Chapter Twenty-One Arturo
Twenty-One
Arturo
Suki floated ahead as we moved through the arena, staying low in the shadow of the benches, scouting for guards.
Alanik seemed as twitchy as I felt, walking close to me, our shoulders almost touching.
We reached the archway with the light-line rope and climbed down, then diffused it when we reached the bottom.
We met Gilaf where he was patrolling around the bend. Hoid had replaced Alanik’s illusion so she looked human again, and Gilaf still wore his. If he’d also lost it for a time while Hoid provided us cover, he’d handled it.
“I didn’t hear any alarms,” he said quietly. “Were you not discovered?”
“They know we were there,” Alanik said, “but they didn’t see us.”
“What did you find behind the gate?” Gilaf asked.
“Nowhere portal,” I said.
My mind churned through our options. Short of going through the nowhere portal and potentially into an ambush, I wasn’t sure how to further our investigation.
We could find almost anything on the other side of that door.
It was impossible to prepare for every possibility, and our resources were few.
“Let’s meet up with Nedd and Sadie,” I said. We needed to receive their full report before making a plan, which gave me at least that long to think of one.
We’d arranged to meet them near the stairs to the arena, at a small park with an enormous tree growing in the center.
Trees were few and far between in the dense city, and those that grew behind buildings or in side yards were shorter and spindlier than the purple-barked woods that covered the continent.
The tree at the center of this park was the only one we’d seen that resembled the woods outside, and in its isolation it had grown bigger and thicker, large enough that all of us holding hands might not have been able to reach around it.
As we entered the park, I scanned behind us, making sure we weren’t being followed.
“Stop looking,” Alanik told me. “You appear nervous.”
“You’ve looked over your shoulder three times since we left the coliseum,” I said.
She huffed a little, but didn’t deny it. “I don’t think the varvax are following us.”
I probably should have let it go, but I couldn’t help myself. “Which you know because you keep looking.”
“Looking!” Hoid said quietly from Alanik’s pack.
“Not you too,” she muttered.
“You too!” Naga fluted from my pack.
“For the record,” Suki said from her vantage point, now inside Alanik’s pack, “I haven’t seen anyone following us either.” At least Suki and the slugs were keeping their voices down and were muffled somewhat by the mesh.
We stopped near a stream in the shade of the towering tree.
I took its presence as confirmation that the trees weren’t all ambulatory—no one would plant creatures that could periodically wake up and attack the patrons in an unassuming park.
A few passersby meandered near us, but we had relative privacy in the shelter of the tree and a clear view of anyone who might approach from either end of the walking path.
I was starving, so I sat in the grass and pulled out rations.
If we were back on Detritus, we’d be approaching evening by now.
Naga had, at some point, broken into the bag that contained the mushrooms for her own sustenance, and the supply was more than half gone.
“Guess you were hungry too,” I said, setting her in the hollow of the tree’s large roots, where she could move freely but remain out of sight.
A moment later three slugs appeared beside her, blinking into existence as if from a hyperjump. Twist, Nope, and Squeeze—the slugs that had gone with Nedd and Sadie to the bar.
“Uh, hi,” I said. “What are you guys doing here, and where are Nedd and Sadie?”
“Doing here!” Twist said. “Nedd and Sadie?”
I don’t know what I expected—the slugs always reiterated what we said—but these particular words had me worried. “Are they in danger?”
“In danger,” Squeeze said, which sounded even more ominous in his baritone voice.
“Do you think something happened to them?” Gilaf asked.
Their assignment was to have a nonalcoholic drink at a pub. Ours was supposed to be the dangerous mission, and we’d come through it fine. But if we’d learned anything as a team, it was that things did not always go the way we expected.
“Do they need help?” I asked Twist.
“Help!” the three slugs said together, their voices forming an odd sort of harmony.
Scud. We could try contacting them via their handheld radios, but the radios didn’t route through our earpieces, so our voices would be audible to anyone near them.
“How bad is it?” I asked. “Do we need to go right away?”
“How bad!” Twist said. “Go right away!”
Stars, it sounded dire, but I couldn’t be sure with such limited communication. “Alanik, can you get anything more out of them? Can Bob?”
“Their thoughts are confusing,” Alanik said. She opened her pack, letting Bob and Hoid join the other slugs in the large cuddle pile among the tree’s thick roots. “Hang on. Bob is conferring.”
Bob’s “conferring” took a long time, and in the end, all Alanik managed to glean was that Sadie and Nedd had gotten into trouble and were somehow detained.
The hyperslugs had a strange sense of spatial awareness—Twist could take us to them immediately if we hyperjumped, but couldn’t give us directions through the city if we wanted to travel the pedestrian way.
And while taynix hyperjumps were all but invisible to the delvers and nearby cytonics, we’d need permission if they took us along—and we’d potentially draw Ivy’s attention.
“I don’t want to hyperjump there if we can help it,” I said. “We haven’t seen any drones fly over the city, but we can’t guarantee that they won’t show up and open fire if they know exactly where we are. I don’t want to be responsible for civilian casualties.”
“So should we look for them on foot?” Gilaf asked.
“I agree that’s the best plan,” Alanik said.
It took longer than I wanted for all the slugs to load back into our packs, with Suki still tucked safely inside Alanik’s, but as we hiked through the park to the main street, we caught sight of familiar figures approaching.
Stars, it was Nedd and Sadie. And a third person who I recognized as they neared: Dayan Dayright, the gladiator from the arena.
“Hey, Twist,” I said, pointing the mesh of my bag in their direction. “Sadie and Nedd don’t look detained.”
“Sadie!” Twist squealed. “Nedd!”
I didn’t know what to make of this situation, but if Sadie and Nedd had gotten themselves out of trouble and brought us a gladiator to interview, things were going significantly better than the slugs had implied.
Stupid interspecies communication barriers.
Sadie waved at us enthusiastically. “Hey!” she called. “We brought a friend!”
Dayan looked skeptical at being called Sadie’s friend, which made sense since they’d just met.
Once we met up, we hiked back to the tree where we could speak without being overheard. Without my asking, Gilaf took a position nearby, keeping watch in case anyone approached.
Nedd escorted Dayan to our shelter under the tree. They looked suspiciously over their shoulder, like this might be some kind of ambush. They were carrying both Sadie’s and Nedd’s packs, which were, of course, empty of taynix—but also missing their weapons.
So maybe they had been detained and talked their way out. Which was evidence I’d been right to assign them to do the talking, not the sneaking.
“Dayan,” Sadie said, “this is Arturo, our flightleader.”
Their flightleader? That implied there was a flight, which implied ships, which implied—
“Hi,” Dayan said. “Is it true you have ships that brought you here from off planet?”
Oh scud. I was impressed that Sadie and Nedd had talked their way out of trouble, but…had they really just announced that we came from another planet?
“Um, yes,” I said. Technically our hyperdrives brought us, but I didn’t know if Nedd and Sadie had shared that.
Though anyone who knew anything about space travel would surmise that we didn’t traverse the unimaginable swaths of emptiness between planets without it.
“Nedd, you want to explain what’s going on? ”
“We went to the pub to talk to Dayan,” Nedd said, “but they thought we were acting suspicious, so they…approached us afterward and accused us of being from the Superiority.”
I stared at him. “You went to have a casual conversation and immediately acted so suspicious that someone suspected you were an alien.”
Dayan did not contradict this. They watched us all carefully, like they were learning things about our group from this exchange. We were not presenting ourselves in the best light at the moment.
Sadie deflated. “They didn’t suspect us immediately.”
“Sadie did a good job,” Nedd said, with a rare edge in his voice that surprised me.
“It wasn’t her fault. Dayan got suspicious of us and thought we must be from the station in the sky.
Some of the gladiators know the Superiority is watching them.
Dayan thought we might be enemies, and we set them straight. ”
“We…had a report that you all were in trouble,” I said, carefully avoiding the specifics of who that report came from.
“I’m glad our scouts made it back to you to report,” Nedd said, without missing a beat. “Yeah, we had a bit of a scuffle, but it all worked out.”
Dayan looked down at their boots, shifting nervously—almost…guiltily.
“Dayan tied us up,” Sadie blurted out. “So yeah, okay, maybe we were a little too obvious.”
“You both were suspicious as hell,” Dayan said. “But I wouldn’t have thought you were aliens if I wasn’t already expecting to be ambushed.”
“Some of Dayan’s friends were kidnapped by the Superiority,” Nedd explained. “People who suspected there was more to the story about Elysium. At least one of them was a cytonic.”
“Do you think they took them to the space station in the sky?” Dayan asked.
I gaped at them. “Your people know about that?”