Page 8 of Defiant

“Right,” he said. He searched my eyes. I knew what he wanted; there was a subtext here. He was worried about me. And worried about us.

I didn’t know what to say. Iwantedto leap to my feet and kiss him and tell him to stop being silly and stop worrying. But I couldn’t.

My silence wasn’t fair to him. “I just felt M-Bot,” I told him. “He’s alive, in the nowhere.”

“What, really?” Jorgen perked up. “That’s the first good thing that’s happened in a week. How is he?”

I’m me!M-Bot said.Tell him I’m me. Very me.

“He says he’s very much himself,” I said. “And I believe him. He seems to have escaped the attention of the delvers, and is existing like they do, in the nowhere, without a body.”

“That’s incredible,” Jorgen said. “Surely that’s an advantage of some sort?”

“Surely.”

We sat together for a few more minutes, the long table somehow making the room feel huge and hollow, now that it was empty. Scud, he was worrying about me again.

“What about you?” I asked, to try to deflect. “How are you feeling?”

“Better than I thought I would,” he said. “Maybe part of me still doesn’t believe my parents are gone. But today’s ceremony…it’s what they wanted for me. Misguided though they were sometimes, I have to accept that they knew me. That these bars were going to find their way to my shoulders eventually.” He met my eyes. “I’m doing this because it needs to be done, not because they wanted it. Though it makes me think that they’ll be happy to see me, when they look down from Valhalla.”

I rested my hand on his, on the tabletop. He didn’t often talk about his religious heritage, but it was there—a part of him, like so much else. He turned his hand over and squeezed mine. But there was so much tension in his eyes.

“Jorgen?” I forced out. “When I was in there…lost…you were my anchor. You are the lighthouse that brought me home.”

He smiled then, and some of the tension seemed to melt offhim.“When you were in there,” he said, “and I was trying to make sense of all that was happening, I kept asking myself, ‘What would Spensa do?’ Trying to be a little more like you helped me keep pushing forward.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head.

“Jorgen, that’s aterribleidea!” I dropped his hand and gestured at myself. “Have youseenme try to solve problems? Things end up on fire. Or dead. Usually both!”

“Things get done when you’re around.”

“Things,yes,” I said. “Things like me running off and moonlighting as an interdimensional space pirate! ‘What would Spensa do?’ Honestly, Jorgen, I thought better of you.”

He kept smiling, though it faded as he glanced over at the statistics on the wall—the projector image having recovered from my episode. He slipped out of his seat and stepped up to the numbers. I joined him, taking in his worried expression—which was more unnerving to me than the numbers themselves.

My heart bled for him, knowing that all of this was on his shoulders. Unfairly so, but again, what was fairness to us? We had rarely tasted that particular nectar. We survived on algae and rat meat instead.

“I feel,” he said softly, “like I’m a lone man trying to hold up a collapsing building. I know it’s not true. I know I’m not the only one working for our future—but still…the walls of the house tremble. The ceiling buckles. Worse, I know an earthquake is coming that will shake the entire cavern. And I’m barely keeping things together as it is…” He turned to me. “They’re going to crush us, Spensa. While you were gone, we failed you—and we’re still failing. We’re just doing it in slow motion.”

“Failing? Jorgen, that’snonsense,” I said. “You recruited not one, buttwoplanets to our cause. You rescued Cuna and figured out how to work Detritus’s defenses. Scud! You found the taynix!”

While I’d been playing spy on Starsight, Jorgen had followedcytonic impressions deep into the bowels of the planet and found the slugs’ breeding ground. Because of him, we had slugs that could hyperjump ships, others that could create cytonic attacks, and even ones that could block all cytonic abilities in a region. And then there were the other varieties whose powers we hadn’t learned yet.

It was increasingly obvious that the Superiority knew how to manipulate the various kinds of taynix. The inhibitor field around Starsight that had prevented me from hyperjumping in or out? Facilitated by a slug. A different type sent the communications the Superiority used to connect their empire, link their drones, deliver commands to their officials. An empire all built on the tiny backs of enslaved cytonic creatures.

I reached out to Doomslug, who I’d left in my room before coming to the meeting. She reached back, empathetic. Unfortunately, my worry about all of this made that vibration inside me start up again.

Cuna’s notebook appeared near their seat, then flopped down onto the table. Jorgen started, then glanced at me. I wrestled my emotions back, and as my frustration subsided I felt something new. A distorting of self, a fuzzing of reality, and a link to him—mind to mind. Cytonic to cytonic.

Jorgen was worried about me. While I’d heard him say it, this time Ifeltit. Scud. That was wonderful, but dangerous. I didn’t want him to feel pain or worry for me. He had way too many other things to deal with.

Despite myself, I withdrew, blocking him.

“You’re not a monster, Spensa,” he whispered. “You’veneverbeen a monster.”

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