Cytonic (Skyward #3)(76)

I still felt a sense of dread from what I’d experienced the night before. The deal had been made; the delvers would work with Winzik. I needed to find answers, and quickly.

Fortunately, I seemed to be on the best path for that. Win this duel; help Peg take Surehold. Unfortunately, the trip to the arena would take a few hours. When I’d complained in the hangar about the flying time, Maksim had tossed me the book.

A real book, made of paper and everything. I hadn’t been intending to read it, but as the flight stretched long—and I let M-Bot take over steering for a little while—I found myself poking into it as a distraction.

It was slow reading, as I had to use my translation pin with its optics on to read the sentences to me in English. At the same time, it was fascinating. Not only was physical media like this almost nonexistent on my planet, information from our old ship archives was fragmented. The biggest chunk that had survived until my time was about the plants and animals of Old Earth, so my schooling had covered that in detail.



But I’d never heard of a “trashy romance novel,” as Maksim had named this one. It was written from the perspective of the cambrian species, who had a lot of tentacles and stuff. Their courtship rituals were surprisingly similar to human ones—if way, way more sappy. Or maybe that was the genre.

I didn’t really care about the plot; I was more intrigued by this book’s nature. It was just…so fluffy. The protagonist spent her time romancing three different guys, and her most urgent question was deciding which one to bring with her on vacation.

Like, that was the entire conflict. Not the quest to win this vacation, but the stress of choosing between the guys. This was what they read, what they enjoyed, in the Superiority? It contained no fighting. I wasn’t so ignorant as to think everything had to involve battle. There were plenty of great stories about heroes like clever Coyote escaping trouble using his wits instead of his brawn. There were even stories about people building up to a war, then making peace.

Gran-Gran hadn’t ever told me a story about people taking a vacation. Part of me thought it was ridiculous. But another part understood. It whispered, “This is what people can focus their attention on if they aren’t constantly at war. You learned something living among them: your life is not normal.”

This aspect of the characters made them so much more alien than the tentacles. I wanted peace for my people, yes. But to imagine a world without flight training, without the military complex being society’s central and most demanding need…

Scud. I couldn’t understand it, but I needed to. So I read their romance novel and tried to comprehend.



We flew for some time, and I dug a good quarter of the way through the book, when M-Bot spoke. “You see that fragment?”

I glanced out of the canopy. We had to move slowly for the benefit of the tugs, so we made a leisurely pace through the belt, passing fragments with a variety of terrain. One down below was a rare ocean fragment. Not the one we’d traversed earlier, but similar.

“I feel something seeing that one,” M-Bot said. “I remembered sailing with you and Chet, and it felt…pleasant. Like I was meeting an old friend. Is it strange to feel this now? It’s not even the same fragment.”

“It’s not strange,” I said. “Humans often associate feelings with locations. The caverns beneath Detritus sometimes feel more like home to me than the neighborhood where I grew up—and each time I see a cave, I think of them.”

“This feeling is…nice,” M-Bot said.

“Not going to ask this time what the emotions are for?”

“I’m still wondering that,” he said. “But today I just…like these feelings. That’s all right. Isn’t it?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“I used to try to imagine why you liked stories so much,” M-Bot said. “At first I thought it was a purely logical response—education through the story as a mnemonic device. Yet your strange reactions baffled me. You didn’t treat them as mere education, but as something more.

“I think I understand now. Hearing those stories, being with your grandmother, felt good. And thinking of them again… Well, you remember her voice, don’t you? That’s like me seeing that fragment and remembering the fun of sailing. It’s…warm to me. A machine shouldn’t be able to feel warm, but I do.”

I shifted in my seat, trying to remember Gran-Gran’s voice, as he said. And…I couldn’t. I remembered the stories, but her voice was lost to me.

Needing to be distracted, I turned back to my book, and we flew for more…time. I’ll admit, I kind of liked the book. I didn’t find it trashy at all. Indeed, I actually found myself engaged, almost excited to find out who got to go on the vacation. Granted, it helped to imagine the heroine was planning to feed the failed suitors to her pet shark.



It would have been easier if M-Bot hadn’t piped up with some observation or another every five minutes. “Hey, Spensa! That fragment is black and purple, with crystals growing in the ground! I think it comes from a planet like where Shiver lived. What do you think?”

“Don’t know, M-Bot,” I said, turning the page. “Why don’t you scan your databases to find out?”

“Done!” he said. “I think it does!”