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.
I couldn’t open the portal, I realized, because I lacked the key. Similar to the impression that let us use our powers inside a cytonic inhibitor, there was some kind of cytonic vibration that would open the portal, letting the kitsen pass through.
“Juno,” I said. “Do your people have any kind of recordings from the days before the kitsen cytonics disappeared? Some kind of database, or digital records?”
“We do not,” Juno said. “We lost much when we were colonized, and more in the War of Liberation.”
Stars. I didn’t even know if such a recording had ever existed. The kitsen had become stuck, after all. They might never have been fully capable of traveling in and out. I didn’t know how to get in and out of a portal, and since Alanik hadn’t recognized it, she wouldn’t know either. She hadn’t even been able to hear the kitsen.
I could feel the sense of failure pushing in around the edges, the sense that I never had enough to give, never had the right pieces at the right moments to really come through for the people I cared about. FM was right though. Sometimes I did. But the failures loomed so much larger than the successes that it was easy to forget.
“You are completely relaxed,” Juno said.
I tried to relax. I didn’t need to solve all the problems on my own. I was supposed to lean on the people around me for help, and while no one on this side of the portal had the information I needed…
I want to help you, I said. But I don’t know how to open this portal.
I felt despair from the other side. Weariness. The burden of centuries spent watching, wondering, hoping and then losing hope, and struggling to find it again and again. A picture formed in my mind—a wrinkled kitsen watching her friends and loved ones die, knowing others were dying on the other side of the portal as time passed, knowing she would never see them again. The occasional glimpse of a cytonic nearby—probably Superiority ships visiting the planet. But they never heard, and they never came to help.
Then a voice, far away. A woman who had spent her lifetime listening finally heard them.
And now she was trapped somehow, strangely separated from her body. Regret, a sense that reaching out was selfish, because she and Cobb had now suffered their same fate.
“The stars shine upon you, an ancient light in the darkness,” Juno continued. “The darkness widens to swallow them, but they shine endlessly on.”
We’re going to get you out, I said. It was a promise I didn’t know I could keep, more a message of determination than of certainty. How did you get in there?
What followed wasn’t words so much as images. A summit. A room full of kitsen, each bringing their unique talents, knowledge, and abilities. They meditated together, sharing their knowledge, their scribes writing furiously to contain it all.
They toyed with the threads of the universe, the barrier between our world and the nowhere. I could feel the memories now, not only from the old kitsen but embedded in the portal itself, as if it were made of experiences.
Together the kitsen had picked at the boundary, separated the threads. They’d meant only to figure out how to visit that realm for a time, the way the legends said their people did when they first met humans. But instead they opened the gaping maw of nothingness and it swallowed them all, along with a large chunk of their world.