If Stoff decided to pull us home, maybe I could use that knowledge as an excuse to stay, at least until Alanik and I could learn more about how to use our powers. We were the best weapons the DDF had right now, but we needed more training. A lot more.
“Thank you, Juno,” I said.
“It has been my pleasure, shadow-walker.”
It was strange for him to call me that, since I didn’t walk anywhere. I wondered if he had a meditation in his book that could teach me to hyperjump.
“Let’s try it again,” I said, walking over to a fresh section of the cliff. “I want to see how deep I can make the shards—”
I slipped into the nowhere, and immediately a voice entered my mind. We hear you, it said.
Scud. Was that the delvers? It didn’t feel terrifying, but—
Help us! it said. We hear you.
They didn’t sound menacing. They sounded…desperate. Scared.
I don’t know how to help you, I said.
“Is something wrong?” Juno asked.
“I can hear someone,” I said. “Someone asking for my help.”
Jorgen? a voice said. I recognized that one.
Gran-Gran! Was she awake now? You have your powers back?
I… What?
Your powers, I said. Are you awake? Did they disappear while you were asleep somehow?
Not a lot of time, Gran-Gran said. Hard to concentrate, but you need to…help us…
Her voice faded, and while I called her name again into the nowhere, she didn’t respond.
Jorgen, Alanik said. We need you at the medical tent. You need to see this.
She sounded urgent, so I didn’t ask questions. “Excuse me,” I said to Juno. “I want to learn more, but my people need me.”
“Of course,” Juno said.
I called to Snuggles, who was waiting again in my ship. She appeared in my arms. “Take me to Alanik,” I said, sending Snuggles a picture.
“Alanik!” Snuggles said.
Juno, the cliff, and the melting remains of the sunset all disappeared.
Eleven
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…