Evershore (Skyward Flight: Novella 3)

“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.

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?

I couldn’t figure out how to pinpoint a location to hyperjump to, Gran-Gran said. But I could hear the voices calling to me. So I tried to go to them instead.

Oh, stars. I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that either, I said. It doesn’t make sense when Alanik describes it. That was clever, trying to move toward the voices instead.

It would have been, Gran-Gran said. Except when we got here, our bodies were gone.

They’re trapped outside the portal, I said. This was why we had to hyperjump to places we knew, or places we could see. Gran-Gran had tried to go somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere she couldn’t physically hyperjump to—and it had only partially worked. I think trying to hyperjump through the portal severed your soul in half.

Sounds like the sort of thing that could kill a person, Gran-Gran said.

That it did, though it hadn’t killed them yet. But scud, how long could they survive like this, half in and half out of the nowhere? I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.

I could see the other side of the portal in my mind now. It looked like Evershore, a sandy island in an ocean of nothing. It looked…oddly corporeal for a place called the nowhere.

I understood. “They accidentally closed the door behind them,” I said. “They were trapped, with no one left on this side to let them through.” They’d remained there, huddled together, for so many years.

Scud. That was incredible. The knowledge these kitsen must have.

Through the portal, I could feel the despair of the kitsen as their kinsmen died, their fear that they would all perish behind the portal, that their long life would run out, that they didn’t have enough people to breed and sustain their numbers. That the line of kitsen cytonics would come to an end, long after the rest of their people had supposed it had. They’d been searching for help for so long, and now they were weary. So weary. Gran-Gran was among them, and they were afraid her end would come even faster, separated from her body as she was.

Juno had piled several books onto his platform, so many that he barely fit in the center in his suit of power armor. He held one of the new books open in his gauntleted paws, floating over to me.

“The waves of the ocean wash upon you,” Juno said.

“I thought you didn’t have a meditation for this,” I said.

“I don’t,” he said. “But the last one seemed to help you even though it was not specific. This is a meditation for the ages. One that is meant to sharpen your mind and your focus, to bring out your best potential. I don’t have the answer for you, but you may find the answer for yourself.”

Huh.

“Should I go on?” Juno asked.

I didn’t see what it could hurt. “Yes,” I said.

“The waves of the ocean wash upon you, but they have no power to drag you away. You are one with the waves, and you are one with yourself. You are eternal, relentless as the rising sun. Your heart beats with the rhythm of the stars.”

I still wasn’t relaxed—when was the last scudding time I had been relaxed?—but I could hear it, the rhythm Juno was talking about. The vibration of the stars. The heartbeat of the universe. I could hear it in the taynix, and in the battle above. I could feel it from the portal, brimming with power.

I felt a nudge at the edge of my mind. It was that image of Spensa again, lost and alone. No, not alone. Doomslug was with her, and M-Bot, though I didn’t know how that worked if M-Bot’s ship had been dismantled by the Superiority. I couldn’t help Spensa, couldn’t reach her. I didn’t know how to do anything except—

Take care of her, I said to Doomslug.

And then something shifted, and Doomslug teased a thread out of Spensa’s thoughts and passed it on to me, clear and powerful as anything.

Stars, it was her memory of me. She was forgetting herself, her friends, her family, everything, but she still remembered me. She cared about me, deeply and with a ferocity that was totally and uniquely Spin.

That made me incredibly lucky. More so than I’d ever be able to express.

I felt a swell of agreement from Doomslug; she would take care of Spensa. But it was accompanied by gratitude that I already was.

Thank you, I said. I tried to hold on to that snatch of memory, to cling to what little I had left of Spensa, not sure if I’d ever see her again. But it was slipping away along with Doomslug, back into the nowhere.

Doomslug faded, but the portal remained, pulsing with power, with a rhythm all its own—a rhythm that felt familiar somehow, like a melody I’d heard before.

“You yield to the universe,” Juno went on, though I’d missed some of what he said, “not because of its power, but because of your wisdom. You yield power over all things, and in doing so become one with the stars—”

I felt the impenetrability of the portal, the lock that kept me from pushing through. I didn’t know if I could fall through, or if it prevented entry from both sides.

I couldn’t open the portal, I realized, because I lacked the key. Similar to the impression that let us use our powers inside a cytonic inhibitor, there was some kind of cytonic vibration that would open the portal, letting the kitsen pass through.

“Juno,” I said. “Do your people have any kind of recordings from the days before the kitsen cytonics disappeared? Some kind of database, or digital records?”

“We do not,” Juno said. “We lost much when we were colonized, and more in the War of Liberation.”

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.

I pictured the vines and touched them each in turn, trying to see which would shift and which held fast. I was able to bring one to the side, creating the smallest part in the jungle of them, but there were more vines on the other side, ones I couldn’t reach.

I couldn’t do this alone. I needed help.

I reached out to the old kitsen on the other side of the portal, trying to show her what I saw. Her mind seemed to receive it, as if she also knew the barrier well, had been over these same vines thousands of times. I showed her the ones I could move, and I felt her study them.

And then the ones on the other side began to shift.

I focused on the vines I could control, feeling the vibrations, holding fast the ones that supported the entire structure while manipulating those that only supported tiny bits of it.

“You are completely relaxed,” Juno said.

I breathed in rhythm with the vibrations. I wasn’t relaxed, but I was calm. I was at peace. I was the power.

And then all at once, the smooth surface of the portal cracked open, and a kitsen hobbled through. Her fur was greying and her skin was so wrinkled it folded down over her eyes. She pushed it back and looked up at us.

And then a dozen more followed.