Page 101 of Blightfall

Thirty-Four

Arturo

I sat on the floor of the forest. My lungs burned and my heart pounded like it was going to beat out of my chest. Was this what a heart attack felt like? My whole body still felt like it was falling, falling, falling.

But I wasn’t. I was on steady, soft soil. There were plenty of roots and logs to sit on, but I sat on the ground with both hands pressed into the dirt, needing to feel it beneath me.

Stars, I’d never been afraid of heights before, but I thought I might be now.

Leaves crunched to the side—Dayan had floated overhead just seconds after we landed. Naga had done a good job triangulating where to take us. I knew I should get up and make sure Dayan was okay, but the sound of them coming closer was probably a good sign.

And I wasn’t sure if I stood that I wouldn’t just fall back down again.

“You all right?” Dayan asked.

I looked through the trees to find them smirking at me.

“How are you okay?” I asked.

Dayan shrugged, though they did look pale, and I noticed they were gripping the low branch of a nearby tree rather tightly.

Maybe they were just better at putting on a brave face.

“Okay!” Naga chirped beside me, nuzzling my leg with her face.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes, we are okay. Thank you.”

“Thank you!” Naga replied.

I didn’t mean to seem ungrateful. Naga had saved my life. But stars, I was going to have nightmares about falling from the sky like that for years. I flopped backward, lying in the dirt, looking up at the canopy, which thankfully was not composed of scions.

“Let’s never do that again,” I said, mostly to the sky.

“Good plan,” Dayan said. “What, exactly, are we going to do now?”

We were well hidden here. I’d heard a drone fly by overhead, but if they’d tracked the location of our hyperjump, they hadn’t been able to pinpoint us here beneath the canopy.

“Find the others,” I said. “Though we can’t use the radio without advertising our location to Ivy.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dayan said. “That figures.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s focus on the options we do have.”

“We do have!” Naga said.

Right. “We have a hyperdrive. Sadie also has one. Ivy doesn’t appear to be able to track us when we hyperjump.” Which meant Ivy was probably not a cytonic, though it could just mean she wasn’t great at that particular ability, the way Jorgen hadn’t figured out how to hyperjump, and Alanik hadn’t been able to form mindblades.

Stars, Alanik. She’d been in bad shape, and Gilaf hadn’t had a hyperslug to teleport them out. My chest ached, thinking about what might have happened.

We needed to find them as soon as possible. “Naga, can you ask Bob for permission to hyperjump again?”

“Again!” Naga said.

I hoped that meant that Bob, at least, had survived, though I couldn’t be sure.

So we waited. I knew Jorgen said it mattered more how many hyperjumps were taking place in the whole of the galaxy than in our particular area, but I still worried it would be a while for this one, since we’d just asked for multiple hyperjumps in a row. I wanted to see the others, to be with Alanik and make sure she was okay. I had no idea what we’d be jumping into if we had Naga take us to the others, but I’d rather be with my team than here alone, wondering, no matter what they were going through.

Branches creaked overhead. Dayan was on their feet in a heartbeat, their hand on their light-whip, which they’d managed to hold on to in the fall.