Page 122 of Blightfall

“Not just humans,” Alanik said.

I wove through the debris, hitting piece after piece with my light-lance, weaving between them, putting more and more obstacles between me and the enemy. I seemed to have lost them, for the moment, at least.

I slowed to a stop above a particularly large piece of debris. I’d never seen rocks floating so close to the surface of a planet—if that was what this landmass was. Theoretically, gravity should have pulled them down, crashed them into the buildings below. And yet they stayed aloft, almost like they were frozen in time.

I hovered close to the rock beneath me, keeping it between me and the surface below. This near, the sensors of the enemy ships shouldn’t be able to differentiate between me and the debris. They’d have to search the sky rock by rock. And to do that, they’d have to separate, which meant I could pick off any that came close.

The various taynix still hanging out in my ship seemed to have mostly settled in. One boomslug curled around Alanik’s ankles while another rested on her knees. Three taynix were fluting softly behind my seat, where they had found a bag of Naga’s rations and tucked into it. At least that would keep them from wandering around the ship and disturbing the instrumentation.

“Look at that,” Suki said, indicating the rock. Like some of the debris around Blightfall, this chunk of jagged stone contained a square, inorganic shape. This one appeared to be made out of concrete.

“Looks like the foundation of a building,” I said. “And there”—I pointed up higher on the rock—“there’s one of the walls.” It was mostly destroyed, its exposed steel all that held the remaining pieces together.

This debris looked exactly like the chunks of rock that hung around Blightfall, as if some of them had leaked from one side to the other.

“Material leaks from the somewhere into the nowhere, right?” I asked. “It slides through the portal and ends up here. That’s how we think the caverns on Detritus were formed. Rock slowly leaking through over years, leaving a space behind where it used to be.”

“But where did the land below us come from?” Alanik said. “Can it all have leaked through?”

“Can we get a look at the surface from here?” Suki asked, craning her neck and peering past the nose of the ship. I eased my ship slowly toward the edge of the rock. As long as I stayed close, the enemy ships should have difficulty finding me. So I tipped the ship to get a better look at the land below. Our view was hazy due to the rock and dust in the atmosphere, but we could make out the general shape of the land below.

It was sloped and spherical. Stars, had an entire world been sucked through into the nowhere, all in one piece? Blightfall’s portal wasn’t big enough for that, though space clearly worked differently in this dimension, since every point of it seemed to be tied equally to every point of the somewhere.

To devour a whole planet, though. The implications boggled my mind.

There were oceans below, though the geography looked different from the islands of Evershore or the forests of Blightfall. And there were unmistakably continents, the curves of their coastlines irregular and jagged. My eyes paused on a particular hooked formation on one of the continents.

It looked familiar.

“No,” I said.

“What?” Alanik asked.

I couldn’t bring myself to say it, not unless I was sure.

I didn’t want to expose us to danger, but I needed to get a better view. I checked for enemy ships, but the closest ones were all moving erratically, still searching for me. I eased out from behind the rock, banking left, traveling from piece of debris to piece of debris to avoid detection, watching below me and analyzing the shape of the land. It was simply a coastline, just curves and lines. It didn’t have to mean anything.

But the curve of the top of the continent looked familiar too, and there was the hooked, boot-like shape of a peninsula just above it.

“All stars above,” I said. “Suki, are you seeing this?”

“I’m seeing it,” Suki said. From the hush in her voice, I could tell she was coming to the same conclusion.

“What is it?” Alanik asked.

“It’s Italy,” Suki said, her voice quiet with awe.

“It’s what?”

“Earth,” I said, unable to rip my eyes away. “It’s the coastline of what used to be Europe. This planet is Earth.”

Alanik swore in her own language, which was warranted. Earth had vanished a hundred years ago. No one had seen any trace of it since. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure,” Suki said. “That block-shaped peninsula there, that used to be the Old Earth country of Spain.”

“The continent next to it was Africa,” I said. Suddenly, those school lessons didn’t seem so pointless after all. “Is Africa? Stars, I don’t know. Are there people still living here?”

“Look at that,” Alanik said. She pointed at the horizon, an area particularly crowded with broken fragments. “Watch for enemies,” I said to Alanik, unable to tear my eyes from the surface of the planet as I flew to investigate.