Spensa, who was told to follow the 'Path of Elders' by her delver ally, journeys with Chet to find different portal stones placed throughout fragments. The nowhere is occupied by rival pirate gangs controlling areas of fragments, and as Spensa, M-Bot, and Chet traverse different fragments containing diverse environments, they hope to cross through the pirate lands into No Man's Land, the area surrounding the lightburst. She quickly gains the help of Chet Starfinder, a human explorer who has been in the nowhere for 170 years, and deduces that he is actually Commander Spears, M-Bot's previous owner. Spensa emerges at the edge of the nowhere where it crosses over into her universe, the 'somewhere', and finds that many areas of land called 'fragments' surround the center of the nowhere, which is a luminous sun called the lightburst.

She chooses to enter the nowhere, believing as she is that she cannot give her friends the advantage they need over the Superiority. The penultimate novel of the four-book series, it was published by Delacorte Press on Novem with a sequel due in 2023 entitled Defiant.Īfter entering a portal into the nowhere, the delver Spensa had come into contact with gives her a choice to enter the nowhere or return to her home. It is the third book in the Skyward series after Skyward and Starsight. Cytonic is a 2021 young adult science fiction novel written by American author Brandon Sanderson.

Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson