Chet kept us to the valleys between the dunes. I watched the sand carefully as we walked.
“Um…” M-Bot hovered out in front of me. “Spensa? I had to leave behind some of my information databases, but I kept the fauna surveys for all known worlds in the Superiority and…I don’t want to be a downer…”
“No sand worms?” I asked.
“Afraid not.”
“Scud,” I said. “What about giant scorpions? Orion totally killed one of those on Old Earth, so they’ve got to be real.”
“There are several low-gravity planets with arthropod-like creatures that would probably fit that definition. Oooh… One has a poison stinger that, if it hits you, you grow fungus on your tongue. And in your blood. Basically, it kills you. But mushroom tongues!”
“Wow,” I said. “That really exists?”
“Spensa?” M-Bot said. “Are you…crying?”
“No, of course not,” I said, wiping my eye. “It’s just…I’m glad something that awesome exists, you know? Like in the stories. Maybe when this is all done, we can visit that place. You think maybe I could train one up from a baby to let me ride it?”
Chet chuckled from up ahead, leading us farther into the desert—and I allowed myself to grow excited. The next fragment would be the one with our destination, my chance—finally—to see what the delver had sent me to experience.
I should have been exhausted. And to an extent I was. It had been a difficult day of travel. It felt good though; there was something healthy and satisfying about being this type of worn out. It was odd that I wasn’t hungry. And I’d been hiking all this way and was only mildly thirsty.
But…well, I was walking across a literal flying desert and had passed infinite waterfalls that were fed by no tributary. I doubted lack of hunger would be the oddest thing I experienced in here. I hurried up, joining Chet as we were forced to climb a dune—a difficult process, though he showed me how to do it at an angle, and while keeping somewhat solid footing by not walking in his footsteps.
“In snow,” he explained, “step where the person in front of you did. That will save energy. Sand dunes, however, settle. And so the person in front of you will disturb that, which actually makes it harder if you step right where they did.”
At the top, I picked out the proper fragment. “That one?” I asked. “The green one?”
“That’s it,” Chet said.
There was so much life on these. Plant life, at least. Even the desert had scrub stubbornly breaking from the sand and growing defiantly. Was this what it was like on most worlds? Plants just kind of grew, without anyone to cultivate them?
“Are you nervous?” I asked Chet. “About what we’ll find?”
He thought for a moment, smoothing his mustache. “I feel…like it’s inevitable. I knew I’d make my way to the Path eventually. To the point that when you mentioned it to me, I felt like I’d been drawn to you. Pulled onto this course.”
“That…sounds kind of unnerving, honestly.”
“My apologies; that was not my intent.” He glanced toward the distant lightburst. “Still, I worry about the delvers’ hand in this place. I never can quite trust that my will is my own…”
“Do you know anything about them?”
“They’re not a group mind,” Chet said. “People get that wrong about them. The delvers are all separate beings—but they’re also identical. They live in a place where nothing ever changes, and where time doesn’t exist. They exist in one moment, in one place, indistinguishable—and terrified of anything that isn’t exactly as they are.”
“Okay…” I said. “A lot of that doesn’t make sense to me, Chet. But I’ll try to pretend otherwise.”
“Thank you,” he replied. “All I know is that the not-making-sense part is why individuals like you can hyperjump through the nowhere! Time and space are irrelevant, and after slipping into the nowhere you can come out anywhere else. I worry, however. Every time we puncture the barrier between the nowhere and the somewhere, we corrupt the nowhere a little. Like how you can’t walk through clean fresh snow without leaving tracks.”
“Do you think…there is snow in here somewhere?” I asked. “I’d like to see it sometime.”
“It exists, but is rare,” he said. “Tell me, Miss Nightshade. Did you actually live your entire life on that barren planet? How did you survive?”