Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(54)

When I talked to Spensa before, she was right there, face-to-face with me. This was so much more distant, almost like a memory.

As if it came from someone else, someone watching her from the outside.

Who is this? I asked.

I felt a tingle of…amusement maybe? And then an image came into my mind of a hyperslug sitting on the control panel of my starfighter. “Jerkface!” it cried at me.

Doomslug? I asked.

The tingle of amusement grew stronger.

Huh. I’d apparently found Doomslug in the nowhere. It made sense that she’d left with Spensa, but the fact that I could contact her and not Spensa herself was more than a little concerning.

Is Spensa okay? I asked.

The amusement faded, replaced by a sadness, a loneliness.

Saints. What can I do? I asked.

A trickle of doubt. Doomslug didn’t know.

I sent a picture of the portal in front of me. Do you know how to open it? I asked her.

I heard nothing in response, except maybe a tiny bit of confusion. Either she didn’t understand, or she didn’t know.

“Are you learning anything from staring at the portal?” Juno asked. “I don’t mean to interrupt a shadow-walker at work, but—”

“Oh,” I said, shaking myself. “I was listening.”

“To the silence?” Winnow asked.

“No,” I said. “To a taynix. But I don’t think she’s going to help us here.” Though if I could figure out how to open the portal, I still might be able to use it to get Spensa and Doomslug home.

“Did you want to try another meditation?” Juno asked.

“Do you have any meditations for traveling to the nowhere?” I asked.

“There are many meditations for hyperjumps,” Juno said. “I could select one of my favorites.”

Learning to hyperjump without a taynix would be useful, but it wasn’t what I was after here. “Hyperjumping is moving through the nowhere,” I said. “I need to be able to move into it. And ideally back out again.” That was the important part, really.

Juno paused. “?‘In and back out again’ sounds indistinguishable from ‘through.’?”

I blinked at him. I supposed it did. “When we hyperjump, we pass beneath the eyes, but there’s no one else there. This time I want to stop while I’m in there and help my people escape—and the kitsen cytonics too.”

Cuna and the medtechs all looked at each other. The medtechs, at least, seemed to think I had lost my mind. I was the scudding commander of this battle, and here I was staring at walls and claiming to hear things while everyone else was fighting. I would have thought the same thing in their place, and maybe they were right. If anyone got hurt up there while I was chasing shadows, it would be my fault. I’d never forgive myself.

“You really believe that our shadow-walkers still live, trapped on the other side of this portal.”

“Yes,” I said.

Help us, they called.

I picked up Snuggles, and she nuzzled my wrist.

Juno steered his platform over to the glass case filled with books and opened it, extracting a volume. The thing was as thick as three of my fingers together, but no larger than the palm of my hand. It still looked enormous in Juno’s paws. “Let me find one of those meditations.”

I wasn’t sure a meditation was what I needed, not for this. Instead I took a step closer to the portal.

“Shadow-walker?” Juno said. “Are you sure you wish to get closer? If you truly believe it to be a portal into the nowhere—”

“Spensa said a cytonic could fall through it,” I said. “And maybe that’s what happened to your people long ago. But if I don’t at least try to interact with it, how can I reach them?”

I walked between the stretchers holding Gran-Gran and Cobb and moved up to the portal, careful not to step on any of the tiny tables or chairs or carts covered in books. I walked within arm’s length of the portal and examined it.

I could feel them. Kitsen, many of them. I felt their sorrow and their frustration, trapped behind the portal. Generations of them, some born behind the portal and unable to ever leave. Some had died, while others had learned to extend their lives. They’d been sucked in and trapped, leaving no one on the other side who could hear them, their planet devoid of cytonics for centuries.

Until now, one of them whispered. I could feel their hope, and their disbelief.

And then suddenly a familiar voice filled my mind. It’s about scudding time you listened, Spensa’s grandmother said. I am too old to be trapped in here for eternity with gerbils, and too set in my ways to live to be two hundred, even if I could figure out what in the stars they’re talking about.

Scud. Gran-Gran, I said. Are you in there? We found your body and Cobb’s. How did you—

I was trying to follow the voices, Gran-Gran said. And I followed them all right. Right into the same scudding trap. Never listen to a rodent who asks for your help. Let that be a lesson.

I supposed I had volunteered to help rodents, but I didn’t regret it.

Is Cobb okay? I asked.

He’s here, Gran-Gran said. Growing grumpier by the hour. The kitsen say they’re not sure our bodies could have survived out there. They say we might be dead.

You’re not dead, I said. But why did this happen?