Looking up, I see six dumbstruck eyes gazing back at me.
“What?” I ask uncertainly. “That’s what it says. I mean, it’s depressing as hell, I know – ”
“According to you,” says Tate slowly. “That’s what it says according to you. I’ve never seen an alphabet like that in my life.”
“What does that prove?” I snap. “I recognize dozens of different languages, Tate. That’s how I collect. Just because you don’t – ”
“What language is it, then, Naiya?” Enoch asks quietly.
Frustrated, I glance back down at the page, and slowly the truth reveals itself. It’s no language I know either, not even a dead one: Sanskrit, Aramaic, Latin, Akkadian, Coptic. It is, in fact, far loopier and more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen.
“I don’t know,” I say eventually, the admission sticking in my throat.
“Read some more,” Tate orders. “Read some more of this convenient journal.”
“Convenient journal?” I ask, irritated by her tone. “What does that mean?”
“Well, isn’t it handy that it’s just lying here, waiting to explain all … this?” She looks around skeptically.
“I don’t get it.”
“We’re not here by accident.” Her voice is robotic.
“No, obviously not. Papa sent us. We’ve been following a trail this whole time.”
“Right, and this just happens to be carefully laid out on this table in excellent condition even though those dead guys have been locked in here for … how long?” If her voice were capable of emotion, I would think it was sarcasm. “It’s just convenient, that’s all.”
“Naiya,” Enoch interrupts tiredly. He gives Tate a look, then catches my eyes. “Read. You’re the only one who can.”
Turning back to the page, I begin to read. Translate, I realize. I’m translating. Without even having to think about it.
“Glancing outside reveals airships massing along the perimeter and lorries patrolling the tops. The trains run day and night. Thankfully the rebels have managed to acquire a good number of airships as well, though theirs are larger and built to a design I do not recognize.”
Nobody interrupts me, all of us fascinated by this window into the past. The journal spans years, sometimes falling silent for months at a time. I continue to read and slowly we begin to piece together the vestiges of a history that has been lost to time, suppressed: a second war, after the first which transformed the Cities from flat metropolises to metal mountains. An all-out battle between angry insurgents and ferocious Home Guard. A mayor who went underground to protect what he knew, hoard humanity’s learning down here in this well-equipped prison. Dying in here, when all he had to do was step outside.
A mayor who cared more for the truth than for power or prestige or money. Doesn’t sound like any mayor I’ve ever known. I wonder which body is his.
“Why haven’t we heard anything about this?” Enoch asks eventually, interrupting me.
“Obviously the Party doesn’t want anyone to know about it,” Tate says. “You can see why they’d prefer the story we’re taught in school, that they’re simply protecting us from incursion by enemy countries. If people knew about a failed bid for independence, things would start to feel a lot more oppressive, wouldn’t they?” Tate’s voice is surprisingly bitter. I watch her closely. Two almost-emotions in the space of an hour.
Huh.
Enoch nods. “Makes sense. But then why don’t you know this version, Tate? You’d think the wealthy, at least, would be in on it.”
She shakes her head. “Why? A lot of them have high-minded ideals. They wouldn’t like it any more than you do, any more than the poorest worker in the Upper City. Best not to tell anyone. These days, I’ll bet even people like my father have forgotten the true history. Just like they intended.”
“Who’s they?” I ask skeptically.
Tate shrugs. “Read.”
I comply grudgingly, and as the minutes pass the answer to my question becomes clear. Horribly, horribly clear. Eventually I look up, throat dry.
“The guards,” Enoch whispers.
“So it was true at first,” I say, shaking my head. “The Party, they were really trying to protect us during that first war. It was the second when … ”
“When the guards took over,” Tate finishes succinctly. “They’re in control of this City. Not the Mayor. Not my father. Not the Party. Them.”
We are silent, digesting this. It seems obvious now. Their strange power, the pervasive fear they instill, their insolence and arrogance … of course they’re more than trained dogs. They’re the real power in the City. Yet they still answer to someone.
“But then,” Enoch says slowly, reading my mind, “who controls them?”
The question makes me uncomfortable, and I feel the ghost of a prickle creep up my spine. Who controls them? I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. Instead, I keep reading. We break for lunch, then pick up where we left off, devouring the journal until nearly evening. From time to time someone makes a comment, but mostly they are silent, listening to the endless murmur of my voice.
“Read that part again,” Enoch says after almost an hour without interjection. I nod, struck by the same passage.
“As the war continues to rage, the Home Guard are taking extra care to shut down internal resistance. Their brutality seems to know no bounds, and the institution of the tithing laws is but the latest proof. The wealthy now find themselves barren, though they do not know why. And if they did, would they act differently? Suppressing their reproductive capacity has only one goal anyway: to encourage allegiance by withholding children until they prove it. It is an effective strategy, and would likely work under any circumstances. After all, which of humankind’s urges are stronger than the one to care for young?”
Enoch looks angry. “That’s why? The wealthy can’t have children of their own on purpose? They’re sterilized to ensure loyalty? So then, what? When you’re a good enough Citizen you become … eligible?”
I shake my head dumbly. “That’s horrible.”
“What’s horrible?” Pip asks, who is following every word but cannot make sense of it.
“Don’t worry about it, honey.” I take his hand.
“I wonder when the procedure happens,” Enoch murmurs to himself. The silence widens, and I raise my eyes slowly to his. I can see the same thought that’s just struck me forming behind his green irises. In unison we turn to Tate.
She says nothing.
“What do you know about this?” My words come out harsher than I intended, but I bite back an apology. I knew she’d been acting strange.
“Tate?” Enoch asks, more kindly.
Tate sighs, though her face is still flat and unfriendly looking. “I don’t know much,” she says, “but I heard my father talk about it once or twice to my mother. The surgery is performed on children when they’re taken to the Lower City for adoption. It’s painless.”
“You knew?” I ask accusingly. “How could you just let that happen? It’s barbaric!”
“Naiya, I don’t control the City. Or the world,” Tate says evenly. “Why do you think I left? Why do you think I want to help you?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Look,” she says, seeming almost angry. “I think it’s as awful as you do. That, the Hollow, your father’s death – ”
“Don’t talk about him,” I snap.
She puts up her hands placatingly. “I’m sorry. All I’m saying is that these are the reasons I want to leave, the reasons I’m happy to help you in whatever way I can. I mean it.”
An awkward pause fills the silence. The first stirrings of guilt thread their fingers through my hair, making my scalp prickle even more.
“Besides,” she adds, “it doesn’t explain everything. Far more children are tithed than end up in the Lower City, just like Chen said. And it’s not just the wealthy who are barren, either.”
I fix him Enoch a killing look. Did you
tell her everything?
“What else does it say?” he asks, pretending to notice nothing. “Keep reading, Naiya.”
“Fine,” I say, worn out and irritated. “I’ll keep reading, but I’m tired of you all looking over my shoulder. It’s exhausting.”
Enoch nods gently, as though this is what he’d expected me to say. For some reason his resigned agreement hurts my feelings more than an argument would have. I set my lip as he and Tate wander into the far corners of the room, Tate examining some medical equipment while Enoch goes down on his side by the computer tower. Only Pip remains, looking at me with sad eyes.
“Why are you always mad now?” he asks softly.
I wince. Pip has it hard enough, but instead of making him feel better, comforting him, all I’ve done is added to his anxiety. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Enoch watching us. It makes me feel even worse.
“I’m sorry,” I sigh, putting a hand on his neck. “Everything is messed up. I wish you didn’t have to be a part of it.”
He shakes his head. “It’s my fault,” he says.
“Only partly,” I reply, smiling slightly.
He smiles back, but weakly. He sits on the floor next to my chair and leans his head against my thigh. I choose to interpret the gesture as forgiveness, and my smile widens. I squeeze his shoulder protectively.
With one hand on his head, I turn back to the log and begin to read again. The story is familiar, the City during this second war becoming one I recognize intimately: disappearing children, strange experiments, duplicates that begin to haunt the deserted floor and the upper levels.
And I, a Legerdemain, am caught in the middle of it all but unable to do anything about it.
I blink, startled to see the name written out for the first time. In the mysterious script it is beautiful, its letters framed with a subtle but alluring aura. I stare at it, trying to absorb the fact that this man with his delicate script and his despairing words must have been related to me somehow. A great-great-grandfather? An uncle six generations back? Older?
That explains the door, I realize. My hands …
Suddenly eager, I begin flipping through pages more quickly, scanning paragraphs instead of really absorbing them. When I finally hit upon it, my thoughts jam and I’m forced to read the passage several times. Nervously I pick at my cuticles, bite my nails, trying to make sense of the dense and frightening language. Finally, I look up.
“I found it,” I croak. Enoch straightens at once, rousing Tate, who has fallen asleep on one of the bunks.
“What is it?” he asks, coming to stand by the little desk. Tate follows sleepily, looking much less like a psychotic ice-robot with her eyes half shut and her hair tousled.
“Listen. It has gone by many names throughout many eons; Term - Terminus … ” I stop, still amazed that real, live answers have finally appeared.
“Keep reading.”
I bend my head to the page. “Terminus is but the latest. But ah, the power of that one simple word. In every age someone discovers and misuses this most sacred of places, trying to control the fundamentally uncontrollable: the human soul. So here we are again, repeating history, fighting and taking lives. And what do we hope to accomplish by this? We are such fools, to think anyone could win a war on Earth and thereby own the heavens. We are fools, and soon all will bleed.”
EIGHTEEN
“Naiya. Naiya, wake up.”
Enoch’s whisper breaks slowly into dark, dreamless sleep. I blink drowsily, still flopped in the same position I lay down in last night, after taking a shower in the mysteriously functional bathroom. Rousing myself, I grab the power pack from the small table next to the bunk I’ve appropriated. Though I feel like I haven’t slept at all, the clock says it’s been twelve hours.
“Wow.” I sit up slowly. Enoch is crouching next to me on the floor. “I slept for a long time.”
“Still mending,” he grins, reaching out to pull the neck of my black tee shirt aside. The bullet hole is almost completely gone, though the fabric near the shoulder still bears a faint, greasy stain from Tate’s salve.
I lean against the wall, away from his hand. “I think we can consider it healed now.”
He drops his arm, sits back on his heels. For the first time I notice that his broken finger is better as well, and has been since I woke up in the warehouse. He looks down at his hands, clasps them between his crouched knees.
“So what’s our plan?” he asks.
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
“That’s okay,” he says sympathetically. “It’s a little overwhelming.”
I smile ruefully, looking over at the beds across the room, where Pip is sleeping on the bunk stacked over Tate’s. He is sprawled wide, his mouth open, but Tate looks similar to her waking self: inert, inaccessible, expressionless. We’ve been down in this room for two days already, reading the log, perusing the books, trying to get the old computer to work. It’s starting to feel like a home.
Which is comforting, since I don’t even feel at home in my own body anymore. Killing with my hands, reading strange languages, watching as an immortal world dies every night in my sleep …
“Overwhelming is an understatement,” I say, grateful Enoch hasn’t made me talk about any of it.
Enoch grins too, looking at the ground. “An afterlife,” he muses softly, working through what we’ve learned. “It all seems so unreal.”
“Not an afterlife,” I correct. “It’s more of a stopover, a between-life. Souls only spend a little while in Terminus, right? Then they come back to Earth when they’re ready to … live again.” The concept still seems totally alien. Not so much the idea that the human spirit is real, or even that reincarnation is. I’ve read plenty of religious texts; I’m very familiar with the ideas. But that anyone could have learned the truth about where the soul goes after death? It’s unimaginable. Then again, someone had always known and protected the truth: a Legerdemain. All through history, that was their only purpose for being.
Ours, I remind myself. It was our only purpose for being.
Mine.
“I guess that’s true,” Enoch agrees, breaking into my thoughts. “A between-life. I wonder who I was in a past life,” he grins.
“A sleep pirate,” I say groggily. “Get it? Cuz you won’t go away and let me sleep?”
“Yeah, yeah. But still … reincarnation.”
Dazed, I nod. I think of Pip’s large green eyes last night, when he’d asked me what the word meant.
“So that’s what happens when we die?” he said, uncertain, scared.
“Yes,” Tate told him, when neither Enoch nor I answered. “And then we return, only … ” But here words had seemed to fail her.
“As someone else,” I’d finished. It was the last thing anyone said for the rest of the night.
Now Enoch laughs quietly. “I always thought reincarnation was when you came back as a slug for, I don’t know, being mean to people. After Papa told me what it meant, I used to think about Doctor Black living his next life as a particularly foul intestinal parasite.”
“Or a coprophage.”
“A flatworm.”
“A cockroach that never had a head.”
“A decomposing corpse so foul even a vulture wouldn’t touch it.”
“A sadist who has to live with the knowledge that everyone wishes he would die a thousand fiery deaths. Oh, wait … ”
Enoch laughs, then grows serious, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “Thought it was just a dream, though. Never thought it could be real.”
Just a dream.
In truth, everything feels like a dream. This is but the latest mystery in a long series. Terminus, the strange in-between world where souls live, is dying. So are the spirits which rest there, waiting to move on. And without them … new people cannot be born. The population decline is only partially the result of shortsighted madmen.
It’s also a divine problem, and that seems much harder to fix.
Harder
than the impossible? my mind grumbles. Because really, could anything be more difficult than fixing what the Home Guard have wrought?
What do you want from me, Papa?
At least this also explains the first wars: a tussle for power once the truth had been revealed. A war whose real attempt was genocide of other races in an attempt to eliminate competing bodies.
But it raises other questions, like how anyone but the Legerdemains learned of the existence of Terminus in the first place. Why people like Achilles know about it. And what we’re going to do. Less than two weeks ago I thought my last name was Barrigan, and I knew the shape my life would take; I hardly feel up to the task of saving a whole world.
Let alone two.
“Naiya?”
“We’re not done here,” I say, looking up suddenly. “Much as I want to leave, go with Achilles, help Pip, I don’t think we can. We’ve figured out a lot, but there’s more to it.”
Enoch waits.
“I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do. So we know what Terminus is, but what does that really tell us? Nothing. We don’t know where it is, we don’t know how to get there. We don’t know what’s wrong or what we can do to help.”
He remains silent.
“And … ”
“And what?” he prompts, after a long pause.
“The log mentioned a portal,” I say in a rush. “A path from here to there, constantly changing. I think that’s what Papa sent us to find, only he couldn’t in case we were caught or – you know.” Tortured. “But that information has to be here, it’s what my mother was looking for. She’s been here as well, she must have.” I gesture to the perfectly laid-out journal, the functional bathroom. Tate was right to be suspicious of the convenience. “And it’s what I’ve got to find.”
His lips quirk faintly, and I notice what had escaped me before: The computer tower is glowing. A small button is blinking in the lower right corner of the huge monitor. It’s on.
Broken Moon Page 17