Starsight

“I haven’t told anyone what you really are, have I?” she whispered.

I looked sharply toward the empty space where she resided. Finally, feeling overwhelmed, I climbed out.

“Cuna,” Vapor said loudly from behind me, “do you need me any longer?”

“No. You can return to your main mission.”

“Affirmative,” she said, and the shuttle door closed.

Cuna started toward the building without waiting to see if I’d follow. Why turn their back on me? What if I were dangerous? I hurried up beside them.

“I wasn’t Vapor’s main mission?” I asked, nodding back toward the shuttle as it took off.

“You were a stroke of luck,” Cuna said. “She’s actually there to watch Winzik.” Cuna reached the door, which had a window and a security guard inside. They nodded to Cuna, but then bared their teeth in a dione scowl at me.

“I bring this one with me, by my authority,” Cuna said.

“I’ll need to note it, Minister. It’s very unusual.”

Cuna waited for them to do some paperwork. I took the chance to tap a short message on my bracelet. M-Bot. Still read me?

“Yes,” he said in my ear. “But I’m very confused.”

Doomslug is hyperdrive. If I die, get to Detritus. Tell them.

“What?” M-Bot said. “Spensa, I can’t do that!”

Heroes don’t choose their trials.

“I can’t even fly myself, let alone hyperjump!”

Slug is hyperdrive.

“But . . .”

The guard finally opened the door. I stepped into the building after Cuna, and—as I’d worried from its fortresslike exterior—it had shielding to prevent spying, so M-Bot’s voice vanished.

The hallway inside was empty of people, and Cuna’s footwear clicked on the floor as we walked to a door marked OBSERVATION ROOM. Inside was a small chamber with a glass wall overlooking a larger room, two stories tall, with metal walls. I stepped up to the window, noting the markings on several of the walls.

That strange language, I thought. The same one I saw in the delver maze—and in the tunnels back on Detritus.

Cuna settled down in a chair near the glass window, placing my backpack beside the seat. I remained standing.

“You have the power to destroy us,” Cuna said softly. “Winzik worries about delvers, politicians argue about pockets of aggressive aliens, but I have always worried about a danger more nefarious. Our own shortsightedness.”

I frowned, looking at them.

“We couldn’t keep the secret of the hyperdrive forever,” Cuna said. “In truth, it shouldn’t have outlasted the human wars. We endured a dozen close calls when the secret started to leak. Our stranglehold on interstellar communication was always enough, just barely, to keep the truth contained.”

“You won’t keep this secret much longer,” I said. “It’s going to get out.”

“I know,” Cuna said. “Haven’t you been listening?” They nodded toward the window.

A set of doors down below opened, and a pair of diones entered, pulling someone by the arms. I . . . I recognized them. It was Gul’zah the burl—the gorilla alien who had been kicked out of the pilot program way back after the test, then had been protesting against the Superiority.

“I heard that the Superiority made a deal with the protesters!” I said.

“Winzik was called in to handle the issue,” Cuna replied. “His department has been gaining too much authority. He claims to have negotiated a deal where the dissidents turned over their leader. I can’t track any longer how much of what he says is true and how much is false.”

Those diones, I thought, noting the brown-striped clothing they wore. I saw some like them cleaning up after the protesters vanished.

“This burl has been in custody since then,” Cuna said, nodding to Gul’zah. “Some fear that the incident on the Weights and Measures today was caused by revolutionaries. So the exile has been moved up. And I have little doubt that Winzik will seek other ways to use your attack on us to further his goals.”

Below, one of the dione technicians typed on a console at the side of the room. The center of the room shimmered, and then something appeared—a black sphere the size of a person’s head. It seemed to suck all light into it as it floated there. It was pure darkness. An absolute blackness that I knew intimately.

The nowhere. Somehow, they had opened up a hole into the nowhere.

The kitsen had mentioned to me that the Superiority—and the human empires as well—had mined acclivity stone from the nowhere. I knew they had portals into the place. But still, seeing that dark sphere affected me on a primal level. That was a darkness that should not exist, a darkness beyond the mere lack of light. A wrongness.

They lived in there.