There was pain in her voice, not unlike Kauri’s. FM had a gift for that—feeling what other people were feeling.
Today it might as well be a curse, but at least I’d been able to give her the job of saving the people we could.
“Take the ship out,” I said. “I’m going to check on Rig. We’ll try to save them, but…I don’t…”
“It’s okay,” FM said. “I know you’re doing your best.”
That was what I was afraid of. That this was my best.
And it was never, ever good enough.
“Juno,” I said, “I’m going to take you to safety.”
Juno looked down at his platform, at the piles of books stacked at his feet. “I should have brought more,” he said. “The books are digitized—the knowledge will not be lost, but these are the originals. It is a tragedy to lose them, but that’s even more true of my kinsmen.”
My throat closed up. All their knowledge. We needed that, and the Superiority would do their best to destroy it.
Stars.
In my mind, I reached for Detritus, searching for Rig. I felt his adrenaline before I’d even found him. He and his team were worn out trying to get the platform up and running, but they were still there doing the best they could.
Report? I asked him.
We’ve got lots of slugs in lots of boxes, Rig said. And we think these rooms are connected to several platforms. That’s the only reason we can see that you’d need so many. But Jorgen, we don’t even know what some of these systems do.
Alanik’s words to me on ReDawn echoed in my mind: Focus on what you have. If we could get even a few of those platforms here, we might be able to protect more cities while we evacuated them. There were hundreds upon hundreds of kitsen cities. The death toll would still be horrible. But…it would be something.
I’m coming, I said. Whatever you’ve got, we need to try it now.
Okay, Rig said.
I looked up at the sky. I could see what FM was talking about now—the flashes of light over the water, the Superiority firing on that island. FM should be pulling the transport ship out, but that was one tiny group of kitsen among so many.
It was going to take a miracle to get us out of this. Spensa taught me never to count a miracle out, and I hoped that held true even if she wasn’t here to work one for us this time.
“What are you going to do?” Juno asked. He stood with a book open, resting it on his forearm. In his paw, he held a small stick poised over the page.
A pen, I realized.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m making a record,” Juno said. “An original account of the actions of a shadow-walker.”
“No one’s going to want to read about anything I’ve done,” I said. I immediately realized it wasn’t true. He might be chronicling the end of civilization on Evershore. That depended not on me, but on how far the Superiority wanted to take their vengeance.
“I have waited all my life to witness the deeds of a shadow-walker,” Juno said. “And if this day is the last for my home, it will be my honor to record that it was not because your people left us to suffer alone.”
Scud. Wouldn’t we, though? We could evacuate some kitsen, but if we couldn’t turn the battle in our favor I was going to have to pull my people out. I couldn’t let them all die for nothing.
Do better than we did, my mother said.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t know if I could, but I was going to keep trying until I knew the answer. I rested my hand on Juno’s platform.
“Snuggles,” I said, “take us to Drape.”
We appeared in the room with the boxes and a lot fewer roaming slugs, most of which had been corralled into corners by the engineers.
Rig spun around from one of the control panels on the walls. “Jorgen,” he said.
“FM is fine,” I said. “She’s working on the evacuation effort. But the Superiority is fanning out over the planet, bombing civilians.” I didn’t know how they justified this to themselves. I didn’t know how they justified anything, but we had to put a stop to it. “We need to get these platforms over there. As many as we can move, as quickly as we can.”
The hum of all the slugs around us was overwhelming, and it was difficult for me to pick them out one from another. I tried to focus on the hyperdrive slugs, but I couldn’t because there were so many. I didn’t want to give a blanket instruction to all of them, since we didn’t know what many of them could do.
“Where’s Fine?” I asked.
“Hypercomm box, I hope,” Rig said. He moved down the row of boxes. “Over here.”
I found Fine before he did—one of the few signatures I knew in this cacophony. Fine, I said. Can you tell them to take these platforms to Evershore? I showed him an image of the slugs he knew—Naga, Happy, Chubs, Whiskers—all flying around the planet, and then some of the platforms appearing in a ring beneath the clouds, where they could fire on enemy ships.
Go? Fine said to me.
Go, I responded.
He hesitated for a moment—conversing, I thought, with the other slugs. And then I felt us slip into the nowhere, the surface of it rippling around us like rings on a pond. We passed beneath the eyes—scud, this was working. We’d be able to support the flights, and at least reduce the damage the ships were able to do to the islands of Evershore.
As we reemerged, I looked out the control room window, expecting to see the stars above.
Instead I saw the planet itself, an enormous ball of water, punctuated by sand-colored islands. Scud. The platform was way too high up, and we were facing the opposite of the direction I’d expected. I could see the backside of several of the Superiority carrier ships. They might be in range of our hyperweapons, but—
One of the engineers swore. “Flightleader Weight,” she said, “you’re going to want to see this.”
She indicated the proximity monitors, which showed the planet of Detritus and all the platforms moving around us—the entire belt of them.
They were still there.
Scud. The control room had worked, but it hadn’t only moved some platforms. It had moved the whole damn planet.
Go, I heard Fine say through the nowhere.
And all around me, the nowhere began to ripple, tear, and explode.
Twenty
Bits of the nowhere ripped apart, exploding outward toward nearby Superiority carrier ships. Scud, there were more of them. It was kind of gratifying, seeing how much force Winzik felt he had to bring in order to take us down.