Page 11 of The Sunlit Man

Glowing Eyes spun around, obviously shocked by this turn of events. Whatever was happening to them, it seemed to be the actions of the attacking enemy. In any other circumstance, the look on that man’s face would have been comical, but Nomad couldn’t pause to appreciate it, as the ship he was chained to slowly rose away from the arena floor. It got about five feet up before a blast hit it from above. A violent explosion ripped it apart, ejecting the part with Nomad from the rest of the disintegrating vessel.

On the plus side, Nomad dropped to the ground.

On the minus side, a smoking, sparking piece of the ship came with him. He hit the ground with it right on top of him. Hisbody protested this rough treatment, and all the air was knocked out of him. Invested or not, if he hadn’t fallen into the soft mire, he’d have been crushed.

As it was, he was stuck there in the muddy darkness, the huge weight pressing him down—his thumb still broken and healing slowly—as a firefight broke out above.

Oh, comeon.He could hold his breath practically forever—with his highly Invested soul renewing his cells in much the same way the sun here made the plants grow. But his chance to steal a weapon was dwindling by the moment.

Nomad, the hero says to his exceptionally lazy valet, this is no time to take a rest.

Nomad gurgled an annoyed reply through the mud.

Yes, thatwasa joke on my part,Auxiliary said.Proof that I’m not completely mirthless since my death. But, to be more serious, you should probably try to get out of this. That sunrise is going to arrive eventually. I tasted the strength of it earlier. Let it catch you here and you’ll be vaporized. Right now I don’t have the strength to shield you from such power, and there’s no way we can absorb something so potent.

An explosion shook the ground, vibrating Nomad where he was stuck. His left hand was still manacled to the large piece of wall on top of him. He could pull it free, maybe, but that would probably break his thumb or wrist at the same time, which seemed like a bad idea. His right hand was healing but mostly useless.

Fortunately he could feel air on his legs and even move them. His ankles were sore. He guessed the bonds there had been ripped free in the blast and that the piece of wreckage holding him down covered only his top half.

Right, then. He tried imagining Auxiliary as a knife first—but that didn’t work, even though Nomad insisted he was making a tool, not a weapon. He needed something else. He thought back to his days as an aspiring scholar—that seemed so, so long ago—and imagined a jack for lifting something heavy.

The more complicated an item Nomad needed Auxiliary to be, the longer it took—unless he’d been turned into the same thing many times. The jack took a while and formed wrong the first time, so Nomad had to try again. But eventually he got Auxiliary to appear next to his right hand in the appropriate shape, with the jack’s saddle just underneath the metal’s edge.

Nomad didn’t have much maneuverability, but he was able to move his free hand onto the specifically designed crank and rotate it a few times. It was enough to lift the metal up perceptibly.

Another clever adaptation,Auxiliary said.Glad to see some of the old you shining through.

Fresh air flowed in as he slowly turned the fallen piece of wall into a sort of lean-to over him. Eventually that gave him the room to get both knees underneath him.

Then, with a supreme effort almost betrayed by the slipperiness of the mud, heheavedwith his legs and flipped himself over. This planted the metal wall down into the mud with him lying on top—one manacle still in place—staring upward.

Ships buzzed around. There wasn’t as much blaster fire as he’d thought—these ships didn’t have onboard guns. The explosions were from dropped bombs, and the gunfire he’d seen was all from people wielding rifles on the decks. The ships also couldn’t get very high; the highest he saw them flying was fifty or sixty feet. Theseweren’t proper warplanes, but more hovercraft with a little extra oomph.

All through the arena, plants had started sprouting. Just weeds, but it was amazing how quickly this barren pit of mud was becoming a field from only the light reflected off those rings.

“There’s Investiture in the light coming from the rings,” Nomad said. “Can we absorb that?”

Slowly, it seems,Auxiliary replied.There isn’t much. Maybe ten or twenty BEUs an hour?

Damnation. Well, most of the ships that had formed the arena had launched into the air, and Glowing Eyes was nowhere to be seen—though many of his ember-hearted subordinates lay in the mud where they’d fallen. This was Nomad’s best chance to escape, maybe steal a ship.

He tried to form Auxiliary as a pair of bolt cutters, but eventhatwas too much of a weapon for the Torment at the moment. Why had it let him form a Blade one time, and now forbade bolt cutters? He tried a crowbar, leaning on it to get it to break him free of the wall, but he couldn’t get the leverage right with his broken thumb.

As Nomad slipped in the mud, a smaller, four-person hovercyle came roaring down, frying plants with its jets. Two people jumped free, a man and a woman. The man carried a rifle, but neither had the white uniform coats of the guards he’d encountered before. They were the aggressors, it seemed—the ones who had attacked Glowing Eyes and his group. Enemies of his enemies, dared he hope?

“Hey!” Nomad shouted as they dashed past. “Hey!”

The woman glanced at him, but the man ignored him, searchingthe ground for something. A ship went roaring past, the narrow deck crowded with people in dirty clothing. It scooted off into the distance.

It’s a rescue mission,Nomad realized.Those were captives from earlier.

“Hey!” he shouted louder. He held up the crowbar, waving for them. “Help me!”

The two people turned away from him, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what they were looking for in these weeds. Then, not far off, someone sat up—one of the ember men. He looked lethargic, but…

“Whatever you did to them is wearing off!” Nomad yelled.

The rescuers continued their frantic searching through the growing grass until the man called to the woman, who joined him, and together they heaved a muddy figure up from the grass.

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