“Please forgive the mess in here.” Jaelyn swept an armful of maps and loose notebook paper off one of the chairs in the cluttered room and motioned the barefoot girl behind her to sit. “Oh, my dear, you’re freezing! Here, take this.” She snatched up a shawl that had slipped behind the chair and wrapped it around the younger girl’s trembling shoulders, and Maiwenn hid her face in it for a moment before looking up with brimming eyes.

“Aren’t you—aren’t you afraid I’ll spoil it?”

“Not in the slightest. I only wish you could take it back with you—to wherever it is you’ve come from.” She shot a black look toward the as yet unpainted door nearest the office that the girl had stumbled out of, then turned to survey the piles of construction scraps littering the floor. “I’m sorry this place isn’t in better shape. She’s built at least three new doors since I was here last, and that when she’s barely stepped foot out of one of the old ones for a month. I can’t tell you what any of that means, except that she intends to bring you to a better end than the place you’re at now. Whether she’ll accomplish it or not is anyone’s guess. But if she will pull us out here with no instructions—”

Jaelyn leaned against the wall and began sifting through the pile of paper.

“I wonder if you’d know your story if you heard it. You’re a bit too young to be a mother in space, I’d think.”

“I—I’m not a mother at all.” Maiwenn curled her feet deeper under her tattered skirt, and Jaelyn nodded.

“I thought not. Would your story take place in a royal court in an Italian-inspired setting?”

“I don’t know what that last part means, but—I’ve never stepped foot in a royal court in my life.” Maiwenn shook her head in bewilderment, and Jaelynn flipped a few more pages.

“A wetland setting reminiscent of the British fens in the time of the Danelaw?”

“I do live in the fens.” The girl’s eyes widened in recognition, but Jaelyn’s brow furrowed as she surveyed the rest of the scribbled sheet.

“Well, I’m not going to read the rest of this because I don’t half understand it, and I don’t think it applies to you at all. You’re quite beautiful, my dear.”

“Oh, no.” Maiwenn curled into herself a little as she ducked her head. “I’m too big and clumsy—ever since I was a baby. And I’m not half as pretty as my sisters.”

“I certainly hope there’s a lesson there,” Jaelyn muttered under her breath. She continued flipping through papers for a moment, then looked up with a gleam in her eye. “Well, I say if she won’t give us any instructions, we ought to take things in our own hands. Here are some of the most interesting searches she’s made and bookmarks she’s saved recently—perhaps they’ll give you a glimpse of what’s going on in her mind—just be aware it’s a frightening place sometimes!

Several searches to find when the phrase “a good sport” was first used

The text of “Wrecked but not Ruined” by R.M. Ballantyne

How to make a fish trap

The history of looms and butter churns

Gold rushes in the early 1900s (crossed out with a note of “not workable”)

How to find repeated words in a document

Futuristic trends for married last names (scribbled out with a note of “way too much of an unnecessary rabbit hole”)

How to tell whether sliced ham has gone bad (labeled “NOT for a story” and obviously in this stack by mistake)

Pages upon pages of Breton names

Historical methods of cooking eggs

And if that’s not the most oddly specific question that I don’t know why anyone would need to know—”

“Did you say…eggs?” Maiwenn’s cheeks flushed with a bit of color, and Jaelyn nodded.

“That’s what it says here. Is that something in your world, do you think?”

“I—perhaps not, if she actually means the eggs to be cooked.” The girl looked away with a grimace, and Jaelyn opened her mouth, then shook her head.

“She also has notes about a plan to write more consistently outside of her superhero serial—I’ll believe that when I see it—and notes about getting ready for another writing camp—I don’t want to know what kind of a mess this place will be in when that comes.”

Two doors popped open in the hall, and Jaelyn sighed as she laid down the papers.

“I suppose this means she is paying some kind of attention and wants us to leave before I spill too many of her secrets. I’m sorry I have to send you back into that—” She shivered as a chilly breeze wafted into the hall from Maiwenn’s door. “—but I promise you things will work out for good in the end. Whatever happens, you can cling to that.”

The younger girl rose without a word and disappeared into the cold and fog, and Jaelyn looked after her a moment, then slipped through her own door as the hallway faded to darkness.

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