Page 40 of The Sunlit Man

Nomad grabbed the pilot’s metal stool and threw it at the windshield, cracking it. Glass, contrary to a lot of his master’s stories, was strong stuff. But the windshield rattled in its frame. Good enough.

“Nomad?” she asked as he threw the stool again, which bounced off this time, then they ducked as bullets began blasting through the door.

“Yes, I deflected a bullet,” he said. “I can manage it about one in ten times. Get ready to run for my cycle.”

“Onein ten?” she said, growing paler.

“Fortunately you’re the one. Pay attention!” Another shot came through the door. They assumed he’d somehow thrown the dead bolt and were trying to shoot the doorknob off.

Nomad jumped up onto the control panel and slammed his shoulder into the windshield, completely breaking it free of the frame. Together he fell with it outside, where he rolled to his feet and ran across the deck. Rebeke found her wits and scrambled out after him.

To his vast relief, he found the cycle where he’d left it. Yes, they’d docked it and chained it in place, but they didn’t seem to have sabotaged it. Auxiliary, as a crowbar, let him pop the chain from where it had been mounted to the deck. Rebeke climbed behind the controls and unlatched it from the side of the ship. Nomad leaped onto the seat behind her.

The Cinder King strode out of his cab, pistol in hand, firing wantonly—and Nomad blocked with a shield. A second later, Rebeke dove the cycle toward the ground, nearly tossing him off with the sudden acceleration. He managed to hang on with his knees and grip her around the waist with one arm, keeping his shield up and intercepting a few more shots as they descended.

“This is going to get awkward,” he remarked in Alethi, “if they start shooting at the cycle and not me. Can you get a little bigger and protect the whole thing?”

You are at just over ten percent Skip capacity, the hero warns. I’ll need some of that to grow. If we drop below ten percent, we won’t be able to make new Connections, though you’ll maintain the ones you made before.

“Do it,” Nomad said, feeling Auxiliary grow weightier in his hand—feeding off the Investiture they’d gathered. He expanded to about five feet across, just in time to block more shots. That size increase wouldn’t be permanent, and would continue to leech Investiture from Nomad while he remained that size.

Rebeke continued to dive, and he realized she was going for the other hovercycle. He could see the edge of it peeking out into the ringlight from the stone overhang below. Apparently the officers who had grabbed her had left it.

“Rebeke!” he shouted. “We need to get away!”

“These are one of the only sets of cycles we have!” she shouted back, turning her head so he could hear over the wind. “I’m not going to abandon one.”

Nomad looked up. The Cinder King appeared at the edge of the deck above, his glowing eyes like the coals at the heart of a campfire. He held something else in his hand. The key?

The fake key. He slammed it and his pistol to the deck in obvious fury, then held out his hand to the side, where someone handed him a rifle. He took aim, and blast after blast hit the shield.

“Rebeke!” he yelled. “You might be low on cycles, but if you stop down there, heisgoing to pick us off from above. Do you understand?”

A moment passed, the cycle still screaming toward the ground. Then, with obvious frustration, she pulled up and shot them along the ground—leaving the other cycle behind, abandoned. The CinderKing took no further shots. Indeed, Nomad thought he saw the man stalk back to his cabin, though the distance was now too great to be sure.

He has figured out, the knight conjectures, that the Beaconites replaced his key and are hunting for the doorway.

“You think?” Nomad grumbled in Alethi, dismissing the Investiture-draining shield, then called to Rebeke, “Trade me places.”

“What?”

He forced her to slow, now that they were out of range, and let him take the driver’s seat. There was barely enough room on the cycle for that, and as he got her on the back portion, she refused to hold him around the waist.

He frowned at her.

“We don’t…touch,” she said. “It’s not comfortable for us.”

“Even through clothing?” he demanded.

She looked away. “It just feels strange to—”

“Yeah, whatever. I don’t care.” He locked her in place by the legs with an improvised variation of Auxiliary’s door blocker. Then he tore off toward the main body of Beaconites and fired up the radio. “Contemplation,” he said, “we have a problem.”

“Alas, my news is of a similar nature,” she replied. “We’ve gone over the region twice and found nothing.”

“He’s been lying to you,” he said, “about the location of the doorway. Obscuring it by making a big show of stopping in this region.”

“As I explained previously, some of us have seen it.”

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