Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(56)

Stars. I didn’t even know if such a recording had ever existed. The kitsen had become stuck, after all. They might never have been fully capable of traveling in and out. I didn’t know how to get in and out of a portal, and since Alanik hadn’t recognized it, she wouldn’t know either. She hadn’t even been able to hear the kitsen.

I could feel the sense of failure pushing in around the edges, the sense that I never had enough to give, never had the right pieces at the right moments to really come through for the people I cared about. FM was right though. Sometimes I did. But the failures loomed so much larger than the successes that it was easy to forget.

“You are completely relaxed,” Juno said.

I tried to relax. I didn’t need to solve all the problems on my own. I was supposed to lean on the people around me for help, and while no one on this side of the portal had the information I needed…

I want to help you, I said. But I don’t know how to open this portal.

I felt despair from the other side. Weariness. The burden of centuries spent watching, wondering, hoping and then losing hope, and struggling to find it again and again. A picture formed in my mind—a wrinkled kitsen watching her friends and loved ones die, knowing others were dying on the other side of the portal as time passed, knowing she would never see them again. The occasional glimpse of a cytonic nearby—probably Superiority ships visiting the planet. But they never heard, and they never came to help.

Then a voice, far away. A woman who had spent her lifetime listening finally heard them.

And now she was trapped somehow, strangely separated from her body. Regret, a sense that reaching out was selfish, because she and Cobb had now suffered their same fate.

“The stars shine upon you, an ancient light in the darkness,” Juno continued. “The darkness widens to swallow them, but they shine endlessly on.”

We’re going to get you out, I said. It was a promise I didn’t know I could keep, more a message of determination than of certainty. How did you get in there?

What followed wasn’t words so much as images. A summit. A room full of kitsen, each bringing their unique talents, knowledge, and abilities. They meditated together, sharing their knowledge, their scribes writing furiously to contain it all.

They toyed with the threads of the universe, the barrier between our world and the nowhere. I could feel the memories now, not only from the old kitsen but embedded in the portal itself, as if it were made of experiences.

Together the kitsen had picked at the boundary, separated the threads. They’d meant only to figure out how to visit that realm for a time, the way the legends said their people did when they first met humans. But instead they opened the gaping maw of nothingness and it swallowed them all, along with a large chunk of their world.

Stars, the chasm this library was built in. It was formed when the kitsen left the somewhere, taking the stone of the cliffs with them.

“You look up at their lights,” Juno said, “letting their vibrations wash over you. You too are eternal like the stars, a piece of the endless something that makes space for the nothing, but never yields to it.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I tried not to focus too hard on it. I concentrated instead on the threads that made up the border, infused with memory, vibrating so strongly as if the nowhere wanted to burst out of the portal. I didn’t want it to swallow Dreamspring, didn’t want to open the entire thing.

Just enough for those trapped on the other side to come through.

I could feel Gran-Gran listening, noticing what I was doing as I began to manipulate the threads. The way Alanik described the boundary—it was like listening to a description of an ocean when I was young. I never really understood until I saw it for myself. But I could feel the boundary between the realms. I might not be able to carry myself through, but here I had power.

I tried to give you the story you needed, Gran-Gran said. I told you to imagine yourself flying among the stars.

I remembered Gran-Gran’s story, about how disobeying orders could be the right thing to do.

Wait until you hear what I’ve done, I said.

I can see it, she said. I tried to give you the story you needed, but perhaps you’ve found your own story after all.

Had I? I could feel the way the threads of the boundary wove together, sealing the portal. I didn’t know how to move them, but I focused on them the way I had the birds. That image wasn’t quite right for this, so I tried vines all woven together, creating a wall between us and them. I didn’t want to cut the vines down, only move a few aside, forming a small area where the kitsen could return, where Gran-Gran and Cobb could slip through.

“You are the light and the darkness,” Juno said. “You are the place where the two worlds meet. The intersection of what is, and what could be.”

Spensa flies among the stars, Gran-Gran said. But you build things up from the ground. She is a warrior, and you are a defender. It’s a different kind of story.

I can’t protect them all, I said.

You can’t, Gran-Gran said. We all have our own burdens, even if we carry them differently.

I thought about the way I’d lost it in the senate meeting. I’m not carrying mine well, I said.

Ah, Gran-Gran said. Well, you’re not alone in that.

I hated it. I wanted to get it right, to get everything right. But maybe sometimes there was no right. There was only the best I could do.