Cytonic (Skyward #3)(68)

Chet hopped back from the portal as something else materialized in front of it. Stones? Yes, a pile of building materials. People began using them to construct something.

“This wasn’t their first visit here,” I said, feeling it was true. There were…sensations to the vision, not just sights. “They want to build a shrine, I think.”

Chet and I watched as time sped up, and walls sprang into existence. The people became blurs, erecting the very structure that Chet and I were standing in. They carved delicate art into the walls, then painted everything with vibrant colors.

Why put something so nice in this strange place? Time slowed again, and the humans—it seemed the construction had taken weeks, maybe months—gathered together out front. Chet and I joined them and saw another fragment swinging closer. This bore a group of people in vibrant red robes. They had pale violet skin, growths like horns, and pure white hair. People from ReDawn…Alanik’s homeworld.

“I know those people,” I told Chet. “They’re the UrDail. The one I met said they’d known humans in the past.”



“How far in the past?” Chet asked, rubbing his chin. “These humans wear ancient clothing.”

“Scud,” I said. “Could this be first contact? The first time humans met with aliens? I thought that didn’t happen until we were in the space age.”

Except Hesho had also told me that the kitsen people had met with humans in Japan centuries before either achieved space travel. They’d traveled using cytonics. Like these, it seemed.

In front of us, the humans greeted the UrDail—who stepped over to our fragment—and I realized this probably wasn’t first contact. The two groups looked familiar with one another, so their first encounters must have happened earlier. Now the humans had built some kind of meeting hall. It wasn’t a shrine, I realized as we followed the people in. It was a place where they sat together at tables, trying to…

Trying to figure out one another’s languages perhaps? Yes, they were writing words, gesturing, explaining to one another. Time sped up again, and I counted dozens of meetings in a matter of minutes—each time the two fragments aligned. I think I even saw some UrDail visit Earth through the portal, while some humans left on the UrDail fragment.

Then…the humans stopped coming.

An alignment happened and the UrDail arrived, but no humans were there to meet them. That occurred several more times, then eventually the UrDail stopped visiting as well.

“So…” I said. “What does this tell us about our powers?”

Chet frowned, inspecting the mural in the vision—which was colorful and vibrant then. “Alien species began meeting in the nowhere. Mixing. But then it ended. Why?”

That…had happened with the kitsen too, hadn’t it? Hesho said their cytonics had vanished for some reason. As I was considering this, a woman appeared out of the wall. She was middle-aged, with tan skin and colorful robes. I followed her as she walked out of the building, then over to the nearby edge of the fragment. There she settled down, looking out at the expanse.



Time passed. Months, maybe years. And still she sat there, as if waiting for something. Finally she rose and walked past us.

“Who are you?” I asked.

And the impression returned, I am the only one who was not killed by the beast.

Wait. Wait. Had she replied?

I followed her back into the building as she walked up to the portal. There she rested her hand—and lines in the stone began to spiral and flourish out at her touch.

I feel your questions, the impression said. It is my talent. Though I do not know any of you, I leave my answers in the portal.

“What happened?” I asked. “To the cytonics?”

A beast. Raised by an alien species who had technological marvels.

I saw something in my mind then. An assembly of thousands of cytonics—of a hundred different races—gathering to fight…something dark, something rising from a blackness, but with a set of piercing white eyes.

It…destroyed them, the cytonic said. We fought. We won. But the price was so high…

“How?” I asked. “How did you win?”

We made it become real, she said. I do not know how. I survived…and those who did know how…were consumed. She lowered her hand. She’d…inscribed her memories into the portal, which…were now reaching me somehow?

Chet walked up behind me. “Time is unnatural in the nowhere, but this is strange even by its standards,” he said. “I…have no idea what to make of this.”

I felt the vision begin to fade. It was coming to the end of its memories.

“Wait,” I said to the woman. “You kept your memories while living in the nowhere. How?”

Why would I lose my memories? the impression returned.



“That’s an attribute of this place,” I said.

Not in our time. You face a beast, like ours.

“Not one beast,” I said. “Thousands. Millions of them.”

Then you are doomed.

“No. There has to be a way!”

Find the memories…of the man who will come… Find the memories…of the man named Jason Write.

Then a different sort of impression came upon me, as had happened during the previous vision. I understood it better because I was stronger in my powers, better at listening. It felt like dozens, maybe hundreds, of minds reaching to me from within the stone.