Brade had been about to haul herself onto her ship’s wing, but stopped when she saw me. She cocked her head, then pulled off her helmet too. I put mine aside, then gestured for her to do the same.
“What?” she asked.
Again, I nearly told her. I nearly turned off my bracelet, revealed my true face. In this place of lies and shadows, I nearly exposed to her the truth. I wanted so badly to have someone to talk to, someone who might understand.
“What if there were a way to change things?” I said instead. “A way we could make it so humans didn’t need to be treated like you are? To show the Superiority they’re wrong about you?”
She cocked her head and drew her lips together in a dione sort of expression. “That’s the thing,” she said. “They aren’t wrong.”
“What was done to you was unnatural, Brade. You were right to feel angry about it.”
She grabbed her helmet and put it on, then climbed up into her cockpit. I sighed, but did the same. So my helmet was back on when I caught what she said next.
“Flight Command,” Brade said. “We’ve reached the center, so I’m going to test the weapon now.”
“Affirmative,” Winzik said.
Wait. What?
“Brade!” I said, looking across at her cockpit. “I’m not even strapped into my—”
She pushed a button on her console, and a flash burst from the center of her ship. It hit me like an invisible wave, connecting not with my body, but with my mind.
In that moment, I immediately knew the way home.
31
I knew the way home.
I saw it—the pathway to Detritus—as clearly as I could remember the way to the hidden cavern where I’d found M-Bot. As clearly as I remembered that day when my father had flown for the last time against the Krell.
It was burned into my brain. Like an arrow made from light. I knew, somehow, not just the direction—but the destination. My home. This weapon, the secret one created to fight the delvers, was not what I’d assumed it to be.
“Weapon test successful,” Brade said. “If this were a real delver, I am one hundred percent confident this would have diverted them to the human refuge of Detritus.”
I heard, in the background, cheers and congratulations. I heard Winzik telling the other government officials that their anti-delver system was operational, and their pilots perfectly trained. He ended with a simple, stunning conclusion. “If a delver did ever attack the Superiority, my program ensures that we will be able to send them to destroy the humans instead. We will fight the two greatest threats to the universe by turning them against one another!”
The terrible understanding loomed over me. I threw off my helmet and leaped out of my cockpit, crossing the spongy ground toward Brade’s ship. When I arrived, I found her lounging on the wing, her helmet off and beside her.
“You knew about this?” I demanded of her.
“Of course I knew,” she replied. “Winzik’s scientists used my mind to develop the weapon. We’ve always known that there was a connection between cytonics and the delvers. We cause them pain, Alanik. They hate us, maybe even fear us. We tried for years to exploit this, and came to the logical conclusion. If we can’t destroy delvers, we can at least divert them.”
“That’s not a good solution! At best, it delays a catastrophe! It doesn’t stop one!”
“It can if we play this right,” Brade said. “We don’t need to defeat the delvers. We simply need to control them.”
“This isn’t controlling them!” I snapped. “A single barely tested blast that might divert them away? What happens when they come back? What happens after they destroy your target, then continue to rampage across the galaxy?”
I was growing so used to the way diones and Krell responded to outbursts like this that a part of me was surprised when Brade just smiled, instead of pulling back and chiding me for my aggression.
“You act as if Winzik hasn’t thought about any of that,” she said.
“Considering my experiences with him and his military tests, I think I’m allowed to question his foresight!”
“Don’t worry, Alanik,” Brade said. She nodded toward her ship. “Today’s ‘test’ was a way to show off for the officials back on the Weights and Measures. This isn’t the first time we’ve tested the weapon—we’ve been planning this for years. We know that we can handle a delver.”
She slipped off her wing, her boots scraping the mossy rock beneath her as she