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The ghosts of our past dog each step but it’s the future that haunts us.

Present and Correct , by Colonel R. Sanders

Livira

She fell through a night not made of darkness. The others plummeted beside her, a constellation of falling stars, all of them pitched into the void through the portal opened by Hellet’s blood.

A flash of sight, gone too swiftly to register. It felt like falling through a gossamer web, or the thinnest of pages. Another barely sensed impact, and another, each with its too-brief flash of vision. Three more, ten more, scores, each barrier feeling a little firmer, glimpses of sky, grey ground, tall trees, white-topped waves, an endless desert of stones.

Livira understood they were falling through places, times, maybe even worlds. A flat greyness tore at her as she punched through it, a mountain range shuddered, almost managing to keep her as her velocity made a hole.

The next one stopped her entirely. She jerked awake from a dream of falling and found that she had fallen. She lay on her back, the others close at hand, each startling from their own nightmare.

Yolanda got to her feet beside Livira. Despite having lain flat out on the dusty ground, the child’s white hair, white skin, white tunic, and white leggings showed no trace of dirt, even her shoes were pristine. All around them the refugees who owed their lives to Yute were beginning to stand. Despite their debt to Yolanda’s father, they had followed her rather than him. Or more accurately they had followed Livira when she tied her colours to the white child’s mast.

Livira was the last but one to stand. Seera Leetar only managed to reach her knees, and knelt there, head bowed, still shaking with grief. Livira knew she should also be floored by Meelan’s death. The fact that she could stand felt like a betrayal of their long friendship and brief intimacy. And yet she had known tragedy and hurt on this scale before, and now, like then, she found she could push it from her mind, leaving only a raw wound, filled with the knowledge that the sorrow would dog her until she stopped running, and then it would have its way with her.

“We’re home!” It was Acmar who said it. Acmar who Livira had barely had time to register among Yute’s band, let alone speak to.

She turned to face the direction in which Acmar and most of the others were now staring. The bloody edge of the sun made lumpy silhouettes of the dome-like huts. The structures huddled together for company amid a mean scattering of crops, black against dawn’s red warning. Livira could hardly distinguish one dwelling from the next, but she knew her own in an instant even after half a lifetime’s absence.

Her eyes sought and found the rickety windlass above the well. The refugees all stood in silence for a long moment, broken only by the cry of the baby in their midst. A mother reached for her child’s hand.

“I tried to aim for a place that I knew,” Yolanda said, “but it seems the majority steered us here.”

Livira understood. Of their number, a dozen, more than half, were from the Dust, and six, including herself and Acmar, were survivors from this settlement. “How is it still here?”

All of them, even the city dwellers who had probably never ventured from Crath’s walls into the dry peril of the Dust, were walking slowly towards the small collection of buildings. Jella and her fellow bookbinders, Sheetra and Nortbu, followed them.

“No dogs,” Livira muttered. The dogs should be barking at the approach of strangers. Silent during the day, the hounds were essential for the crops’ survival during the nights.

Acmar, reaching the first of the jarra plants, bent his broad back to touch the leaves. He pulled back his arm and stared at his fingers in puzzlement, then tried again. This time he snatched his hand away with an oath. “It’s bewitched!”

Livira understood in that moment. “We’re ghosts.” The miracle wasn’t that the settlement was still here. It was that Livira and the rest of them had fallen back through hundreds of years to a time when the settlement still existed. She raised her voice. “You can’t touch anything here, Acmar. None of us can. The people here won’t see or hear us.”

Even as she spoke, a figure emerged from the blackness of the nearest hut. Just from the shape of her, the way she moved, Livira recognised the old woman. Ella, whose clever fingers had defied age to keep on working the wind-weed, right up to the day that the canith came and ended her along with so many others. Livira had called them sabbers back then—“the enemy.” The small band that destroyed her life in this place had held at least two of Evar’s distant ancestors, and for a while it had been hard for her to rid herself of the belief that their crime ran through his veins. Now though, the sudden memory of him, stick-shot and bleeding out his lifeblood, eclipsed her vision. He’d gone where she couldn’t follow.

“Livira!” Breta, who had been almost a baby when they took her from the settlement and who was now barely into her teens, helped Livira back to her feet. Livira hadn’t even known that she’d fallen to her knees.

“I’m all right.” Livira wiped her stinging eyes. Benth had carried little Breta across the Dust when her legs failed her, and Acmar had carried Gevin. But Benth was dead, a victim of Crath’s hungry industry, and Gevin…Livira could hardly bring herself to think of Gevin. She’d left him in hell, half-eaten by darker appetites than she had ever thought men might entertain.

Hypnotised, the refugees moved slowly towards the settlement, following Acmar. Those who had been captured when the canith raided reached the huts first, others from the Dust behind them, the city people almost last to go. Only Yolanda and Livira lagged behind the city-born.

A lone ball of wind-weed, no bigger than a fist, blew between Livira and the white child. They stood, watching the others go.

“We can’t take them with us,” Livira said. “I don’t know where we’re going but it’s no place for babies and children.”

“You and I were both children when we entered this war,” Yolanda said. “By some reckoning, I still am.”

Livira didn’t buy that last part. Yolanda had bathed in strange timestreams. Whatever lies her body might tell, her mind was old. “I don’t care about that. I want them safe, or you’re on your own. And I think you need me.”

Yolanda shrugged. “You’re the author of the weapon with which Jaspeth intends to end the library. It would be easier to defeat his plans with your help. This is a war fought by proxies and Irad appears to have fewer of us than his brother does.”

New figures were emerging from the huts’ dim interiors. Soft cries of hurt and wonder went up from Acmar, Breta, and the others who had once made this place their home. Livira, knowing that she should not, let the same fascination draw her forward.

At Teela’s hut she found her aunt already dressed and sharpening her hoe. She looked good, less stern than Livira remembered, the steel gone from her dark hair. Back in the hut someone was moving—a stumble—a fall!

“Cratalac shit!” Her uncle’s legs waved in the air as he lay on the bed finishing the job of hauling his trews on.

Livira remembered her uncle, though dimly. He vanished in the night the year before the storm took her mother.

“Mother…” The force that swung Livira around felt external. Like magnetism taking command of the compass needle. She walked towards the place her mother had lived. To where there had been a family with Livira at its centre. She skirted Trayvon’s hut, rounded the curve of the largest hut, where Kern, their headman, kept home with two wives and several children. Acmar sat outside that door, head on his knees, his weeping shielded by both arms, betrayed only by the quaking of his shoulders. A small boy chased a chicken close by. And the boy was Acmar.

“You shouldn’t go.” Yolanda had followed Livira. “Some things are best forgotten.”

“I don’t forget.” Livira turned on the girl. They stood just yards from the hut—the home—where Livira was born into the world and given her first name. Her mother would be there, perhaps already shelling beans, her fingers crimson. Livira would see herself as a baby in the crib, or at her mother’s breast, or crawling in the dirt, exploring everything, tasting the sour world into which she had been delivered. She knew now that the dust surrounding them was the stuff into which every past triumph of mankind had been pounded. Glorious civilisations pulverised by their own hubris, wrecked by the seeds of violence that they bore within them, and that technology could not erase.

Livira turned to meet Yolanda’s pink-eyed stare. “Isn’t memory what we’re fighting for? The library is the world’s memory? But you’re telling me I should turn away here?”

“It’s important that there is a memory, and that it can be visited. That doesn’t mean that every memory should be returned to, any more than the existence of a library means you should read every book in it. Exercise discretion. I’ve walked enough of my own past to know it to be a path that will cut you. Even the softest recollection can conceal a blade, if only for the fact that it is gone, and those moments will never be yours again.”

Livira glanced in the direction of her home, looked at Acmar then went to stand beside him, setting a hand to his quaking shoulder. “We need to get them somewhere…” She wanted to say “safe” but the place they were in wasn’t dangerous to ghosts. “…somewhere they can live. This isn’t their fight.”

“It’s everyone’s fight,” Yolanda said, looking up at Leetar as she came to stand, red-eyed, beside Livira.

“That’s what people in wars always say.” Livira shook her head. “Whatever happens with the library and however doomed this world is on the grand scale, there’s still time to live out good lives.” She looked at the settlement hunched around them. “People lived them here. They weren’t happy all the time, but they laughed, there were games, they loved, children grew. I was loved. And yes, dammit, I want to see that, even if it makes me cry. So, send the others who haven’t chosen this fight somewhere better.”

“You overestimate what I can do.”

Livira had already turned her back though, and her feet brought her to the open doorway of her mother’s hut. The small dome was dried mud bricks, layered in a reducing spiral to a smoke hole that a tall man could reach without going to tiptoes. Her mother sat a little way within, the morning sun lighting her to her neck, face still shadowed. Crimson hands moved almost too quickly to follow, the action ingrained even now in Livira’s muscle memory, shelling beans. The jarra bean had three skins to protect its moisture from the Dust’s endless thirst. The innermost one was toxic and unless it was completely removed the bean stew would induce vomiting and diarrhoea.

Drawing closer Livira saw her mother’s face for the first time since she was six years old, and the storm had taken her. For a moment Livira didn’t understand why she couldn’t breathe. The sound that burst from her was as ugly and raw as it was involuntary and unexpected. Like Acmar she found herself on her knees. The grief for Meelan Livira had been able to wall off though she knew it would find her later and hurt her all the more. This emotion was primal, like a fist striking up from within, and Livira could no more stand against it than she could stop her heart from beating.

She had thought that she might study her mother as an object of curiosity, then step by her to peer at her infant self. Instead, she crawled away, passing Leetar who stood bewildered but wise enough to stay silent. Once out of sight of her mother Livira rose, standing to continue her retreat, bent around a child’s pain, bowed beneath the weight of a lifetime’s unspoken words.

By the time she reached Yolanda, Livira had straightened herself and dried her face, walking now with the careful steps of someone cradling a wound. The girl offered no comment and an echo of Yute’s compassion could be seen in her face, though perhaps she was still too young to inherit her father’s seemingly all-encompassing care.

“We need to get them out of here,” Livira said.

“I can’t make portals.” Yolanda raised a white hand to forestall what would have been unreasonable objections from Livira. “But”—and now she rose from the ground, flying just as Livira and Evar had learned to do as ghosts—“in this form our motion is not limited to up and down, or through. We can move in time too. Though it is more difficult.”

“How difficult?”

“It requires something to push off,” Yolanda said. “If I push the rest of you forward to a point where you will regain your present, it will push me much further backwards into the past.”

“We’ll do it together, if you show me how.”

“You know how,” Yolanda said. “You wore the white. You just need to remember.”

Leetar, who had been following Livira silently, a ghost’s ghost, spoke up behind them. “I want to go with you. There’s nothing for me now. I don’t know how to start…”

Livira opened her mouth to say that it was too dangerous, that Leetar didn’t understand what she would be letting herself in for. She closed it. Even Livira didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. And Leetar had seen the danger. A huge mechanical wonder had crushed her brother beneath an assistant. “All right.”

“Should we tell them?” Leetar said. “The others?”

Livira looked out across the settlement and in that moment saw Jella, who was standing some way off between two huts, turn and stare in her direction. Gentle Jella, who only wanted peace, and had not long ago had only a rapidly failing door between her and a raging canith warrior. Jella would never forgive her for what she was about to do. Never forgive her for saving her.

Livira looked to Yolanda. “Can you send them somewhere good?”

“I can only send them some-when. They’ll still be here. Right in this spot. Just like we will be. And good times are few and far between. In fact, in most of the better times, this spot is underwater. But I’ll do my best.”

“There’s a baby.” Livira stressed the word.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Should we tell them?” Leetar repeated. Jella was walking towards the three of them now, with purpose.

Livira stared at the dusty ground, seeking wisdom, or at least inspiration. She could tell them, but they would want her to go with them. Or they would refuse to go. Those that didn’t know her would think she was using them somehow. Those that did would want to help her and want her help. Jella would want to help her. Already the guilt was eating at her, and yet all she’d ever done was try to save them. She could go with them, leave Yolanda to the quest. Spend her life shepherding the refugees through whatever future Dust they arrived in. As if not having abandoned them to the canith hordes made her somehow responsible for their survival forevermore. As if she were somehow more able to carve out a life for them than Acmar or Breta or any of the others were.

“No.” Livira met Leetar’s bloodshot eyes. Where dirt and panic had failed, grief had dented the girl’s seemingly impervious beauty. It made her more real, closer to someone Livira could like.

Jella was almost on them. Livira raised her hand, asking her to wait, and Jella did, confusion in her eyes.

“Don’t leave me,” Leetar hissed. They’d trained her to be a diplomat, to falsify smiles, to flatter and deceive. But sorrow had pared all that away, leaving honesty. “I need to be with people who knew him. Who loved him.”

Livira met Leetar’s honesty with her own. “I did love him. I don’t know what he would want me to do. But I’ll take you with me as far as you can go.” She turned to face Yolanda. “How do we do this?”