Determined not to be intimidated, I quested out with my own cytonic senses. And I found…strength? I’d grown, here in the nowhere. I was able to brush that distant delver’s mind as it projected anger at me. I picked out things it didn’t intend to broadcast. They had indeed sensed what I’d done in activating the Path of Elders, and they’d sent the battleship fragment to destroy the one I’d been on.
That had taken a remarkable amount of effort, and was something they couldn’t do often. It had actually been an experiment, as they felt they needed to push farther into the belt to try to find and stop me. These glowing-eyed things were the same. An experiment. Isolated individuals, who had lost a lot of their memories, were susceptible to the delvers’ touch. But only non-cytonics, for this particular thing they were trying.
Saints…I felt so much more in control now, even after only one step on the Path of Elders. The experience had opened something in my brain, showing me how to hide and not draw attention while spying with my cytonics.
This delver still wasn’t aware of how much I’d gleaned from it. I felt like gloating, but then I sensed it trying to attack my mind. That manifested as coldness and pressure; it was as if I’d been plunged into an icy lake, the cold seeping like water through my skin, toward my heart.
And those voices…
What have you done…to the Us…to the Us…
“The Us” referred again to the delver I’d changed. The others were angry, furious at me. Because I’d touched and spoken to that one delver I’d persuaded not to attack Starsight. In so doing, I’d corrupted it forever. Essentially destroying one of their kind.
That made me feel sick. The friendly delver and I had connected in a beautiful way; I’d thought my actions would change things. But if the others refused to listen to me… I shivered as our fragment drifted farther from the one with the waterfall.
Chet stepped up next to me then, and jarred me from my thoughts. “You felt it too, I presume?”
“The delvers possessed someone over there,” I said.
Chet nodded. “Whatever we did with the Path attracted their attention,” he said. “I find it amazing they’d risk individuality by entering the belt, but it is obviously happening. We will need to be careful moving forward.”
“Agreed.” I took a deep breath. “You finished planning our route?”
“I did indeed, Miss Nightshade,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “Tell me. What is your opinion on sailing?”
Chet led me back to the small wooden building I’d discovered, saying that we needed to salvage some supplies. I tried explaining that it had been picked clean, but once we arrived he proceeded to take the doors off their hinges.
We each carried a door to the edge of the fragment, where we waited an hour to jump across to the next approaching fragment. It was a tropical one, full of tall trees with bare trunks and leaves only at the tops. We took our time crossing this one, scavenging for some strange oversized nuts the size of a person’s head. They weren’t coconuts—I knew those from my studies on Old Earth—but were similar.
We spent the evening hollowing the nuts out by prying off the tops and pulling out the long, stringy pulp by hand. Afterward we stretched the interior membrane of each one over the hole we’d made and set it to dry.
That night, I again failed at contacting Jorgen. But I woke up eager and excited for the day’s trek—because while we’d slept, our next fragment had approached.
An ocean.
It was the most bizarre thing I’d seen here yet. The sides were stone like the bottom, but they were only about a meter thick. Beyond was water; essentially the fragment was an enormous bowl. It seemed larger than most fragments we’d traveled on, extending for kilometers into the distance.
Chet showed me how to use the pulp—which had become cordlike as it dried—to tie the doors together and lash the hollowed-out nuts to them. The nuts were watertight and filled with air. So when we shoved off into the ocean, we had a functional raft.
It was awesome.
Even M-Bot was impressed. He buzzed around us, complimenting the raft’s “structural integrity” and “remarkable buoyancy.” We named the ship the Not-ilus and I stood proudly at the prow—well, the flat front end I declared the prow. Chet chuckled softly, weaving oars from bent reeds and leftover nut-guts.
It was slow going, but I still felt like I was some ancient Polynesian hero sailing the ocean for the first time. Plus it got even better. Because the ocean had sea monsters.