“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.