Page 70 of Blightfall

“Nowhere portal,” I said.

My mind churned through our options. Short of going through the nowhere portal and potentially into an ambush, I wasn’t sure how to further our investigation. We could find almost anything on the other side of that door. It was impossible to prepare for every possibility, and our resources were few.

“Let’s meet up with Nedd and Sadie,” I said. We needed to receive their full report before making a plan, which gave me at least that long to think of one.

We’d arranged to meet them near the stairs to the arena, at a small park with an enormous tree growing in the center. Trees were few and far between in the dense city, and those that grew behind buildings or in side yards were shorter and spindlier than the purple-barked woods that covered the continent. The tree at the center of this park was the only one we’d seen that resembled the woods outside, and in its isolation it had grown bigger and thicker, large enough that all of us holding hands might not have been able to reach around it.

As we entered the park, I scanned behind us, making sure we weren’t being followed.

“Stop looking,” Alanik told me. “You appear nervous.”

“You’ve looked over your shoulder three times since we left the coliseum,” I said.

She huffed a little, but didn’t deny it. “I don’t think the varvax are following us.”

I probably should have let it go, but I couldn’t help myself. “Which you know because you keep looking.”

“Looking!” Hoid said quietly from Alanik’s pack.

“Not you too,” she muttered.

“You too!” Naga fluted from my pack.

“For the record,” Suki said from her vantage point, now inside Alanik’s pack, “I haven’t seen anyone following us either.” At least Suki and the slugs were keeping their voices down and were muffled somewhat by the mesh.

We stopped near a stream in the shade of the towering tree. I took its presence as confirmation that the trees weren’t all ambulatory—no one would plant creatures that could periodically wake up and attack the patrons in an unassuming park. A few passersby meandered near us, but we had relative privacy in the shelter of the tree and a clear view of anyone who might approach from either end of the walking path.

I was starving, so I sat in the grass and pulled out rations. If we were back on Detritus, we’d be approaching evening by now. Naga had, at some point, broken into the bag that contained the mushrooms for her own sustenance, and the supply was more than half gone. “Guess you were hungry too,” I said, setting her in the hollow of the tree’s large roots, where she could move freely but remain out of sight.

A moment later three slugs appeared beside her, blinking into existence as if from a hyperjump. Twist, Nope, and Squeeze—the slugs that had gone with Nedd and Sadie to the bar.

“Uh, hi,” I said. “What are you guys doing here, and where are Nedd and Sadie?”

“Doing here!” Twist said. “Nedd and Sadie?”

I don’t know what I expected—the slugs always reiterated what we said—but these particular words had me worried. “Are they in danger?”

“In danger,” Squeeze said, which sounded even more ominous in his baritone voice.

“Do you think something happened to them?” Gilaf asked.

Their assignment was to have a nonalcoholic drink at a pub. Ours was supposed to be the dangerous mission, and we’d come through it fine. But if we’d learned anything as a team, it was that things did not always go the way we expected.

“Do they need help?” I asked Twist.

“Help!” the three slugs said together, their voices forming an odd sort of harmony.

Scud. We could try contacting them via their handheld radios, but the radios didn’t route through our earpieces, so our voices would be audible to anyone near them.

“How bad is it?” I asked. “Do we need to go right away?”

“How bad!” Twist said. “Go right away!”

Stars, it sounded dire, but I couldn’t be sure with such limited communication. “Alanik, can you get anything more out of them? Can Bob?”

“Their thoughts are confusing,” Alanik said. She opened her pack, letting Bob and Hoid join the other slugs in the large cuddle pile among the tree’s thick roots. “Hang on. Bob is conferring.”

Bob’s “conferring” took a long time, and in the end, all Alanik managed to glean was that Sadie and Nedd had gotten into trouble and were somehow detained. The hyperslugs had a strange sense of spatial awareness—Twist could take us to them immediately if we hyperjumped, but couldn’t give us directions through the city if we wanted to travel the pedestrian way. And while taynix hyperjumps were all but invisible to the delvers and nearby cytonics, we’d need permission if they took us along—and we’d potentially draw Ivy’s attention.