I grinned. “Has anyone ever written about it?” I asked.
“Like a newspaper piece?” she asked. “No. Some things are still too hot to touch.”
“For some people, perhaps,” I said. “Maybe one day, you could do it.”
“When I’m living off my column inches instead of how many papers I can flog?” she said, unable to keep the grin out of her face.
“Why not?”
“Well, the Bar-Selehm Standard isn’t the Glorious Third,” said Sarah, “but you won’t find many of my color—or yours, for that matter—turning in stories to delight and inform our ever-expanding readership. One day, perhaps, if we survive whatever the Grappoli have in store for us.”
“You think there might be war?”
“Wars have been fought over less,” she said. “I think the disappearance of the Beacon is unlike any other kind of theft we’ve ever experienced. It’s like our heart. And it’s spectacularly valuable, which makes things dangerous. Whenever you have an international dispute over something valuable, things get dangerous. But in this case, you’ve also got a potential war over a commodity that most of the people who will do the actual fighting could never afford.”
People like her father, she meant, and all the other Mahweni who would be conscripted to protect the Crommerty Street merchants with their NO COLOREDS signs.
“Fight for Bar-Selehm? Sure,” she said. “For liberty, for principle. But for luxorite and those who trade it? I think we’d tear ourselves to pieces long before a shot was fired at the Grappoli.”
I stared at her, registering for the first time the depths of our divisions and the peril Willinghouse had glimpsed on the horizon, barreling toward us like a rogue bull elephant.
“I suggest you find that Beacon,” she said. “And fast.”
“I think I know where it is,” I said, “but I don’t know who paid to get it. What if it really is the Grappoli?”
“Then run,” she said grimly. “And don’t stop till you reach people who have never heard of luxorite or Bar-Selehm.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Now, how do I get into the library’s storage facilities?”
“That,” she said, getting to her feet and brushing crumbs from her dress so that one of the nearby ibis came strutting over, “is your department. Thanks for the pasty.”
*
MNENGA SMILED WHEN HE saw me climbing up through the cemetery. He wanted to talk, and brandished the little milk bottles with the rubber teats as if they were a special prize I had won. He started telling me about a dream he had had, in which I was standing down by the river like some water spirit risen from the depths—
I was rude. Brusque, at very least, and I caught the hurt in his eyes, so that I wondered for a moment if my suspicions about him were mistaken. But in one respect at least, it was too late.
“I don’t have the baby,” I said. “That’s what I came to say. I left it at an orphanage.” I had forced myself not to call her Kalla, as if that would make me seem more sure of my actions.
Mnenga looked stung, his big black eyes wide with shock, as if I had slapped him. “Orphanage?” he repeated.
“It’s a place where you take children, who…,” I began, angry that I was having to explain myself. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not my business anymore.”
“Anglet…,” he said, taking my hand, but I cut him off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Yes,” he said, letting go of my hand with slow deliberation as if he were releasing a bird. “I understand.”
He didn’t, of course. How could he? But I believed that he wanted me to feel better about the terrible thing I had done, and in that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had said to me in a long time.
Without thinking, I kissed him quickly on the cheek. His disappointed smile turned into something else entirely.
I fled, feeling guilty and harried.
As I walked, those feelings swelled till they seemed to trail behind me like the great anchor chains wrapped around the massive cleats of the dockside. I tried to shake them off, but the more I struggled, the tighter they became, so that in spite of my haste, I had to pause and be still.
I didn’t know why Mnenga’s care for me bothered me so much. I had liked him. I really had. And had trusted him, which was rare for me and exquisite as the ruby-petaled sunset flowers that sometimes grow from the fractured bricks atop Bar-Selehm’s tallest chimneys. But I didn’t trust him now. He was altogether too convenient, too supportive, too quick with his dreams and his kindness. They couldn’t be real, and if they were, I did not deserve them.
I began walking again, wondering about Sarah’s teasing hints so that for a moment I saw in my mind’s eye Willinghouse watching me shrewdly with his sharp green eyes.