Book of Fire

by Michelle Kenney

  The Myth Code? Wasn’t that what August said Octavia wanted? Was this about the Voynich?

  Aelia’s face contorted with annoyance, as though he had struck a nerve.

  ‘How do we know we can trust her?’ she complained, twisting her head in August’s direction. ‘She’s not interested in helping the PFF take down a dangerous Biotechnological Programme. As soon as she finds a way to rescue her family, she’ll abandon us without so much as a backward glance! And you want to tell her about the code?’

  My ears pricked, this was a chance. Reluctantly, I threw one last black scowl at Aelia, before releasing her wrists and standing up. She was up in a trice and rubbing her hands.

  It didn’t matter. It was time to roll the dice. I forced myself to turn and walk away from her before taking the biggest gamble of my life.

  ‘But if it’s the Book of Arafel you’re interested in … I can tell you it’s real because I’ve seen it.’

  The words hung baldly on the air, and any guilt I felt about admitting its existence was immediately outweighed by the expressions on both their faces. It was clearly the very last thing they expected me to say. Aelia recovered herself first, and rushed to the cave entrance to pull the old woven tapestry across, before returning and grabbing my arm.

  She pulled me towards the back of the cave and drew aside another dusty, woven tapestry, revealing a tiny snug comprising a couple of old cushions and a pile of antiquated books. Indicating I should sit, she left me alone in the small, dark grotto. Moments later she reappeared supporting August. A protest rose to my lips, but made no further progress when I caught the look of pure excitement on his face. I thought fast. I needed to make this convincing, without compromising Arafel.

  When we were all crammed into the tiny space she pulled the blanket back across and tugged at a medium-sized rock, which looked to me like part of the cave wall. I watched in amazement as she rolled it to one side and reached into the recess behind, pulling out a thick, yellow-edged book. A host of tiny butterflies fluttered against my stomach wall. It looked uncannily like Thomas’s research inside the Book of Arafel.

  She turned the manuscript around and held it up for me to read the front page:

  ‘Classified: PAN31AVoy 5th October 2023. Author: Thomas Hanway.’

  I felt the blood drain from my face. This was the missing half of the research document hidden inside the Book of Arafel, torn into two pieces just before Thomas escaped to the forest.

  ‘It’s some of the original Government research into Il Codice Mito, or the Myth Code’ she whispered, her eyes glittering. ‘Anyone found with this stuff earns themselves a fast track to the Flavium.’

  I had no idea what the Flavium was and didn’t ask. My growing knowledge of Pantheon told me it wasn’t likely to be anything remotely inviting.

  ‘Il Codice Mito,’ I whispered, recalling August’s words. ‘The cipher that unravels the Voynich Manuscript?’

  She nodded, her eyes glittering with excitement. ‘Yes, the medieval contents have eluded the world’s best cryptographers and scientists for centuries, much to Octavia’s frustration. The original manuscript is more than two hundred pages long, and handwritten in a language no one has ever been able to decode.’

  ‘And Il Codice Mito, the cipher, would help Octavia decrypt the Voynich?’ I asked with a frown.

  Aelia nodded. ‘In theory, yes. Although the nonsense lettering seems to make it impossible to translate – cipher or no cipher. I’ve done some work on the patterns within the text, and although there are similarities to other Renaissance languages, the distribution of lettering is confusing.’

  Her voice tailed off as she stared at Thomas’s yellowed research pages. I watched her intently, and warning bells resounded in my head. It seemed the whole world wanted the answer to the Voynich riddle.

  ‘What?’ I asked breathlessly, feeling my pulse begin to race. ‘What does it mean? What secret does she think the Voynich holds?’

  Aelia looked at me sharply, her eyes narrowed like a hunting cat’s.

  ‘Firstly, you tell me what you know about the Book of Arafel,’ she returned swiftly. ‘You say you’ve seen it … Where? Where is it now?’

  I drew a silent breath, recalling Grandpa’s trusting face, and imagining his horror if he was here now. But I needed their trust. And a bait.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen it,’ I answered with a deep breath, ‘but that doesn’t mean I know where it is now. I believe my grandfather destroyed it as he said.’

  I frowned at the research document, while Aelia and August exchanged glances.

  ‘Thomas and Octavia were part of the lead scientific team in the Lifedome before the outbreak of the Great War,’ August offered encouragingly. His smooth brow was unusually furrowed, and I was aware of his careful scrutiny. ‘They were both working on the Voynich under the instruction of the Government, and making serious advances. Then Thomas discovered something that made him run for the hills, taking the research with him. Many believe he worked out the original cipher to crack the Voynich. Over time it has become known as Il Codice Mito.’

  My head was in turmoil, trying desperately to picture Thomas’s tightly scrawled pages inside the Book of Arafel. Were any of his faint notes the cipher Octavia was searching for?

  ‘Thomas had access to entire museum collections, and decrypting the Voynich became an obsession for Octavia. The Great War destroyed faith in the modern world, and she was an ambitious Government scientist who believed the manuscript held valuable information about the secret to a successful civilization,’ August continued. ‘Then Thomas traced its creation to an unknown writer in the Italian Renaissance period. Theories about its purpose have always been plentiful, but Thomas and Octavia became convinced by just one – because of a few isolated words found buried in the manuscript.’

  ‘What were they?’ I prompted.

  ‘We were hoping you could help with that,’ Aelia challenged tersely, ‘but of equal significance was their language. They were written in clear Latin.’

  Suddenly, Octavia’s obsession with all things Roman became clear.

  ‘It became obvious then the Voynich was a medieval scientific document concerning the Roman period,’ she added, her voice calm, but her olive skin flushed.

  I looked at my fingers, interlaced to hide the shaking. I crossed two for added luck.

  ‘I never had a chance to read any of the Book of Arafel or Thomas’s research,’ I stated. ‘I only glimpsed it once when I was a child.’

  ‘Octavia will find that hard to believe,’ August whispered, his voice barely reaching above the sound of our breathing in the cramped space.

  ‘But … why would an entire scientific team be so interested in a medieval manuscript?’ I pushed, aware of his close scrutiny. ‘What possible interest could an old book hold for a technological civilization?’

  Aelia threw August a dark look and he hesitated. I looked from one to the other. It was all teetering on the edge of a knife.

  ‘Grandpa always said Thomas was working on the human genome …’ I paused dramatically.

  ‘Sink or swim, Talia,’ my father encouraged from the depths of my memory as though I was measuring up a tree jump. Images of the Sweepers ripping up forest life, the animals cooped up in the laboratories, the cage of capuchins, Brutus and the endless array of genetic beasts living and breathing behind every thick door in Pantheon, raced through my head, while beneath it all Grandpa’s whisper echoed like a distant drum: ‘Our beginning is hidden in these pages somewhere.’

  ‘Does the Voynich contain some sort of early genetic information?’

  It was the lightest of whispers, the most insane of notions, but one look at Aelia’s and August’s faces was enough to tell me I’d just stumbled upon the crazy truth.

  August was the first to respond, his face more serious than I’d ever known it. ‘Thomas and Octavia were specialists in biotechnology and genetic engineering,’ he confirmed intently, ‘and given all the drawings, the Vo
ynich was believed to be some kind of medieval record of the natural world. It was only when some of the drawings were re-analysed that its real subject matter was finally understood.’

  ‘Beasts of Myths and Legends,’ I responded in disbelief, feeling the colour slowly drain from my skin.

  Suddenly, everything crystallized into sharp, overwhelming focus. Grandpa’s cryptic references; his teaching and encouragement of my passion for ancient myths and legends; and his insistence that the Book of Arafel was protected with my life.

  ‘Yes,’ Aelia replied matter-of-factly, ‘but without the blueprint the genetics are weak – usually a gene cancer or morphing of some kind.’

  ‘But … they don’t … shouldn’t exist!’ I protested fiercely, picturing the dehumanized manticore rearing furiously on its tiger haunches. ‘Such creatures are only supposed to live within the confines of books. They’re monsters of imagination, not reality! How is it even possible?!’

  I scowled, my head refusing to compute the idea that a medieval document could be some sort of blueprint for creatures that never formally existed. Was I becoming as crazy as them by listening? And yet, it all made perfect, terrifying sense: Thomas’s disappearance, Octavia’s hunt for Arafel, Isca Pantheon’s Roman obsession. If true, the Voynich could change the face of the world, and Thomas’s research was the spark needed to combust every secret it held.

  August read my confusion with a tight smile.

  ‘How? How could a Renaissance writer know more about genetics than scientists in the twenty-second century?’ I reasoned, trying not to sound wholly sceptical. ‘DNA wasn’t even a thing back then!’

  Aelia scowled at me, and took a moment to peek out around the tatty tapestry. ‘How is this helping? She knows nothing!’ she hissed at August as though I wasn’t sitting there.

  There was a pregnant silence before August turned his head back to me. ‘Perhaps,’ he muttered.

  ‘The Voynich is believed to hold the key to the origin of mythological creatures.’ He opened the cave-dusted yellow book at a specific page and turned it round so I could see. The pages were covered in a densely annotated drawing, torn down the middle. Part of the page was missing, but there was enough of the drawing to spark a memory. I tried to rein in my racing pulse. I’d definitely seen something similar elsewhere. Was it in Thomas’s half of the research notes?

  Aelia scowled and drummed her fingers against the stone floor.

  ‘This diagram is part of a Vigenère cipher, a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of different Caesar ciphers, based on the letters of a keyword,’ August explained. ‘An ordinary Vigenère cipher was originally discounted for being too simple, but these pages, annotated by Thomas, seem to suggest that he discovered the missing factor that makes the cipher work.

  ‘That’s enough, August!’ Aelia interrupted, glaring at us both. She reached forward and closed the text so a small billow of dust rose up from the pages.

  August frowned.

  ‘If it had been a classic alphabet shift cipher we’d have cracked it by now,’ Aelia snapped, ‘but as we only have part of Thomas’s cipher – and clearly you know nothing more about the Book your own grandfather has been protecting for most of his life …’

  I shook my head in apology.

  ‘… then we’ve been wasting each other’s time!’

  Aelia’s voice was caustic as she climbed to her feet; her confidence was at an end.

  I racked my brains. ‘Grandpa said,’ I offered with difficulty as his pallid face swam before my eyes, ‘that our beginning was hidden in Thomas’s research somewhere – ours and every other creature that walks this earth …

  Aelia frowned.

  ‘But how can it even be possible when such creatures didn’t even exist the first time around?’

  ‘Does Unus exist? Does the manticore exist?’ August responded excitedly. ‘The passage of time can blur history. Creatures of myth and legend were key to the Roman’s Empire’s success, to conquering other nations and instilling fear and obedience. They were the reason the Roman Empire became one of the most successful civilizations our world has ever known. And it’s a world Octavia has been determined to emulate since the Great War.’

  ‘So mythical creatures really lived?’ I answered, feeling as though I had entered a parallel universe. And for the first time I felt the full weight of Thomas’s discovery. It was the key to spark a fire. A Book of Fire.

  A glimmer of a smile illuminated Aelia’s eyes. She nodded once, briefly. ‘And somewhere out there is their real DNA.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  A deafening alarm pierced the air. I sat bolt upright in the cramped space, and bumped my head against the cold rocky wall. Indignantly, I rubbed the tender spot as Aelia frowned and pushed the precious research back into its hiding place.

  ‘Cocoa time!’ she scathed, before disappearing through the curtain. Ten seconds later, I peeked through after her, minutely aware of August’s warm skin next to mine. An imperious voice shouted from far below us, and a small grubby wall box I’d not noticed before started glowing next to the cave entrance.

  ‘Twelfth tier, access your work upload immediately!’

  ‘Crap, where’s it gone?’ Aelia’s voice was laced with unusual anxiety as she rummaged through items on a small table in the corner of the room.

  There was more shouting from outside.

  ‘Twelfth tier, access your upload immediately.’

  Aelia pounced on a semi-circular-shaped box with a sigh of relief, and pointed it at the glowing box. It bleeped three times and fell silent. The shouting below stopped simultaneously.

  ‘Shove your rotas up your enhanced ass!’ she called furiously.

  I couldn’t help smiling. Aelia had one gear for everything including work.

  It was only when I dropped the curtain that I realized I was also being scrutinised. For a moment August and I regarded each other in silence, then briefly, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, he reached out and brushed his thumb lightly across my lips. It was a simple gesture that stole any words.

  ‘Inscrutable,’ he whispered, letting his fingers drift lightly across my left cheekbone.

  The heat of my embarrassment threatened to spread outwards and enflame my whole face, but I couldn’t will my limbs to move a millimetre.

  ‘Tell me,’ he continued, ‘how does a feral girl who has seen nothing and been nowhere hold the whole damned world in her eyes?’

  It was the first time I’d seen his eyes unguarded. He looked so much younger – and oddly vulnerable.

  ‘You make me feel almost … free.’ He caught his breath, before darting a quick look at the curtain. ‘I … just can’t… stop myself.’

  There was a brief moment when his face swam before my eyes, and then his warm lips pressed down on mine, sending rebellious delight coursing through every shorting nerve. Blood pounded in my temples, making me feel as though I’d just dropped into the frothing rapids of Arafel’s highest waterfall.

  First the tunnel, then Max, and now … here? But this was different, this time I didn’t want it to stop.

  My heart thumped like a new roe deer, and yet I couldn’t pull away. My limbs didn’t feel my own any more. My hands slipped up behind the nape of his neck, and just as I was beginning to lose all sense of time and place, Aelia pulled the curtain aside.

  I was released instantly, but not before an ugly black scowl twisted Aelia’s face. I turned away, trembling. What in the name of Arafel was I thinking? I didn’t want to get close to anyone in this warped world, least of all someone I didn’t trust, and who had history with someone like Aelia.

  I avoided August’s searching gaze as low voices filtered through from the front of the cave. Then a familiar, teasing chuckle rose above the rest, and air rushed into my lungs. Max! I was on my feet in the blink of an eye.

  A second later, I was sprinting across to the front of the cave and throwing myself at his rugged figure.


  ‘Max! I was so worried about you!’ I scolded, dragging him into Aelia’s limited candlelight so I could survey any damage. ‘Eli? Grandpa?’ I added eagerly. His response was a tight smile and a fierce hug. I swallowed back my bitter disappointment – well Max was a start.

  ‘Knew you’d make it, soldier!’ Aelia quipped beside me. I was goaded. Soldier?

  ‘What happened? Are you sure you’re not hurt? What happened to Cassius and Octavia?’ I rattled.

  A chuckle escaped him, as I caught sight of a yellow-stained bandage, protruding beneath the hem of his ripped cotton trousers. My eyes flew to his.

  ‘Hey, that’s old,’ he reassured me. ‘Aelia sorted that for me; didn’t you, Lia?’

  He threw her a friendly smile, which she acknowledged coolly. I recalled Max’s kiss in the laboratories, and allowed myself a tiny moment of satisfaction before realizing Max was grinning down at me, clearly reliving the moment too.

  ‘Octavia?’ I prompted, feeling my disloyal cheeks flush.

  ‘If you’re going to talk, move to the snug,’ Aelia instructed.

  August looked less than willing to share our cosy den, and Max clearly reciprocated the feeling. I ignored them both as I pushed him forwards. I needed to understand exactly what had happened, and whether he’d seen Eli and Grandpa again. So much time had passed already.

  Swiftly, Max regaled us with a full account of his adventure, and it turned out Brutus had been more of an ally than any of us had expected. Several of the free molossers had joined in the pandemonium of chasing my little apricot monkey, giving Max long enough to ‘make Cassius sorry’.

  ‘So, how did you get out? Did you see Grandpa and Eli again? What about the other guards?’

  I had guards on my tail so couldn’t go back to the ward,’ he confessed, ‘but I did get to use the other exit.’

  I wrinkled my brow, trying to recall the domed space. A second exit had to be very well concealed.

  ‘Where? How did you find it?’

  Max looked a little sheepish.

  ‘Tell me,’ I threatened.

  He shrugged finally. ‘The incineration chute.’