“Right,” Burak said. He glanced curiously inside, but did not press Leo for details. A grin flashed across his face. “If all of you die in there and leave me out here guarding your corpses indefinitely, I’ll be rather put out.”
Leo grinned back and clapped him on the shoulder. “If that happens, I’m afraid I’ll be past the point of feeling your ire.”
When the doors were shut, Burak on the far side of them, Porzia gave Leo a dry look. “I didn’t realize you required a private guard, Mr. Trovatelli.”
Leo sauntered over to their table, back to his usual insouciant self. If he was still mad about yesterday, Elsa could see no outward hint of it. He said, “If all four of us are going to be inside the books, don’t you think it’s wise to keep curious children from wandering in and playing with them?”
Porzia sniffed, granting him nothing. “In any case, shall we get started with the least damaged world?”
She reached out a hand for the book, but Elsa snatched it up, irked by the other girl’s bossiness. Flipping through the pages, she tested the feel of the paper beneath her fingertips. The gentle hum felt the same as yesterday: old and comfortable, settled, well-developed. A finished worldtext satisfied with its contents.
“They feel successfully repaired to me. But,” she grudgingly admitted, “we do have to start somewhere.”
The least-damaged world would also be the least risky to enter. This world didn’t seem a likely candidate for containing Montaigne’s private notes, but Elsa could evaluate its structural integrity. If the book repair process had left no residual damage here, it would probably be safe to proceed with searching the other worlds.
It cost her an ounce of pride, but Elsa made herself hand the book to Porzia, letting the other girl set the coordinates into a portal device. Porzia’s device was much newer and fancier than Elsa’s, with decorative silverwork set into the brass backing.
“Ready, everyone?” Porzia paused to glance up at them, nervous determination in her eyes. Then she flipped the final switch. “Here we go.”
The portal yawned open in the air before them. Elsa slid her hand into the stability glove, activated it, and stuck her arm into the portal up to the shoulder. She wasn’t entirely certain the glove would be able to detect an unstable world through the portal, but it seemed like a reasonable precaution. She drew her arm back out again and checked the indicator light, which had turned neither red nor green but remained dark instead. Inconclusive.
Porzia, one eyebrow raised, leaned over to view the results for herself. “Well, your arm didn’t fall off. That’s a good sign.”
“I suppose,” Elsa said. “Shall we risk it?”
Porzia surprised Elsa by linking arms with her. She’d expected Porzia to be the voice of caution and didn’t know where the other girl’s brash confidence came from. Together they stepped through into the frigid black nothingness, the boys right behind them, and out the other side.
Elsa craned her neck to take in their new surroundings. They stood on a ledge overlooking a dark, mist-shrouded abyss. A cliff face rose above them, decorated with a network of ledges, wooden ladders, and dark cave openings. Artificial terraces supported beds of tilled earth, but nothing grew in them. The wind whistled low and eerie, playing the cave-pocked cliffside like a flute.
Elsa held her arm out and splayed her gloved fingers, hoping to detect any potential instabilities. After a moment, the light turned green. For whatever that was worth. “It should be safe to move around a bit,” she said.
Leo leaned out to look over the edge and whistled. “Long way down.”
“It’s Edgemist,” said Elsa, grabbing the back of his waistcoat to pull him away from the edge. “Concealed behind a bit of scribed fog for the aesthetics. If you fell, you’d never hit the ground—you’d simply cease to exist. So try not to fall, will you?”
“You make a gentle death sound so ominous,” Faraz said lightly, while Leo tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it. He turned his tawny eyes on her with an inscrutable look, and Elsa turned away, feeling heat rise in her cheeks.
“It’s all nicely done,” said Porzia appreciatively, “but I can’t say I understand what it’s for.”
Relieved to have something else to focus her attention on, Elsa said, “Montaigne was obsessed with the idea of scribing subtextual humans as an emergent property of a worldbook. This must be one of his early attempts.”
Faraz looked around, interested. “So why didn’t it work?”
“Not enough arable land, and nothing to hunt. It was obviously designed by someone who’d never needed to grow his own food,” she said, not trying to hide her scorn.
Leo shook the nearest ladder to check for structural stability and then started climbing. “We should take a look around anyway.”
Up the ladder, they spread out, each taking a different cave to examine. Elsa’s was a single room outfitted as if a person might call it home. A fire pit just inside the entrance, where the smoke would be carried away by the breeze instead of pooling inside the cave. A rough woven blanket laid out along one wall. A neatly arranged collection of clay bowls and pots in a variety of sizes. A broad, flat stone for grinding grain into meal.
The emptiness of the world began to seep into Elsa’s bones, and she shivered. It felt far worse than any abandoned place—this was not simply a place where people used to be and no longer were. This was a place where people never had been and never would be, and that pervasive absence of life seemed to emanate from the very walls.
“We should go,” she called to the others.
Leo clattered down a ladder to her ledge, a manic glint in his eye. “So soon? What fun is that?”
Elsa folded her arms. “This world is a failed attempt. Montaigne wouldn’t have left anything important here.”
Faraz edged slowly over a narrow strip of ledge to join them in front of Elsa’s cave just as Porzia made her way there as well. She held up her portal device and said, “Anyone care for a ride? I’m stepping back. This is lovely and everything, but we need to stay on task.”
Against the rock wall of the cliffside, a portal irised open, as if an especially dark cave entrance were suddenly appearing before them. Watching it widen, Elsa felt a pang of regret that her mother had never altered the Veldanese portal dynamics. The way Montaigne had written her world, portals could only be opened at the Edgemist; perhaps if Veldana had been as flexible as this world, with portals opening any old place, Elsa could have caught up with Jumi’s abductors that first day.
Elsa shook off the feeling. Self-pity and what-ifs would not save her mother. She had to stay focused, objective, unsentimental—this was the only way to help Jumi.
They all stepped through the nothing-moment of the portal back into the comfortable warmth of the library. Gathering around the table, they looked at the array of worldbook candidates.
Porzia chewed her lip. “Which one next, do you think?”