“Yes,” I agree. “I suppose it means nothing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, you know. It was just a dream.”
“But that’s not what Papa said,” Enoch objects. “He told you to pay attention to them, right?”
I feel a surge of relief. I want desperately to believe the dream has some meaning, that it is a message sent to help me. Despite Papa’s words, it seemed foolish to think so, but Enoch is normally sensible, not given to flights of fancy.
“Well, what do you think it means?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I have no idea. But you should tell me about any others you have. If you want,” he adds, peering sideways at me.
“Sure. Of course.” I smile to myself.
The rest of the day passes mostly in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. When we arrive at our destination that evening, after a brief scouting trip at Enoch’s insistence, we find Tate seated behind a low stone wall, waiting with a book in hand.
“What are you reading?” Enoch asks as we approach, weary and aching.
“Confessions,” she answers nonchalantly.
“Saint Augustine?” he wonders curiously. We’d looked for the book over a year ago, searched the City high and low to no avail, disappointing a very wealthy collector in the process. “Where’d you get it?”
“From my father’s library,” she says. This gives me pause: The Blacks reading a forbidden book? Then again, many of the things we looked for were at the Party’s behest. “Are you hungry?” she asks, changing the subject.
Enoch and Pip, who is awake once more, nod eagerly. I merely shrug, though my stomach grows at the mere thought of food. Our dinner, miraculously, consists of roast beef and a hunk each of orange cheese and crunchy, half-cooked beets. With the addition of fresh bread and full canteens from a nearby stream, it is a feast.
“Thank you, Tate,” Enoch says, his strong objections apparently forgotten. I grudgingly follow suit.
“I wonder many rooms there are in this place?” Pip says to no one in particular.
“78,” Tate answers immediately.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Okay,” Enoch says with a grin, “how many windows?”
“546.”
“How many doors?”
“132.”
“How many columns?”
“519.”
Though Tate is not smiling, the two boys are, enjoying quizzing her. Even I have to admit her fluency with numbers is incredible. No wonder she was able to hack the tracking system.
Eventually Pip grows tired of the game, and Enoch sets his back against a pillar to take watch. The night is quiet, our hideout a tiny roofed-over room off the open, tumbled great hall, out of the wind. It feels safe.
Rolling into my blankets, I fall into a sleep blissfully unburdened tonight with dreams. When I wake in the morning, I realize Tate and Enoch have let me sleep all night. This, added to a headache and sore injuries, makes me grumpy. I head toward the great hall as soon as possible.
The Painter’s Palace was not idly named. Unlike everything else in this City, built to modern scales and modern standards, at least for the time, the Painter’s Palace was built with the classical tropes in mind. Arching ceilings, soaring pillars, windows bigger than a house and walkways that could accommodate a train twine through the vastness of its stone halls. Glimmering frescoes of metallic paint portray gods and myths and more. It was built by a millionaire, a lover of old ways, back when loving the old ways was still allowed.
Papa never really cared to send us here, preferring to keep us away from such superstition. But when a wealthy patron wanted something – a tile or piece of stone, a relic from a bygone age – then we did what we always did. Collect, Tate’s voice sneers in my head.
Enoch walks up beside me silently, smiles and says nothing. Over his shoulder I see Tate in the distance with Pip, who seems perfectly content. Again I feel a grudging gratitude toward her, this time for giving me time alone with Enoch.
We walk slowly amongst the ruins, sometimes tracing a finger along a design or passing our hands in front of blank windows and cracks, as if to feel the air that passes chillingly through them. I gaze at the deities that frolic on the walls, Pan with his pipe, Shango with his double-headed axe, Isis with her thick black hair.
I wander fruitlessly, scanning each image, peering into doorways and making short forays down staircases that go nowhere. The skeletal remains of mostly dissolved ceilings arch overhead, and dead grass crunches beneath our feet. Hours later I begin to feel discouraged, wondering how I’ll ever search such a huge place for such a tiny word.
I’m about to call for Pip and Tate, whom I can see standing several rooms away, partially obscured by rubble.
And then I see it.
Ganesh.
“Enoch,” I breathe, stopping in my tracks. The elephant-headed god is smiling serenely back at me, seated on a lotus flower. His four arms seem somehow more fluid than the immortals that drape themselves across the other walls, as though he is actually making an effort to sit still. “Look at his hand.”
Enoch does, and his eyes light up. Ganesh has his legs crossed, three hands holding golden platters and vessels. But his forth is raised, hand close to the heart, palm facing outward. The center glows a faint silvery violet.
Just like the woman in my dream. The significance is not lost on Enoch, who gives me a laden look before leaning closer.
Bending in as well, I inspect the figure, taller than me by a few feet. The paint is chipping, but the image itself still seems fresh, as though it were completed a few years ago, as opposed to many decades. Soft browns and distinct blacks meld with roses and golds and hints of green, scattered for detail and effect. But aside from the startling familiarity of his posture, the god tells us nothing.
Starting to feel frustrated, I walk away, taking my hair down and putting it back up, drawing a deep breath. Turning back, I am just in time to see Enoch lay his fingers against the painting and jump back in shock.
“What is it?” I whisper.
He nods toward the wall, and I put my hand on it, next to his. This time even the heat of his skin can’t distract me from the warmth that is emanating straight through the dead, cold-looking stone, and I gasp.
“No one’s lived here for more than a century. Where could it be coming from?”
He shakes his head, bewildered. Bringing the other hand up to the wall, he begins feeling around, then stops with his palms roughly three feet apart. This time he motions for me, and taking my hands, places them where his were just a moment ago. There the wall is barely room temperature, yet slowly, as he directs my wrists inward toward each other, the wall begins to warm once more. At the heart of the figure, right where Ganesh’s hand hovers in front of his chest and mine meet fingertip to fingertip, the stone is almost hot.
Surprised, I turn to look at him, and find his face mere inches from my own. Still as statues, we regard each other for one tense moment, then he drops my hands and steps back.
Awkwardly, I drop mine too. At a loss for how to move past the moment, I lift them once more and cup them over the god’s heart. As if in response to my touch, his smooth outlines suddenly glow a bright, electric blue. Around him a rectangle of the same glowing hue has appeared. Enoch and I stumble back, staring openmouthed at each other, then the wall.
“A doorway?” I ask finally, voice hushed.
He nods, the moment forgotten. “It must be. And it – it knows you,” he adds doubtfully.
“Knows me?”
“It wasn’t doing that when I touched it,” he says, “or when we touched it … together.” He clears his throat, looking away quickly. “What else could explain it?”
I shake my head. Even if it were true, how are we supposed to get through a wall? I lay my ear against the upraised hand, hoping for more information, a humming, a whirring, a buzzing, a sign of electricity or gas or wate
r, anything that could explain the bizarre temperature differential. And indeed, I do hear a faint drone, though what its source might be is impossible to tell.
Enoch bends to his pack, pulling from it his magnifying glass. Our heads crush together as we peer through the curved lens, tracing it over the upheld golden palm. Each finger and the lines in the palm are traced in black, but what at first appears to be a solid line much like that used for the rest of the painting now reveals itself to be tiny words. Words written over and over and over again in neat, careful, ancient-looking script: Terminus Terminus Terminus Terminus Terminus …
Exhaling, I step back. The outlines are once more dark, and as I gaze at them calculatingly, Enoch moves closer, this time without fear or embarrassment.
“Touch it,” he orders.
Hesitantly I bring my hands up once more, again placing the palms over the painting’s heart, his upraised palm. The outlines glow once more, casting a sky-colored light on our faces as we stand there. “It’s still not opening.”
“Maybe a password?” he says.
“What could it be, though?” But even as the words leave my mouth, I know.
As always, he reads my mind. “Try saying the name.”
Glancing once at Enoch, who nods, I open my mouth and whisper, very softly, “Terminus.”
Immediately, the wall responds.
Astonished, we can do nothing but stare. A moment later I hear Pip’s cry and Tate’s slight gasp, carried easily on the calm, cold air. They both move toward us, Pip’s footsteps a thumping run.
Still we gaze, washed in a brilliant blue glow, far brighter than before. The expanse of wall within the rectangle begins to fall back, and back again, then slide to the side.
“The Remover of Obstacles,” I breathe, my voice filled with awe, remembering one of Ganesh’s many names.
“Poetic,” Tate says without inflection.
I ignore her. Because before us, black and forbidding and blasting a terrible heat, gapes an open doorway.
SEVENTEEN
My first thought is how much I wish Papa were here to see this. My throat cramps as I picture his crinkled green eyes, the way they shone with a feverish excitement whenever we brought back a new gadget, every time he fixed something that had seemed broken forever.
“Wait here,” Enoch orders, breaking into my thoughts. “I’m going to check it out.”
I roll my eyes. My job is keeping you safe. You and Pip. Knowing how useless it is to argue with him, I step back. Tate slips her baton out of her belt and extends it, making to follow him.
“Stay,” he says.
“I don’t take orders from you,” Tate replies stubbornly.
“Yes, you do. Now stay here.”
Tate looks at him, jaw set. Then she turns around, looking outward and assuming a wide stance. I reach down to my belt for my own knife, realizing as I remove it that it isn’t mine at all: it’s Tate’s. Though she insists I should keep it, I’ve chosen to think of it as a loaner. The balance is all wrong, the handle too long, the blade too narrow. But it’s what I have.
Enoch reappears moments later, looking sweaty. “It’s a passageway. Heated.”
“I can see that,” I say.
He gives me a look. “But I found a way in. Simple door, no password, no lock.” My stomach squirms uncomfortably and I ball my hands. There is a password, of course, I’ve just already given it. I don’t bring this up. “Let’s go,” he adds.
“Um, Enoch, can I talk to you for a moment?” I ask him, purposely avoiding Tate’s gaze. She takes the hint without a word, turning and walking away. Pip looks at us uncertainly.
“Go,” I shoo him off, not wanting him to hear anything he could repeat. He follows Tate morosely. “Stay in sight,” I call after him.
“What’s wrong?” Enoch asks.
“What do you mean what’s wrong?” I say, turning back to him. Keeping my voice low is a monumental effort; I feel like I’m about to snap. “We’ve found, like, a magical doorway or something! From a dream! This is pretty much the weirdest thing that has ever happened, on top of a whole bunch of other really weird things!”
“So?”
“So I don’t think it’s the best idea to just invite Tate Black on in!”
“Naiya, come on,” Enoch protests. “How many times are we going to have this conversation?”
“Once more, at least.” I count to ten in my head. “She already turned me in once, Enoch.”
“Look,” he says, almost whispering now. His gaze flicks to Tate in the distance. I hate how he watches her. “That was a long time ago. I know you don’t believe me, but I talked to her a lot while you were out, and I – ”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better? That you two got all chummy when I could have been dying?”
“You weren’t dying,” Enoch says peevishly. “Because of her.”
“That’s not the point. The point is I doubt Papa would be glad to hear you’ve become best friends with the daughter of his murderer.”
“Watch it,” Enoch says sharply.
I pause, feeling guilty.
“I’ve been as careful as I could be, okay?” he continues. “I searched her, looked through her pack, asked her every question I could think of. I’m sorry you weren’t around for it, though honestly I think you would have made it a lot more difficult. The point is, we haven’t got a chance without her. We don’t have a lot to go on as it is, and she’s a huge help. You could try being grateful.”
“So that’s how it is,” I say, eyes flashing.
He grimaces. “Naiya, please. I don’t want to fight with you. Don’t we have enough to deal with?”
I look away, scuff the toe of one boot with another, working off a smudge of dirt. The anger drains away. “I don’t want to fight with you either.”
“Good,” he says. Looking up, I see he’s smiling once more. No one can forgive a grudge faster than Enoch. “Enough time wasted, don’t you think?”
Sighing, I pick up my pack, gesture to Tate and Pip. “Sure.”
The dark passageway is brutally hot, and quite dark. We quickly shed our coats, Enoch filling the small space with blue light from his power pack. The little hall is short, a small, unguarded trapdoor at its end. Enoch has already thrown it open, revealing below a spacious, dimly lit room.
We descend the bright airmetal ladder one by one. Standing in a huddle at the bottom, we stop to take our bearings. The room is warm, heated by the burning passageway above. It is very dark, lit only by Enoch’s makeshift torch. He studies the trapdoor for a moment, looking for a lock, but still doesn’t find one. Shrugging, he pulls it closed, and the room flares up brightly in response. The hatch seals with a decisive click, and I know without having to look that the stone door is closing once more, Ganesh fading into frescoed obscurity.
Then Pip gasps, recoiling into me. I turn to him, and my mouth falls open in horror.
Bodies.
Four in all. They are snuggled up to one another behind the ladder, their legs bent and their arms at odd angles. They look dried out, shrunken and desiccated like mummies, hair sparse, eyes empty and staring. With considerable panic, I reach for the ladder and swing myself up to the top, heaving against the trap door. It opens with ease, and everyone releases a collective breath. I descend, legs shaking with relief.
“Who are they?” Enoch breathes. “If they could get out, why are they dead?”
“Let’s find out.” Tate turns her back on the corpses, intent on exploring the space. Dumbly, we follow suit.
In the middle of the room, shelves of books are lined up in dusty rows. Against one wall is a computer workstation with a huge monitor and a giant computer tower. The screen is dark and dusty. In the corner nearby are a minute kitchen and a door that leads to a small bathroom, with a real toilet, sink and shower. I eye it with anticipation, wondering if the plumbing works.
“Look at this,” Enoch says, pointing to the wall behind the shelving. On it is a giant poster,
its edges frayed, held up by faded colored tacks. The background is blue, irregular colored shapes fitted into larger blocks, forming seven distinct land masses.
“A map.” I walk closer to it, touching it reverently. Even I’ve barely seen one; as the Party took control hundreds of years ago, maps were among the first things handed over, destroyed. Surreptitiously I look to Tate, who does not look as impressed by the large, colorful image. But then, who can really tell with her?
Apparently bored, she turns away, walking back to the center of the room, where there is a small writing desk and a wooden chair. She reaches down, picking up a faded bundle of yellowed pages, sewn together to form a flimsy spine.
“What language is this?” she wonders aloud.
Enoch walks up beside her, shrugging at the book. He flips through the thick pages, letting it fall open somewhere in the middle. I wander over, absently run a finger down the highly stylized script.
“What is it?”
“A log?” Tate guesses. “That’s what it looks like. This here could be the date.” She points to the top of the page, where a series of numbers and slashes is clearly scrawled.
“Obviously.” I roll my eyes. “It’s signed The Mayor. Wonder what that means.”
“The Mayor?” Tate asks, slipping between us to read it for herself. “You’re kidding.”
“No,” I say, irritated by her presence. I move sideways slightly, crossing my arms. “The Painter’s Palace was built by someone with a lot of money. It makes sense it would be a Party leader.”
“No. I mean, how can you read it? It’s no language I’ve ever seen.”
“I can’t read it either,” Enoch says hesitantly.
“Me neither,” Pip chimes in, standing off to one side, small and forgotten.
“Of course you can!” I snap, pushing Tate out of the way as I step in front of the book. “Look, right here. The noises from above grow louder every day, and though the walls shake less than they did at first, as though they’ve settled into the foundation, we can still feel the vibrations. This civil war seems destined to go on forever, and though we have water and each other, we grow weaker by the day.”
Broken Moon Page 16