Cytonic (Skyward #3)(28)

I knelt, unsteady. I could feel the floor, touch it. Yet it was faint, nearly invisible to my eyes. Near our knees was a small pinprick of whiteness. It was part of the vision. “Is this the lightburst?”

Chet shook his head, seeming baffled. But as we watched, something changed. A substance began to grow around the pinprick of light, obscuring it. Growing like a tiny asteroid, then flattening out, and…

“A fragment,” I said, watching as stone grew. “We’re witnessing the birth of a fragment.”

“Yes…” Chet said. “I believe you are correct. We are watching it grow over hundreds of years, I suspect. It’s as if…”

“As if matter is seeping through,” I said. “That’s what this is, Chet. A tiny weakness between the dimensions. The somewhere is leaking in, forming a fragment like a stalactite forms slowly over time in a cavern.”

And I knew this was happening over centuries, as Chet had said. That information appeared in my mind, because…because it had been left intentionally to inform me. These thoughts, they were the thoughts of ancient cytonics.

“Yes!” Chet said. “I believe you’ve done it, Miss Nightshade! This is the past. The Path of Elders. The secrets of the ancient cytonics.”



Scud, it sounded awesome when he said it that way. As we watched, the fragment expanded into a block of stone perhaps twenty meters wide.

“Look,” Chet said, pointing behind me. “Was that there before?”

I turned around. I didn’t see any other fragments, but I did pick out a faraway white spot. It was the lightburst, but it seemed to have appeared as the fragment grew.

“It’s so small,” I said. “And there are no other fragments around. This must be the distant, distant past.”

I got a sense of this place at the time. A kind of silent tranquility. Nothing dangerous. No feelings of anger. No…

No delvers. The delvers either hadn’t existed at that time, or had been somewhere else.

“How can we see this?” I asked. “You said this Path was memories of people who entered the nowhere, but presumably nobody was here to see this part.”

“Time is strange here,” Chet said, still kneeling. “I imagine that cytonics were able to uncover this somehow. Do you see this here? What do you make of it?”

A line had appeared in the ground—the illusory version. It was different from the rest of the fragment, shinier, a different color. As we watched, it grew up into a wall, just a few handbreadths high. But a tiny pattern appeared on it, a little swirl. It felt like some kind of natural occurrence. Like erosion.

Yes, that was it. A kind of interdimensional erosion. Only created when…

A figure appeared in the scene. A dione, with blue skin.

I felt the vision abruptly slow. Decades were no longer passing with each second; this was in real time. The dione stumbled to their feet.

“Preindustrial clothing,” Chet guessed, pointing at the furs sewn roughly together.



The dione gasped and spun around, confused. They smiled, baring their teeth. Wait, no. That wasn’t a smile. For diones that meant aggression, or maybe fear.

The dione didn’t see us, and it felt eerie to have them look through me. They then dropped to their knees and started clawing at the tiny wall that indicated the portal.

Until…time seemed to speed up again. We watched the unfortunate dione as a blur trying to find a way off the fragment. They aged, then died. Their corpse turned to dust, leaving bones. It happened in seconds.

“That poor creature,” Chet said. “Dying alone in this place.”

I knelt beside the dione’s bones. The fragment had grown larger, but only a little. “Matter leaks into here from the somewhere. You’ve said you suspected this, Chet.”

“Indeed! Perhaps the belt formed because of weakened boundaries.”

I scanned the darkness and thought I could pick out another fragment forming in the distance. And the lightburst…it was a tiny bit larger. “So the fragments grew around small weaknesses between this dimension and ours. The lightburst consolidated as a reaction—it became the uncorrupted region of the nowhere. A kind of…safe room in a quarantine zone, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Chet said. “Yes, that feels correct.”

There was another piece. Something more to this. “If the somewhere is leaking into here,” I said, “did the nowhere in turn leak into our dimension? What shape would that take?”

The answer was right before us. Other diones appeared in the vision, coming through the portal, each leaving a tiny addition to the wall—more matter, and another swirl each. These learned to jump in and out, and no more died alone in here.

“Cytonics,” Chet whispered. “This is how it happened. The nowhere leaked into our dimension, and it…changed people living near the breach. It made us.”



“It’s like…interdimensional radiation,” I said, “that infuses people with the nowhere?”

I felt a surreal sense of disconnect as—in the near distance—another fragment grew in fast motion. Other people appeared on it eventually, but of a different species. Varvax. The Krell, though they didn’t have their exoskeletons. They were little crabs, and…

I felt the two species connect, speak mind-to-mind before they even got close enough to shout at one another. The first two species to ever meet, at least in the nowhere, and long before either had access to space travel.