Cytonic (Skyward #3)(55)

“It is different out here,” Nuluba was saying. “When I rode with Shiver on that scavenging mission a few weeks back, I felt distant. Even with others around me in the ships, it was harder to remember my past than it ever is here in the base.”

“It’s worse the farther inward you go,” Shiver said. “The mining installation is as close to the center as I’d ever want to go.”

That got me thinking. “So, that region closest to the lightburst. Nobody lives there?”

“No Man’s Land?” Shiver said. “No one lives there that I know. It is…an odd place. Where time distorts. Something is in there, at the center, watching outward.”

“People who get very close to the center see odd visions,” Nuluba said. “Have strange experiences.”

“Yeah,” Maksim said. “I’m not going anywhere near there. The belt is strange enough. Can you imagine if we started seeing things that aren’t there?”

“It is not so bad.”

I started. That last voice had been…Dllllizzzz? I’d never known her to speak.

At the words, Shiver began buzzing excitedly. The pin translated. “What was that? Dllllizzzz, you spoke! Have the reality ashes helped?”

“I…saw…” Dllllizzzz said, her voice soft. “Saw the past…”



“Where?” I asked, leaning toward her crystal—which she’d created at the end of a line of runners leaving her ship, as Shiver had.

“Ruins,” Dllllizzzz whispered.

Shiver continued to try to prompt her to speak, but Dllllizzzz returned to her normal low, wordless vibrations.

I pondered what she’d said. She’d seen the past in some ruins—had she happened across one of the stops on the Path of Elders? Was Dllllizzzz cytonic?

Shiver asked Maksim to sprinkle some reality ashes on Dllllizzzz—they’d been doing that regularly with the ashes they’d confiscated from me. I paid attention to see if Shiver could get anything out of her, but no luck. Eventually Maksim settled down next to me and helped to sort through junk for anything useful. “You look thoughtful, Spin.”

“Merely distracted,” I said.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. “You having troubles remembering?”

“A little,” I admitted. “Some faces, here and there.”

“That hurts,” he said. “I know how it feels. Good news is that you’ll probably start forgetting the faces of your captors too. That didn’t happen quickly enough for my taste.”

He still thought I had been a human captive. Scud, it suddenly felt awful to be doing what I was. Lying to these people, planning to steal one of their ships, maybe sabotage them.

“I wasn’t a captive, Maksim,” I said. I hadn’t meant to tell them the truth—it kind of slipped out. “I lived on a human enclave planet.”

His eyes widened. “Those are real?”

“One is, at least,” I said. “Not everyone in the Superiority agreed that they should exist though. There was…a lot of fighting. We’d rebel. They’d suppress it…”

It wasn’t a hundred percent the truth, but it felt good to share some of myself.



“You grew up in an actual human society?” Shiver asked. “What was it like?”

“It was hard,” I said. “My father was killed when I was young. My family had to struggle for food because resources were tight for everyone—but especially those who weren’t directly involved in fighting the Superiority.”

“So it really was like they say,” Maksim whispered. “Humans together…just leads to war.”

“Hardly,” I said. “The Superiority caused this. My people didn’t want war—we fled from it. My family—all of us humans on Detritus—were the crew on a vast starship, the Defiant. My great-grandmother was in the engine crew, and our starship wasn’t part of the human groups perpetuating the war.

“The enemy wouldn’t leave us alone. When we crashed on my home planet, they tried to exterminate us. Then they imprisoned us there. I think any society would turn warlike under such circumstances.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” Shiver said, her voice ringing out, “if I hadn’t grown so long near Maksim. Who is the least violent person I’ve met.”

“That’s because you haven’t seen me in action yet!” he said, then he made a growling sound. “Just wait until I get into the sky. I’ll be fearsome!”

“I’m sure,” Shiver said, vibrating with a sound like ringing bells—her version of laughter.

“I believe you, Spin,” Nuluba said softly, looking up from her spreadsheets. “I mentioned my job earlier. Well, one year I was analyzing population statistics on the planets of species with ‘lesser intelligence.’ My job was to suggest where to employ advertising for regions that weren’t buying our services.

“But in the data, I found unexpected truths. Many so-called lesser species weren’t suffering the casualty rates from intraspecies murder that we projected. They were known as aggressive species, so they should have been killing one another at horrific rates. Yet…that just wasn’t the case.