Chapter Seven
Nyna and I had left the others at the village and were now screaming through a steep mountain range on a single hoverbike. Since Nyna knew the way, it only made sense to let her drive. But man was it a scary ride—and she was wearing her colorful backpack, so I couldn’t hold onto her properly. She took turns hard enough to rip a normal passenger from the seat, jumped over gulleys wide enough to get a hovertank stuck, and careened around the edges of seemingly bottomless chasms. At one point we even had to make our way down to the gullies and dodge the huge boulders dotted around them. But before long we re-emerged to the smell of the ocean.
“Couldn’t we have just traveled along the beach?” I asked.
She laughed. “Yes, but I had to make sure we weren’t being followed! And, how boring would that have been? Life’s too short for flat beaten tracks.”
I laughed and shook my head. She was a unique girl, and I looked forward to getting to know her better.
Ahead, I caught sight of a strange rock formation. There was a ring of evenly spaced stones of roughly the same size, surrounded by broken, cracked ground. For ten yards around the stones, nothing grew—not even the strong-willed weeds I’d seen in every corner of this planet.
Also the treeline didn’t approach the stone circle. It seemed that the forest had either decided the place was either too frightening or too nutrient-sapped. It sure was a frightening sight.
Nyna powered down the hoverbike some ways off, and we climbed off.
“Follow me,” she said. “And I mean it. You have to walk where I do. No shortcuts.”
The ordered stones I’d noticed were only the first of five. As we traveled a straight path through the first gap, we turned left onto a path created by the second line of stones. When I reached out and touched one, the tan-colored dirt adhering to it fell away. Underneath, the stone was completely black and appeared to reflect no light.
I was awestruck. The name “Void Temple” meant so much more than the words could possibly convey.
After the second line of stones, we turned right and circled a third ring of shorter stones within the second ring. They were still taller than me, and Nyna’s warning reminded me to keep my desire to jump and peek over in check.
We passed another gap in the stones, though this one seemed to have been caused by damage. Stubs of stones peeked from under the tan soil. When Nyna saw me looking, she took my hand and pulled me on.
“We don’t go across the broken stones,” she said. “Others have and learned the hard way. Don’t ask me how or why, but if you step across them, you get burned to ash. I haven’t personally witnessed it—but once I found a vrak’s foot there. The stub at the ankle looked like it had been forgotten on a grill for a night.”
I gave her a military salute and a lopsided grin before following her on. We turned left at the next gap, then right, then took another right, and finally reached the last circle of stones. These only reached up to my shoulders, and though I could see over them, I didn’t stick my head over to peek. I was dying to see, but we’d have an unobstructed view in just a few steps.
I was beginning to feel something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Something was telling me I was heading in the right direction. I was making something, somewhere, happy. The feeling was like a soft, loving caress from a cadaver.
Yes. Gather them here. Gather our artifacts in this place. We are pleased.
I wished they’d stop doing that. There was something in the words and the tone that set my teeth to chattering. The Lakunae had given me power, endurance, and strength. They’d also shanghaied me, but that was another matter. I’d made friends, found lovers, and was saving a whole planet I hadn’t even known existed before. Yet I couldn’t get rid of the suspicion that there was more to this than the simple quest they’d sent me on. It was like someone had baked me a birthday cake and frosted it with buttercream but spiced it with tiny shards of broken glass.
When we reached the final gap, Nyna halted and stopped me with her hand. Then she closed her eyes, crossed her arms across her chest, and fell silent. I watched her for several seconds and wondered if she was speaking to the Lakunae. It wouldn’t surprise me if they themselves had constructed the temple and required the offering of someone’s time in order to enter. That could explain why the curious vrak hadn’t survived. They weren’t a patient species.
I wondered if it might be nothing more than a ceremony, something she did out of reverence. Out of respect for the difficult thing she was going, bringing a stranger to her cherished temple, I waited silently for her to finish whatever she had to do.
About a minute later, Nyna opened her eyes, raised one finger, pointed it toward the gap, and slowly stretched her arm out. To my surprise, her finger stopped in mid-air as if it had hit something. When she drew her finger back, there was a soft, electronic beep, and a round-cornered door materialized.
I gasped. Even though it slid open without a sound and appeared to be made of the metallic equivalent of the stones surrounding it, the shape of the door was unmistakable. This wasn’t a temple. It wasn’t even a building of any kind.
It was a starship.
It was mostly buried underground, but whether it had crashed or the original crew had concealed it, I couldn't be sure. It still had some power—enough to open the hatch on top and bring us down. There had to be power to make the dust-covered crystals dangerous, too. Without the ship being operational, though, I had no way
