I listened with devoted attention. It felt like such a practical thing to learn—the sort of thing that…well, that I imagined my father might have taught me. If things hadn’t gone so poorly.
Once we were done, I tucked away the shoelace—he’d told me to keep it to practice with—and picked up my club. I swung it a few times for good measure.
“A fine weapon,” Chet said, hands on hips. “What shall you name it?”
“Skullbreaker, of course,” I said.
“Excellent.”
“Though…I don’t know if sand worms have skulls,” I said. “Maybe we should sharpen a rock and make a spear, in case I get swallowed and need to kill it from the inside.”
“I doubt that will be requisite,” Chet said with a chuckle.
“Say that when you’re in a sand worm’s gullet and I’m standing triumphantly on the corpse of mine, contemplating how to make a hat out of its skin.”
“Ha!” Chet said. “I doubt I’ve ever met a young woman quite so…bloodthirsty.”
I shrugged. “It’s kind of an act. You know, bravado. But I do want to be able to defend myself against any beasts we encounter.”
“If we must do so, then we have failed,” Chet said. He held up a finger, adopting a straight-backed lecture pose. “No beast attacks a person unless that person has made a mistake. We trespass in their domain, and it is incumbent upon us to take the utmost care to avoid accidents.”
“You don’t hunt?” I asked.
“Heavens, no!” Chet said. “Not except for sustenance, which is unnecessary in here. I explore to see the wonders of the universe! Why, to leave that wilderness so desecrated… No. An explorer must not be a destroyer. He must be a preserver! But then, I’m rambling. We should continue. The pirates appear to have taken their squabbles elsewhere.”
We continued on, barely reaching the desert fragment and leaping across before the two drifted too far apart. M-Bot seemed reluctant to leave his mushroom hunt, but he followed us.
Chet’s comments about hunting and exploring left me intrigued—it was the opposite of what I’d expected from someone like him. The way he talked felt liberating. Exploring, traveling…he could do that and test his skills without needing to fight or kill. It was a new way of thinking. For me, the struggle to get better had always ultimately ended with the destruction of my enemies. Or at least the humiliation of those who had laughed at me.
I was changing though. It had begun on Starsight, as I met so many who were technically my enemies—but also just ordinary people. I wanted a way out of all of this now, more than I wanted to end the “Krell.” Was there a way we could stop this war without destroying them or them destroying us?
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?”
I shrugged. “We have algae vats and artificial light underground. And there is some life. Rats live in the caverns, eating fungi and algae that transfer heat into biological energy. It isn’t much, but we make it work.”