Starsight

That seemed to open me further, and the noise invaded my mind. I screamed, and something smashed into my ship, ramming it to the side, nearly bringing down my shield. Warning alarms from my dash were just another noise. I . . . I couldn’t fly in this. I . . .

A shadow emerged from the dust. My heart leaped at the shape of a ship. Vapor? M-Bot?

No, a shuttle, with no weapons except an industrial light-lance for moving equipment. It speared my ship and pulled me after it, away from the churning shapes. An ember—I thought it was real—roared past, narrowly missing my ship.

“Alanik?” a voice said on my comm.

I . . . I knew that voice. “Morriumur?” I whispered.

“I’ve got your ship tethered,” they said. “You were just sitting there. Are you all right?”

“The heart . . . ,” I whispered. “You have to get me to the heart. But . . . but Morriumur . . . you can’t . . . The illusions . . .”

“I can see through them!” Morriumur said.

What?

Morriumur towed me through the dust, approaching one of the spines of the delver—a large spike leading down to its surface. We flew along it, Morriumur dodging some of the nightmares, but completely ignoring others. They smashed into us and puffed away. Just . . . illusions.

“It shows different things to everyone,” Morriumur said, expertly towing me into a hole in the surface.

“Two people . . . ,” I whispered, holding my head. “You need—”

“That’s the thing, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “I am two people.”

I whimpered, squeezing my eyes shut at the assault, which only grew worse as we flew inside. Fortunately, Morriumur’s voice continued, somehow comforting and real in the middle of all the emotion and noise.

“It’s projecting two different things at me,” Morriumur said. “One to each of the brains of my parents. I . . . don’t think it knows how to deal with me. We’ve never flown a draft into a delver before, so far as I know. Honestly, I don’t think any diones at all ever tried flying into one of these. Our pilots have always been varvax or tenasi.

“The illusions are nothing to me, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “We didn’t realize, during training. We treated me like anyone else—but I can see through them as two overlapping, shadowy images. I can do this. I can reach the heart.”

I undid my buckles with trembling hands, barely aware of what I was doing. I ripped off my helmet, then curled up, holding my head, trying to escape the visions. I bounced against the inside of my ship as Morriumur pulled me one direction, then the next.

“A lot of these tunnels are fake,” Morriumur said. “I think the maze would have led us around in circles . . . It’s really just a big openness in here, Alanik.”

I trembled beneath an infinite weight. I don’t know how long it took, but I felt us getting closer. I was a child alone in a black room, and the darkness was pressing against me. Growing deeper, and deeper, and deeper . . .

“There’s something ahead.”

Deeper and deeper and deeper . . .

I dropped inside my cockpit, pressing against the seat.

“This is it!” The small voice came from my dash. An insect to crush. “Alanik, we’ve entered a pocket of air and gravity. What do I do now? Alanik? I never got to the heart during our training!”

“Open. My. Canopy.” I whispered the words, my voice hoarse.

A short time later, I heard a thumping as Morriumur forced open my canopy with the manual override.

“Alanik?” Morriumur asked. “I see . . . a hole over there. The membrane is an illusion. It’s just a blackness, like a hole into nothing. What do I do?”

“Help. Me.”

Eyes squeezed closed, I let Morriumur assist me out of the ship and onto the wing. I stumbled, clinging to them, and opened my eyes.

Nightmares surrounded me. Visions of dying pilots. Hurl screaming as she burned. Bim. My father. Hesho. Everyone I’d known. But I could see it too, the hole. Our ships had settled down on something solid. It looked like one of the caverns from back home. The hole was right next to my ship, a deep void in the ground.

I let go of Morriumur, pushed off them. They cried out as I dropped from the wing. And plunged into the void.

44

I entered a completely white room.

The pressure on my mind vanished immediately. I stumbled to a stop and looked around at the pure whiteness, somehow familiar.

I let out a long sigh, turning around until I saw myself standing beside the far wall. Not a mirror image. Me. Standing there. That was it, the delver. It looked like me the same way the one in the recording had. I wasn’t sure why it chose that shape—or even if it did. Perhaps my mind simply interpreted it this way.

I walked to the delver, surprised at how confident and strong I felt. After what I’d just been through, I should have been weak, exhausted. But in here, in this white room, I had recovered.