do that, but nothing in our training had indicated how creepy it would be to enter this dust.
As we flew through that silent cloud, which flashed periodically with red light, my sensors started to go out. My proximity screen started to fuzz, giving me only the briefest warnings when something was drawing close. Embers emerged as burning shapes, indistinct and terrible.
Vapor and I stopped fighting the embers, instead just trying to dodge as they attempted to slam into us. They’d fall in and trail after us, occasionally streaking forward with bursts of speed. I felt like I was trying to outrun my own shadow.
The pressure on my mind grew worse and worse the closer we drew to the delver itself. Soon I was gritting my teeth against it—the sensations were so overpowering that they affected my flying. I barely got out of the way of one ember, but put myself into the path of another.
Frantic, I speared a third with my light-lance, which fortunately pulled me out of the way. But when I looked up, I couldn’t see Vapor. My sensors were a jumble of static, and the only things I could make out around me were moving shadows and bursts of red light.
“Vapor?” I asked.
I got a jumbled response. Was that her over there? I followed another shadow, but only got further lost in the dust storm. I glanced the other direction, and saw what I was sure was an explosion.
“Vapor?”
Static.
I dodged away from another ember, but my fingers had started to tremble from the force of the thoughts pressing upon my mind.
Oppressive thoughts, weighing me down. Nightmare visions started to appear in the dust. Monsters from Gran-Gran’s stories, appearing and vanishing. My father’s face. Myself, but with burning white eyes . . .
This wasn’t anything like the carefully designed illusions of the training maze. It was a horrific cacophony. No secrets to uncover, just noise slamming against me. Being a cytonic here was a huge disadvantage, because the delver got inside my brain.
I was barely controlling my ship. Reality and illusion melded as one, and I took my hands off the controls and pressed them against my eyes. My head had begun to throb in agony. I tried another weak effort to whisper back—to divert the thing toward deep space.
That seemed to open me further, and the noise invaded my mind. I screamed, and something smashed into my ship, ramming it to the side, nearly bringing down my shield. Warning alarms from my dash were just another noise. I . . . I couldn’t fly in this. I . . .
A shadow emerged from the dust. My heart leaped at the shape of a ship. Vapor? M-Bot?
No, a shuttle, with no weapons except an industrial light-lance for moving equipment. It speared my ship and pulled me after it, away from the churning shapes. An ember—I thought it was real—roared past, narrowly missing my ship.
“Alanik?” a voice said on my comm.
I . . . I knew that voice. “Morriumur?” I whispered.
“I’ve got your ship tethered,” they said. “You were just sitting there. Are you all right?”
“The heart . . . ,” I whispered. “You have to get me to the heart. But . . . but Morriumur . . . you can’t . . . The illusions . . .”
“I can see through them!” Morriumur said.
What?
Morriumur towed me through the dust, approaching one of the spines of the delver—a large spike leading down to its surface. We flew along it, Morriumur dodging some of the nightmares, but completely ignoring others. They smashed into us and puffed away. Just . . . illusions.
“It shows different things to everyone,” Morriumur said, expertly towing me into a hole in the surface.
“Two people . . . ,” I whispered, holding my head. “You need—”
“That’s the thing, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “I am two people.”
I whimpered, squeezing my eyes shut at the assault, which only grew worse as we flew inside. Fortunately, Morriumur’s voice continued, somehow comforting and real in the middle of all the emotion and noise.
“It’s projecting two different things at me,” Morriumur said. “One to each of the brains of my parents. I . . . don’t think it knows how to deal with me. We’ve never flown a draft into a delver before, so far as I know. Honestly, I don’t think any diones at all ever tried flying into one of these. Our pilots have always been