No one answered.
“Mother?” Elsa pushed herself up to a sitting position. The writing chair was knocked over, and her mother’s favorite fountain pen had rolled across the slate flooring, leaking a thin trail of blue-black ink.
Fear tightened her chest, but she had to keep a level head and figure out what was going on. Think, think! Elsa groped on the floor for the object she’d slipped on and came up with a small metal cylinder of some kind. She lifted it and sniffed carefully, confirming it as the origin of the sweet smoke. Some kind of gaseous chemical designed to induce sleep?
This was no accident. Someone had abducted her mother.
A thread of panic laced through Elsa, quickening her breath. She struggled to her feet, grabbing the edge of the writing desk to pull herself up. Gone, too, was the worldbook her mother had been scribing in. What did that mean? Was it valuable? Who could have taken her mother, and why?
Elsa bent over, hands on knees, breathing too fast. She was unaccustomed to the sensation of helplessness. She needed to figure out what to do; there had to be something she could do. Gather information, focus on the details, employ rational evaluation—this was the methodology Jumi had taught her, and so she forced herself to look up and observe.
Sunlight still filtered through the windows. How long had she been unconscious? Elsa scrambled for the door, her legs feeling wobbly and loose-jointed, and she peered outside to judge the time by the angle of the shadows. An hour, perhaps.
She might still be able to catch up with them. A portal from Veldana could only transport someone to the location on Earth where the Veldana worldbook was kept: the home of Charles Montaigne, the scriptologist who’d created her world. They could open a portal in the Edgemist anywhere along the boundaries of Veldana, but they could only arrive in Paris, France, inside Montaigne’s study.
They’d taken Jumi’s portal device, which had been sitting out on the writing table. Elsa clattered up the ladder to the loft, opened her mother’s clothing chest, scooped out all the clothes, and lifted the false bottom. Jumi was nothing if not dedicated to precautionary measures.
Elsa reached into the chest to take out the spare portal device and slipped it into a pouch on her belt. Next she lifted the revolver, shook six bullets out of the ammunition box, and loaded the revolver. She threaded the holster onto her belt and settled the revolver snugly into it. They were all Earth objects; Veldana had no infrastructure for manufacturing. The revolver had been a gift from Alek de Vries, a scriptologist who had mentored Jumi. Elsa knew how to operate the gun but had never pointed it at anything alive; the thought that she might have to, now, gave her a queasy feeling.
Last, Elsa lifted out a small book, its leather cover no larger than her hand. It contained her most ambitious scriptology project, and the only one in recent years for which she’d needed Jumi’s advice—her doorbook. Deciding it might be useful, Elsa took the book, along with a pen and a little bottle of scriptology ink. Through the glass the midnight-blue ink gave off an iridescent sheen, as if swirled with quicksilver. There, that was everything.
Rushing from the cottage, Elsa lifted her skirt and ran along a narrow path that followed the creek upstream and out of the valley. There was a shortcut halfway up, a little-used trail so steep Elsa had to grab at tree trunks to lever herself or crawl on all fours over the rocks, but every step was familiar and she could fly up the slope much faster than a stranger might.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. The interlopers didn’t know Veldana like she did, and carrying Jumi’s weight would slow them down, but they had a whole hour’s head start. They might have already reached the Edgemist—they might be dialing their portal device for the return trip even now.
The Edgemist … of course! The disturbance she’d observed had had nothing to do with a fault in her mother’s alterations to the worldbook. These invaders must have opened a portal while Veldana was still adjusting to the expansions—even a single person coming through at the wrong time would be enough mass to destabilize the Edgemist temporarily.
Elsa flushed hot with panic and guilt. If only she had thought of that explanation before, there might have been time to prepare, time to fend them off. How could she have been so stupid?
She scrambled up the last section of the slope, and then it was a straight shot through the forest to reach the Edgemist. She took it at a run, her legs burning, the hard leather pouches that hung from her belt banging against her thighs. The forest opened up into a narrow strip of meadow separating the trees from the Edgemist, and Elsa stumbled to a stop. Her breath still hitching, she fished the portal device from its belt pouch.
Elsa knew the coordinates for Earth by heart, and she twisted the little brass knobs to the correct settings. The memory rose, unbidden, of the first time Jumi had let her work the portal device—she had been six, and the device had felt unwieldy in her small hands, requiring all her concentration. But she’d had plenty of practice since then, and despite the superior attitudes of European scriptologists like Montaigne, Elsa had taken to the science as if she were born for it. By now the controls were so familiar, she could have dialed the settings with her eyes closed.
The coordinates set, Elsa flipped the stiff brass switch in the center with her thumb. A small black dot appeared in the Edgemist before her, the mist spiraling around it as if it were the eye of a storm. The black eye irised open until it was an oval portal wide and tall enough to admit a person, and Elsa lunged in.
The insides of portals weren’t, strictly speaking, existent places, and that was precisely how it felt to be there—as if one no longer existed. It was freezing cold and perfectly dark in a way that felt like the concepts of temperature and light were absent. Elsa knew to keep walking, even though there was nothing to walk on, and nothing to walk toward, and then it was over as suddenly as it had begun.
She stepped through into a room full of light and smoke, the portal automatically closing behind her. Elsa covered her face with her sleeve for the second time that day—Montaigne’s shelves of worldbooks were burning. The thieves must have set fire to the study after they’d come through.