Book of Fire

by Michelle Kenney

  ‘You went outside?’ I asked incredulously.

  He nodded. ‘And the top floor is completely transparent.’

  ‘What was the outer surface like? Was it hard to grip?’ August interjected, leaning forward.

  ‘A little, but not enough to stop me climbing down the incline to the last dome. From there it was only a matter of accessing one of the laundry chutes, which after a pretty bumpy ride, brought me right back to Prolet-fel! The satyrs were pretty taken aback to discover an Outsider among the bedsheets of Pantheon’s elite, but I must have smelled sweet enough because they let me go after a little bit of help with a sticking laundry wheel. Easy!’

  There was a short silence as we digested the full impact of Max’s account.

  Then I threw my arms around him fiercely.

  ***

  August insisted we all sleep until morning roll call. In the Prolet world that was 4.30 a.m. and it was already gone 1 a.m. Somehow I’d lost three days in this place, although it felt like far longer.

  ‘You won’t make it out of the pit if you try tonight, the exits are watched. Pantheonites guard their workforce carefully.’

  Sleep was impossible, even after sharing out Aelia’s meagre supper of rye bread and cheese. I took care to bed down next to Max, but the soothing sound of his steady breathing did little to calm my racing brain.

  Were Grandpa and Eli still in the laboratory? Had Octavia moved them now or worse? How did the Voynich cipher work, and why was she so obsessed with deciphering it? Was the mythological creature blueprint lunacy at its worst, or was she really onto something?

  And then there was Mum, Arafel, and everyone else. What would become of them all if I failed to stop Octavia in her hunt for Thomas’s book? Would I ever see our treehouse home again? Our treehouse? I froze.

  Numbly, I pictured our forest home in all its natural beauty. But it wasn’t the tree I was visualizing; it was the living room or, more specifically, the floor of the living room. It was the place where Thomas had so carefully drawn out his vision for Arafel, or so we’d thought. A wave of excitement swept through me and I rolled over to face Max’s sleeping profile.

  ‘The floor, Max, the floor!’ I gripped his warm forearm tightly, and hoped the others had sunk into a deep sleep.

  Max rolled over to face me, his forest eyes open, and at once I knew he hadn’t been sleeping at all. I stared into his open face and felt more homesick than any other time since arriving in this domed hellhole.

  ‘I never said thank you,’ I whispered, ‘for leading them away, for giving me a chance to find Grandpa and Eli.’

  He grinned lopsidedly. ‘I’m used to giving you a chance.’ He winked, reaching out with his free hand to push a strand of my hair from my face.

  ‘Max.’ I smiled and pulled his hand away gently. His lips parted as though he might say something, but right now I just needed my old friend.

  ‘You remember the floor of our treehouse where Thomas drew out the map of Arafel?’ I pressed on swiftly. ‘The one I’ve coloured and painted for as long as I can remember?’

  He nodded, frowning.

  ‘It wasn’t a map; it’s the Voynich cipher!’ I continued in a rush. ‘I recognize the shapes from Aelia’s torn research book. Thomas drew it out right beneath our noses and left it there for us to walk on every day. He knew we wouldn’t realise what it was, until we needed it.

  ‘Can you remember it? All of it?’ he asked in slow wonder.

  ‘I can do better than that! I’ve painted it so many times I could draw it out from memory.’

  He nodded, his eyes shining. I’d taken a few minutes to bring him up to date on what August and Aelia had told me about the Voynich, although I hadn’t told him the Book of Arafel actually contained Thomas’s secret research. I’d made a promise, and I was determined to keep it if I could.

  ‘Tomorrow we save your family,’ Max promised, squeezing my hand, ‘and then we save Arafel.’

  I closed my eyes in exhaustion, too tired to notice that across the floor, August was watching.

  Barely two hours later, Aelia shook us awake and pushed another ration of rye bread and cheese in our hands. We washed it down with ice-cold water, and I longed for the warm porridge my mother prepared for Eli and I before we set off for a day’s work. She’d sweeten it with cinnamon sticks she dried high above the fire, another newcomer that had set up home in our warmer climate. Gritting my teeth, I buried the memory.

  Max had gained a perfect bird’s eye view of the top floors of the three domes, thanks to his brief outside adventure. Although it had been dark, he’d located a particularly interesting and well-guarded suite of rooms containing media equipment and a full library.

  ‘Octavia’s suite,’ confirmed August in a low voice. ‘Only the most senior Pantheonites are admitted. Octavia keeps a personal record of all her research, hence the library. In addition, there is an isolation unit for observation of her current project. If she’s doubled her guards, she’s likely moved your family there after the incident in the laboratory. The suite is impenetrable unless you have a pass, and the observation room is reinforced.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked August.

  ‘I’ve carried out observations there myself,’ came the blunt response.

  I returned his stare. I was no further forward in knowing where his real loyalties lay. His whole world was Pantheon, and by siding with us and the Prolets he was signing his own death warrant. Why would someone so senior and involved switch allegiances so completely unless … I looked from him to Aelia, my eyes narrowing. Could they have been? Still be …? August’s gaze followed my own, and a glimmer of a smile appeared on his olive face.

  ‘Perceptive little feral cat,’ he whispered. I didn’t respond.

  Aelia suggested we made our exit on the tram vehicles that transported most of the Prolets directly to Pantheon’s holding bays, production lines, and mining sites. As she talked, my mind was whirling with a thousand unasked questions.

  Where had she met August? How had she persuaded him to her cause? A flush stole across my cheeks as his kiss in the snug suddenly materialized in my head. Had they kissed there too?! I pushed the image back down hastily, but not before August noticed.

  But if August was with Aelia, it had to make him more loyal to the rebel cause.

  It was reason enough and so I did what I’d been longing to do since the early hours: I asked for a piece of paper. Aelia fetched a well-used piece of notepaper, which I turned over, and everyone watched in silence as I carefully drew the cipher Thomas had drawn out on our treehouse floor. Now I knew what a Caesar code was supposed to do, it made better sense to me. The strange, faded interconnected shapes weren’t meant to represent buildings in Arafel at all; they were part of his Voynich cipher.

  Recalling most of the lettering was straightforward as it was the alphabet shifted by a place of one, a common Vigenère cipher. However, as Aelia had suspected, Thomas had included an extra line of what appeared to be rogue, unknown symbols directly through the diagonal of the square maze.

  Remembering each exact shape was hard, but the many happy hours I’d spent tracing and re-tracing them in root and berry inks were ingrained in my memory. Finally, after much thought and plenty of crossing out, I had the closest thing to a complete Voynich cipher anyone had seen for centuries.

  A wave of excitement rose within me as I lay it flat on Aelia’s small, rough table. I’d wrestled with the idea of sharing my recollection, but I knew the cipher would be useless to them without the keyword, and I needed their knowledge of genetic symbology more.

  Aelia was the first to speak after studying the extra diagonal line of symbology running through the square.

  ‘It looks like a line of Roman symbology,’ she offered in wonder, ‘but it’s like nothing I’ve seen before.’

  ‘I have,’ August added quietly. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s coding from an ancient genetic alphabet. Octavia has a translation in her suite.’

 
; There was silence as we turned to look at him, while Max regarded him with barely concealed suspicion.

  ‘So each of these symbols corresponds with a genetic code?’ I asked slowly. ‘But how can that be possible? The Voynich is a medieval document.’

  ‘Our medieval ancestors knew nothing about today’s ATCG bases, but they were aware there were tiny building blocks of life that determined characteristics, and to these they attributed symbols,’ Aelia clarified, not taking her eyes from my copy of Thomas’s cipher.

  ‘It’s incredible, but if each of these symbols can be made to match a codon or group of three bases, and we locate the keyword to operate the cipher, we may just be able to read the Voynich.’

  There was a moment’s silence as we all wrestled with Aelia’s theory.

  ‘So all we need to do is break into Octavia’s suite, rescue Tal’s grandfather, snatch the ancient genetic code, translate these symbols, substitute them into Thomas’s cipher, and then find the keyword to operate the cipher that will translate an ancient manuscript that has baffled scientists for centuries,’ Max offered with a wry smile.

  A chuckle broke out across the group, instantly dissolving any tension.

  ‘Exactly,’ August agreed, ‘not forgetting hijack the guards, free the laboratory specimens, and living happily ever after in your utopian village.’

  Aelia raised an eyebrow. ‘Jeeez, Aug, if I didn’t know you as an upstanding member of Octavia’s Equite elite, I’d say you’d dodged your genetic upload.’

  There was more laughter.

  ‘Yet there’s still one element of the cipher missing,’ she added, looking at me with more respect than she ever had before. ‘We’ve still to locate the keyword necessary to operate it. Any more memories, Talia?’

  I shook my head emphatically. The keyword could be any combination of letters of any length; I hadn’t seen it but I’d gamble my life I knew where to find it: the Book of Arafel.

  I let out a quiet, deep breath. I hadn’t told anyone about Thomas’s research lying underneath Jas’s bed at home, and that was the way I was planning for it to stay.

  ‘It’s 5.15. Gates open at 5.30 a.m. It’s time we moved.’

  Aelia’s curt instruction sent nerves haring through my body. It was time. We assembled quietly and joined the throng of people descending the rough wooden walkways under the watchful eyes of thin Prolet guards. We’d agreed to integrate as much as possible to lessen the chance of discovery, and I didn’t let myself think about the consequences if any of us were discovered. As we moved down the steps I began to breathe more easily. The Prolets were such a strange and diverse population; our differences were less noticeable.

  The tram vehicles were located at a different exit to the pedestrian tunnels. I’d seen pictures of such vehicles in Grandpa’s old books, but the ones in the Prolet underworld were rusted metal and wooden contraptions pulled by tough cables.

  We all managed to squeeze on the second and third platform, and I found myself sandwiched between a thin, wheezing woman and a small girl carrying a flame-red monkey, which chattered incessantly. August was also on my tram carriage, which was crammed to bursting with men, women, children, and genetically engineered creatures of all shapes and designs. The sight was oddly mesmerizing.

  He caught my gaze across the crowded wooden tram, his height making him more noticeable than anyone else; though he had borrowed one of Aelia’s long cloaks, and was doing his best to slouch. He claimed his wound no longer pained him but his colour suggested otherwise. Briefly I wondered how he felt at re-entering Pantheon, and whether he was afraid. His expression gave nothing away.

  I closed my eyes to offer a silent prayer; then there was a hard jolt and the old rusted wheels screamed into life. I couldn’t see very far into the gloom, but an echoing shriek and the sound of large claws scraping the cold, hard floor a few metres ahead said all we needed to know. A shiver passed down my spine as I recalled Aelia’s warning.

  ‘The giant strix are the watchdog of the underworld, designed to keep our worlds separate unless Octavia chooses otherwise,’ she’d warned over our meagre supper. ‘It’s also flesh-eating and will devour anything that gets in its path except for, rather luckily for us, Cyclops.’

  ‘So Unus is the only one who can pass through the tunnels without protection?’ I’d asked.

  ‘Safely? Yes,’ she answered, ‘unless you fancy running the gauntlet of giant, flesh-eating mythical birds.’

  I breathed in my last few breaths of fresh air as I recalled our conversation, leaving behind the safety of the Prolet world. My last glimpse as we pulled way from the cavern was of the old Roman tunnel at the back, with the satyrs standing guard.

  The suffocating, putrid air of the tunnels hit me instantly, and I clamped my mouth closed. Unus’s thick heavy figure plodded ahead of the trams and I wondered at his life, walking these tunnels so many times a day. What was the point of such a life, created for one madwoman’s crusade and then discarded in this deviant underworld? The forest had never seemed so pure and sweet by comparison.

  The dank tunnel walls rattled by, illuminated only by the trams’ sickly yellow lights, which were barely sufficient to cover the platforms. In the darkness I made out the shadowed recesses of several crossroads.

  ‘Arms in!’ barked a Prolet guard, as a short woman on the first carriage screamed and surged against her companions, her rough tunic arm quickly staining dark red. It looked as though the strix weren’t afraid of trying their chances. I pressed inwards. I had no desire to become giant-bird food.

  The journey through the maze of damp tunnels seemed to take for ever. We were crossing directly underneath the vast domes, and heading straight towards the heart of Isca Pantheon, the city’s civic centre. I tried to draw comfort from the low voices around me as I ran through the plan in my head one more time.

  If I had to, I could use Thomas’s cipher as a bargaining tool with Octavia, but only after I had destroyed his research for good. The last part was my idea alone. I knew Aelia and August would never agree to my destroying Thomas’s lifework; both were dedicated scientists and the secrets of the Voynich seemed too much to resist for anyone in here. As for Max, the less he knew about the whole thing the better. This was my decision alone, for the safety of my family and for Arafel. But first, I had to rescue Grandpa and Eli.

  At long last, a glimmer of light pierced the murky gloom ahead, and I exhaled in relief. I couldn’t exit these tunnels too soon. I stiffened as a strong hand grasped my shoulder and adrenaline doused my veins. Had I been spotted? Was it one of the guards?

  ‘Stay close,’ August warned, before merging back into the crowd.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The bright light spilling into the Pantheon’s central square was almost blinding, although I could tell instantly it wasn’t natural. As we disembarked from the trams with the workers, it occurred to me that I’d spent the best part of two days away from daylight – and it had been quietly suffocating. We were surrounded by grand, imposing Romanesque-style buildings, but it was only when I looked skywards that my breath deserted me entirely.

  The Arafel Elders had said there was a roof like the sky at the top, but that didn’t do justice to the extent of Octavia’s insanity. Beyond the haga nests, there were dozens of smaller coloured circles disappearing into the pale blue expanse. It felt as though we were looking out on an entire galaxy of stars and planets, and that Pantheon was the centre of them all. It was the most elaborate work of deceptive art I’d ever seen; and the sight was as spellbinding as it was terrifying.

  Not content with playing with the inhabitants’ DNA, Octavia was also engineering Pantheon’s view of the outside world. As I stared, one of the planetary balls suddenly whirred and descended from the sky at breakneck speed. There was a general murmur of acknowledgement as the large ball came to rest about twenty metres above us, and both Pantheonites and Prolets stepped back expectantly.

  There were a few quiet clicks and then the entire b
all rolled over, revealing a flattened, rectangular edge, which suddenly flooded with light. Seconds later, the dome’s central white square burst into life with an image so real I felt I could reach out and touch it.

  The five-metre-high full-colour picture of the city in ruins after the Great War hung momentarily upon the air, the white floor disappearing into heaps of rubble and dusty concrete. After a few seconds, it flickered and disappeared before another came up. This time it was an image of the forest, blackened and charred, with no evidence of life.

  They looked so real I wondered if I could pass right into the picture and stand among the grim, charcoaled remains. I was transfixed as image after image flickered past, their message unequivocal: outside life was dead or changed beyond recognition, and Pantheon was the new world. Octavia was leaving nothing to chance, and the propaganda was frighteningly convincing.

  The raucous cry of circling haga high above among the fabricated planetary system interrupted my concentration and a new, steely determination spread throughout my core. Octavia was not going to get away with this. The natural world was recovering, it was where people belonged – and the Insiders deserved to know the truth.

  I sensed August’s watchful eyes across the throngs of people, and met his gaze squarely. I’d be crazy to believe such a senior member of her Government had completely switched allegiances. I couldn’t trust him, no matter how much I wanted to. He strode up to two of the guards observing the crowd from the tram station, his cloak discarded. They regarded him with a mixture of surprise and deference, it was clearly highly unusual for a Pantheon knight to emerge from the Prolet trams.

  Swiftly, I recalled the agreement in Aelia’s cave. If the guards believed he was undertaking classified research for Octavia, we should all board the sky train – but if he was arrested, we were to disperse and find our own way to Octavia’s suite.

  I caught sight of Max’s healthy-looking face among the scores of paler Prolets and wished he’d had the foresight to whiten his outside-tanned skin. He flashed me a concerned look, and I knew instinctively he was thinking the same thing. Aelia was close behind him and reached up to whisper something.