Page 40 of Blightfall

“If they shoot at us, we don’t have a lot of options but to shoot back,” I said.

“True,” Nedd said. “You did some good flying in that firefight.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You too.” I cringed. Nedd was a copilot. He hadn’t been flying. “I mean you did good work!” I said immediately. “There was a lot of navigation to do, and we were all too distracted trying to stay alive and—”

“It’s okay,” Nedd said. “I know what you meant.”

I didn’t think I actually meant anything. I was just babbling because I was nervous. But if Nedd was going to let me off the hook, I wasn’t going to correct him. His smile had faded, though, and he was looking out over the river like it had beaten up a friend of his.

I’d hit a nerve, even though I hadn’t meant to. And that probably meant I should shut up, slink off, and go do my job. But if I was good at one thing, it was failing to quit when I was behind.

“What’s it like?” I asked. “Being a copilot.”

Nedd shrugged. The others were getting farther ahead, and we should have walked faster, but I didn’t want to be interrupted. “It’s fine,” he said. His tone said otherwise, and I couldn’t blame him. Being unable to fly was most pilots’ worst nightmare.

“With that glowing review, maybe I’ll put in for a transfer.”

That earned me a chuckle. “Don’t do that. The flight needs you.”

“Do they?” I asked. “For what?”

I immediately regretted that question too. Was I fishing for compliments now?

Maybe I was. But sometimes when you went fishing, all you caught was a lost piece of vat equipment.

“Because you’re a good pilot,” Nedd said. “And you’re good for morale.”

Morale. That was a role, I guessed. “Like a mascot?”

“No! Like…a person who doesn’t take life too seriously.”

“Like you,” I said.

Nedd shook his head. “Not like me. I mock everybody. But you remind us all that we’re on an alien planet and we ought to look around and notice how incredible it is that we’re here, even when it’s scary and we’re afraid of getting killed.”

Okay. Probably none of them were going to do that. “You shouldn’t need reminding,” I said. “It’s obvious.”

“Yeah, well,” Nedd said, looking into my eyes. “Maybe the obvious things are the easiest to forget.”

That fizzy feeling bubbled all the way down to the tips of my toes. It shouldn’t have made me feel better, being offered the role of the person who says obvious things, like some kind of court jester from old stories. But Nedd seemed to genuinely think it was valuable.

If it meant he thought about me at all, I’d take it.

We walked in silence for a while longer, and I wondered if any of that joking could be considered flirting. I didn’t have the first idea how to flirt. If FM were here, I might have asked her, but Alanik and Gilaf weren’t likely to be much help, and Arturo would definitely accuse me of talking too much.

The river split, and the tree creature pulled the barge up the smaller fork, which flowed down the hill from the city itself. Ahead was a bridge that a motorized vehicle was driving across, carrying a truckload of the spiky pineapples. The city waited on the hill, walled and intimidating.

“Do you think we’re ready for this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Nedd said. “But I guess we’re going to find out.”

Twelve

Arturo

The white walls of the city grew larger and larger as we approached the foothill on which it stood. The city was massive—bigger than any individual cavern on Detritus. The barge continued up the river, nearing a series of wooden docks at the base of the hill, lined with wooden buildings and huge metal waterwheels for generating power. A series of pipes jutted from one of the buildings, running up the cliffside to an enormous tank above the wall.

The river didn’t run through the city, I realized. Instead, the city was accessible by a switchback road that ran up the hill from the river. There were also many people living outside the walls—farmers, factory workers, maybe more hidden in the forest.