Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(28)

That didn’t make any sense though. “Talking about it isn’t going to change anything,” I said. “Nothing can change it.”

“That’s true,” FM said. “And trust me, I don’t like talking about these things any more than you do. But it helps, I promise. It doesn’t change what happened, but it changes you.”

I looked over at her. “You know this from experience?”

FM nodded. “Rig taught me that. Sometimes he has to make me talk, but every time I’m glad I did.”

“You guys are really good together,” I said. I would never have guessed it before they got together, but they seemed to balance each other out.

FM smiled. “Rig is my safe place,” she said. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you, and the fact that you need to talk or you’re going to explode. Again.”

I ran my hands through the sand. The grains were so tiny, and some of them stuck to my fingers. “I don’t even know what to say,” I said.

“Okay,” FM said. “I’ll go first. I was terrified when that Superiority ship exploded. I thought you had died in there. That’s the second time in a couple of weeks that we all thought you’d died, and it was horrible both times. So I would appreciate it if you’d stop doing that.”

I hadn’t thought about what that was like for the flight, waiting in their ships. They’d known there was a bomb. Alanik had pulled Rig in to try to disarm it.

Oh scud. “Is Rig okay?” I asked. “He knows that it wasn’t his fault, right?”

FM held out a hand and wobbled it back and forth. “I mean, logically he knows. He is not an expert at defusing explosives. But he still blames himself.”

I should have said something to him. I was the officer in charge of that operation, and it was my responsibility to—

“We’re not talking about Rig either,” FM said. “The question is, do you blame yourself?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t even have to think about it.

“But you know it isn’t your fault, right?”

I stared out at the ocean. The sun was starting to get lower in the sky, the light over the whole landscape turning an orangey-yellow.

I didn’t answer, and FM sighed. “What happened on the ship? Before the explosion.”

I closed my eyes. My memories felt fractured, slowed down and sped up all at once. “We split up,” I said. “I was taking fake Cobb to my parents to out him. Alanik went to release Gran-Gran. She was able to communicate with Gran-Gran, and Gran-Gran said she could sense Cobb, like, cytonically, even though she shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“So something strange was going on with Gran-Gran even before they hyperjumped,” FM said.

“Yeah, I guess so. Alanik also said Gran-Gran was talking about hearing voices.”

Voices asking for help.

Oh scud.

Whatever had gone wrong with her, was it happening to me too? She’d somehow lost her powers because of it, and if I did the same—

“There’s more,” I said. “Those people in the tent are Gran-Gran and Cobb—at least, best as we can tell—but Gran-Gran doesn’t appear to be cytonic.”

“What does that mean?” FM asked.

“It means her mind isn’t…visible to us in the nowhere anymore. She’s lost her…vibration, I guess.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” FM said. “That’s bad, Jorgen.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She was fleeing a Superiority ship. Maybe it was a trap they left for anyone trying to hyperjump away? But Alanik and I didn’t get caught in it.”

Not yet anyway.

I remembered the strange things I’d felt when Alanik and I were looking for Gran-Gran and Cobb in the nowhere—the texture, like there were hundreds of beings around me, there one moment and gone the next.

There was something out there in the nowhere. Maybe it wasn’t the Superiority at all. “I wonder if it’s them,” I said. “The delvers. The voices didn’t sound like I would imagine a delver—”

“Wait,” FM said. “You’ve heard them? The voices that asked for help?”

Scud. “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my hands on my knees, trying to wipe off the sand. The stuff seemed to cling to everything. I wondered if we’d ever be free of it. “I heard them in the meeting. Right before I… Right before.”

“That’s not good,” FM said. “There’s something really weird going on, and you’re all caught up in it.”

“I know,” I said.

“And that’s the only reason I’ve let us get sidetracked for this long. You were telling me about what happened on the ship. You told me all about what happened to Alanik…”

“I went to find my parents,” I said. “It took me a while, because the ship was big and I took some wrong turns. Eventually fake Cobb got away from me and ran off. He seemed really eager to get out of there, though I didn’t know why until Alanik told me about the bomb.”

“Right,” FM said.

“By the time I found my parents, they were trapped in this room in the center of the ship. I could see them through the glass but it wouldn’t break, and all the doors were sealed shut.”