continued, somehow comforting and real in the middle of all the emotion and noise.

“It’s projecting two different things at me,” Morriumur said. “One to each of the brains of my parents. I . . . don’t think it knows how to deal with me. We’ve never flown a draft into a delver before, so far as I know. Honestly, I don’t think any diones at all ever tried flying into one of these. Our pilots have always been varvax or tenasi.

“The illusions are nothing to me, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “We didn’t realize, during training. We treated me like anyone else—but I can see through them as two overlapping, shadowy images. I can do this. I can reach the heart.”

I undid my buckles with trembling hands, barely aware of what I was doing. I ripped off my helmet, then curled up, holding my head, trying to escape the visions. I bounced against the inside of my ship as Morriumur pulled me one direction, then the next.

“A lot of these tunnels are fake,” Morriumur said. “I think the maze would have led us around in circles . . . It’s really just a big openness in here, Alanik.”

I trembled beneath an infinite weight. I don’t know how long it took, but I felt us getting closer. I was a child alone in a black room, and the darkness was pressing against me. Growing deeper, and deeper, and deeper . . .

“There’s something ahead.”

Deeper and deeper and deeper . . .

I dropped inside my cockpit, pressing against the seat.

“This is it!” The small voice came from my dash. An insect to crush. “Alanik, we’ve entered a pocket of air and gravity. What do I do now? Alanik? I never got to the heart during our training!”

“Open. My. Canopy.” I whispered the words, my voice hoarse.

A short time later, I heard a thumping as Morriumur forced open my canopy with the manual override.

“Alanik?” Morriumur asked. “I see . . . a hole over there. The membrane is an illusion. It’s just a blackness, like a hole into nothing. What do I do?”

“Help. Me.”

Eyes squeezed closed, I let Morriumur assist me out of the ship and onto the wing. I stumbled, clinging to them, and opened my eyes.

Nightmares surrounded me. Visions of dying pilots. Hurl screaming as she burned. Bim. My father. Hesho. Everyone I’d known. But I could see it too, the hole. Our ships had settled down on something solid. It looked like one of the caverns from back home. The hole was right next to my ship, a deep void in the ground.

I let go of Morriumur, pushed off them. They cried out as I dropped from the wing. And plunged into the void.