Chapter Thirty-Five Arturo
Thirty-Five
Arturo
The woods shifted around us, the trees all changing position.
We materialized next to the Dulo, parked beneath the low branches of a hulking tree.
Its branches were bent over Alanik where she sat propped in the copilot’s seat, as if protecting her from the sky.
Her shoulder was bandaged and her flightsuit stained with dark blood, but she was awake, and she smiled at me.
Stars, it was good to see her. I felt like I could fall over from relief.
“You’re alive,” Gilaf said. He sat in the Dulo’s pilot’s seat, hovering over Alanik. Suki sat on the dash, eating a bit of the rations we’d brought.
Alanik looked sharply at him. “Was this in question?” She’d been unconscious at the end of the fight, and I guessed Gilaf had elected not to fill her in.
“A bit,” I said, leading Dayan over to get a better look at her. “How did you escape?”
“Took them on a wild chase until Alanik woke up enough to jump us out,” Gilaf said.
“I’m glad she did,” I said.
“I might have shaken her a little,” Gilaf said.
“He did,” Alanik said. “It hurt.”
“But you’re not dead,” Dayan said, “so I think you came out—”
They were interrupted by Sadie and Nedd, who suddenly appeared next to the nose of the Dulo. Dayan jumped.
“I know we just did that,” Dayan said, “but it’s still disorienting.”
“You get used to it,” I said. I nodded to Nedd and Sadie. Nedd’s face still looked bruised from the stunt with the light-lances, and Sadie had a mark on her arm where she’d been burned, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. “You guys okay?”
Nedd marched up to me and punched me in the arm.
“Ouch!” I said. “What was that for?”
“For making us all think you were dead,” Gilaf said. “Obviously.”
“When did we think he was dead?” Alanik demanded.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Next time you can be the one to jump out of a crashing starship with nothing but your flightsuit and a hyperslug. How about that?”
“Did you seriously do that?” Alanik asked.
“If he hadn’t,” Dayan said, “I’d be dead.”
“I’m okay,” I said to Alanik, though she still seemed horrified.
“Jumping off a tall object with a hyperslug actually sounds kind of fun,” Sadie said. “If you’d already received permission to hyperjump, of course.”
“You need to visit ReDawn sometime,” Gilaf said. “I’ll take you rubber-jumping from one of the branches.”
“We’re doing that,” Sadie said. “As soon as possible. I cannot wait.”
“People have died rubber-jumping,” Alanik said.
“This is all beside the point!” I said. “We need to talk about getting back into the city.”
“Is that where we’re going?” Gilaf asked.
“We have to,” Sadie said. “The space station was a bust, so now the only place where we might find answers and a way off this planet is the nowhere portal under the arena. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “Though we don’t know what we’re going to find inside, so we can’t say whether it’ll help until we take a look.” I hated the idea of sending my team in with so little intel, but we’d exhausted all our other options.
“Can we even get through the nowhere portal?” Sadie asked. “What if it’s locked?”
“There’s going to be a final tournament tomorrow,” Dayan said. “If they plan to take gladiators through, it’ll have to be open then.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “And around that time, there could also be a really big distraction in the coliseum.”
Sadie smiled. “We’re going to make one, right?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. I turned to Dayan. “What do you say?”
Dayan smiled. “I say I’d like to get enough points to go to Elysium, get close enough to one of those robed priests, and then tear the robe off them right in the middle of the arena so everyone can see what’s underneath.”
“Ooooh,” Sadie said. “That’ll do it.”
That probably would do it. Ivy hadn’t mentioned recognizing Dayan on the space station, so hopefully our ruse with the flightsuit and hair covering had worked. “I imagine the audience will be pretty shocked to realize the gate to Elysium is being staffed by aliens.”
“The varvax will attack Dayan if we do that,” Alanik said. “Some of us will need to stay in the coliseum to back them up.”
“Do you think the gladiators would have your back if you disrobe a varvax in front of the crowd?” I asked. I imagined a crowd of armed gladiators would fare pretty well against the robed varvax, though if the varvax were armed, we would want a few of our team members in the arena with pistols.
“I can brief them beforehand,” Dayan said. “A lot of them are already on our side.”
“We’ll need to divide into two teams, then,” I said.
“One to sneak through the portal while it’s open, and one to assist Dayan and the gladiators in the arena.
” Both teams would take enormous risks. One would attack varvax in a stadium full of bystanders, and the other would go into a completely unknown situation with no way to be sure they’d be able to come out again. We’d lost people in the nowhere before.
I could only go with one of these teams, I realized. And I didn’t like the idea of sending members of my team alone into either situation.
“Sadie and I can take the portal,” Nedd said.
That made sense. I knew Sadie was going to want to go in, and if I was going one way, Nedd would need to go the other. “It will be dangerous—” I began, but Nedd cut me off.
“It’s all dangerous,” Nedd said. “We need to get word back to Jorgen about what’s going on before he sends more ships in. Even if we don’t make it out, it’s worth the risk.”
He was right, much as I hated that it had come to this.
“Okay,” I said. “Take Bob with you. We don’t know if he’ll be able to communicate from within the nowhere, but he can try.
” Hyperjumping didn’t work into and out of the nowhere, only through it, but Jorgen had been able to use cytonic communication to speak to our old flightmate Spensa in the nowhere before, so it was worth a try.
“And take Hoid and Naga too, for illusions as you sneak in, and in case you get caught beneath the arena and need to hyperjump away.”
“I’d like to stay in this reality, if you don’t mind,” Suki said. “I have no desire to be lost in the nowhere.”
I hoped no one was going to get lost, but I could see why Suki was cautious. Her people’s cytonics had been trapped in the nowhere for centuries and only recently released.
“Gilaf will also stay with me,” I said, “to help reveal the varvax, defend Dayan, and cause a distraction. Alanik—”
“You are not leaving me behind,” Alanik said.
I looked at her shoulder. “You’re wounded.” Alanik swung her feet out of the ship and stood up on the wing. I wanted to reach out to steady her, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate that when she was proving a point.
“I am fine,” Alanik insisted.
She didn’t look fine. She looked injured, but also determined.
“We need to get some rest before we go, regardless,” I said. “We’ll all be sloppy and careless if we haven’t had any sleep.”
“Though if we have to walk back to the city,” Dayan said, “we’d better get started now. Even if we go back for the canoes, going upstream is going to be a lot harder than going down.”
“Hear me out,” I said. “I have another idea.”
* * *
We slept in the forest, denying Alanik a turn taking watch so she could get as much rest as possible.
A few hours later, I sat in the pilot’s seat of the Dulo, the canopy open, the ship suspended over the water and moving at slow speed, by starfighter standards at least. The banks slid by; the tree branches towering overhead shaded us from view.
Hoid sat on the dash, keeping up an illusion over the ship to make it look like one of the motorboats we’d seen on the way in—small and open topped, with a round prow that filled in the areas around the nose, disguising the shape.
As long as we kept our distance, I thought the idea was pretty good.
Ahead of us, Sadie and Nedd rode on the wing of Sadie’s ship, which was likewise disguised, with Gilaf sitting in the open cockpit while Suki and Dayan perched on the opposite wing.
Alanik sat in the seat beside me, ostensibly resting, staring up at the branches as they passed overhead.
Gilaf had cleaned her wound, changed her bandages, given her painkillers, and put her arm in a sling.
It remained tucked against her side, and she wouldn’t be able to fly until it healed, but if it was causing her much pain, she refused to let it show.
I caught sight of a singular, bright star overhead—the Superiority space station.
“They can’t see many stars here,” I said to Alanik.
“I always thought we were more or less unique, trapped under Detritus’s platforms, unable to see the sky.
The people here can see a lot of sky, but the constant sunlight still obstructs their view of the stars.
Besides the space station, only a couple of bright ones shine through. ”
“We can’t see stars from ReDawn either,” Alanik said.
That was true—Alanik’s home planet was a gas giant, swirling with toxic gases that were cleaned from the air by the enormous floating trees on which her people lived.
I squinted through the trees at the few pinpoints of light visible over the mountains behind Epiphany.
The universe was a truly massive place, and the visible stars in any one location were only a small fraction of the total.
But…“I wonder if you can see ReDawn’s star from here,” I said. “Or from outside the debris belt.”
“Even if you could see it,” Alanik said, “it wouldn’t be the same light that we see.
The light takes thousands of years to reach across the galaxy.
” She shrugged. “It’s…hard to explain, but the universe I feel in my mind, the one I sense with my powers—it’s not the same as the one you can see with your eyes.
The light we see in the sky is just a memory, an impression of the way the universe used to be.
A bit of radiation the star emitted long, long ago, like an ancient photograph.
And the universe is in constant motion, churning, shifting.
You can’t visit that image of the past, because nothing is the same as it was.
To visit the star you see, you’d have to go back in time. ”
“When you think about it that way,” I said, looking up at the branches as they passed by overhead, “it’s hard to imagine that anything we do matters.”
“I suppose it depends,” Alanik said. “Matters to whom?”
That was a good point. I supposed almost nothing we did mattered on the scale of the universe, but our actions mattered very much to the people closest to us, and even to the future of humanity. “Thanks,” I said.
Alanik shot me a confused look. “For what?”
I shrugged. “For being you.”
Alanik looked surprised and then fell quiet.
The silence felt awkward, like neither of us was sure what to say.
On the ship in front of us, Sadie and Nedd were laughing about something.
They both leaned back on their palms, looking up at the trees, like being together was the easiest thing in the world, and I was suddenly struck by jealousy, not just because they made it look so easy, but because I knew I was the one making this hard.
“Those two look awfully friendly,” I said.
Alanik glanced in their direction. “Do you think that’s ethical?” she asked. “Hypothetically, I mean.”
She was mocking me and I deserved it. “He’s her superior, so maybe not. But I’m not going to stop them.”
Alanik was quiet for a moment. “Do you think it is easier for them?” she asked. “Because they are the same species?”
My heart stopped. I’d just been thinking as much, but I didn’t want to admit it.
I didn’t care that Alanik was UrDail. On the contrary, I liked her that way.
Her species was part of who she was. I stared up at the sky, at the star that wasn’t a star, imagining all the stars beyond it, twinkling dots in the vast sky, so far away that the lights we saw were only glimmers of the past. Alanik was right.
Nothing in the universe stayed the same, and you couldn’t go back to the past, to the way things used to be.
“I don’t know that taking a chance with someone else is ever easy,” I said. “Especially with lives as complicated as ours.”
“What makes it so complicated?” she asked. “Social conventions?”
“Yes,” I said. “My parents may disown me.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud.
Maybe the first time I’d fully admitted it to myself.
I hated thinking about the lectures I knew I would get from my mother.
I was already angry about things she would say about Alanik, and she hadn’t even said them yet.
“I don’t imagine mine would be thrilled,” Alanik agreed. “But I don’t think I care. Do you?”
I wanted to say that I didn’t. But obviously I wouldn’t have hesitated if I didn’t care. I still valued my parents’ opinions of me. I still wanted to be respected, to make them proud, to make my community proud.
Trouble was, I wasn’t sure I wanted the sort of life my parents or their friends took pride in. Not anymore.
“I do care,” I said. “But I think I’d be happier if I stopped.”
“Is it that easy?” Alanik asked. “Can you just stop?”
“No,” I said. “But I don’t have to let what other people say govern my choices, even if it still bothers me. Does that make sense?”
Alanik leaned back in her seat, looking up at the branches. They cast a pattern over her face that shifted as we moved. “I don’t want to be something you’re ashamed of,” she said.
That hit me like a tree trunk to the chest. She didn’t deserve that. Alanik was too amazing to be something anyone was ashamed of.
“You couldn’t be,” I said, struck by the truth of it. “If I were with you, I could never be anything but proud of it.”
Alanik smiled. And then she reached over and took my hand below the dash, where no one else could see.