“Yes, but here’s the strange thing about the documents. I read them, and they didn’t really make any sense. They didn’t have anything to do with the Founders’ ship. Or Madeline’s earlier discovery.”
I search his eyes. “What were they about?”
“They seemed to be excerpts from a story, maybe some kind of fiction. It was an odd tale about a man and a woman named Adam and Eve who were in a garden … I think it was called Eden.”
Jasper’s description reminds me of something familiar, something at the edge of my memory. “Hmm. Adam and Eve and a garden. How do you know the pages were part of a larger story?”
“Because they were torn out of another book. Something called the Bible?”
I squeeze his hand tighter. That word! I can never forget it. Lukas found a copy of the Bible on Elizabet’s computer, and he explained to me that it was the pre-Healing’s version of The Lex. That the two books bear uncanny similarities to one another supports Madeline’s suspicions that The Lex is man-made, not divine. “You’re certain it was the Bible?”
“Yes, the first page said ‘Bible’ front and center. The heading on the page actually said Genesis, but there’s no reference to the Founders’ boat.”
I am quiet.
Now he’s searching my eyes. “Does the word Bible mean something to you?”
I’m not sure how far down into this I can pull Jasper just yet. “Possibly. But I have to do a little digging. I wish I could have seen those pages.”
He smiles that beautiful, wide grin he saves for the most special of occasions. “May I kiss you later if I’ve made your wish come true?”
I smile back at his Gallant’s flirtation and feign a curtsy. “Of course, kind sir.”
He bows before me to kiss my extended hand and slips an envelope into my other one. “It seems as though I’ve granted your wish. And later I’d like you to grant mine.”
My mother and Lady Charlotte motion for me to join them on the bench. Gallants and Lords traditionally sit separately from Maidens and Ladies after dinner. Jasper and I are violating that rule, a breach of decorum they can chalk up to Betrothal enthusiasm. Besides, it’s the kind of breach my mother secretly approves of, even encourages. It shows that I truly am a Maiden. I take my place, tucking the envelope into the folds of my gown. While the Ladies chatter on about their own gowns for the Union, the Attendants serve the nuts and cheeses. A platter appears before me.
“Maiden Eva?” an Attendant asks.
I nod, and as the Attendant passes me a small plate, she whispers, “Tomorrow night, at the Hall.”
I look up, confused by her words. It is Ana. It seems Lukas has finally sent me a message.
XXXIII.
Augustus 10
Year 242, A.H.
“Shall we ready ourselves for the festival?” my father asks as the conversation dies down, although it’s not really a question. His suggestions are nearly always commands.
The group assembles in the solar as we bundle for the evening cold. Because the streets will be alive with other Northern Lights revelers, my mother selects her finest furs and instructs Katja to wrap me in mine.
We step out into a rare world of nighttime merriment. The normally pitch-black streets are bright with torches and packed with people. The Keeps have set up makeshift stands everywhere, offering samplings of savories and sweets. The favorite is always the Aurora Borealis, icicles drizzled with the purest honey. I decline, but Jasper takes one and licks it with the gusto of a child.
I giggle. He glances up with a goofy grin, and for a tick, he looks like Jasper the Schoolboy, tagging after my brother. His face distracts me from my thinking on Ana’s message and his news about the Genesis.
We head toward the town square along with the rest of New North. The Northern Lights festival is one of the few attended by Aerie and Boundary alike, so the streets are doubly crowded. Amidst all the black-haired and dark-eyed Boundary folk, I keep thinking I see Lukas. But I don’t. Maybe it’s just as well. I wouldn’t know how to act around him in public. Especially not with my arm linked with Jasper’s.
At my mother’s prompting, our parents take a prime spot in the town square; she doesn’t like to miss a chance to be at the center of any gathering. We stand right next to the dais where the Chief Basilikon offers his annual Northern Lights festival blessing. “Let us look upon this display as another sign of mankind’s second chance after the Healing, a symbol of the chosen people.”
The crowd cheers and converges around us.
I lose sight of my parents in the throngs, and Jasper takes my hand in his own sticky glove. I assume he’s just protecting me Gallantly, but to my astonishment, he leads us right past the dais and the Basilikon and out of the town square entirely.
Looking over his shoulder, Jasper shoots me a mischievous grin, one I didn’t ever expect to see on his Gallant face. He leads us down an alleyway and up a set of stairs.
I’m disoriented at first. It’s not until we ascend the steps that I realize we are on the roof of his family’s Keep. And that no one in New North has a better view of the Northern Lights.
He draws close to me and reaches his arm across my shoulder. “Is this all right?”
I smile over at him. “It’s better than all right.”
We stare up at the heavens. The sky begins to glow phosphorescent. A faint green stripe fans across the horizon, then thickens. It starts to swirl, and hints of white and purple emerge, pulsating across the horizon. Suddenly a swath of pink, a shade not unlike Elizabet’s backpack, but not nearly as brassy, appears, and the whole display of lights shimmers. The stars stretch endlessly above the colorful spectacle, the North Star glittering brightest among them.
No matter how many times I witness the Northern Lights, I am moved.
Tears stream down my face. Part of me is so happy to share this moment with Jasper, a small tick of simple joy amidst all the deception. Part of me is bereft at the sacrifice and fear and searching still ahead.
“Why are you crying?” Jasper asks, wiping away a nearly frozen tear from my cheek.
“Just some old memories.”
“Of Eamon?”
I scramble for an innocent excuse. “Actually, of my Nurse Aga.”
“I remember her.”
“You do?” I’m surprised that a Boundary person would linger in an Aerie memory other than my own.
“Of course. She was always in the background when you and Eamon were little. Always smiling at you two.”
“She was, wasn’t she?” I think of her kindly, worn face. “On the night of the Northern Lights festival, she would tell Eamon and me a story, a different one than the Basilkon tells.”
“What was it?”
“She said that a long time before the Healing, a different great flood swept over the earth. The Gods spared a simple, pure race of people in the North from this deluge. When the flood waters finally receded, the Gods told these people to gather their things and follow Them to the North to new lands. The people listened, but became scared as they made the trek North because the sun was hidden behind the clouds. The Gods decided to cover the Northern cap of the world with great crystals of ice, some as high as mountains. With those crystals, the Gods were able to capture the rays of the hidden sun and reflect them up in the sky, giving their people a light to see by. And that is how the Northern Lights came into being.”
Jasper stares up at the sky. “That’s kind of beautiful,” he says quietly.
“I know. I like it a whole lot better than the Basilikon’s reason for the Northern Lights.”
“Me, too.” He glances down, shaking his head. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. A few months ago, I would’ve thought that your nurse’s story was some simple-minded Boundary notion. Now I’m not sure.”
Am I really hearing that Jasper questions the very same things I do? I venture a Lex-breaking question. “Do you ever think that The Lex itself might be a fiction?”
He looks up, alarmed
. Have I gone too far? “A fiction?”
“Not a fiction in the banned-story sense. Maybe that’s the wrong word. More that … maybe it was crafted by the Founders to make us believe what they wanted us to believe.”
“Are you saying that it wasn’t Gods-inspired?”
I tread carefully. “I’m not saying that there aren’t truths in it. In fact, I think there are. I believe that the Gods come to us in ways we’re capable of understanding at a particular time. And that history as the Founders tell it might be … well, it might not have happened entirely the way they tell it.”
He pauses for an eternal tick. “But you do think there are Gods-ly truths in The Lex mixed in with the Founders’ other agendas?”
“I … do.” I shrug, as if the notion hasn’t been preoccupying me for weeks now. “It’s just a thought. I might be wrong.”
Jasper doesn’t answer. He’s staring up at the Northern Lights but seems to be looking through them. I wonder what he’s thinking. It’s hard to imagine that I ever thought he might have killed Eamon.
As if he can hear my thoughts, he turns to me and says, “Just about the only thing I believe in right now is you.”
I am so torn by his response and his slightly shell-shocked look, that I feel like melting into the ice. What have I done to the loyal, Lex-abiding Gallant that Jasper used to be? I’ve crushed his faith, and what if I’m wrong? I’m just guessing at the truth.
Still, a part of me delights in his words. He is starting to question the same things I am, and to believe in the same things I do—and that makes me believe in him. I turn and look into his eyes. Instead of their normal clear blue, they glow green and purple and pink from the reflection of the Northern Lights. “Me, too.”
Jasper pulls me close, bringing his lips to nearly touch mine. Then asks, “May I collect on the kiss you promised?”
“Of course.”
I bring my lips to his. All thoughts of The Lex and the Founders and the Genesis and Madeline wash away from my mind, and I can think of nothing but him.
XXXIV.
Augustus 10
Year 242, A.H.
I finally retire to my bedroom, spent from the Northern Lights festival. Good thing Lukas didn’t send word to meet tonight. Tomorrow night I might be ready. But tonight, I’m not certain I can tear myself away from the memory of my kiss with Jasper.
I shoo Katja away from my bedroom; I want to be alone with the feeling of Jasper’s lips on mine. As I collapse onto my bed, an envelope slides out of my pocket. How could I have forgotten it even for a few ticks? Once again, I’m amazed at the dangerous lengths Jasper has gone to for me. Stealing these Genesis documents out of the Lexors’ archives could have gotten him sent to the gallows.
I smile a little, thinking of his heroic acts—all for me—as I delicately remove the few yellowing pages that I find inside the envelope and begin to read. The words are strange and oddly entrancing. They sound like certain sections of our Lex—the parts about our history, not the rules—and yet they are a doorway to a world that seems ancient and otherworldly. So different than any we learned about in School.
This Genesis starts with the creation of the world and the first humans, Adam and Eve, by a single God. They live in a perfect place called the Garden of Eden. The archaic-sounding story gets more interesting when a serpent appears in the garden.
In response to the serpent’s question as to whether they could eat from every tree in the garden, Eve said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree of knowledge which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’ ”
The serpent responded, “Ye shall surely not die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food … and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, an apple, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked …
They heard the voice of the Lord God … and he said, “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee thou shouldest not eat?” …
The man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat …”
The woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat …”
And the Lord God said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever, he shall be banished.”
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
I sit up on my bed. What is this strange world of Eden? Did it exist in the pre-Healing world? And what became of this Adam and Eve? Is this fiction or some account that’s meant to be true? From the text, I cannot tell. We don’t have stories of the first humans in The Lex, just the tale of the pre-Healing world and our second chance in New North. But what seems to be clear—fiction or truth—is that someone, sometime recounted a story about a single God who gave these first humans a paradise in which to live, from which they were exiled when they defied this God’s only rule: to keep away from the fruit born from the tree of knowledge.
Apples. Can it really be a coincidence?
As I read the pages over and over, trying desperately to make sense of them, the story becomes more and more familiar. Pieces of it, anyway. Suddenly I remember where I had heard it before. My childhood Nurse Aga used to tell me a version of it, along with all sorts of wild tales that were banned in the Aerie. The image and idea that the mere fact of a woman biting into a piece of fruit would open her eyes to forbidden knowledge and change the fate of the world made such an impact on me that years later, I included an image of a bitten apple in a piece of embroidery I worked on for the Basilika. This deviation from the accepted symbolic forms was considered so heretical that I was removed from the Maidens’ sewing circles and sent to work in the Ark. Ironically it was a punishment that served me well, as I adored the Ark, much to my mother’s chagrin.
Another question nags at me: Why is this story in a Bible section called Genesis? Did this have any relationship to the Founders’ ship Genesis? It must.
I feel like answers lie in these pages, but I cannot see the connections.
I turn my attention to the scrawled notes in the pages’ margins, holding them close to the candlelight. The handwriting is so different than the form we use in the Aerie that I can’t make sense of it first. Plus it varies slightly from comment to comment. Clearly, different people annotated the Genesis story, and I must deal with each note separately. Only when I transcribe the handwriting letter by letter can I decode it.
Should we include an Eden tale in The Lex? Might be too memorable for the Christian people to forget. And not enough similar stories throughout cultures to make it a monomyth that other religious groups represented in New North would embrace. Thoughts?
Maybe we should take a symbol from the Eden story for The Lex? If Eve’s bitten fruit is an apple, and we liken past people’s addictive use of technology to worship of “false god Apple.” It works well with the Apple technology, after all. Then by use of the bitten apple symbol, we subtly suggest that by ‘biting of the Apple Tech’ the people are partaking of evil? And that this led to mankind’s Fall and the Healing? Just like in Eden.
This might work well to suggest mankind is responsible for the Healing, and that humans must make sure they don’t bite the Apple again—namely, partake of anything modern—or risk another Healing. This would lead the people to the logical conclusion that, if we follow God’s mandates this time, God might let us stay in this paradise/utopia of New North. Unlike the pre-Healing people, and before them, Adam and Eve. Does this work? Too heavy–handed?
Not at all. We will create our own Eden in New North wher
e we all have what we need as long we don’t ‘bite the Apple’ again.
With this last note, I understand. Not that the revelation brings me any joy or peace. The theory I’d only speculated about with Jasper was correct. New North and The Lex—and everything about our entire history and world—is a lie. Worse, it is fiction of the most evil sort: the kind that’s dressed up as the truth.
XXXV.
Augustus 11
Year 242, A.H.
“I think you can start your Chronicle this afternoon, Archon Eva,” Theo says as I’m entering a note in the log on the eighth piece of Tech from the Genesis dig. At first I think I misheard. I’m deep into a query about whether this Relic’s slightly more silvery sheen is attributable to weathering or the original patina application. In fact, I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.
“I’m sorry, Archon Theo. Do you mind repeating what you just said?”
“I said, I think you can start your Chronicle of the Genesis this afternoon.”
“I don’t understand. It is yours to write.” It’s unheard of for the junior Archon to take the lead on the Chronicle. Like everything else in New North society, status prevails.
He offers an encouraging smile. “We only have seven days until the Founders’ Day celebration. You heard the announcement at this morning’s gathering; the Chief Archon would like a commemoration of the Genesis excavation and its Relics at that celebration. The whole population will be in attendance, after all. I think you need to start working on it if it’s to be completed in time.”
“You want me to write it?” I have to ask the question out loud. I am incredulous.
Folding his arms over his generous belly, he says, “I may be a proud Archon, but I’m not so arrogant that I can’t admit when one of my fellow Archons has a gift that I do not. Archon Eva, the Gods gave you the gift of writing. I may be able to cobble together an exacting description of a Relic and its pre-Healing purposes, but I’ve never been able to captivate the people like you did with your Testing Chronicle. And the Founders’ Day celebration is a time for captivation.”
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