Eliska collapsed on the ground panting hard. She barely kept her eyes open to make sure all the Watchmen made it through the gap followed by Wesh.

She shut her eyes and threw her arm over her face. “Phew! We made it!”

“Are we there?” Yvan asked. “Are we in the Ancestral Empire now? It looks like an ordinary forest.”

Something clicked out of sight and a completely different voice Eliska didn’t recognize muttered, “The Black Watch. What are you doing here?”

Eliska tore her arm off her face and scrambled to stand up. She didn’t notice before where she was or to which part of the Ancestral Empire her portal took her. She’d been too concerned with actually getting here.

Yvan was right. The Watch was in an ordinary forest—a different kind of forest with deciduous trees instead of pines.

Night blanketed this Layer the same way it did in the Layer the group just left. A campfire crackled nearby with a bunch of people sitting around it.

They wore a strange combination of clothes from threadbare versions of glittering finery to patched rags and hand-repaired knitwear.

Seven men wore decorative scarves tied around long hair hanging to their waists. They didn’t shave or even trim their beards. Their bright black eyes glittered out of chiseled faces lined by age and long experience in the Coil.

Ten women and a dozen children made up the rest of the group. The women wore dresses down to the ground. These followed the same pattern.

Some of these dresses must once have belonged to royalty, dignitaries, or the extremely wealthy. Glittering gold thread, elaborate embroidery, and lace frills showed at intervals between all the rips, patches, and dirty smudges.

The women wore excessive amounts of jewelry. Each woman wore dozens of necklaces, multiple rings on each hand, extravagant earrings, and countless bangles hanging from both wrists.

Eliska relaxed when she recognized the gypsies. She didn’t recognize these people, but she knew and understood their ways.

“We’re sorry for stumbling into your camp like this,” she told them. “We just escaped from another Layer. We had no idea where we would break through.” She waved behind her. “We’ll just go on somewhere else and leave you alone. Have a nice evening.”

“You don’t have to go.” One of the men waved at the fire. “Take a seat. Any traveler is welcome.”

Eliska took a step forward. Yvan grabbed her arm to stop her. “Do you know these people, Eliska? They could rob us.”

“We don’t have anything to rob. They can see that perfectly well. Besides, it would be rude to turn down their hospitality. Sit down—all of you.”

She set the example by crossing the last few feet to the fire. Its warmth lit up her face and made her sleepy.

The women and children moved out of the way to make room for her and then the whole group rearranged themselves to find space for the Watchmen.

“What are you doing here?” the same man asked. “The Ancestral Empire is no place for the Black Watch.”

“Their town collapsed to the Dark,” Eliska replied. “These are the only people who survived the destruction. They escaped with the clothes on their backs, so of course they didn’t have time to change out of their uniforms.”

The man nodded. “You should change your clothes now before anyone sees you.” He turned his dark eyes on her. “You didn’t escape when their town collapsed. Where did you come from—and this one is a member of the Guardian Templars.”

“I’m a Coil rat,” Eliska replied. “I happened to be passing through their town when the disaster hit. That’s why I’m with them.”

This explanation seemed to satisfy the gypsies. The man nodded down at the flames. “That makes sense then.”

“Have you seen anything unusual in the Coil recently?” Wesh asked.

The man looked up and split into a huge grin. “Do you mean anything unusual like everything?”

“I mean anything even more unusual than everything,” Wesh replied. “Have you seen more instability than usual—or anything outright malicious—like Darklings?”

“How can you ask them that after what we’ve just seen?” Yvan whispered in his ear. “These people could be Darklings.”

“They aren’t Darklings. They’re just gypsies. Look.” Eliska passed her hand over the fire in a circle around the group.

A curtain of watery magic passed in front of the gypsies. They didn’t change their appearance except to waver for a minute. That wavering stopped the minute she put her hand down.

“See? They aren’t Darklings.” She turned back to the gypsies. “Please don’t take offense. They’ve never been outside their town before. They don’t understand the Coil.”

The man only nodded. “Everything here is the same way it always is—a little more unstable, perhaps, but nothing we can’t handle. You know what the Ancestral Empire is like. Nothing here ever changes very much.”

“So you haven’t seen anything that might make you think someone was deliberately manipulating the instability?” Wesh asked. “Something that couldn’t be attributed to just instability?”

“What are you saying?!” Yvan gasped again. “Are you saying this landscape….and all these changes…..are you saying this is all the work of….?”

He broke off and didn’t finish his sentence.

“It isn’t deliberate,” Eliska interrupted. “It’s always like this. Nothing we’ve seen has been anything new.”

“What about the Darklings always attacking?” Wesh asked. “That’s new. They’ve never acted so coordinated before.”

She shrugged. “I disagree.”

Wesh’s eyes widened. “Are you saying you’ve seen this behavior before? Have they deliberately attacked you before?”

“Darkling attacks aren’t deliberate—not the way you’re making them sound. They just happen. The Darklings come out of the Layers. Of course they attack. They belong to the Dark.”

Wesh looked away.

“How do you survive if things are so bad out here?” Yann asked.

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“Just like this—by fighting them off and traveling from one Island to another.”

“It’s the same for us,” the gypsy man added. “We never stay in one place for long.”

“Have you seen the Darklings organizing their attacks instead of just threatening the Islands randomly?” Wesh asked again.

The gypsy man cocked his head to one side. “I hear you describing two things that are the same. The Darklings come from the Layers. They attack and destroy Islands, people—whatever they can find. This doesn’t change no matter how unstable the Coil becomes.”

Wesh let the subject drop. One of the women pulled out a bowl piled with some kind of flatbread. She handed it to Eliska. “Eat. You must be hungry.”

Eliska took a piece of bread and passed the bowl to Barsali who sat next to her. The Watchmen handed the bowl from man to man until it made the whole circle.

The gypsy man who’d been talking to them took the last piece. No one mentioned everyone else going without. They must already have eaten.

Yvan changed his tune and finally stuck out his hand to the gypsy guy who’d been doing all the talking. “I apologize for implying that you were Darklings. Please forgive my ignorance. My name is Yvan Dilnao. I’m very grateful for your hospitality.”

The guy shook his hand. “My name is Ando Dupris. You must stay with us tonight.”

Yvan started to say, “I don’t think that’s…..”

“Thank you,” Eliska interrupted. “We’re grateful for your hospitality. Wesh and I are magic-users. We can help defend you if you meet with any trouble.”

Ando sliced his dark eyes at the men of the Watch. “The Black Watch can help defend us if we meet with any trouble, too.”

“We’re unarmed as you can see,” Yvan replied. “We would otherwise.”

“We have weapons,” Ando breezed around a mouthful of bread. “We can supply you.”

A charge of tension went through the Watchmen and their eyes lit up when they exchanged glances. Even Rien brightened up at the thought of getting his hands on a weapon.

Vidal clapped Yann on the shoulder and Yann burst into a huge grin of relief and excitement.

Eliska kicked herself for not thinking of this sooner. She should have armed the Watch.

She let herself think they were helpless because they didn’t have magic. She was the one who left them defenseless. That was a mistake.

Now she saw them coming to life when they found out someone was going to arm them.

In a few minutes, the women left the fire and took the children to a bunch of tents set up among the trees. Light glowed through the tents’ fabric walls and cast the forest in golden beauty.

The men stayed up talking and passed the time with Wesh and the Watchmen sitting on that side of the fire.

Eliska didn’t get involved in their conversation. She didn’t want to go to sleep.

Maybe these Watchmen weren’t so bad. Being a Coil rat with no family and no one to connect with wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Yvan was right about that.

That didn’t mean she planned to stay with them.

She would get them to a town where they would go back to being safe behind the wall. Then she would go her way and they could all forget about each other.

The men started to drift away to their own tents. The gypsies invited the Watchmen to sleep in tents, too, and pitched extra ones for the Watchmen to share.

Eliska stayed by the fire. She didn’t expect the gypsies to give her a tent to herself and she didn’t want one.

She didn’t want to start getting comfortable with anyone if she would only be going back out on her own pretty soon.

She got lost in her own thoughts until someone brought her back to reality. “Eliska?”

She looked up and froze when she saw Barsali still sitting next to her. He stared up at her with wide, searching eyes.

She couldn’t hold eye contact with him. She already sensed where this was going. “You should go to bed,” she told him. “The Ancestral Empire is a dangerous place even if it remains stable. You’ll need your sleep.”

“Do you think you could find my family….with that Coil thing of yours?” he blurted out. “You saw which Layers collapsed into which Layers. You could find the Layer they fell into. If they’re alive, I would know where to go look for them.”

She took a deep breath. She’d never had a conversation like this with anyone. No one had ever asked her anything like this before.

She realized again that she’d stayed with these people just a little too long—or maybe way too long. She knew too much about them. Now she got herself all tangled up with their problems and worries and desires.

She didn’t plan to look at Barsali when she answered. She planned to stare into the flames. That would make it easier to completely dash his hopes—which was what she would be doing.

The minute she opened her mouth, she just couldn’t do it. She had to face him and look him in the eye. She couldn’t give him what he most wanted, but she couldn’t stab him in the heart without at least doing that much.

His eyes didn’t water the way they did before, but they radiated a depth of misery and longing she’d never witnessed from anyone. What would it be like to care about someone that much—to yearn with all your heart and soul just for one glimpse of their face again?

She couldn’t imagine caring about anyone that much—or even more important, that someone might care about her that much. That would never happen. No one out there was hoping to find her lost in the Coil.

Her voice trembled when she finally worked up the nerve to speak. “I could find out which Layer Middleborough collapsed into, but more Layers will have collapsed on top of that one and that one will have collapsed on top of others since then. Even if I looked into my Coil thing, I wouldn’t be able to see if your family was alive or where they were. I don’t have that power.”

He barely heard her. “But you could at least look. Couldn’t you? It would be better than nothing.”

She sighed and snapped her fingers to create the Coil illusion. It rotated on her palm.

She pointed at it with her other forefinger. “This is where Middleborough used to be. The Layers are still wild there. They haven’t started to reform into anything yet. You can see that the Layers above and below are also changing too rapidly.”

“Could you expand it….please?”

That one word tore her guts out. God, he needed this!

She couldn’t deny him, so she expanded the image of the Layer Middleborough used to occupy. A mass of swirling Dark mingled with the colored vapors.

She adjusted the image to search the Layers above and below that one. She didn’t find a single square inch of solid landscape in any of them.

“It doesn’t mean they’re dead,” she told him. “It just means I can’t find them—not without actually searching each and every Layer.”

He seized on that like the hopeless fool he was. “Then I could look for them! I could find them! I don’t care if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it. If they’re out there, I’ll find them. I have to!”

She closed her hand to shut down the image. As soon as it vanished, that same overpowering drive made her turn around and face him again.

“You couldn’t go alone, Barsali. You would have to leave the Watch to go search for your family and you would need a very powerful magic-user to go with you if you hoped to survive in the Coil without protection. You could search forever and never find your family even if they are alive. Believe me. I spent years searching the Coil for my family and never even found the Layer they originally came from—and that was using all my magic.”

He definitely heard that. He wilted in defeat, turned away, and slumped while he stared into the flames. “Oh. Of course,” he muttered. “I didn’t think of that.”

She raised her hand to touch his shoulder, but she stopped herself in time.

“If your family is alive out there, they would want to know that you’re safe in some Island—not that you’re risking your life to go look for them. If they are alive, it means they must have found an Island of their own somewhere—somewhere they can stay and be safe themselves. Don’t throw that away.”

He didn’t answer for a second. He sat there with his shoulders hunched and blinked into the flames as he took all this in.

She didn’t expect a response from him. When he finally looked up, he locked his soft brown eyes on her with a very different expression on his face. It wasn’t despair or desperation or even pleading.

It was pure heartfelt sympathy—sympathy for her—for the years she spent alone wondering if someone might be out there waiting for her.

It took a long time for her to finally make her peace with the fact that they weren’t.

“Thank you, Eliska,” he murmured. “Thank you for trying.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied as calmly as she could. “I’m sorry about Middleborough.”

“You tried there, too, didn’t you?” he breathed. “I’m alive right now because of you. Thank you.”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. He got up and left to join the other Watchmen in the tents.

She stayed where she was and stared into the flames the way she originally wanted to. She really wished now that she’d never met these people.

Becoming connected to them—understanding them and having them understand her—this was hands down the worst pain she’d ever experienced.

She never felt anything like this when she traveled alone. No one reminded her of how it could have been. She never had to think about how it could have been.

Her life was the way it was for a reason. She was better off alone.

Now all of that fell apart around her ears. She didn’t want to feel this. She didn’t want to remember what it felt like to ache for someone—anyone who might give a hoot if she lived or died.

She didn’t want to remember the brutal agony of searching, coming within a hair’s breadth of finding some answer, only to fail and have that hope snatched away at the last possible second.

She would rather do just about anything than feel that. Now she had no choice but to feel it. Just looking at these people brought it all rushing back.

End of Chapter 11.