“Mm.
And we should check whether everything we stored is still there,” Neve added.
When she had moved the vault into the space, she had set it all down near the spring, where it would be easy to find.
But the space had changed so much since then.
She wasn’t sure anything would be where she’d left it.
“Yes, let’s.” Margaret shaded her eyes and gazed out across the land, and her face was full of wonder.
“When we first came in, I’d have guessed the whole place was a few hundred acres.
Now I can’t even see where it ends.
I have no idea how big it’s become!”
She set off toward the river with a spring in her step that Neve hadn’t seen in years.
The spring in her step didn’t last.
This time, the spot where they had entered was a long way from the spirit spring, much farther than before.
They walked and walked, following the river as the sky stayed the same even, sourceless pale.
The mountain grew slowly larger ahead of them.
Neve’s calves began to ache, then burn.
Her breath grew short.
By the time the rocks around the spring finally came into view, a long time had passed.
“I can’t,” Neve gasped.
“I can’t do it anymore.
I’m exhausted.
Nana, let’s rest.”
She didn’t wait for an answer.
She simply lay down flat on the soft black earth and stared up at the sky.
“Ugh.
This body is so weak.” She threw an arm over her eyes.
“That won’t work in the apocalypse.
Nana, starting now, we both have to exercise.
We have to get stronger.”
“Mm,” Margaret agreed faintly.
She lowered herself to the ground beside her granddaughter with a small groan.
She couldn’t have walked another step either.
Seventy-one-year-old knees had their limits, spirit spring or no spirit spring.
For a while, they simply lay side by side, catching their breath.
Then Margaret propped herself up on one elbow and squinted.
“Neve, the spring looks bigger too.
Doesn’t it?
What happened?”
Neve sat up and looked.
Nana was right.
The little pool that had been no wider than a kitchen table had spread.
It was now the size of a small pond, ringed with smooth pale stones, and the wisps of steam rising from its surface were thicker than before.
“I don’t know!” Neve pushed herself to her feet, legs protesting, and limped over to the stacks she’d left beside it.
The gold was exactly where she had put it, pallet after gleaming pallet.
It was untouched as far as she could tell.
But the boxes…
She opened the nearest wooden chest.
Inside, where there should have been carved jade bangles nestled in silk, there was only a thin layer of fine, pale green powder, like crushed chalk.
Frowning, she opened a second box.
She stared.
The box was almost completely full of powder, a soft, grayish-green dust that sifted and shifted when she touched the lid.
Neve’s mind raced.
She had looked through a lot of these boxes when she first brought them in.
There had been jade carvings and jewelry, rolled calligraphy and paintings, porcelain and ceramics, and all sorts of antiques.
There had been no powder.
None at all.
She went from box to box, flipping lids open one after another.
Some held exactly what they had held before: scrolls, porcelain vases, and ropes of pearls.
But others, dozens of others, held nothing but that same pale dust.
By the time she reached the fifth box of powder, she had a pretty good guess what had happened.
“Heh,” she said softly, and started to laugh.
Margaret, alarmed by the sound, hurried over and peered into the nearest box.
“Eh?
Where’s the jade Guanyin?” She looked around.
“It was right here.
It was the biggest piece in the whole collection.”
She started toward the next stack to look for it.
“Nana, don’t bother.” Neve caught her hand and drew her aside, still smiling.
“I think I know why the space got bigger.”
She pointed to the long wooden case on top.
“This is the box the jade Guanyin was in.
And these, all these boxes with powder in them, almost all of them were full of jade before.”
Margaret looked.
It was true.
“All of this jade was very old.
Some of it was hundreds of years old.
Maybe it’s just like the novels say, and old jade holds spiritual energy.” Neve’s eyes were bright.
“The space absorbed it.
It drank the energy out of the jade and used it to grow.
The spring too.”
She turned to her grandmother, excitement bubbling over.
“Nana, if that’s really how it works, then this is wonderful.
We can buy more jade, good, high-quality jade, and bring it in here to upgrade the space again.
And again.
It’ll keep getting bigger, and the bigger it gets, the better for us.”
Margaret looked back at the boxes.
The jade was truly gone, carvings and bangles and seals that had been in the family for generations, and in their place was only dust.
“But why would this happen?” she asked slowly.
“How could something written in a novel actually be real?”
“I can’t say it’s impossible, Nana.” Neve shrugged.
“Honestly, those apocalypse novels are a lot like the real apocalypse.
It was almost scary how close some of them were.”
She waved a hand at the space around them, the endless land, the steaming spring, and the distant mountain.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter how it works.
There are things even scientists can’t explain.”
A new idea struck her, and she spun around.
“Nana!
Now that it’s this big, should we try bringing in animals?
To raise them in here?”
Her heart beat faster at the thought.
If they could grow crops and raise livestock inside the space, they would never have to worry about food again.
Not during the drought, not during the floods, not ever.
“Mm.” Margaret’s eyes lit up, too.
“I’ll have Helen buy some animals, and we’ll bring them in and see what happens.
Chickens first, maybe.
If it works, we’ll never go hungry in the apocalypse.”
She gazed out over the vast, empty land, and something in her chest loosened.
Let the jade go.
If it was gone, it was gone.
They could buy more and feed it to the space, and the bigger it grew, the safer her granddaughter would be.
A treasure was only worth something if it kept the people you loved alive.
“Nana,” Neve said, glancing back at the spring, “should we drink some more of the spring water?”
Margaret turned.
“We didn’t drink very much last time,” Neve went on.
“We could tell it was doing something.
We felt lighter, and your shoulder stopped hurting.
But it wasn’t anything dramatic.” She stepped toward the steaming water.
“What if we drank more this time?”
She had a feeling, a strong one, that more spring water would do a great deal more.