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.