Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(53)

Good, I said. Keep me updated.

“Should we have brought you a new ship?” Juno asked.

“I’ll get one later,” I said. “Right now I need to have a look at that portal in your library.”





Seventeen


“The portal?” Juno said. “This seems like an odd time—”

“I know,” I said. “But I think it’s important.” My mindblades could help in the battle, but we needed more than that. We needed Cobb’s command expertise. We had to get him back in charge of this battle, of the war.

The medtechs would be crowded into the library with Gran-Gran and Cobb, and I didn’t want Snuggles to accidentally land us on top of one of the stretchers. Instead I put a hand on Juno’s platform and had Snuggles hyperjump us to a foothold I could see at the top of the cliffs. From this vantage I could see the staircase that led to the library, and I had Snuggles make a second jump to land us outside the domed doors.

I reached down below my knees for the handle, but found the door locked.

I knocked, and there was a scuffling inside.

A moment later the door cracked open. On the other side Cuna stooped down, looking out at us, and then opened the door the rest of the way. “I didn’t think that Winzik would knock,” they said. “But one can never be sure.”

“Not Winzik,” I said, crawling into the room.

Kel and Winnow knelt between the long tables, which had been scooted together so the stretchers holding Cobb and Gran-Gran could rest on top. Several of the kitsen doctors sat on the stretchers, helping the medtechs monitor Cobb and Gran-Gran, while their transport pilot, callsign: Zing, listened to the radio that was perched on a glass case filled with very small books. I could hear Arturo giving orders to the new flights. Hopefully the additional ships would help us hold out a while longer while Rig figured out the platform.

“How are they doing?” I asked Winnow.

“Stable,” she said. “You were right—moving them didn’t cause them to deteriorate this time. It’s possible we could put them in a ship now.”

“I don’t want to move them while we’re under attack,” I said. “And I don’t think it’s the time that made the difference. I think it was the direction. Farther from that.” I indicated the wall, and the medtechs only looked more confused.

“What is that?” Cuna asked.

“A portal to the nowhere,” I said. “I think.”

I was becoming increasingly sure that Gran-Gran—or her spirit? her soul?—was behind this wall. I hoped Cobb was there with her, that non-cytonics could even exist in that strange place. We’d learned from the datanets that the Superiority had mines in the nowhere and ran entire operations to get acclivity stone. They probably used people who weren’t cytonic on those missions.

Of course, those people probably had bodies, so it wasn’t a perfect comparison. Still, I suspected the kitsen cytonics were lost in there too. I didn’t know how they could have survived all this time, but it seemed likely those were the voices I was hearing.

I looked up at the portal, at the strange mass of interconnected lines running all over the wall. I could feel the vibrations of the nowhere, but not Gran-Gran’s distinct signature.

“Quiet, please,” Juno said to the others. “The shadow-walker must concentrate.”

Zing turned off the radio, and everyone else was silent. That was helpful, if a little presumptuous of Juno. Usually he was the one chattering and distracting me.

I considered the portal. Spensa said if I got too close I might fall in. There was a draw to that—the idea that if I got lost in the nowhere I could see Spensa again. But I had no idea if I would be able to find her, and I couldn’t leave while Evershore was in peril, my friends in jeopardy.

Instead I reached out to the wall with my mind, inspecting it.

Are you there? I asked.

The answer was immediate. We’re here. We want to help.

The kitsen cytonics had been gone for centuries, Juno said. Cytonic powers were genetic, so if the kitsen cytonics had all been lost somehow, it made sense no more had been born. Though…Spensa had said she thought living near a portal could change some people into cytonics; why hadn’t that happened to any of the lorekeepers?

An image struck me. Voices calling out of the portal for years and years, but there was no one left on the other side who could hear. Eventually they stopped calling.

Stars, was I imagining that? Or…reading it somehow? I needed to reach them, but I didn’t want to get lost in there. If I could find Spensa, could she find them in the nowhere and help me somehow? Together maybe we could find a way to get them all out at once.

I reached across the nowhere, searching for Spensa. I’d found her before, even if our connection was strange and distant.

Something reached back. It was another image of Spensa cleaning a piece of a ship, a different one from the last time. I’d been too distracted before to think about the significance of that. We had ground crews for that, but Spin didn’t have those in the nowhere. Did she have a ship? I thought she’d lost M-Bot on Starsight, and that was how the Superiority got hold of his holographic projector.

The image was hazy, but the feeling that went with it was unmistakable. Loneliness. Loss. A fog of forgetfulness, like the stupor of coming out of an illness and not really being sure how many days had passed. It was so un-Spensa-like that it floored me.