Hale takes off his glasses, huffs on the lenses, and rubs them with his sleeve. “The manifesto called for a cultural revolution, the establishment of Fell, the land of peace, a biodome of security, equality, and of course, the creation of one free, open unified Inter-Net run by their incorruptible, indomitable AI. Perhaps you know of her?” Hale says, looking at me.
“Verity?”
“You guessed it,” Hale says. “From there, it was a hop, skip, and a jump through a blinding civil war. Fell defeated the old government by the people, for the people, and at last established one stream, under Fell, indivisible, unhijackable, with endless absorption and injustice for all. Of course, power being what it is, Fell’s principles didn’t last. They fooled people with their promises of something better, and it wasn’t long before they became everything they’d decried in the land they’d overthrown.” He turns to Miriam. “Am I missing anything, Mom?”
“No, that’s very good, Hale. Thank you for that most concise account of our history,” Miriam says. “Of course, the reality of having lived it was rather different.”
I get up and sit at Miriam’s feet, near the warmth of the fireplace. “Please, I want to hear your story.”
“Very well,” she says. “As I was saying, I was called Amanuensis. That was the name Prospero gave me when we met. I was there to take dictation, you see, because Goodfellow could not do it, it being the eve of the break out of war, and anyway Prospero by then didn’t trust anyone. Not even the other Risers. They hadn’t believed in the dream, you see.”
“The dream?”
“Prospero had a dream and wished for me to take it down and share it with the other Risers, so they would know that not all was lost. That there was still hope, because even though they had failed, even though it seemed everything had been burned, there would be a time when this was righted. Prospero said a spirit—no, a soul—had appeared in the dream and had called himself the soul of the books, and claimed one day he would be restored in time to find the one with the words. The one who still remembered.”
Miriam looks from Ledger to me and back again. “The one with the words, my dear, is you. You are the one who still remembers.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I say. “How can I remember what I never knew in the first place?”
“Hmmm,” Miriam says. “That’s a wise question to ask. But is memory simply knowing a thing from the past? Or is it also having the capacity to know?”
“And you think I do? You think I have the capacity to remember what happened before I was even born?”
“That is what he is here for,” Miriam says, lifting a finger to Ledger. “To help you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I tell her. “I can read because something is clearly wrong with me. An accident. That’s all.”
“You can read because you are a reader and were born to be so. How else can you explain reading Shakespeare without ever having read a thing before?”
“Shakespeare?” Hale says, sitting forward. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
“Oh, don’t look so alarmed. I gave her Volume I as a test. And like I say, she remembers words. Noelle can read.”
“Mom, you promised you would never, ever reveal that book. What were you thinking?”
Miriam lets out a grunt of frustration. “I was thinking of our future, Hale, what else? John brought a girl to me who could read. What else should I have given her to prove I was right, that she is the one Prospero dreamed about?”
“There is no dream.” Hale says the words painfully slow, like he’s said them many times before. “Just like there is no Rising. The only chance we have now against Fell isn’t hidden in some ancient book. It’s hidden in data. Code, in understanding how it is possible to reengineer the human brain in a matter of minutes. That’s our way out, Mom. That’s the future!”
Miriam’s face tightens. “You can see my son does not believe in my stories of the past.”
Hale presses his palms against his eyebrows. “It’s not a question of belief,” he groans. “It’s a question of logic.”
“Very well. Then why does the evidence before you not suffice?” Miriam asks. “You can see your son is changed; he is not what he was. Your data tells you he has not been through immersion, so why is it so hard to believe he, too, comes from another place and time? How else can you explain his being alive, if not by some strange miracle of the past?”
“I can’t explain it,” Hale says, letting his arms drop. “But I do know one thing. It’s us against them.” He looks at Ledger. “John and I were so close. We almost had them. Pedanta had cracked the stream, and we would have been next.” Hale stands. A burst of air escapes him. “I’m going to bed. I need to think. And I think best when I’m unconscious.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Ginny says, getting up from the sofa. “He’s upset. We all are.” Ginny goes after Hale. They head upstairs. I note the gun is missing from the wall, where Hale had left it leaning.
It’s just the three of us now. Miriam’s eyes are distant, glowing with the light of the fire. “You know, we call it a war now,” she says. “But they were not wars. Not really. They were fought another way. With fire. Fires that consumed our precious history. Fires that persecuted the writers, the artists, the thinkers. The fire that made chaos and left us weak, starving, and desperate. When the death toll became too much, we had to compromise. There was so little left for them to burn, so little left for us to save. We let them have our books, our histories, our brains. They let us have our lives in the Sovereigns. For most people, the choice was easy. With no government and no resources here, Fell looked like a rather attractive alternative. Safety, security. Respite from the chaos. There was a feeling at the time, a fear Fell had inspired in us. They could offer certain mental bliss, without struggle. For many, struggle was all they had ever known. And thus was the first Vale born. It is easy to want to forget, let me tell you. It would be unfair to say every human being wasn’t just a little bit tempted by the amnesiac life Fell offered. A life of peace and tranquility. A life without the suffering of remembrance. Now that is the difficult thing to do. To remember. That is the challenge!”
I feel the room shrink again. The story Miriam tells hits me in my heart. The guilt for being what I am registers. I see how everyone here in the Winnow must look at me. A Valer, born and raised. I am complicit. And yet I do not feel like I belong to that world.
“It didn’t happen all at once of course—the burnings,” Miriam continues. “Little by little, they stripped what they could of the outside world away. They burned our stories, our books, our records, to avoid any of our printed past leaking into the Vales.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You said the Rising tried to stop them. What happened to them?”
Miriam takes a breath, the flames of the fire make her face appear splotchy, her skin uneven. But her eyes are clear, with the look of one harking back into the past.
“There were nine of them at first. Just nine against all of Fell. You can imagine the odds. The Nine of the Rising was what we called them. I wanted so badly to be part of it, but I was too young to join them at the time. They were our heroes, bravely risking their lives to save our printed past before Fell destroyed it. Conservation activism to an extreme. No museum, no library was off-limits. They took anything and everything they could, saving the books, the art, the past from the fires of Fell. Soon, Fell discovered what they were doing, and the Rising could no longer fly beneath the radar. They tried to rally the people, but it was too late. Fell had already started to work their brain-altering magic, and the populace had grown fearful at heart. They would do anything to forget.”
“If people chose to forget, that means they chose Fell,” I say, my head fuzzy. “That must mean my family chose, too.”
“It was often more complicated than that,” Miriam says.
“No. It was not.” We all turn to the voice behind us. My grandfather stands, observing us from the dark kitche
n. “We chose, just like everyone else.”
Miriam hoists herself from the chair, rising slowly. “Oh, my dear old friend,” she says. “I cannot tell you what it means to hear your voice, to know you’re okay.”
“You gave my granddaughter that book?” he says. “The one she had with her on the outside that could have gotten her killed?”
“Grandpa, I . . .”
“You let her risk her life for these fairy tales from the past?”
“William, please,” Miriam says. “You’re not well; you’re not thinking clearly.”
“I am thinking clearly,” he says calmly. “In fact I’ve never felt so clear. You made a mistake to give it to her. You endangered our family, and now you’ve endangered yourselves by bringing us here.”
Miriam shrugs. “What can I say? We Winnowers have always been loyal to a fault. I made a promise I would keep the volume safe, and I did.”
My grandfather opens his mouth to retort, but only static comes out. A display in the kitchen flickers on and enlarges between the rooms. The voice inside it rises to a deafening degree. Hale and Ginny rush downstairs, their eyes wide with panic as the fluttering image in the center of the display expands and takes over the room: it forms a single pulsating letter. P for Pedanta.
Beware the lull of silence. Those who do not speak listen with sharpened ears. Blood runs quietly when all is still. Beware the lull of silence . . .
The words form on the screen simultaneously with the voice. The letters take shape. I sound them out, drowning out the words being spoken. I realize the speech is to confuse anyone who cannot see that the text does not match, anyone who cannot read.
“If this message finds you,” I read. “You must find us. We are the letter. Post tenebras spero lucem.”
I turn to Miriam. Her mouth is agape, watching me. “It’s just as it was before,” I tell her. “The simulcast is the same. They’re still inside the stream, just like John said. Pedanta. The people of the other Sovereign. They want us to find them.”
The text on the screen changes. “Find us, Dearest Imagined,” I read aloud. “Find us posthaste.”
The display darkens as the message disappears.
“So you can do it.” Hale’s voice is as brittle as a leaf. “You can actually read.”
“Of course she can,” my grandfather says. He lowers himself into a chair.
“Grandpa, you knew?”
“I knew from the moment you began the Learning that you were a reader, Elle.”
“How?”
“Resistance to the stream, the way you tried to find meaning in the images. All the signs were there. It was easy to recognize them. We readers are more alike than you’ll ever know.”
My mouth falls open. “You are a reader, too?”
“Was. Was a reader.” Grandpa’s eyes close. His head falls. “I remember now,” he says, rubbing his leg. “I remember what they did to me.”
“William,” Miriam whispers. “They took it from you?”
My grandfather nods. “I’m blind once again. The words may as well be ashes.”
Ledger crosses into the center of the room. He points at the display, still hazy with light. “We need to go there. To Pedanta.”
The thought of traveling to another Sovereign sends me reeling.
“He is right. It’s not safe here anymore.” Miriam looks at my grandfather, her voice breaking. “You and Noelle are fugitives now. If you are found outside of Fell, they will kill you. If you are found here, they will kill us all.”
NOELLE
ELEVEN
Morning in the Winnow is warm and hazy, a comforting blanket of calm over the terror of the last two days. We huddle around the breakfast table. Ginny has made a thing called oatmeal with little sweet pieces of fruit. Everyone eats, except for Ledger, who stands at the counter. He seems to be avoiding us, as if he’s uncomfortable being in close proximity to . . . anyone.
We don’t talk of anything except plans for leaving.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Miriam says. “But you should take the RV. It’s got a lot of life left in it yet.” She glances at Ginny. “Sorry, dear.”
Ginny holds up her hand. It’s easy to see she hasn’t slept at all. Her eyes are sunken, her face pale. She stirs her bowl of oatmeal, barely eating.
“It will need to be fixed up, of course,” Miriam adds. Ginny lifts her head. Her eyes blink rapidly. “I can do it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Virginia,” Hale says.
“I said I will do it,” she repeats. “I want to.”
“There’s one problem,” Hale says. “There are no roads leading out of the Winnow you can drive on. We’ll have to build one.”
“I’ll help you, Hale.” Ledger stares at the floor. “I will help you build the road, I mean.”
“So it’s settled,” Hale says, standing up from the table. “We have a lot to do. So let’s get moving.”
The next few days pass in a strange blur of routine and busyness. We all keep to ourselves, especially Ledger. He and Hale work twelve-hour days outside, constructing the road for the RV leading us out of the Winnow. They leave in the early morning and don’t return until much later when it is too dark to see outside. They work in random sections, disguising their work so Fell surveillance can’t detect a pattern.
Ginny has taken to wearing all white, the Winnower color of mourning. She eats breakfast with us, then heads out to work on the RV. Each day Miriam and I offer to help her, but after the third day when she begins to cry, we stop asking. Page goes, too, keeping her company and fetching supplies.
Miriam and I spend our days with my grandfather, seeing to his leg and helping him heal. He spends most of the time in bed, at Miriam’s insistence. On the fifth day in the Winnow, I go to bring Grandpa lunch, and find him sitting up staring into space.
“You’re awake,” I say, placing the food on the side table. “How do you feel?”
“It’s strange,” Grandpa says. “But I feel very calm. Too calm.”
“Eat something,” I tell him and hand him the sandwich. He looks at me with gratitude. “I’d be a lot worse off if you hadn’t gotten me here safely.”
“It wasn’t just me,” I say. “It was Ledger, too.”
Grandpa nods, as though he’s already forgotten. I sit with him as he eats his sandwich. When he’s finished, he slides his plate to the side and wipes his fingers. “I haven’t had peanut butter in a long time.”
“We don’t have it in the Vale,” I say.
Grandpa sighs. “No, we couldn’t. It makes folks yearn a little too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no good nutritional value in it. The real value of peanut butter is that it makes people remember the past. That’s why they still eat it.”
“They don’t want us to remember,” I say.
“I wish I could remember,” Grandpa says. “But for the life of me, I know the words are gone this time.”
“This time? So you lost them before?”
“I was immersed just like every Valer. I, too, became word-blind. But I found a way back from it. I taught myself how to read again. In secret, of course. I’d write small things anywhere I could and trace the letters, sounding out what I’d just written, careful to keep it hidden from Verity. It took me ten years, but I was determined to find a way out of the darkness.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why would you risk being caught? Having it taken from you again?”
“Once a reader, always a reader. I simply could not deny what I was. The impulse to read was always there, even if the words and the books were not.”
“If you taught yourself how to read before, you could do it again, right?”
Grandpa shakes his head. “It’s different this time. I can feel it in my fibers. I used to wonder why other people were not like me, why they didn’t try to learn again. But now I know the reason.” Grandpa sighs. “It wasn’t just the words they took
this time. It was something else. The burning thing in my core that made me what I was. They plucked it out, as cleanly as if they’d taken my very heart. It’s not that I couldn’t read ever again. No. It’s that I don’t even care to try.”
“How can you say that?”
Grandpa shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t recognize myself. I don’t feel like myself. Whatever they’ve done, they have been clever, because they’ve found a way to alter the fabric of my personality in a way I never thought possible.”
*
For the rest of the fifth day, I feel a deep sense of unease. Ginny comes back with Page at dinnertime as usual, the stains of dirt, blood, and her broken heart apparent on her clothes and face. Each night she’s a little more worn, a little more unraveled. Page does her best to comfort her, but I know we need to leave this place soon. Seeing Ledger every day is killing her. The best thing I can do is help my grandfather get well enough to leave the Winnow, and take Ledger with us.
But it scares me. I do my best to avoid him, the boy who looks like John but is not John. I cannot face traveling with him for days on end. How did Ginny know so quickly what none of us did? How did she sense it? The thought frightens me, that something inside Ledger had made her realize he wasn’t her son. Whatever that is, I don’t want to discover it for myself. In fact, I want to stay as far away from him as I possibly can.
I’m helping Miriam prepare the evening meal when Ledger and Hale get home, looking exhausted and sunburned.
“We’re nearly finished,” Hale says. “Won’t be long now.”
My heart sinks. “That’s great news,” I say, trying to sound cheerful.
When dinner is ready, we crowd around the table. Ginny joins us from the bedroom. “I can’t eat,” she says quietly. “I have the sickness now.” She glances quickly at Ledger, then looks away.
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