“But they saw your visuals, Beckett! We had locals that were hostile, and nobody even knows what the situation is in this city, except that it’s obviously not good where she’s concerned.” She jerks her head at Samara. “And so they send in two kids from the anthropology sector that haven’t even trained in contact? And you think that makes sense?”
No, it doesn’t make sense. But I want this. I want it so much it hurts. And I know Jill doesn’t. She’s more archaeology than anthropology. More comfortable with the dead than the living, learning history instead of living it. She was thinking she’d camp with me, fly back to the team in a cloud of glory, spend the next few years hunting nice, safe, uncomplicated artifacts in those half-fallen buildings, and see her name written in the history files. But this is messy, and dangerous, and nothing like we planned.
“You know there’s something wrong with her,” Jill whispers. “It’s like a trance or something … ”
“I was thinking maybe a trauma disorder. Did you see her palms, and the bruises?” I glance at Samara again, a long, lean shadow against the light. She’s either smelling the flowers, or letting them tickle her face.
“I think she has psychiatric issues.”
“We don’t know a thing about her culture. For all we know, this could be normal. And she must be mostly okay. She seems to know her medicine.”
“She’s too young to be a doctor, Beckett! And what is she doing, taking us with her? Who does she even think we are?”
“She said we were from outside.”
“Well, there’s an understatement.”
I laugh once. A breath of humor. Jill smiles a little, and then she’s not smiling anymore.
“You were going to leave me back there,” she says. “If the orders hadn’t come. Weren’t you?”
The one thing about Jill is she’s never, ever stupid. Exactly the opposite. I don’t want to look at her face. “I would have made sure you got back safe.”
Jill bites her lip again.
“What she’s offering is once in a lifetime,” I tell her. “Everything I left Earth for. You can’t blame me for wanting to take that chance.”
Actually, I think she can blame me. And she’s probably going to blame me for a lot before this is over, because when you get down to it, I don’t think Jill and I want the same things. But there’s no point in talking about it. Not now. We have our orders—maintain contact, get the coordinates of the city—and we don’t know what we’re about to walk into.
I look over Jill’s head and see Samara standing in the greenish-purple light of a glowing flower, her hair curling everywhere, as much like an image from the historic culture files as it’s possible to look. It’s hard not to stare at her. Because she is history. Only she is also real, right now, and she is taking me to her city.
And she could answer all of my questions.
I had five scars on my arms the day I discovered that my mother had a hole in the wall behind her mirror.
Mother sent me to get the box of picture tiles. I’d only been inside Mother’s chamber once, when I was a baby. And so I looked quickly at the face paints, the row of elegant clothes, at one black wall hung with items that were odd and interesting: spoons; tools I didn’t Know; a knife, long and thin. All with the letters “NWSE” stamped in the metal. Like Mother’s necklace. I let myself smile in the mirror. I am allowed in Mother’s room, I thought. I can be asked to bring the picture tiles. I think Mother must love me now.
And then I saw that her mirror was crooked. It hadn’t been like that when I was a baby. And there was a spot of tarnish on the silver frame. A finger mark. I reached out my own finger, pushed in the direction that the frame was crooked, and the mirror slid up and to one side. There was a hole in the rock. And inside the hole were two books. Secret books. Mother must miss the Archives, I thought. Like me.
One was plain, with pages written by different people. The other had a title pasted onto the cover: “The Notebook of Janis Atan.” They were both very old. I looked at every page, just like Uncle Towlend taught me, turning quickly and carefully, so I could read them later, in my memory. But one sentence got read with my real eyes. “The elimination of all technology was shortsighted. The technology of Earth will lift the best of us to the pinnacle of our evolution.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it sounded like an idea that would get your hand swatted in the learning room.
And then I was afraid. Father said not to look at books. Maybe these books were hidden because they’re bad. If Mother Knows I’ve looked, she’ll Know I’m bad, too. Again.
I put them back, exactly as they were. Left the mirror perfectly crooked. Ran from the room with the tile box. And while I was playing in the receiving room, making pictures with the tiles, I asked Father, “Can technology be used for good things? Or only bad?”
It was my mother who answered. “You’re asking the wrong question, Samara. Because there is no good or bad. Only better.”
I Knew after that day that sometimes my mother didn’t tell me the truth. You don’t hide books in a wall because they’re better. And she had spent my lifetime showing me that I was not better in any way at all.
FROM THE HIDDEN BOOK OF SAMARA ARCHIVA
IN THE CITY OF NEW CANAAN
The two aliens follow me down the cavern, river spraying on our right, wafting flowers on our left. They’re coming to the city. Both of them. And I don’t even understand it. I can’t see Jillian’s expression, but whatever Beckett said to her, it must have been good. Hope blooms inside me like a poisonous flower. Pretty, but dangerous.
I need to be careful. Because that was much too easy.
Beckett lied to me, or at least he let Jillian do it for him. And what was he looking at through those magnifiers while she did? For a moment, it seemed like he was reading. Words I couldn’t see …
I sift through my memories, fast. Beckett spotting me in the shadows, looking at his own bones. That fire. And he seemed to know exactly what was on the other side of a wall. My stomach twists, turns over, a tingle of fear trickling through my insides. I think those magnifiers are technology. And that Beckett is hiding that fact from me, too. What else can he do that is beyond my Knowing?
I think I’ll need to be more than careful, if I’m going to get us all back to the city. I wonder if I’m even capable of it. How do you outwit what you do not understand?
But I do Know, now, that this is the way to my city. Because while Beckett was busy seeing through walls, I went back inside my mind and looked at the map, this time at the page before it. A thin piece of linen, woven so fine it was translucent, laying perfectly over the map, marked with red lines that added a new network of scrawling pathways. The caves. And there, in bold, double ink, was the underground river, running between the old city and the new. The river I’m walking beside right now. The Torrens. The river that took Nita away from me.