“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.
It was the fourth wall though that caught my attention.
It was a stone wall, smooth and polished, with rows and rows of lines carved into it in a strange, almost technological design. The wall radiated a power that was undeniably cytonic, and something about it felt familiar.
“This is where you found them?” I asked Juno.
“Yes,” Juno said, hovering in the doorway on his platform. “Over there, by the scroll case. They appeared lying side-by-side on top of some tables.”
Alanik picked her way across the room and examined the wall, which stretched all the way to the relatively high ceiling. She pressed her hand to the lines on the wall. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.
Neither had I, but I swore I’d heard of a wall like this.
Oh, scud.
Now I remembered where.
“Alanik, step away from the wall,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder at me like I was crazy, but she did as I asked, working her way past the rows of tables littered with books.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I think…I think it’s a portal,” I said. “An entrance to the nowhere. Spensa told me there’s one in the caverns of Detritus. She said we should search for it—but that we needed to be careful, because a cytonic could fall through and get stuck there like she did.” We had teams looking for it, but I hadn’t heard if they’d found anything.
Alanik suddenly looked alarmed. “What does that mean?” she asked. “If Gran-Gran hyperjumped, she shouldn’t have had to use a physical portal. There wasn’t one like this on the Superiority ship.”
“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “But Gran-Gran heard voices asking for help before she jumped, right? And I’ve been hearing them too.”
Alanik squinted at me. “Voices from the negative realm?”
“Maybe,” I said. I concentrated, listening for them again. “Juno, you said this used to be the burrow where your master cytonics lived. What happened to them?”
“They met in a great summit to compile the vast knowledge of our people,” Juno said. “During the summit, they simply disappeared, leaving behind only these strange symbols.” He gestured to the wall. “Beyond that we don’t know, as there was no one left to write down the history.”
There wouldn’t be, if they all disappeared at once. My people had lost knowledge the same way. After the crash of the Defiant fleet, the first lifebuster bomb dropped by the Superiority had killed all the officers, the entire command staff—everyone who knew what had happened and why. We were left to make up our own stories about the “Krell.”
Thanks to Spensa though, I had a hunch as to what might have happened. “They left this wall behind,” I said, “because the summit was here? In this room?”
“Yes,” Juno said. “This city has been our capital for centuries, so it was a natural meeting place.”
“If they decided to try out their knowledge,” I said, “they might have figured out how to create this portal into the nowhere and then gotten trapped inside.”
“If that is so,” Juno said, “I’m afraid they should have died many years ago.”
That was true, but I’d heard something in the nowhere. I focused on the portal. I couldn’t hear the voices at the moment—not Gran-Gran’s or the others.
They were asking for help. Gran-Gran had heard them—she’d spent so many years trapped on Detritus, listening to the stars. If anyone could have honed their skills at detecting signals in the nowhere no one else could hear, it was her.
“Did Spensa tell you how to open it?” Alanik asked.
“No,” I said. “And I haven’t been able to reach her again these last few days, so I can’t ask.” I turned to Juno. “Are there legends of what happened to the cytonics?” If there was any truth in them, there might be some clue as to how to reach the kitsen cytonics—and Gran-Gran, who had been lost chasing after them.
“Oh, many,” Juno said. “Most of them are children’s tales. My favorite involves a band of space pirates who flew through the skies on the back of an enormous turtle.”
“Space pirates stole your cytonics?”
“Almost certainly not,” Juno said. “I said it was my favorite, not the most accurate.”