“All right,” Margaret said.
She agreed without hesitation.
Seventy-one years of burying people and rebuilding from nothing had given her a very steady heart.
If her granddaughter said there was a world inside a piece of jade, then Margaret would go and see it.
Neve took her grandmother’s hand, closed her eyes, and focused on the space.
The bedroom vanished around them.
When Margaret opened her eyes, she was standing under a pale, sourceless sky.
There was no sun, only an even light like early morning.
The air was cool and very still, and it smelled faintly of damp earth.
Far in the distance, blurred at the edges, she could just make out the shape of a mountain.
Closer, perhaps a hundred yards away, sunlight-colored water glinted.
It was a river.
“Nana, let’s look around.”
This was only Neve’s second time inside.
The first time, she had been too worried about Nana panicking to do more than glance around before coming straight back out.
“Yes, let’s.”
Margaret was far more curious than she would have admitted.
They walked slowly, side by side.
The ground under their feet was strange, black in some places, rich and crumbly like good garden soil, and yellow and dry and cracked in others.
A few small tufts of grass grew here and there, green and stubborn, but otherwise the land was bare.
“It’s like a farm no one has planted yet,” Margaret murmured.
After a few minutes, they reached the river.
It was wide, sixty or ninety feet across, and the water moved slowly, clear enough that Neve could see smooth pebbles on the bottom.
Upstream and downstream, where the river should have continued into the distance, it simply disappeared into a thick bank of white mist.
Neve wanted to see the mountain up close, so they followed the riverbank toward it.
They were still a couple hundred yards from the foot of the mountain when Neve stopped.
“Nana, look.”
Tucked among some rocks was a small pool, no wider than a kitchen table.
Its surface was perfectly calm, and thin threads of steam curled up from it into the still air.
Neve crouched and dipped her fingers in, braced for heat.
It wasn’t hot.
It wasn’t cold either.
It was simply the temperature of skin, so mild she could barely feel it.
But if the water wasn’t hot, why was it steaming?
As she knelt there, a strange sensation spread across her chest.
It was a faint prickling, an itch right where the knife had gone in.
The bleeding had stopped earlier, but the wound itself was still there, raw and stinging under her ruined pajamas.
Acting on instinct, she cupped a little of the water and splashed it over the cut.
The itch sharpened, then faded.
Neve pulled the collar of her pajamas aside and stared.
The wound was closing.
The edges drew together as she watched, the redness fading and the torn skin knitting smooth.
Within a minute, there was nothing left but a faint pink line, and then not even that.
She leapt to her feet.
“Nana!
It’s a spirit spring!”
She had read about things like this in web novels, a magical spring hidden inside a pocket world that could heal wounds and strengthen the body.
She had never once dreamed she would find one herself.
“A spirit spring?” Margaret had no idea what that meant.
But she had just watched a knife wound disappear in front of her eyes.
Whatever this water was, it was precious beyond words.
An idea struck Neve so hard she almost stopped breathing.
If this really was a spirit spring, could it save Nana?
Could it keep her from turning when the rain came?
That was what Neve wanted more than anything.
Nana was her only family.
And in the apocalypse, family was everything.
She wanted her grandmother to live.
“Let’s drink some,” she said.
“All right.
I’ll try it first.”
Margaret knelt at the edge of the pool, cupped her hands, and drank.
Neve immediately knelt beside her and did the same.
“Wait!” Margaret reached over to stop her.
“Let me drink first and see what happens.
You can try it after.”
“It’s okay, Nana.
In the stories, water that heals wounds is always a spirit spring.
We’ll just have a little.”
Still, a small doubt nagged at her as she drank.
Why was everything so different this time?
In her past life, she had never been able to enter the space.
There had been no spring either, or at least none she had ever known about.
The space had simply been a storeroom.
Was it because of the blood?
Last time, she had activated the pendant with a cut on her finger.
This time, the blood had come straight from her chest, almost from her heart.
Could that make a difference?
She couldn’t work it out, so she let it go for now.
They each drank only a few mouthfuls and then sat back to wait.
For several minutes, nothing happened.
Then Margaret’s face went pale, and she pressed a hand to her stomach.
“Nana?”
“I’m fine,” Margaret said through gritted teeth.
“I just…
I need a bathroom.
Right now.”
Neve grabbed her hand and pulled them both out of the space.
She hurried her grandmother into the bathroom attached to her bedroom, then felt her own stomach lurch violently and ran for the guest bathroom next door.
The next half hour was not dignified.
When Neve finally staggered out, she felt strangely light, as though something heavy had been scrubbed out of her.
Her skin looked clearer, and her head felt sharp and clean.
Margaret emerged a few minutes later looking shaken but steadier on her feet than she had been in years.
She rolled her shoulder experimentally.
The ache that had lived there for the past decade was gone.
They exchanged a look and went back into the space.
This time they explored longer.
Wherever they walked, the land eventually ended in the same thing, a wall of thick white mist that ringed the entire space and swallowed the far bank of the river and the lower slopes of the mountain.
Neve started toward it.
“I want to see what’s on the other side.”
“Not today.” Margaret caught her arm.
“We can explore when we have time.
Right now, we need to get out and start preparing.”
Her voice was calm, but her eyes were serious.
“We aren’t only facing the end of the world anymore.
We also have to face the Ashfords.
If Sylvie has come back too, she’ll come after this treasure.
We need to be ready before she makes her move.”
“You’re right.” Neve nodded and glanced down at her hand.
She froze.
“Nana, the pendant is gone!”
She hadn’t noticed until this moment.
The jade pendant she had been clutching ever since the accident, the pendant she was sure she had been holding when they first came in, was nowhere to be seen.