Page 16 of The Sunlit Man

“Absolutely,” Nomad said. “I’m tired of hearing only gibberish.”

Right,Aux said.Give me a few minutes, and I’ll have it done.

Nomad nodded. He pointed the rifle at the pilot, disguising the way his arms locked up by making it seem like he was standing there, stoic, ready to fire. The pilot grew even paler at the sight. Nomadlowered the gun as soon as his muscles relaxed, then gestured to the side.

The pilot obediently took him in close to the fleeing hovercycle. Nomad nodded, then pointed at the pilot and gestured dramatically backward with as much of an ominous expression as he could form. He tried to make the implication as clear as possible:I’d better not see you following.

Nomad jumped onto the hovercycle. It seemed the enemy pilot had understood Nomad’s command, because he immediately turned his craft and fled toward the other ships that were giving chase in the distance. The landscape was growing darker, and ahead, rainfall masked the air further. As they sped toward it, that sheet of rainfall reminded Nomad of another storm back home. A place he missed terribly but could never visit again, lest he lead the Night Brigade to people who loved him.

The gap-toothed man was staring at him in awe. When had he regained consciousness? The woman flying the hovercycle glanced back. Then paused. Her eyes went wide as she saw the one ship fleeing, the other one nowhere in sight. Storms. Hadn’t she been watching? Had she only now noticed what he’d done? Judging by her expression, that was indeed the case.

He sighed. By this point, he had gotten accustomed to the way many outsiders looked. He didn’t think they were “childlike” because of their odd eyes; in fact, he had come to recognize the many nuances of countless ethnicities. He knew Alethi with eyes as open and wide as a Shin, while he’d met offworlders who could have passed for Veden—even within a population of people who generally wouldn’t have.

Still, he couldn’t help thinking they looked a little bug-eyedwhen expressing surprise. Well, to each their own. He clambered forward to the seat to her right. In the process, though, he caught his foot and dropped his rifle over the side.

He leaned out and reached for it, then came up empty-handed and shrugged.

The driver said something to him, sounding frustrated.

“Yeah,” he said, settling down in the seat across from hers, “I bet you’re annoyed I lost a gun. Those don’t seem plentiful around here. Ah, well.” He sighed and shook his hand. His thumb was working fine, and the pain had faded, the scrapes on the sides of his hand healed. “Don’t suppose you’ve got anything good to drink?”

He said this in Alethi on purpose, which wasn’t his native tongue. Previous experiences had taught him not to speak in his own language, lest it slip out in the local dialect. That was how Connection worked; what Auxiliary was doing would make his soulthinkhe’d been raised on this planet, so its language came as naturally to him as his own once had. Since he generally didn’t want people listening in on what he said to Auxiliary, it was better to get into the rhythm of speaking Alethi when he didn’t wish to be understood.

Regardless, the driver of the hovercycle could only stare at Nomad as they passed into the darkness of this strange, oppressive cloud cover.

The rain herewasn’t nearly as bad as a storm back home. Just a quick wash of cold water. The sprinkle lasted less than a minute, though they soon passed through another one. He guessed that those omnipresent clouds made for near-constant scattered showers in this dark zone.

“This place is quite spectacular,” he said to Auxiliary. “Sun constantly driving forward, vaporizing all of this.” He glanced at the dash in front of him, which had a compass as one of the readings. That required him to reorient how he’d been viewing this all. “Sun rises in the west here, behind us. Chasing us, vaporizing everything in its path, superheating water in a flash. We don’t dare get too far ahead, lest we reach the sunlight again. So ahead of us, in the east, the planet rotates and plunges everything into sudden darkness. I’ll bet this storm here is the aftermath of that, created at sunset by sudden cooling of all that superheated water.”

Indeed, the knight replies to his squire’s strange rambling. It’s been a long while since we’ve been on a planet with a persistent storm. Remind you of home?

“In all the wrong ways,” Nomad said. “The weather pattern doesn’t make sense, considering the heat on the other side. I’m no meteorologist, but my gut tells me this entire planetshouldbe a vortex of unlivable misery.”

The hovercycle had consoles with lights to let the driver know what she was doing, so they weren’tcompletelyblind. But there weren’t headlights on the thing, and the lack of even a token canopy or roof made him think that people didn’t fly these things into the darkness often.

That made sense. This woman’s force attacked a clearly more dangerous power on a rescue mission. He seemed to have joined some sort of guerrilla force—one that hid in the darkness others feared to enter. A small nation of raiders, perhaps?

But how had their people been taken in the first place? And if they were consistently doing this kind of work, why hadn’t they altered their ships to fly in the rain without soaking themselves?

So he walked back his assumptions, returning to what he knew for certain, then worked forward again. Thinking methodically, logically. That part of him remained, the part that had pushed for evidence and statistics even when his friends had laughed. He was still the same person all these years later. Just as a hunk of metal was technically the same substance after being forged into an axe.

They’re not raiders,he decided.They’re refugees. They were attacked by that larger group, then they went into hiding. Now they’ve dared strike back to rescue their friends.

A working theory only, but it felt right. What he couldn’t figureout was why they’d kidnapped an ember person. To experiment on, or perhaps…

I’m an idiot,he thought, looking at the driver and noting her dark black braid, woven with silver, resting over her shoulder. The shape of her youthful features mirrored those of the woman tied up behind them, both bearing light green eyes, of a shade that might have marked them as nobility back on his homeworld.

The ember woman was a family member. Probably an older sister, based on their relative ages. He should have seen it earlier. These people had been attacked, captives taken, and some of them had been subjected to terrible torment. The driver next to him had rescued one. Dangerous business, judging by how the ember woman continued to struggle and growl, the light from her chest glowing bloodred in the darkness.

But who was he to judge? He was just here to steal a ship, then find a power source strong enough to get him off this planet. Though first, he figured he’d let the driver feed him and give him something to drink for saving her hide.

He felt the Connection happening as they soared farther into the darkness. But the confirmation came as the woman spoke on her radio. “Beacon?” she said. “This is an outrider, requesting signal alignment.”

“Rebeke?” a man’s voice asked. “Rebeke Salvage, that you?”

“If it is agreeable,” she said, “it is me. Code for admittance is thankfulness thirteen.”

“Good to hear your voice, girl,” the man replied, the words nearly lost to Nomad in the howl of the wind. “Is Divinity with you?”

---