On Nothing But Hope

"Hope is what's left when you've run out of everything that actually works."

I pulled the coat tighter, for all the good it did. The Portal Cave held a breath of warmth in it—the old fissure down in its heart never quite went cold, and it was the one place in Belkeep the wind couldn't get its teeth all the way into—but a breath was all it was, and the cold came through hide and cloth and skin and settled in the bone regardless. My legs had gone stiff under me. I'd been stood at the cave mouth too long, keeping a watch on nothing, which is the only kind of watch there is when the thing you're waiting on is out past the reach of any help you could give it. Beyond the opening the wind tore across the rock and howled, the way it always did, like it took the shelter personally. Snow spun in on it and touched down and was gone, melting almost before it landed—a small losing argument with the freeze that owned the rest of the world out there.

Further in, the cave made its poor try at warmth and mostly lost. Kerosene lamps sat about, flames leaning and guttering, throwing shadows up the walls that were bigger than the light that made them.

Up along the high side stood the two great translucent screens—the dormant doorways, standing quiet on the stone. One of them I could never look at straight for long. A screen gone dark is a portal with nobody left the other end of it, and that one was a headstone as much as anything we'd ever set a slate over.

I'd spent more hours than were good for me wondering why here—why a frozen, broken, cut-off scrap of a place had ever been chosen to put people on. There was never an answer that satisfied. Ask a question like that out loud and you'd get the same flat article of faith every time: Clivilius makes no mistakes. It had been said to me so often I'd half come to lean on it, the way you lean on a wall you already know isn't sound.

I let my eyes sit on them a moment—the two dead screens, one apiece for a pair of Guardians I'd counted as close as blood. South Australians, the both of them, same as me, which out on a frozen rock at the far end of creation counted for a good deal more than it ever had back home. Jeremiah had brought them in around the same time he'd brought me, and for a handful of good years there'd been the three of us going between the worlds together, splitting the load three ways, and it had felt less like drowning and more like work a man could actually get done. Now their doorways stood dark and quiet on the stone, and the silence where the two of them used to be was its own particular cold—worse than the kind outside, because there's no coat you can put on against it.

Jeremiah's words came back to me, the way they did in this cave. I've been watching them a long time. Just as I've watched you. And then: You'll be good for each other. He'd said it the way you'd read out the last line of a story the rest of us hadn't started yet, and not long after he'd put a device into each of their hands, same as he'd put one in mine—a Portal Key, and with it the whole weight of what came attached to it.

Freya came in out of the weather and pushed back her hood, her cheeks gone raw with the cold. She had a way of arriving that made the cave feel smaller and less empty at once.

"Can you get these for the Chief?" she said, and held out a folded list.

I took it and couldn't help the sound I made—not at her, at all of it. The list was the same as it always was: the plain, dumb makings of staying alive, the sort of stuff Earth had stopped so much as thinking about while we were still breaking ourselves to scrape it together. She'd never seen Earth, Freya. She'd no notion of the gulf between the world I fetched this from and the one she was trying to live in. I folded the list away inside my coat.

Jeremiah's right, I thought, and my mind went, the way it kept going, to the two devices I had left to place. That was the shape of it: one for Gladys—and then let Gladys herself choose who got the other. Let her feel it was her own hand on it, not mine.

Only not her sister. Anyone but Beatrix. I turned it over one more time, cold as the stone under me. Keep the two of them apart—Gladys here with me, Beatrix carried off to Luke's side instead—and neither could simply cross to the other. A Guardian can't walk through another Guardian's doorway; Gladys, bound to me, would have no road to Luke's settlement at all, however badly she wanted one. And there's nothing on this earth or the other that drives people to find each other like being told they can't. Gladys straining towards her sister, Beatrix towards Gladys, Luke hauled along in the middle of it—and somewhere in all that straining, a road might get found between his world and ours. If Luke found his way to Belkeep, then we weren't the last stranded thing left on this frozen rock after all. It was a cold hope, built on keeping two sisters from one another. I'd made colder trades. I hated that as well.

"Our settlement's dying, Cody. This is the worst I've ever seen it." Freya said it plain, no dressing on it, and she wasn't wrong.

"Luke Smith will find us," I said. "I promise you." I needed her to believe it. I needed to believe it myself; I'd said it so many times it had worn smooth as a mantra.

She gave me a look with no faith left in it. "Go and listen to the Chief. He's got a good plan." Meaning a real one, a here-and-now one, not another promise about a Guardian nobody had ever laid eyes on.

I frowned at my own daughter, and the distance in it hurt worse than the cold did. There'd been a time—she'd have been no bigger than Krid—when she'd climb onto my knee of an evening and make me tell it all over again: the sun on Earth, the green of it, an ocean you could swim in without it killing you, the Guardian who'd come one day and pull all of Clivilius into something a person could actually live in. She'd known those stories better than I did by the end, and she'd pull me up sharp if I left a bit out. That girl was gone. Loss had made this one—loss, and the endless scraping just to stay alive—and it had set all that wonder hard, into practical bedrock. I couldn't even be sorry for it. Bedrock would keep her alive a good deal longer than wonder ever would.

"It's time," I said, and put my hands on her shoulders.

She tensed under them, her shoulders coming up. "Time for what?" There was a sadness in it that went straight through me.

"Time to complete the team."

Her breath caught, sharp in the cold. "Is it safe?"

"No," I said. There was no lying to her about that one. "It's never safe."

"Then why?" The frustration in it was the same that lived in me. "Haven't we buried enough people already?"

I didn't have an answer that would hold, so I gave her the only thing I had. I shrugged out of the heavy coat and let it fall over the rocks, and stood there in what I had underneath—the navy shorts, a thin shirt, my Blundies—dressed for anywhere but here, dressed for a world with a hot sun in it. In Belkeep it was very nearly a joke. It was also the first honest sign of where I was bound.

I turned to the silent screen, then looked back at her the once. Her eyes were hunting mine for a reason—for something that made the risk and the dying and the not-knowing worth it—and I hadn't one to give her. Only the one thing, the ember I kept banked no matter how bad it got.

"Hope," I said. Barely more than a breath. Then I stepped to her and kissed her forehead, and held it a moment, my girl, in the cold.

I set my mind on where I was going—Gladys Cramer's kitchen—and reached for the power the way you do from this side: no word, no hand, just the wanting of it. The dead screen woke. Colour bloomed and ran across it, that shifting, impossible spill of it, and behind the colour came a breath of somewhere else—warm air, and the faint ordinary smell of a house with the heating on, a whole world going about its evening with no notion of us. I took one last look at Freya, small and set against all that cold, and stepped through, and let it close behind me—the cold and the doubt and the two dark screens all sealed away on the far side, and nothing carried across with me but the hope.