Page 39 of Defiant

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“I didn’t mean those stars, child,” Gran-Gran said. “I meant the ones down here.Listen.”

The ones down here? What did she mean? I felt a tugging onmy senses, like Gran-Gran reaching out and giving them a soft redirection. My thoughts expanded, and I saw—in a moment—all the things I’d been ignoring to focus on the sky.

Not things.People.Thousands of minds surrounding me. Bright and brilliant like flares—each burning with its own passions, stories, ideas. Some were brighter to my senses, not because they were more alive, but because they were cytonic themselves.

I could sense themall,if I looked. All the taynix too—the slugs of a multitude of varieties. The sky was empty, but the platform and the planet beneath were set aflame with the souls and minds of those who occupied them. It was beautiful.

Chet leaped at the sensation. This was…this was what I’d shown him at Starsight. It was what had sent him into the nowhere to become Chet. This simple realization had changed everything: the knowledge that all those points of light, the ones that he had found so annoying, werealive.

It was painful,thought the part of me that was also him.Because I’d intentionally forgotten this fact. I didn’twantto know that the points of light were alive. I wanted them to represent pain, because that would keep me away. Safe from remembering the truth, which was an even greater agony.

In deliberately forgetting all of their pain, in seeking a place outside of time and normal reality, his kind had become the delvers. Unknowable. By design.

No,that part of me thought.Not completely unknowable. You and I prove that.

“Do you feel them?” Gran-Gran asked. “The people we protect. Our families, and their families, and their loved ones. A vast, grand constellation.”

“I feel them,” I said.

“We are the people of the engines,” she said. “Clan Motorskaps. Once, we moved theDefiant—the ship that was our home. Now we live here, but our duty is the same. To keep them safe. To be the engines.”

“How does an engine keep someone safe?” I asked. “I still think I’d rather be the ship’s destructor.”

Gran-Gran chuckled, perhaps because I’d said basically the same thing when I was a child and she’d first talked to me about our heritage aboard theDefiant.

“How useful is a weapon that cannot move?” she said. “How long would an army last if each of its soldiers were rooted in place? The sword is only useful if the body that holds it is nimble, capable, fleet. When our people needed safety,wecarried them there. When it was time to fight,webrought the weapons to bear. Without the Motorskaps, theDefiantwould have been a lifeless hunk of metal floating in an infinite void. We were its blood, its life. The same is true of you, here.”

I nodded. I thought I understood.

“I want you to remember that you’re part of something grand,” Gran-Gran said. “Back when we lived on theDefiant,even the children were assigned ranks. Not out of some jingoistic militarism, but to make them feel they were part of something greater. We wereallthe crew of the ship, no matter how old.

“And as a ship is useless without an engine, what is an engine without people to move and protect? You act like the lone spear, Granddaughter. But a spear is always stronger as part of a phalanx.”

“So you’re saying…”

“Where are your friends? Why do you seek to do this mission on your own?”

“I can’t tell Jorgen,” I said. “He’s determined to be the one who pays the emotional toll for this.”

“So you want to do it instead?”

“Would you expect anything different of me? Isn’t that what you trained me for?”

She didn’t respond to that, though I could feel her worry. Yes, that was what she’d trained me to do. In a way, all of this was because of her, and the ideas she’d stuffed into my head. She knew it.

“If you don’t tell him,” she said, “then at least you should tellthe others. A few of them. Spensa, child, don’t bear itall.Let some of the others have alittleglory.”

It wasn’t glory I was interested in, but I could feel the meaning behind her words. The worry that I was spreading myself too thin, like a ship trying to use one charge of gunpowder to fire twenty-one guns. She worried that as determined as I was, I’d rush into things without the wisdom my friends could offer. Mostly she worried about me being alone.

I kept my emotions in check, hoping that I didn’t reveal too much to her. Because she was all too correct; Ishouldn’tdo this alone. I should have at least one other person to keep me in check. To warn me if I was being crazy. To watch my back.

That was what Skyward Flight had been all about. I’d found a family among them. A place. And though I’d learned many wonderful things during my time at Starsight and in the nowhere, perhaps sometimes I’d learned the wrong lessons as well.

“If I go and get a little help,” I said, “will you get out of my seat and let me continue?”

“Am I in your seat?” Gran-Gran said. “I’m sorry, dear. I’m an old blind woman, and I get disoriented sometimes.”

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