Evershore (Skyward Flight: Novella 3)

Snuggles and I passed by the eyes and jumped to the front of the medical tent, where the medtechs had loaded Cobb and Gran-Gran onto stretchers. Nedd and Arturo each stood at the foot of one of the stretchers, with Kel and Winnow at the heads. I sent Snuggles immediately back to Boomslug in my ship.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Alanik.

“We started moving them over to the ship,” Winnow said, indicating to where the transport shuttle was waiting down by the water. “But as we took them farther from the tent, they started to deteriorate.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Blood pressure dropped,” Kel said. “Heart rates became irregular. What’s strange is that it happened to both of them at more or less the same time.”

“Why would that happen?” I asked.

“I can’t explain it,” Kel said. “Even weirder is they stabilized as soon as we brought them back here.”

“It’s like they don’t want to be away from here,” Winnow said. “We wanted to load them in the ship first so we wouldn’t jostle them when we hyperjump—”

“If their condition is linked to this place then we definitely can’t hyperjump them,” I said. “But why would it matter if they’re here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Winnow said. “But my professional judgment is that we don’t move a patient if moving changes their condition for the worse.”

“Can you treat them here?”

Winnow nodded. “We may need to go home for some equipment. But for the moment we can get them comfortable.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Arturo stepped up beside me. “What do you think is going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I slipped into the nowhere, listening, but the only cytonic I felt nearby was Alanik. “Gran-Gran’s powers still seem to be gone. But I heard her in the nowhere.”

“Really?” Alanik asked.

“Yeah. Hang on. Let me—”

I focused, returning to the imaginary ocean from the meditation. Instead of focusing on the fragments—which I now realized splintered off every time I touched the nowhere—I listened, trying to hear her again.

Gran-Gran?

No response. I tried to push farther, listening closer…

And then I felt the texture again, the strange sensation of bumps, hundreds of them—maybe thousands—all over and around the island. One minute Alanik and I were alone, and then there were so many of them.

What were those?

I shook myself, dropping my link to the nowhere. “Do you feel that?” I asked Alanik. “Those…weird ridges?”

“No,” Alanik said. “And I don’t hear Gran-Gran either. You’re sure it was her?”

I was sure. If this Gran-Gran didn’t have powers, but another Gran-Gran was talking to me from the nowhere, did that mean she was lost in there like Spensa somehow? I’d assumed Spensa’s body had gone with her when she left, but I hadn’t asked, and maybe she wouldn’t even know.

Juno had finally caught up to me, his disc floating toward us from the cliff face.

“Juno,” I called to him. “Do you know anything about shadow-walkers projecting their spirits into the nowhere without their bodies?”

“The soul is made up of the body and the mind,” Juno said. “Your mind enters the nowhere whenever you interact with it. Only when you hyperjump does your body follow.”

“Sure,” I said. “But can the mind end up stuck in the nowhere without the body to follow it?”

“I have not read of it happening,” Juno said. “Not in all the books of lore.”

“It wouldn’t explain this anyway,” Alanik said. “When your mind goes into the negative realm, your body remains and continues to resonate cytonically. Otherwise we would stop being able to sense each other every time we communicated through the negative realm. Why would your body stop resonating if your mind was stuck?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wonder if it has something to do with the voices Gran-Gran was hearing before she hyperjumped.” The voices I was hearing now. Scud, I did not want to end up in a mysterious coma. “Something went wrong in the jump, and it’s still possible that she’s stuck somehow.” Though I didn’t know why she would have stopped talking to me. She said it was difficult somehow…

“Juno,” I said. “Can you show me where Cobb and Gran-Gran first came through the nowhere?”

“Of course,” Juno said. “They were found in the burrow that once belonged to our master shadow-walkers. Now it is our library, the home of our lore.”

In a library? That seemed…unhelpful. But still… “I’d like to see it,” I said. “Alanik, will you come with us?”

“Of course,” Alanik said. She seemed confused about why I’d want to see it, but she didn’t argue.

“FM said we’re camping on the beach tonight,” Nedd said. “Because there are no kitsen buildings big enough to hold all of us. We’ll go see about setting up camp.”

The sky was rapidly growing dark now that the last sliver of the sun had finished setting. The horizon over the ocean had turned a rosy shade of pink, but over the cliffs I could make out the first of the stars.

“Thank you,” I said to Nedd, and I followed Juno as he led Alanik and me toward the library.

Unlike the elevated burrows of the rest of Dreamspring, the library was set down in a kind of crater, deep beneath the sandstone cliff. We descended a set of tiny stairs, and Alanik and I pressed our hands against the sandstone walls, resting our feet on three or four steps at a time, using them more for traction than as stairs. As we moved I felt that cytonic resonance I’d detected earlier growing stronger. We were heading toward something important.

We descended far enough down that if the waves were to lap this far, they’d surely fill the basin. But they must not ever reach this part of the island if the library had remained intact for so long.

We had to crawl through the ornate arched doorway after Juno, but the library itself was several levels tall, which allowed Alanik and me to stand with a meter of headroom to spare. The room was filled with tables barely above ankle height, and I was careful where I stepped, so as not to disturb any of the cushions set around them or the carts covered in books and scrolls.

Along three of the walls were shelves covered in books, all of them smaller than the palm of my hand. Ladders scaled the walls, which were lined with railed walkways for perusing the rows of shelves, though several of the acclivity stone platforms also waited at the entrance of the room to provide ease of access.

It was the fourth wall though that caught my attention.

It was a stone wall, smooth and polished, with rows and rows of lines carved into it in a strange, almost technological design. The wall radiated a power that was undeniably cytonic, and something about it felt familiar.

“This is where you found them?” I asked Juno.

“Yes,” Juno said, hovering in the doorway on his platform. “Over there, by the scroll case. They appeared lying side-by-side on top of some tables.”

Alanik picked her way across the room and examined the wall, which stretched all the way to the relatively high ceiling. She pressed her hand to the lines on the wall. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

Neither had I, but I swore I’d heard of a wall like this.

Oh, scud.

Now I remembered where.

“Alanik, step away from the wall,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me like I was crazy, but she did as I asked, working her way past the rows of tables littered with books.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I think…I think it’s a portal,” I said. “An entrance to the nowhere. Spensa told me there’s one in the caverns of Detritus. She said we should search for it—but that we needed to be careful, because a cytonic could fall through and get stuck there like she did.” We had teams looking for it, but I hadn’t heard if they’d found anything.

Alanik suddenly looked alarmed. “What does that mean?” she asked. “If Gran-Gran hyperjumped, she shouldn’t have had to use a physical portal. There wasn’t one like this on the Superiority ship.”

“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “But Gran-Gran heard voices asking for help before she jumped, right? And I’ve been hearing them too.”

Alanik squinted at me. “Voices from the negative realm?”

“Maybe,” I said. I concentrated, listening for them again. “Juno, you said this used to be the burrow where your master cytonics lived. What happened to them?”

“They met in a great summit to compile the vast knowledge of our people,” Juno said. “During the summit, they simply disappeared, leaving behind only these strange symbols.” He gestured to the wall. “Beyond that we don’t know, as there was no one left to write down the history.”

There wouldn’t be, if they all disappeared at once. My people had lost knowledge the same way. After the crash of the Defiant fleet, the first lifebuster bomb dropped by the Superiority had killed all the officers, the entire command staff—everyone who knew what had happened and why. We were left to make up our own stories about the “Krell.”

Thanks to Spensa though, I had a hunch as to what might have happened. “They left this wall behind,” I said, “because the summit was here? In this room?”

“Yes,” Juno said. “This city has been our capital for centuries, so it was a natural meeting place.”

“If they decided to try out their knowledge,” I said, “they might have figured out how to create this portal into the nowhere and then gotten trapped inside.”

“If that is so,” Juno said, “I’m afraid they should have died many years ago.”

That was true, but I’d heard something in the nowhere. I focused on the portal. I couldn’t hear the voices at the moment—not Gran-Gran’s or the others.

They were asking for help. Gran-Gran had heard them—she’d spent so many years trapped on Detritus, listening to the stars. If anyone could have honed their skills at detecting signals in the nowhere no one else could hear, it was her.

“Did Spensa tell you how to open it?” Alanik asked.

“No,” I said. “And I haven’t been able to reach her again these last few days, so I can’t ask.” I turned to Juno. “Are there legends of what happened to the cytonics?” If there was any truth in them, there might be some clue as to how to reach the kitsen cytonics—and Gran-Gran, who had been lost chasing after them.

“Oh, many,” Juno said. “Most of them are children’s tales. My favorite involves a band of space pirates who flew through the skies on the back of an enormous turtle.”

“Space pirates stole your cytonics?”

“Almost certainly not,” Juno said. “I said it was my favorite, not the most accurate.”

“Which would you say is the most accurate?” I asked.

“It’s impossible to say for certain, of course,” Juno said. “But I’ve always given credence to the theories of Ito, who wrote that—”

“Jorgen!” Arturo’s voice came from the handheld radio clipped to my belt.

“Yes?” I responded.

“Superiority carrier ship,” Arturo said. “There are fighters headed this way.”

Scud. The Superiority. I’d hoped they hadn’t heard Kauri’s signal and didn’t realize we were here.

Apparently I was wrong. “We have to go,” I told Alanik.

“If you are going to use your new skills against the enemy,” Juno said, “perhaps I could accompany you.”

I didn’t know if I was ready for that, but a kitsen wouldn’t take up much space in my cockpit. Even less than the slugs, though I hoped he didn’t want to cuddle as close. “Okay,” I said. I called to Snuggles, and she appeared instantly on my shoulder with Boomslug in tow, because she couldn’t seem to go anywhere without him anymore.

I put one hand on Alanik’s shoulder and one on Juno’s platform and asked Snuggles to hyperjump us all to the beach.