Cytonic (Skyward #3)(34)

Chet led me back to the small wooden building I’d discovered, saying that we needed to salvage some supplies. I tried explaining that it had been picked clean, but once we arrived he proceeded to take the doors off their hinges.

We each carried a door to the edge of the fragment, where we waited an hour to jump across to the next approaching fragment. It was a tropical one, full of tall trees with bare trunks and leaves only at the tops. We took our time crossing this one, scavenging for some strange oversized nuts the size of a person’s head. They weren’t coconuts—I knew those from my studies on Old Earth—but were similar.

We spent the evening hollowing the nuts out by prying off the tops and pulling out the long, stringy pulp by hand. Afterward we stretched the interior membrane of each one over the hole we’d made and set it to dry.

That night, I again failed at contacting Jorgen. But I woke up eager and excited for the day’s trek—because while we’d slept, our next fragment had approached.

An ocean.

It was the most bizarre thing I’d seen here yet. The sides were stone like the bottom, but they were only about a meter thick. Beyond was water; essentially the fragment was an enormous bowl. It seemed larger than most fragments we’d traveled on, extending for kilometers into the distance.



Chet showed me how to use the pulp—which had become cordlike as it dried—to tie the doors together and lash the hollowed-out nuts to them. The nuts were watertight and filled with air. So when we shoved off into the ocean, we had a functional raft.

It was awesome.

Even M-Bot was impressed. He buzzed around us, complimenting the raft’s “structural integrity” and “remarkable buoyancy.” We named the ship the Not-ilus and I stood proudly at the prow—well, the flat front end I declared the prow. Chet chuckled softly, weaving oars from bent reeds and leftover nut-guts.

It was slow going, but I still felt like I was some ancient Polynesian hero sailing the ocean for the first time. Plus it got even better. Because the ocean had sea monsters.

I saw them swimming below as sinuous shapes and immediately fell to my knees, worried. And excited. Because, you know. Sea monsters.

I glanced at Chet, who was whistling softly and braiding some nut-guts into a stronger cord. One did not act so cheekily nonchalant by accident; he wasn’t worried about the sea monsters, whatever they were.

“Oh!” M-Bot said, hovering past me. “Look! Ah! Um, turn around! About-face! Reverse rudder or whatever! We’re going to get eaten!”

Chet calmly tossed me the rope, one end of which he’d fashioned into a loop. Then he handed me a small red fruit he’d harvested somewhere.

“Float that out beside us,” he said, “then set the loop around it in the water and get ready to pull.”

I could hardly contain myself as I did what he said. I stood at the ready as a blue serpentine head came up and snatched the fruit. I yanked with a mighty pull, looping the thing around the neck, which let out a gaping…



…yawn?

Well, it was a sea monster, even if it barely noticed that I’d captured it. Instead it chewed on the fruit, bringing up another coil of its body from the depths below. It was like a snake, perhaps as thick as a man’s thigh, but had little flippered legs along its very long body. It bit happily at the fruit, then looked up at me with pleading eyes, its head wagging in the water.

“You,” I told it, “shall be known as Gnash the Slaughterer.”

It made a bubbling sound, then turned eagerly as Chet tossed another fruit far out into the ocean. It began moving, towing us along as I yelped and held tight to the rope.

“Spensa,” M-Bot said, hovering along beside my head, “I don’t think that creature is likely to slaughter anything.”

“It’s a garqua,” Chet explained, settling back down on the raft—er, the deck of our mighty ship. “They’re not dangerous. They come from Monrome.”

“Monrome?” I asked.

“Dione homeworld?” Chet said. “Even I know that, and I’ve forgotten the names of my parents.” At my blank stare, he continued. “No predators on Monrome.”

“What?” I said. “None?”

“None,” Chet said. “Scavengers and herbivores only.”

I glanced at M-Bot, who bobbed in the air to simulate nodding. “It’s true,” he said. “Though I doubt this one came directly from the dione homeworld—they have colonized nearly a hundred planets and have a habit of importing their local wildlife. After, ah, exterminating the local species for being too brutal and aggressive.”

“Sounds like them,” I said. “Still feels odd to me.”

“Did you assume every planet had the same ecological hierarchy as Earth?” M-Bot asked.

“Well…yeah,” I said. “I mean, it seems pretty fundamental. Things eat other things.”



“It seems fundamental,” Chet said, “because it’s the way it was for us. Doesn’t mean it has to be that way everywhere.”

Huh. I continued holding Gnash’s leash. She stopped to eat the fruit Chet had thrown—but then continued on, pulling us along contentedly. She appeared to think she’d find another piece of fruit if she kept going that direction, something Chet reinforced by occasionally tossing out another.