Cytonic (Skyward #3)(114)

“Like?”

“Like courage, M-Bot. Fear creates courage.”

He thought on that for a while. “I think…maybe I understand that. You need opposing emotions in order to feel good ones?”

“Yes,” I said. “And beyond that, I think emotions help us understand our own decisions. You just told me that you know we have to leave, even though you don’t feel it.”

“So…” he said. “So your emotions can’t be your only guide. They exist to help you make some decisions, but not all decisions. In this case, our minds overruled them. Because we realized that if we didn’t continue the quest, many people would be in danger. Emotions are like a secondary processing unit that measures different kinds of input to offer a contrasting opinion and other options for proceeding.”

“That’s right,” I said. “See? You’re putting all of this together.”

“With effort. It seems so instinctive to all of you.”

“That’s because we’ve had emotions since we were born,” I said. “You’re comparing my experience of almost twenty years to your experience of having had emotions—freely, without counter-programming—for a few weeks. That considered, you’re doing extremely well.”



He pondered that. And as he did, the dash chirped.

Destination approaching soon.

We had nearly reached the final stop on Chet’s Path of Elders. The resting place of memories that belonged to the delvers themselves.





The lightburst had grown larger and larger as we approached. By now it dominated the sky. Below, the fragments had grown even closer to one another, the space between them shrinking until it was gone. These ones we passed now had been crushed together, forced to interlock, with ridges pushed up near junctures. Like someone had decided to do a puzzle but had gotten bored, then shoved all the pieces together regardless of whether they fit.

The light was changing too. As we flew the last few minutes toward our destination, the sky faded from pink to a more pure white. And the ground…it all felt painted. Strangely, the lightburst hadn’t grown brighter—I could still stare directly into it—but by its powerful radiance the landscape below became whited, with long shadows stretching away from the center.

I frowned at these, leaning over to watch those shadows pass below. They seemed too…sharp. Like wedges cut in the light that stretched behind peaks in the landscape. They were so long—eerily stretched, with distinct, harsh edges. Shouldn’t the light from the higher-up portions of the lightburst prevent that?

“Spensa,” Chet whispered from behind. “We have arrived.”

I glanced out the other side of my cockpit and spotted a long shadow below, different from the others. The fragments beneath us—well and truly a large plain now—were relatively flat, lacking any kind of vegetation. The only variation came at the edges, where the fragments were crushed together, or from the occasional rocky lump of stone that threw a round shadow.



Yet here below us I saw a distinctly squarish shadow stretching hundreds of meters. The Solitary Shadow, he’d called it. The portal that contained the memories of the delvers. I lowered us slowly toward the surface, and as I landed I felt something else—powerful cytonic emotions from behind.

Raw fear.

I glanced toward Chet, who had pulled down in his chair, his eyes wide.

“You can do this, Chet,” I said to him.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I…I have been hiding from this for too long. We all have.”

He nodded to me in encouragement, but I could literally feel his terror building. So I tried to reach out, like he’d done for me when I’d faced the delvers. I projected feelings of satisfaction at climbing a tall cliff. The pain of muscles that have been pushed, but endured. The glorious feeling of having conquered a difficult fragment.

It wasn’t so different. For a moment our minds connected, and my cytonic self became softer, radiating more strength toward him—and accepting back his returned emotions. I didn’t have to always be so defensive, a part of me whispered.

When I withdrew, I felt a warmth and a gratitude from him. He smiled a confident Chet smile, then gave me a thumbs-up.

I cracked the canopy to look out across an eternal white plane, washed as if by white paint. And…actually, now that I was closer, I could see that the ground was covered in a kind of chalky dust. It was like…all the foliage, buildings, and landscape features had decomposed into this stuff. The only distinctive features were the occasional rocks, like mushroom tops.



Ahead, a solitary wall rose from the dust, with the now-familiar markings on it. The last portal.

“Do you know where it leads?” I asked.

“I think it goes to Earth,” Chet whispered.

A second portal to Earth? The implications—which probably should have dawned on me last time—sank in. “Earth is gone. Lost. Vanished.”

“Yes,” he said, and pointed. “But that portal leads to it. Or it once did. Perhaps Earth is no more. I don’t know.”

Did this mean I could find our homeworld again? Well, this one was probably locked like the others—someone seemed to have gone through them all and shut them, perhaps out of fear of whatever was in here. But the mere idea that Earth was still out there somewhere, still existed…