Page 31 of The Sunlit Man

“So, wait,” Nomad said. “If you touch, you start draining Investiture from one another?”

“There are prayers to formalize it,” she said. “But…yes, a prolonged touch can cause it to begin. Accidents. Or…intimacy.”

“You freeze each other during sex?”

Well, that’s new, the hero says to his overly blunt valet. Certainly didn’t have that on the list of cultural features I was expecting to find on this world.

Rebeke’s face grew redder. “In truth, we pass heat back and forth. It’s…not something I should have to explain to you.”

“Fair enough,” he said, thinking. These people had a natural, biological ability to leech Investiture from one another. Almost everything had some Invested component, but the extremities of experience—specifically the strange things he could doandthe strange things that had been done to him—weredeeplyrelated to the nature of Investiture.

That included his Torment. There was a physical component. A mental component. But the real shackles were spiritual—Investiture. So maybe…

A plan began to form in his mind. A way to potentially escape his affliction. Or at the very least lessen the symptoms of it.

Nomad, the knight interjects—likely interrupting musings about his incredible nature—I see something. Ship twenty degrees to your right. Very distant.

Nomad focused on the direction Auxiliary had indicated. While Aux didn’t have a physical shape unless Nomad called him as an object, the spren could use Nomad’s body to experience the world. Aux had been keeping watch, even if Nomad hadn’t.

Nomad spotted it: a small ship approaching in the distance. “Scout,” he said to Rebeke. “I think it’s observing us. You should warn the others.”

Rebeke followed his gaze, then cursed softly. She flipped a switch on the side of her seat, and the fuselage to Nomad’s left split open. Rebeke’s seat and the metal around itunlockedfrom the main body of the cycle. Sections at the front and sides folded out simultaneously, forming into her own one-person hovercycle, sleek, efficient.

As he’d guessed, this quadcycle could eject the four portions with seats. The vessel wasn’t so much one large hovercycle as it was a carrier of four smaller ones.

“Impressive,” he said. “Caneverythingon this planet break apart into smaller, functional pieces? If we crash this thing, is it going to disintegrate into a hundred evensmallercycles?”

“Call in what you saw to warn the others,” she said to him, then leaned down, ready to go after the scout.

“Don’t go right for it!” Nomad shouted. “It’s observing. See how it’s descending to the terrain to be harder to spot? It’s probably reporting in via radio. I’d bet that scout thinks they’ve caught us planting seeds. If you go screaming toward it, the scout willknowit’s been spotted.”

She paused, seeing the wisdom in that. “It can’t be reporting in,” she said. “We have our entire city here, including our radio jammers. That will disrupt their signals.”

Nomad wondered again at their varied technologies. Then again, maybe they weren’t using actual radio waves, and his mind interpreted the word that way for convenience. Might be some kindof Connection-based communication, if it was powered by these sunhearts.

“Then it’s even more important not to alert the scout they’ve been seen,” he said. “Here. Let me show you.”

He turned and looked down by his leg, in the same location where she’d reached to unlock her cycle. There, he found a handle, almost flush with the side of the craft. At her nod, he turned it, and his own cycle disconnected from the central fuselage.

The resulting single seater was more like the hovercycles he’d flown on other worlds. He pulled it out beside hers.

“This is as small as they get,” she noted. “These don’t even have their own sunhearts; they have a battery that will last you about an hour before needing to reattach to the main vehicle to recharge.”

“Great,” he said. “Follow me.” He turned his cycle vaguely toward the distant scout ship. He made a wide loop, as if he were going to check on the prospectors.

She followed, and as they passed the point closest to the still-distant scout, she pulled up beside Nomad. “Now?” she asked, eager.

“No,” he said. “We’ll do one more loop. Make it seem like this is a normal part of our routine. This time, we’ll swing out wider, though.”

She nodded, watching the scout intently.

“Didn’t you just recently get into trouble for exceeding your orders?” he asked. “They’re going to yell at you again.”

“If it pleases you to know, it is ever my lot,” she said. “Should I care?”

He smiled. “I don’t see why you should.”

She suddenly seemed uncertain. “I…I offer the concern that the scout might be a Charred. What would we do then?”

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