“What happened to them?” Valentina asks. She’s sitting next to Paheli; the tension between them has disappeared. That’s the thing we never understand. They can hate each other one moment and move on to the next as if their argument never happened.

“They chose to fade. They couldn’t endure the loneliness of walking the Between by themselves any longer. They were the last keeper to bond with the Between.”

We come to attention at these words.

“Do you know how they bonded to the Between? What was the process?” Taraana asks, his words tripping over themselves in their hurry to be out.

Master Ferdinand shakes his head. “It isn’t my place to know the details. I didn’t… No, I couldn’t ask. To do so would have been a discourtesy.”

Taraana ducks his head, possibly to hide his disappointment.

The old man picks up a little glass cube containing a link of a silver bracelet. “This belonged to them, and I have kept it by my side for years, waiting for a Keeper of the Between to come and ask me about it.”

“What happened to the keepers who were born after Eckle?” Ghufran asks. There is a peculiar intensity in her eyes that we don’t yet understand. “Did all these relics belong to them?”

“The potential keepers were always abducted before we could get to them. Many of them never entered the Between and couldn’t understand the middle world. They didn’t want to. The others, we reached too late and could only collect their relics,” Ferdinand says heavily.

Qasim keeps stealing glances at Taraana as if he cannot quite believe Taraana is real. “Master will read the bracelet, and I will read the rest. Do you have a preference for the order in which they are read?”

“Can you read the bracelet link first?” Our poor Taraana seems entirely overwhelmed by the amount of attention he’s getting. His face is a bit too red.

Ferdinand nods and opens the small glass cube containing the bracelet link. He picks it up, his gnarled fingers sketching an ode to the relic with their gentle touch. He closes his eyes and we hold our breaths, all of us, even Qasim, as the moment stretches and the noise in the library fades.

“Is there any information about the bonding process?” Taraana shatters the moment with his question.

“I apologize, keeper. All I see are burning doors in the Between. Burning doors. This is all this bracelet link contains,” Ferdinand says.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Taraana is furious. And frustrated. We can’t blame him.

“Lost to the Between,” Ferdinand says. “This library and this bracelet are all that remain of Keeper Eckle.”

“Perhaps the other items will contain more information,” Qasim says, breaking the bleakness in the air.