Page 135 of Defiant

Behind them was another ship. Chet’s. He stood up from the cockpit, wearing overalls and a cap, his vibrant mustaches extending from beneath his nose. “Bother!” he said. “You realize how annoying shaving is? I never had to do that when I didn’t have a real physical presence, Miss Nightshade. It ismostuncomfortable!”

Turned out, delvers weren’t limited to making stone and rock. Chet was having fun learning to be human. And by “fun,” I meant he was mostly making all the same annoying observations about human bodies that I’d spent months hearing from M-Bot. At least in Chet’s case, the complaints seemed more commiserative. For example, he hadn’t realized that if you didn’t sleep, you got headaches.

I picked up a cloth and started cleaning M-Bot, who needed a good mopping up after our last flight to inspect a distant set of caverns. I worked in silence for a time, enjoying the quiet moment, when Rodge called.

“Yo, Rig,” I said, as M-Bot piped through the comm. “How’s life untangling the mysteries of the universe?”

“Ugh,” he said.

“That good?”

“FM keeps going down in person and getting shot at,” he said. “What is with her?”

“She just wants the excitement,” I said.

“That’s not what she says.”

“What does she say?”

“That she needs to ensure, personally, that the instructions are received by the proper authorities.”

“Excitement,” I said. “I empathize.”

“It can’t be getting dull for you already, Spensa,” he said. “It’s only been a few days!”

“Longer than I’ve ever gone without getting shot at.”

“Liar,” he said. “You realize I’ve known you most of your life, right?”

“Then you know that I’m prone to exaggeration,” I said. “So what’s new?”

He chuckled. “Well, I just wanted to let you know I’ve sent Jorgen something interesting. It might help.”

I frowned. “What?”

“He asked for it, and I found it in all of this mess of information we’re getting from the Superiority’s primary databases. Just try not to break anything. Rig out. Thanks, by the way.”

“For?”

“For dragging me into this.” He cut the line. I was left confused as Jorgen walked back in carrying a datapad.

“All right,” I said, hands on my hips. “What scheming have you two been doing?”

He turned it toward me. It seemed to be a list of coordinates.

“Unexplored planets,” he said. “Deemed too dangerous by the Superiority. There’s practicallynothinglisted about them other than warnings to stay away.”

“Which could mean…” I said, snatching it.

“Anything,” he said. “From a taynix refuge to some kind of very aggressive species to…who knows what they determined was too dangerous to even record? Seems mysterious to me.”

I took it, then looked at him, narrowing my eyes. “You just want to keep me busy.”

“Of course I want to keep you busy,” he said. “Doing something important.” He rapped the datapad. “Earth is out there somewhere, Spensa. Either in the nowhere, or here. Something happened with it. And the figments—we know next to nothing about them. And what about the traps we found on the portals into the nowhere? Those have existed far longer than the delvers. There might be dangers out there we don’t know about. Better to explore them than to be surprised.”

I grinned. Then paused and looked at him.

“What?” he said.

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