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“Oh,” she said. “Too much? Did they not want to know about the sculpture part?” She said it lightly, but had her gun trained on the others.

I have your friends,I sent to that distant commslug. But I found I couldn’t reach her anymore. The communication had been authorized initially, but now it was blocked and I had no idea how to contact her again.

“What do you want?” the second in command said, drawing my attention back to the problem at hand.

“The portal,” I said. “Take us to the nowhere portal.”

The next trip happened in a far different manner from the previous two. We put up shields along the sides of the platform for privacy, and held the officials at gunpoint after we stopped one of them—the junior communications officer—from trying to make a stealthy emergency call.

It was eerie, flying through town, feigning calm, passing people on rooftop picnics or hurrying to jobs. At that moment I felt a lot of what Jorgan had to be, as I held my gun at the ready, fully prepared to shoot. You never pointed your weapon at someone if you weren’t prepared for that. If something went wrong, there was a chance I’d have to kill these poor people.

I hated the situation. More, I hated Winzik and Brade for forcing me into it. As we flew there, my rifle trained on an innocent person, I felt a pain well up inside of me. A deep, nerve-shattering agony over the sorry, circular state of life. We were oppressed, so we felt we had to hit back hard enough to free ourselves of thatoppression, which would in turn lead to them fighting back even harder.

It was a pain that whispered nothing could ever be right, or beautiful, or evennormalagain. That everything was inevitably ruined in every conceivable way, and all of my efforts were the emotional equivalent of trying to hold a friend’s intestines in as they died from a mortar shell blast.

The flying platform began to shake. The air vibrated, like from distant war drums. Sections of the railing vanished, and chunks of slag appeared around us—bits of melted metal, dropping and snapping against the floor.

I knew what those were. Pieces of Nedd’s ship, picked up and latched onto by my broken mind when he was nearly killed.

Oh, scud. I was hyperventilating.

I was a weapon. It was okay. I was a weapon.

No need for this. No need…to feel…

I fell to my knees, gun tumbling from my fingers. Kimmalyn dropped beside me immediately, wrapping her arms around me.

But that was meaningless. I didn’t need to be held.

I needed…

I needed…

I…

I pulled in tight and let her hold me. As if, by her effort alone, she could keep the universe from cracking in two.

I’d been lying to myself. It was getting worse. And I knew, deep within, that if I continued on this path I was going to get everyone near me killed.

Like before, this fit eventually subsided. It took longer—excruciating minutes during which I had toforciblyhold myself down, lest everything and everyone nearby suddenly be flung into the nowhere. I felt a buzzing at my mind—the slugs trying to get in—but I forced them away. I couldn’t let this consume them too.

As it finally calmed, I looked up at the others.

The aliens were huddled by the side of the ship, strange shell-likeeyelids closed as they trembled. Kimmalyn still held me, while Alanik kept guns fixed on the enemy. Arturo had gathered up most of the frightened slugs like terrified puppies.

Silence. I huddled there, then—with trembling fingers—reached for my gun and made certain the safety was on. Still shaking, I nodded to Kimmalyn, who released me. I struggled to my feet and grabbed the railing.

“So,” Arturo said. “We…continue?”

“We have to,” Alanik said. “The enemy is alerted. Either we finish this mission, or we go back to command having ruined any chances of them executing their planned mission.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. There was no telling what the aliens thought of our antics, other than that they were obviously terrified. That was fine. It got us through a large set of cargo bay doors, into a warehouse that was mostly empty—though we had them give an evacuation order anyway. I could see where the acclivity stone had once been piled: large swaths of ground with painted square outlines for stock to be placed. It was all empty.

Closing this portal with the help of the Broadsiders reallyhadachieved something. It was a proof of concept showing that shutting down the other portals would work as we hoped. I walked unsteadily to the large portal, which dominated most of the far wall of the warehouse.

“It’s locked,” the lead alien said—he’d recovered from fainting by this point. “It’s been locked for two weeks.”

“I know,” I said, hand on the stone. “I was one of the people who locked it. How large is your defense force here? How many fighters?”