Solda strode over to meet me. She had the black projection device in her hand; it wasn’t much bigger than a heart. She thrust it at me. “Contain that,” she said, though she could have just as easily done it herself.
“Sorry,” I said, spraying the device with a signal blocker, “I’m not so good once fights hit the ground.” I didn’t have anywhere to put the device until the grunts arrived, so I slipped it into my pocket.
“You aren’t good at defense, period,” said Solda. “You aren’t good at offense, either.” She snapped her mouth shut. I saw the tension in her jaw from the rest of the words she had left unsaid. I could guess at a good many of them.
“Sorry,” I said again, but she was already walking away.
“Grunts will be here in two minutes,” she said. “You got the number and date for them?”
“This is the eighteenth,” I said, “year four hundred and seventy eight. You want me to recite the relic pledge, too?”
Solda snorted at my sarcasm and popped something into her mouth. She went off to wait for the contained people to start waking up.
The grunts arrived a little later, two young men, not much older than the girl in the cocoon, and they hefted her into a nondescript wheeled cart to take her back to the coven. Nobody wanted to see Guardians hauling bodies around the islands. There were rumors enough already about what we did. That was the excuse Solda gave me for divvying up tasks, but I figured it was more likely because it kept all of us knowing pieces about a thing instead of seeing the whole picture. The longer the Guardians had with the rebels, the more we could get out of them. As it was, I’d never see that girl again.
We got off the Priory at the next island docking, just as the witnesses were starting to wake up. The island at the dock was the Seventh Day Restaurant. It wouldn’t dock near the coven for at least an hour, so we had some time. The wind was up, buffeting my face, and clouds were speeding past the island, obscuring the long drop between land masses that would, inevitably, lead to the sea.
I went to the edge of the island, to a little park, and Solda followed. I wasn’t going to be the one who broke the silence. I knew what was coming.
But when she sat down next to me, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she pulled her lunch bar from her pocket and ate it sullenly, staring straight ahead.
“Sorry,” I said again, because I really was trying to make amends. When she was angry at me the job was even more miserable.
“Don’t be sorry at me,” she said. “Be sorry at the coven.”
And that’s all she would say, no matter how much I wheedled, until we finally docked at the soaring spires of the coven’s island ninety minutes later. We didn’t even make it to our rooms before a red-liveried little coven’s messenger summoned us to a meeting.
That’s when Solda finally said something. All she said was, “Shit.”
We followed the messenger deeper into the palatial compound until we reached the coven’s assembly chamber. The messenger pulled back deep purple curtains and admitted us into the half circle of stone where the five members of the coven stood, draped all in dark purple. At the farthest end of the half circle was the current Coven Senior, Hovana. Tall and plump, all I could see of her was her tawny face peering out at me, the dark eyes squinting out at me from a face with a dimple in the chin so deep that it seemed to split her jaw in two.
“Most apprentices see us just twice in their lifetimes,” Hovana said as the messenger closed the curtains behind us, “when they are accepted into service, and when they are removed from consideration or raised to become a Guardian. Yet this is already the fourth time you’ve sat before the coven. Why is that, Arret?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “We just disagree about protocol.”
Solda wasn’t looking at anything in particular, though her gaze tarried a long time on the floor. I could hear her sucking on something, probably one of her hard candies.
“You mean the law,” Hovana said. “One cannot disagree with the law. Guardians uphold the law.”
“Laws change all the time,” I said.
“They aren’t changed by apprentices,” Hovana said. “That should have been a containment, not a catastrophe. As it was, we had to contain a good many people because you were tardy.”
“We can’t be everywhere at once,” I said. “You want us to take on too many looters with too few hands. The logistics of retrieval—”
“I know very well the logistics of retrieval,” she said, and she recited the old code at me.
“I know it,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “because a Guardian with a poor memory is not suited for the scarf.”
I started to recite the full book of lost relics. She stopped me. “That’s not the point,” she said.
“I spent a year as a librarian,” I said. “I can recite ten full treatises on martial law from the founding of the city. I know what I’m about.”
“We have enough librarians,” she said. “We have enough people around to repeat facts. I need Guardians. I know you have inventory after this, but I want you to give the shift to someone else and cool your head. You’re grounded at the coven until further notice. Maybe you’ll be a better librarian than a Guardian, you think? This may not be the profession for you. Solda, in the morning I want you to speak to Moravas. The customization of that device was clearly her family’s work. I recognized it immediately.”
“Then she should be drowned,” I said.
“We don’t make the rules,” Hovana said. “We only enforce them. Got it, librarian?”
I gave her my biggest grin, because I’ve always found that joviality rankles hard in the face of insult, especially with the coven. “Sure,” I said.
“Repeat it back,” she said.
“I’m not some first level kid,” I said.
“Repeat it,” she said, and she even used a teacher’s voice, like they all did in the classrooms when we had to give a summary of the day’s lessons. The Purity Corps insisted that no knowledge could be permanently marked onto any surface, which left us with our memories. The better your memory, the better you were in school, the better your life. I was lucky, with my memory. There’s not much to do in an orphanage after the day’s work, so I would spend hours going over lines and stories and formulas until I learned them backwards and forwards.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, and that was the end of that.
They hustled us out of there like I’d set the place on fire. I don’t think anyone had ever told the coven to fuck itself. I wasn’t even sure why I’d said it. I was tired of being yelled at. Tired of being told I was stupid. Tired of getting only half the truth even though I was training to be a Guardian.
The big doors to the audience chamber closed behind us, and Solda and I stood together in the stillness. Solda put something into her mouth, another hard candy; I caught the faint scent of peppermint. The hall was cold. A couple of other Guardians passed by; neither looked our way.
“You go to the library and fill out the paperwork on today,” Solda said. “Then you’re suspended, like they said. Archival work. Present yourself to the head librarian after you file the paper.”
Solda stepped away.
“Wait,” I said, and grabbed for her sleeve.
She yanked her arm back, and when she spoke, her voice was low and gruff. “You listen,” she said. “You don’t know what I’ve put on the line for you. Entitled little sinner boys like you come and go around here, thinking they can fuck things up and everyone gives them a pass because there’s so few of them. But let me tell you this. We don’t need more than a couple boys to keep the world spinning, and the coven is happy to let you fly off the face of the world if you stir the pot here. Your actions are dangerous. Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on the right side,” I said. “I know there’s no better world than this. I’ve seen all that rebel propaganda and I know it’s shit. But blindly following laws is stupid. I don’t like how some things are set up.
There’s no harm in saying that.”
Solda sucked on the hard candy, shaking her head. “Even you don’t get it,” she said. “You heard it in stories, but you don’t know how this world we’ve made is the end result of thousands of years of trial and error that led to failed civilizations. This society is the pinnacle of social progress. Human beings are naturally prone to chaos. You have to give them structure. You keep prodding at the structure like you’re doing, and it tumbles down.”
“If it’s really that weak,” I said, scoffing, “maybe it’s not what they say it is.”
“You’re going to get more than grounded, saying stuff like that,” Solda said. “I like you sometimes, Arret, I do. You are smart when you’re not distracted. You’ve got a great memory and a keen sense for how those relic looters think. But you have to bend to order. If you won’t bend, it’ll break you.”
Solda pulled away and moved out into the hallway, back toward the dining area. I was starving, too, but I knew following her would just result in more finger-wagging. I’d do the paperwork like she asked, just this once.
The coven library had its own floating island, connected to the main coven island by a flexible bridge that wasn’t for the faint of heart. In bad weather it lurched and juddered and snaked about like something alive. I kept both hands on the smooth, silvery rails, too stubborn to wait for a ferry.
Like the coven, the library was built to impress the weary with the weight of history. All along the path leading up the massive stone steps were twisted human relics that had been dredged up from below. Only the coven and its archivists were allowed to house these sorts of relics, and for good reason. The figures here glistened in the sunlight, their bodies encased in a sheer substance like glass, or clear amber. They were the remnants of the people who had come before, the ones buried by the sea a thousand years ago. They had been petrified and then drowned for their sins. Now they stood here at the archives as a reminder of what excessive hubris and decadence could lead to. Not enough rules destroyed them, the coven would say, but I always thought they were just dumb enough to get caught.
I gave my palm at the library entrance for identification, and the palmist spent her time tracing all the lines to ensure I was who I said I was, which was ludicrous, really. There were only four other men my age who ever set foot in the library, and we looked nothing alike. But we all had to pretend at being useful, so she studied my palm, and I let her, because I’d already yelled at Solda and the coven, and look at where all that had gotten me. But you couldn’t have anything outside of the archives written on paper, including identity cards. All the Guardians who had them picked them up at the front desk of the library to use to get into the secret stacks. But outside of the archives, writing stuff down got you thrown into the sea.
I walked up through the stacks. The big wood-and-steel bookshelves were oppressive, stretching up and up for six floors, all connected by the spidery veins of silver catwalks that gleamed in the sunlight streaming in from the multiple glass domes. Marbled light painted rainbows across the floor, intercut by strange, twisted shadows created by the catwalks. Just breathing the air made me cough. The air was clotted with dust and stank of old leather and unwashed old librarians too enamored of their work to pause for hygiene. It was easy to get lost in here. I’d never seen all of it. I still wasn’t permitted into most of the rooms, but I could see tantalizing glimpses of them through the stacks. Those were the rooms that housed all the machine recordings, the disks and crystals and lasers and tinny bits of metal and flickering screens and flashy holograms. Would I ever get in there, now?
The head librarian, Juleta, loomed above it all at her great desk, which was perched like a podium atop a slab at the center of the library. She always reminded me of a spider squatting at the center of her web. I went up the seven steps to her, trotting up each one. That’s when I finally noticed that there was something in my pocket, because it banged against my thigh as I walked. I reached into my pocket as I came to the top of the pedestal, and my mouth went dry. My fingers touched the cold, webbed coating over the projection device that I’d slipped into my pocket back at the Priory. I hadn’t turned it in to the grunts when they arrived. I’d completely forgotten. Heat moved up my face. I’d be murdered for this. They’d drown me. How would I explain?
“Have they assigned you over to me yet?” Juleta said, breaking my frozen panic. She fixed her monocle into the deep trough beneath her massive brow. Her black eye swam in the watery lens, three times bigger behind the glass. Strands of white peppered her hair, and she had soft white hair on her chin and cheeks. Her position alone made her one of the smartest people in the world, but in that moment, I loathed the idea of ever coming back here again. At this rate I was going to end up a librarian, not a Guardian, or maybe just a dead criminal, based on what was in my pocket.
I snapped my mouth shut and reconsidered. They were going to drown me anyway when they found out I hadn’t turned in the device. There was no way around that. I was a fugitive already. It’s just that nobody knew it. I don’t even know what came over me, but I said, “I’m here to pick up a file on Moravas.” The name just bubbled up, the same one Hovana had told Solda to look into. I was just speeding that along, really. What did it matter, now? All I had to leverage was the case. If I could bring this Moravas in, I could pretend I’d gotten this device from her. Nobody would know. Or maybe I’d get out of here and just stage a relic hunt and tell them this was a new device. Whatever I did, I had to get out of this library, because no one was going to buy that I’d found a projector in here still covered in webbing.
Juleta raised a thick eyebrow. Her eyebrows were still black as pitch, like her eyes. “They letting Solda interrogate that little shit, are they?” she asked. She stuck out her meaty tongue and licked her thumb. She began to page through the massive book at her elbow, making little grunts as she sifted through the information.
Finally she wrote something on a card and handed it over to me. It still got me, watching somebody write something down so casually, even if it was permitted in the library. “Consult that catalog on the name,” she said, and went back to her ledgers.
I took the card and hopped down the steps, the device thumping in my pocket as I did. Maybe someone else would worry about getting caught, but what did I have to lose? There’s something freeing about knowing you’re completely fucked.
I surveyed the great wall of card catalogs, searching for the bank Juleta had written down. There were twenty-eight sets of catalogs, all used for different types of information. I needed the one for whatever it was they filed Moravas under. I’d never searched through it before, which meant she wasn’t any type of relic dealer I’d been asked to look up. There was MAA-MAD, and MAE-MAG. I could compare letters, even if I couldn’t exactly sound things out very well. So I kept going, down and across, until I got to MOQMOR. I pulled open the drawer and found the card with Moravas’s name. It listed the full name, which I didn’t try and sound out, and gave a number for where the files were held. I could match that number to one of the big secret rooms that I’d never been in before. I knew it because I’d always wanted to go in there. I wrote down the location of the file on the card that the librarian had given me, giving a little illicit shudder as I did, and hustled my way up to the gated entry of that room. Through the slated bars, I could see rows of disks and crystals and baskets full of data drives.
I strode confidently up to the woman sitting at the desk inside the bars and pushed my card under the bars between us. I gave her my best smile. “Librarian sent me your way for this,” I said.
“I need your card,” she said.
“That’s the card.”
She smirked. “Your Guardian card,” she said. “Unless you have a tattoo?”
“I lost it,” I said.
“Is that so? You lost your tattoo?”
I shrugged. “The card. I left it with Juleta up at the front. Listen, if I wasn’t authorized, Juleta wouldn’t send me up here, wou
ld she? Give me back the card and I’ll just tell Grand Master Hovana I got pushback. Can I get your name?” I reached for the nub of a much-used pencil sitting on the counter on my side, purely for show. I could read after a fashion, but I wasn’t great at writing unless I could copy the forms of the letters exactly.
“It’s fine,” she said, taking back the card. “Just keep it in the viewing room.” When I didn’t move, she pointed to the door to the left of me. “I’ll let you into the room from my side.”
I ambled to the door like I knew what I was doing, and tried the knob. Locked. The clerk came in from the other side and opened it for me. Inside it was even dimmer than the rest of the library, and I had to let my eyes adjust. She led me through a second door into a tiny room muffled by black drapes. There was only a desk and a projection screen on one wall.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” she said, and left.
I admit I sweated a bit while I waited, but what more could they do to me if they found out I wasn’t supposed to be here?
She reappeared with a flat black projection device a lot like the one we had retrieved from the Priory , and a sliver of a crystal. “I need to lock you in here while you’re viewing the contents,” she said, “and I can’t permit you to leave until I verify both are back in my possession. You understand?”
“Of course,” I said. “Old hat.”
A flicker of unease crossed her face, but the truth is that if you’re confident and pretend like you know what you’re doing, most people will believe anything. She left the two things on the desk and locked the door behind her.
I had dismantled one of these recording devices before while on a retrieval, so I knew where the crystal went. I inserted the crystal and waited, but nothing happened. It took a little poking and prodding, but the thing finally snapped on. A brilliant holographic image burst from the device, nearly blinding me, as I still had my head over the lens. I sat back, and a great jowly face filled the air above the device. The head was nearly as big as the desk. I leapt back, knocking the chair over, to get some perspective.
Meet Me in the Future Page 9
