by K. Makansi
“Why thirteen and who made them?”
“We don’t know why thirteen and we don’t know who made them.” He shakes his head and looks at me with a wry smile. “There are things I know and things I think I know.”
I glare at him. Chan-Yu loves to speak in riddles. I tend to wish he would get to the point.
I pick up one of the pendants, one with an elegant black silk necklace attached, and hold it in my palm. “It’s heavy for something so small.”
“The gold is merely decorative,” Chan-Yu says. “Inside is a dense combination of biofibers and nanocircuitry containing a technology that no Outsider has been able to replicate.”
“What about someone in the Sector?” Vale asks.
“I do not believe that anyone in the Sector has knowledge of this kind of technology.”
“What kind of technology?” His voice is laced with impatience.
“I do not know.”
“What do you know, then?” Vale asks, now fully frustrated. Chan-Yu doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.
“I know this: about a hundred years ago, a group of people gathered together and started calling themselves Outsiders. In the wake of the Religious Wars that decimated the world, there were many who were afraid of any form of authority, which they believed would naturally descend into corruption and authoritarianism. There was a word for this type of thought.”
“Anarchy,” Vale prompts.
“Yes,” Chan-Yu says, nodding. “As the new world was growing, recovering, this school of thought became more prevalent. At first it was born out of fear. Fear of governance, of corruption, of a code of laws that could be used in favor of the powerful and to oppress the less powerful. But as the Outsiders grew, it became a movement of trust. In order to reject laws and government, you must trust those around you even if there are no formal laws and even if they will not be punished for harming you.
“The movement grew, and they traveled in loose bands relying on technology they could scavenge from the Old World, technology that would have minimal impact on the environment within which they were trying to survive. After about forty or fifty years, the group grew to include almost two thousand members. It was about this time that the pendants and astrolabes first surfaced. Or at least that’s when our stories first mention them.”
Chan-Yu pauses to take a sip from his canteen. A quick glance at Vale reveals that he is as enraptured as I am.
“Legend has it that there are thirteen of each because the inventor was a bit of a joker. A man—or woman, we don’t know—who loved numbers and what they signified. Instead of creating twelve of each to match the zodiac, the legend goes, he made thirteen because there are actually more than twelve months. If you employ a lunar-solar calendar, there are 12.41 lunations each solar year. Thirteen is also the first prime number that is an emirp as well.”
The last word sounds a bit like a bird chirping. “What’s an emirp?” I ask. “It sounds like half a word.”
“A prime that, when reversed, is a different prime. And,” Vale sits up straight, “there are thirteen Archimedean solids; thirteen is a centered square number, a happy number, and one of only three known Wilson primes.”
Chan-Yu doesn’t say anything for a moment, and there’s a silence while I think back to the last math class I enjoyed. It was called The Art of Mathematics, which might have been why I enjoyed it. My professor, a wiry woman with paint perpetually in her hair, instructed us on the artistic interpretations of Euclidian geometry, the golden ratio, the mathematical implications of perspective, and sacred geometry.
“Isn’t thirteen also a Fibonacci number?” I ask, adding up the numbers in my head.
“Yes,” Vale says, looking at me proudly. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen.”
“But why does any of this matter?” I am suddenly as impatient as Vale was a few moments ago. What does this have to do with anything?
Chan-Yu shrugs.
“Maybe it doesn’t. There are things I know and things I think I know. In this case, I believe that the creator of these acorns made thirteen because it is a unique number, and a bit of a non-conformist one at that. How many rooms does this house have?”
His question takes me by surprise. I think over the floorplan.
“Five bedrooms and one master bedroom. Three bathrooms. The kitchen. Living room. Basement. And if you count the root cellar,” I pause, “thirteen.”
“What are you saying?” Vale asks, his eyes narrowed, deadly focused on Chan-Yu, who, for his part, leans back in his chair with his arms crossed, contemplative.
“Do you think the acorns lead here?” I demand, leaning forward.
“Your grandfather encoded the most important discovery of his life in the shape of a flower that conforms to the Fibonacci sequence,” Chan-Yu says. “How old is this house, Remy?”
My mind is spinning.
“I don’t know,” I respond. “Sixty, seventy years …”
“When I was a child, my elders spoke of a safe place, a place travelers could always stop for a rest, a place where there would be a welcome fire and good conversation.” Chan-Yu sounds almost excited. This is the most I’ve ever heard him talk before. “They called it the ‘waystation.’ When this house was built, it was in the Wilds. Sector territory expanded to encompass it, but—”
“Are you saying my grandfather invented the pendants and astrolabes?”
“There are things I know—”
“I know!” I shout, then lower my voice again. “There are things you know and things you think you know. But why here? Why do you think it was my grandfather, of all people?”
“I stayed here once,” Chan-Yu’s voice softens. “I was on my way back into the Sector after visiting Soo-Sun in the Wilds. It was just a few weeks after your sister died, Remy,” he says, looking at me hard, as though the secret to the mystery might be inside me, and it’s all I can do to hold his gaze. “Your grandfather was already dead, and it had been months since any of his family were here. But Meera guided me here, gave me a safe place to sleep, and stayed up with me for many hours that night.”
“How did Meera know about this place?” Vale asks, as riveted as I am.
“I never asked. And I still do not know. Many Outsiders do not choose to share details of our lives with others, so often, rather than ask, we wait until information is shared willingly.”
Something in the back of my mind is jostled loose. I press my fingers to my temples.
“Meera did talk about Kanaan quite a bit. And when she suggested we could come here, she told me she’d visited occasionally just to keep all of the systems running: water, solar, electricity. Maybe Meera and my grandfather knew each other better than I thought.”
“Did you ever see the scar between her shoulder blades?” Chan-Yu asks. “It was no accident. Another Outsider etched it into her skin. An oak, broad and strong.”
I rub my hand over my head, my short hair stubbly under my fingertips and think back to the day Meera sat me in front of the mirror in her apartment and cut off my curls, then shaved my head. Hair was sticking to everything, and she’d slipped her shirt over her head and turned to throw it in a pile. There was something there, thin lines embedded in her skin that reminded me of the marks on Osprey’s arms but were somehow different—more artistic, more intentional. But I didn’t get a good look at it, and I didn’t have time to put the pieces together. Now all the pieces of the puzzle begin falling into place.
“Like the one outside this house,” I whisper.
Chan-Yu nods, holding my gaze. “My sister and I have pledged our lives to learning the secret to the communication between the acorns and the astrolabes, but thus far our efforts have been fruitless. When Osprey told me of Meera’s dying words, I began to suspect that the tree she referred to was not metaphorical but literal. I found Chariya, and together we sought out the acorns. I brought them here in the hopes that the tree Meera spoke of was the oak outside this house.”
Vale
stands up abruptly, his chair nearly tipping over. The sun glinting through the window catches his face at a vivid angle, and the growing shadow of a beard makes him look like a man to be reckoned with, a leader, a man I’d follow anywhere.
“What are we waiting for?” he asks, and turns sharply on his heel toward the kitchen door that leads out into the garden.
Chan-Yu scoops up the pile of pendants as Vale flings open the door and strides around the corner to where the old oak towers over the remnants of my grandfather’s shade garden.
We stop under the outstretched branches of the oak, arching above us like beams in an ancient cathedral. Vale stares up at the branches, and Chan-Yu holds the tangled pendants out in front of him like a talisman.
“Meera was a Wayfarer,” Chan-Yu says finally. “But not like the other Wayfarers. She had the markings, though hers were scars, not tattoos. She didn’t guide the lost to their destinations. She worked in the Sector, not in the Wilds.”
“She found me when I was lost,” I protest. I turn to Vale. “She and Snake guided me to you, or at least helped me find where you were. She led me to Bunqu. And she kept me safe.” A sharp pain slices through me, the bitter sting of an unfinished friendship biting behind my eyes.
“Maybe her purpose was to lead us here,” Vale says. “Is there something special about this tree?” He narrows his eyes and stares off in the distance. It looks like he’s trying to remember something from a fading dream.
“Not really,” I say with a shrug. “It’s not that large for an oak. It’s not very old. There’s nothing unique about it.”
“It’s a live oak,” Chan-Yu observes, running his fingertips along some of the smaller leaves, a dark green color, and crisp, unlike the wide, fleshy ones of most oaks in these parts. “Live oaks are rare here. Until Old World climate change shifted weather patterns, it was almost impossible for them to survive this far north.”
In contrast to Chan-Yu’s measured rationality, Vale is behaving oddly. He cocks his head to one side and sniffs the air like a dog that’s caught a scent. He puts his fingers to the trunk of the tree and starts muttering to himself.
“It’s too faint.” His voice is low, urgent. “At the very edge of my perception. There’s something … if I wasn’t thinking about it, if I wasn’t open to it, I’d probably ignore it. Do you feel it?” He whirls toward us. I shake my head no, and Vale turns back to the tree.
“Vale?” I draw out my words, watching him with concern. “Are you okay?” He ignores me.
“It’s there. Definitely there. A hum. A vibration. Like a tuning fork.” He presses his palms into the tree trunk, and a moment later, presses his whole body into the tree. “It’s vibrating,” he whispers.
I stare at him, unsure what to do or how to react. I glance at Chan-Yu, seeking some reassurance that the man I love is in fact acting crazy and I’m not crazy for thinking he’s crazy. But Chan-Yu is watching Vale with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. He doesn’t look the slightest bit worried. Then, to my great surprise, Vale bends over and starts unlacing his boots.
“What are you doing?” I ask, a hint of panic now bleeding into my voice. Vale kicks off his boots and then rips off his socks. He tosses them to the side and digs his toes into the dirt. He stands, unmoving, for a moment, then walks a few paces away, comes back to us, and then puts his hands on his hips and looks at us with none of the makings of a madman.
“I’m sure of it.” He looks from Chan-Yu to me and back to Chan-Yu. “The earth is vibrating. But even that isn’t quite the right word. I can’t explain it. It’s like how you know an instrument is tuned correctly. A piano or a guitar. There’s nothing about it you can see, or feel, or even hear necessarily. One single note is just as good as any other, but when the instrument is tuned, when the strings vibrate just so and the frequency of the sound waves are in sync, all the notes work together, building on each other in precise mathematical intervals. It just feels right.” Vale pauses for a minute, staring at the ground, lost in thought. Chan-Yu watches him in silence. For my part, I’m starting to feel what Vale was talking about. Something on the edge of my perception. But it’s not something I’m sensing. It’s the feeling that we’re on the edge of a discovery. Like climbing astride Osprey’s oiseau, it feels like I’m in neutral, with my engine revving, waiting to shift into gear. My heart hammers against my ribcage as I close my eyes and try to let myself feel what Vale described. Then he breaks the silence.
“This is going to sound wild, but I think the pendants are communicating with the roots of this tree. Maybe that’s how the technology works. The pendants and the astrolabes communicate through the soil, through the roots of the plants nearby.”
Chan-Yu nods.
“We have long known that the forests communicate in ways we cannot understand and cannot touch,” he says, and by we I understand that he doesn’t mean anyone in the Sector. “We know they communicate through their roots, through an intricate network of fungi so dense and complicated we do not have the tools to model or understand it. We know better than most others what the trees mean to say, but we cannot understand or speak with them. Yet.”
“What if someone figured it out?” I ask. “And replicated that signaling in these pendants and astrolabes?”
“It is possible,” Chan-Yu says. Then he turns abruptly and starts walking away. He is almost back to the house while Vale and I watch him in confused silence. Then he turns around and calls to us, “Can you feel it now?”
Vale pauses, stands perfectly still for a moment, and then tilts his head to the side and furrows his brow as if listening to something faint. After a moment, he calls back.
“No.”
Chan-Yu smiles triumphantly and marches back toward us, the pendants held out in front of him. He returns to Vale’s side. “And now?”
Vale closes his eyes and cocks his head again. His voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”
The gears shift, the engine roars, and I feel as though I am launched forward. Goosebumps prickle to attention on my skin. “This is right over granddad’s root cellar.”
Vale stares at me, confused.
“This is right over the root cellar,” I repeat. Then it clicks for him, too. He takes off in a sprint toward the house, his socks and shoes forgotten behind him. I follow, and can feel more than hear Chan-Yu’s quiet strides behind me. At the side of the house, where a host of vines and shrubs have overtaken the old entrance to the basement, Vale rips the cellar door open, almost pulling the doors off their hinges in his hurry to get inside. It’s pitch dark but for the glimmer of pale morning light shining down the stairwell. There are rows upon rows of shelves filled with canvas bags of decomposing grains, jars of canned and pickled food, bottles of homebrewed barley beer, wine, mead, kombucha. This was my grandfather’s overflow cellar, where he stored food in case of emergency. Like so many of his generation who had been touched by the Famine Years, he hoarded food, stored it obsessively, kept this cellar packed to the brim even in the heart of summer when food was as plentiful as sunlight.
As a child I was terrified of my grandfather’s cellar. He would send me down here occasionally to collect things for whatever meal he was preparing—canned beans, dried grains, jars of sauces. I would walk downstairs trembling, talking myself through every step: there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here. Once at the bottom I would grab whatever jar he’d asked for and bolt back upstairs as fast as I could, taking the steps two at a time, leaping back outside as though I’d just narrowly escaped a closing portal to Hell.
“Nothing down there but jars and garden tools,” my grandfather would say as I emerged back into the kitchen, flushed with fear and panting, his voice lilting with laughter.
I touch my fingers to where I remember there being a biolight activator, but when I hit the small glass panel, nothing happens.
“The power must be out down here,” I mutter. Fighting for the Resistance has cured me of my fear of darkness, but without
infrared contacts, I see no better than I could as a child. Vale doesn’t seem to hear me. I squint, trying to see through the darkness, but Vale keeps moving confidently forward, as if it were as bright down here as it is outside. He heads toward a dim corner of the cellar, far from the bright entrance. I don’t know why, but he seems to know, somehow, where to go, and is undaunted by the lack of light.
Is he able to feel these ‘vibrations’ because of what Corine did to him? Is that why he can see so well down in the dark? Why he can sense things not even Chan-Yu can?
Vale prowls forward through the corridor, which smells wet and moldy like any old root cellar would. But there’s a richness here, too. It almost smells fresh, like mint or lemon.
“Something’s growing down here,” I say.
“Mmm,” Chan-Yu agrees behind me, sniffing the air.
Vale stops suddenly and turns.
“Give me the pendants.” Chan-Yu hands them over without a word of protest. Holding the pendants outstretched in his palm like an offering to one of the old gods, Vale walks toward the darkest end of the cavern. Chan-Yu and I follow closely. We’re expectant, quiet, holding our breath for something to happen.
But nothing does.
“What now?” My voice is so quiet, I wonder if anyone heard me. The feeling of being on the edge hasn’t gone away. We’re almost there.
Chan-Yu reaches past me to take one of the golden acorns from Vale’s hand. Without a word, he turns it upside down and uses his fingernail to flip the beacon switch. And then, with a whispering swoosh, a wall at end of the cellar slides away, and I am suddenly blinded by a bright light from beyond. I throw an arm up to shield my eyes.
“By all that’s green and growing,” Vale whispers. I lower my arm, squint into the light, and find his hand waiting for mine. “What is this?”
I walk forward, Vale at my side. The air is full of jasmine, citrus, and wet stone. I breathe in deeply. There are steps leading down to a lower level, the cellar dug deeper, I suppose, to make the ceiling higher. As we emerge into a wide, open space, with white walls on all sides and an incredible wealth of greenery, a multitude of plants are arranged carefully in rows and alleys as diverse and varied as the plants in Rhinehouse’s old lab at the Thermopylae base. Even though my eyes have adjusted to the light, my brain refuses to adjust to the reality of what I’m experiencing.
