Chapter 35 #3
Sky tilted his chin down to meet my eyes in the muted dark.
“I told you before that Pladians were—are—explorers, right?” At my slow nod, he turned his attention to the storm-wrapped highway.
“The ship I was born on was once part of those science fleets. The ones that discovered and documented other worlds.”
He plucked at his wet shirt, shifting in his seat. He radiated restless energy. So unlike him. He always seemed so damn calm, it was disconcerting to see him twitchy.
But he kept going. “The Pladians were in a sector of space not far from here when we encountered the Enil for the first time.” Outside the window at his back, lightning cracked apart the clouds, a jagged slash of cold light through the rain.
“They’d found a race they’d decided wasn’t worthy and were already reshaping the planet, the first step to seeding it.
Which also meant they were killing…everything. ”
My mouth went dry. “They were reshaping an entire planet?”
They could do that?
“Yeah.” Sky’s expression hardened. “We tried reasoning with them. It didn’t go well. Can’t exactly reason with mindless purpose.”
I tightened my fists on my thighs. Listening to this felt a little like falling into deep, dark water. Scary, monster-infested water. The Enil were even worse than I’d imagined. And that was saying a lot.
Sky ran a hand over his drying curls. “But Pladians being Pladians, we couldn’t sit by and watch an entire world get wiped out of existence like that.
So the science fleet intervened. Or tried to.
” He let his arm fall back into his lap.
“The Enil are more advanced than us, and their technology outmatched ours. They didn’t appreciate our interference.
And—well,” he spread his hands, “it started the war.”
I was barely breathing, too busy absorbing all of it. Pieces began to fall together.
Sky watched a set of headlights streak past, voice going husky.
“The conflict went on for a while. Our fleet got torn apart. We lost…” His voice hitched.
He swiped his palm over his mouth like he could erase the emotion.
“We lost a lot of people. And so many ships, too. Close to the entire science fleet that’d been out here. ”
I knew that emotion. Grief. I saw it when his eyes flitted to mine, then away, full of stars and galaxies and an old ache I knew all too well.
He’d lost people close to him. I wondered who but couldn’t bring myself to interrupt.
“It became pretty obvious we weren’t going to win,” he said, finally lifting his face again.
His gaze grew distant. As lost in his story as I was.
“We were down to one ship, and it was falling apart. So…” He blinked once, like he was resurfacing, and he fiddled with his wiper setting, kicking it up a notch to battle the downpour.
“So our leaders came up with a last-ditch plan. An attack meant to fry the Enil mothership’s onboard computers—and hopefully disable their drones long enough for us to get away. And it worked. Kind of.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed with a thick swallow, and he dropped his chin, staring out at the storm. For some reason, I braced myself, some instinct telling me we were coming to the story’s culmination.
I wasn’t wrong.
He spoke quietly but clearly. “But the attack also fried our onboard computer and almost destroyed our ship. We were able to salvage basic systems, but we lost all the long-distance comms and nav data. Everything. All the logs. All our past jump points and everything we’d used to map routes through the stars… ”
A stone landed in my stomach. I dug my fingers into my thighs as he slowly turned back to me.
“Including,” he said, his eyes boring into mine, voice steady, “the location of Pladia.”
Holy. Crap.
There was no saliva left in my mouth. Or air in my lungs. “So you’re saying…you don’t know how to get home. You don’t know where Pladia is. And the map in the halix is— And you think…”
Sky nodded gravely. He’d stopped fidgeting. Like now that he’d gotten the words out and it was done—his oath broken—he’d receded into that calm again.
That made one of us. I felt anything but calm.
Because what he was saying…what he was implying…
“Space is huge,” he said, in that same soft, even tone.
“It’s not as easy as just pointing your ship in the right direction and hitting the gas.
And the mothership—the last Pladian ship, the one I’m from—wasn’t built for long-term deep-space travel.
Let alone decades of war. It’s barely holding together. ”
“So…” I flattened my marked hand to my sternum. Underneath it, my insides were writhing. “That’s why you’re looking for these halix things.”
“Yes. Because the info caches hold the coordinates to Pladia. Coordinates we need.”
Which meant—oh God—he thought I was the key.
The key to getting home. And not just for him, but for all of them. Every single Pladian stranded on that ship.
No wonder he didn’t want to let me out of his sight.
And just like that, I was back to wanting to throw up again.