Page 71 of Blightfall

“I don’t want to hyperjump there if we can help it,” I said. “We haven’t seen any drones fly over the city, but we can’t guarantee that they won’t show up and open fire if they know exactly where we are. I don’t want to be responsible for civilian casualties.”

“So should we look for them on foot?” Gilaf asked.

“I agree that’s the best plan,” Alanik said.

It took longer than I wanted for all the slugs to load back into our packs, with Suki still tucked safely inside Alanik’s, but as we hiked through the park to the main street, we caught sight of familiar figures approaching.

Stars, it was Nedd and Sadie. And a third person who I recognized as they neared: Dayan Dayright, the gladiator from the arena.

“Hey, Twist,” I said, pointing the mesh of my bag in their direction. “Sadie and Nedd don’t look detained.”

“Sadie!” Twist squealed. “Nedd!”

I didn’t know what to make of this situation, but if Sadie and Nedd had gotten themselves out of trouble and brought us a gladiator to interview, things were going significantly better than the slugs had implied.

Stupid interspecies communication barriers.

Sadie waved at us enthusiastically. “Hey!” she called. “We brought a friend!”

Dayan looked skeptical at being called Sadie’s friend, which made sense since they’d just met.

Once we met up, we hiked back to the tree where we could speak without being overheard. Without my asking, Gilaf took a position nearby, keeping watch in case anyone approached.

Nedd escorted Dayan to our shelter under the tree. They looked suspiciously over their shoulder, like this might be some kind of ambush. They were carrying both Sadie’s and Nedd’s packs, which were, of course, empty of taynix—but also missing their weapons.

So maybe they had been detained and talked their way out. Which was evidence I’d been right to assign them to do the talking, not the sneaking.

“Dayan,” Sadie said, “this is Arturo, our flightleader.”

Their flightleader? That implied there was a flight, which implied ships, which implied—

“Hi,” Dayan said. “Is it true you have ships that brought you here from off planet?”

Oh scud. I was impressed that Sadie and Nedd had talked their way out of trouble, but…had they really just announced that we came from another planet?

“Um, yes,” I said. Technically our hyperdrives brought us, but I didn’t know if Nedd and Sadie had shared that. Though anyone who knew anything about space travel would surmise that we didn’t traverse the unimaginable swaths of emptiness between planets without it. “Nedd, you want to explain what’s going on?”

“We went to the pub to talk to Dayan,” Nedd said, “but they thought we were acting suspicious, so they…approached us afterward and accused us of being from the Superiority.”

I stared at him. “You went to have a casual conversation and immediately acted so suspicious that someone suspected you were an alien.”

Dayan did not contradict this. They watched us all carefully, like they were learning things about our group from this exchange. We were not presenting ourselves in the best light at the moment.

Sadie deflated. “They didn’t suspect us immediately.”

“Sadie did a good job,” Nedd said, with a rare edge in his voice that surprised me. “It wasn’t her fault. Dayan got suspicious of us and thought we must be from the station in the sky. Some of the gladiators know the Superiority is watching them. Dayan thought we might be enemies, and we set them straight.”

“We…had a report that you all were in trouble,” I said, carefully avoiding the specifics of who that report came from.

“I’m glad our scouts made it back to you to report,” Nedd said, without missing a beat. “Yeah, we had a bit of a scuffle, but it all worked out.”

Dayan looked down at their boots, shifting nervously—almost…guiltily.

“Dayan tied us up,” Sadie blurted out. “So yeah, okay, maybe we were a little too obvious.”

“You both were suspicious as hell,” Dayan said. “But I wouldn’t have thought you were aliens if I wasn’t already expecting to be ambushed.”

“Some of Dayan’s friends were kidnapped by the Superiority,” Nedd explained. “People who suspected there was more to the story about Elysium. At least one of them was a cytonic.”