Page 112 of Blightfall

“The varvax who have kept us here,” Dayan said to the audience, gesturing to the one restrained by Errol, “who have kidnapped our gladiators with promises of Elysium, they’re the enemy. These humans have come to help us. They’ve brought news beyond our imagining. The galactic wars are over.” Dayan looked me in the eye. “And we won.”

There was a moment of silence, and then some in the crowd began to cheer, though they sounded confused and uncertain.

Things were a lot more complicated than these humans could imagine, but if they could at least believe this much—there was no need for further fighting, the war had already been won—then maybe we could convince them to begin seeing aliens as potential allies. Maybe we could bring them one step closer to being ready to join our alliance.

“It’s true,” I said, and Bob amplified my voice so it joined Dayan’s, becoming audible to thousands of humans. “We’re friends, and we’re here to help.”

Such a simple sentiment, but it was the only one I felt I could convey to this many people at once. It was the message the taynix gave to us, over and over, the basis of our alliance with them.

Maybe it was the most important message one group of people could give to another. Maybe everything else was just noise.

“What about Elysium?” someone shouted from the crowd. “Where are the gladiators if the war is over?”

“We need to find them,” Dayan said, “and we need to bring them home.”

Dayan looked to me again. I didn’t have any answers about the gladiators or about Elysium. I hoped Nedd and Sadie were using this opportunity to get inside the portal, if they could.

“We’ll help you find them,” I told Dayan, Bob broadcasting my words.

But then, far over our heads, at the edge of the coliseum’s wall, something caught my eye. An object, moving in the sky.

An enemy drone fighter, heading straight toward us.

Thirty-Eight

Sadie

Nedd and I hurried up the stairs. We emerged into a room deep in fog, which emanated from two large machines that were mostly buried beneath the billowing haze. They emitted a loud hum, dampened only by the roar of the large fans that ushered the fog in the direction of the ramp. On this side of the fans, the floor was covered with only a thin layer of errant mist.

On the left wall was the nowhere portal. I’d never actually seen one before, not even on our own planet. Still, I recognized it from its description: a wall covered in scribbles, as if someone had walked along it with a piece of chalk, moving their hand up and down and drawing line after crooked line. I wondered if there was some code in the scribbles, some language I was illiterate in.

As Nedd and I stepped up to the wall, my pack suddenly felt lighter. I peered inside and found Hoid in the bottom, but Bob had disappeared.

“Um, Nedd,” I said, just loud enough to be heard over the machines, “Bob is gone.”

“What?” Nedd said. “Where’d he go?”

Over the whir of the fans, I could make out the vibrations of Dayan’s voice over the arena’s loudspeaker.

“Um,” I said, “I think he went to project Dayan’s voice through the hypercomm. Do we go in without him?”

“Yes,” he said. “Our orders are to go through the gate, so we need to go. We might not be able to use him to communicate out of the nowhere anyway.”

I reached forward, touching the strange scribbles, wincing as if the portal might suck me through like some magical vacuum.

Though my feet stayed planted on the floor, my fingers passed through. The portal was open.

I looked up at Nedd and grinned. If we did this, there might be no coming back. We were about to enter the nowhere, domain of taynix, cytonics, and godlike AIs. I’d heard the nowhere described before—a great archipelago of floating landmasses, drifting in an abyss of space. A light at their center, bits of cities drifting along like asteroids between them. If I got stuck, at least I would see something most normal people never got to see.

And I, Sadie Chay, was going to step through first.

I grabbed Nedd’s hand, clutching my pistol in the other. He looked over at me in surprise. “I don’t want to be separated,” I said. That wasn’t weird. If I had a good reason, it couldn’t be weird.

Then, without waiting for him to reply, I stepped through.

I didn’t appear on an island in a floating abyss. Instead, Nedd and I stood side by side next to the wall inside some kind of warehouse, massive and rectangular, with a row of dark windows up by the ceiling. The room was as big as the largest of the farming caverns back home; huge banks of what looked like thousands of cleansing pods were stacked one atop the other, all connected with tubes and wires, along with some dials and wheels that looked like they might be used to rotate the pods to provide access to each one. It was like some kind of giant spa where the population of an entire Detritus cavern might go to take a simultaneous bath.

That couldn’t be right. I doubted a bunch of varvax were collecting the best of the best of human melee fighters to clean them. Though I guessed I shouldn’t judge their cultural heritage if they were.