“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.