“All right,” I said as we started across the desert. “First question. How can this place be the nowhere? I’ve been in the nowhere before during hyperjumps. I think I’d remember flying chunks of stone and monsters with teeth in their noses.”

“An astute observation. What you experienced before is the inside of the lightburst.” Chet spun around, both arms extended as he walked. “We are outside it now—in the belt, which is a boundary area. Things of our world—like time, individuality, matter itself—have leaked into the belt. Like how you get brackish water between an ocean and a river.”

“I’ve…never seen an ocean,” I said.

“Tragic!” he said. “Perhaps imagine two countries next to one another. Over time, the people living near the border might pick up the other country’s language. Start to practice some of its habits, customs, traditions. Well, that’s the belt: the part of the nowhere that abuts the somewhere—the ordinary universe—so has some of the same rules. Those who tossed you in here didn’t warn you?”

“I wasn’t thrown in,” I said. “I jumped in on purpose. To escape being captured.”

“Some might call that extreme,” Chet said.

“It was my warrior’s duty,” I explained, “to avoid capture, so that I could not be tortured into betraying my friends.”

Chet grinned. “I like the way you think, young woman. Honor, valor. From those I’ve met in here over recent years, I worried such ideals had been lost!”

“There is this galactic empire,” I told him, “called the Superiority. They…have a different perspective on battle.”

“I know the Superiority,” Chet said. “They have a large base in here for extracting acclivity stone.”

“And so they must get the stone out,” I said.

“Yes, but the only active portals for that are operated by the Superiority,” Chet explained. “From what I know of them, they are unlikely to allow access. They seem a rather controlling bunch, led by…some unsavory individuals.”

“They’re absolute jerks,” I agreed. The word made me sentimental and think of Jorgen. It was a stupid reaction, but it felt like years since I’d last heard his earnest voice.

I’d almost been able to go back to that. Instead I’d come here—a decision I desperately hoped was the correct one.

Please, Jorgen, I thought, stay safe. And be smarter than I’ve been.

Chet snapped a branch off a nearby dried-out shrub, and we stopped walking for a moment as he drew a wide circle in the sand, with a smaller circle at the center.

“Imagine this as the nowhere,” he said. “The lightburst is this circle at the center. All of this larger portion is the belt—where the fragments float. I’ve always thought it resembled a sunny-side-up egg, the yolk being the lightburst and the white being all the fragments.”

“Got it,” I said. “Where are we?”

“Right at the edge,” he said, stabbing the stick at the very rim of the drawing. “This is pirate territory. Specifically, we’re in the region claimed by the Cannonade Faction, near the border of Broadsider Faction territory. That’s where we can start the Path of Elders.”

“Which is…”