Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 31
Solda slung her tracker around her neck and waded through the crowd to find the device causing the light show. I loped around the periphery, which was usually where the dissidents would stand around to watch how their demonstrations were received. I ran one hand along the gritty wall, all pocked brick and concrete. Every step I took released the musky scent of decaying leaves.
Above us the image rippled with voices, their tones high and cantankerous. They talked of revolution like it was a great idea that wouldn’t lead to the whole city falling into the sea. They talked about a world where people lived on solid ground, and didn’t fear the purity corps and Guardians. They talked of some dead world, of the dead past. Most of what they said was stuff any recited text would tell you was a lie, but people loved the idea that there could be some other world but this one we’d made over the drowned carcass of the last one. Here were people like me out here trying to save these folks from themselves, and what thanks did we get for it? The coven telling me I mooned over too many boys.
I tripped over a bit of rubble in the grove surrounding the clear- ing, and caught myself on a thick tree trunk so large it must have been planted during the Founding. I’d disturbed some duff and dirt, revealing a flat, black projection device. In the stories the school marms all told, glittering jewels and gold were the treasures sought by people of the past. But this was pirate’s gold to me. X marks the spot.
I reached for the box just as another figure rushed me from be- hind. We both went over hard. With the wind knocked out of me, I wasn’t much good for anything but flailing. My attacker straddled me and pressed her hands to my throat. Already short on air, I felt my hands go reflexively to her wrists. I should have kept my head and flipped her up and over me, but panic overrides training when you don’t have enough of the training part. Blackness juddered across my vision. I freed my right hand and threw dirt in her face. She wore a long coat with a hood, though, and I ended up eating more dirt than she did.
I always heard you think a lot about your whole life before you die. But there I was, getting strangled to death in the Priory Gar- dens, and the only thing I was thinking about was how I really didn’t want to die. I can’t imagine having time to think about any- thing else. Maybe you got more time to think when it all goes black, but I doubted it.
Solda’s truncheon thwacked the woman from behind. I had never been so glad to see Solda’s scowling face.
The truncheon’s current went straight through my attacker and into me. I had a brief moment to watch her seize up before I did, too, losing all control of my body. As I jerked and spasmed, Solda interrogated my attacker, smashing her with the truncheon again and again to emphasize her points. “Where are your collaborators? Where’s the other device?”
By the time the pain had passed, for me, I had heard those ques- tions so many times I wanted to answer them just to make Solda be quiet. Little bits of spittle flecked her mouth. But my attacker still lay on the ground, curled up, wordlessly absorbing the attacks
I couldn’t help but admire that stupid, thankless little rebel, just a little.
Solda bashed the woman once more, in the head, and her hood came free. My attacker was much younger than I’d thought, maybe sixteen, already old enough to start an apprenticeship. She should have been under some guild’s care, working her twelve hours like the rest of us.
“Confine her,” Solda told me, and marched off to start on the containment work with the witnesses. Containment was boring, so I was glad to have the more exciting part of the job.
I restrained the girl with a canister of spray-on webbing. It bun- dled her up in a breathable cocoon. The grunts could come in later and haul her off to the coven for a proper interrogation.
By the time I finished, Solda had already contained the audi- ence. They lay on the grounds, still and beatific as sleeping children. The air still smelled like lemons, an aftereffect of the projection. In a quarter hour the witnesses who’d been contained would get up, shake off a headache, and carry on like nothing had happened. I’d been contained before, back when I was a little kid. I hadn’t known what it was at the time, but I remembered the big, kindly face of the Guardian crouching next to me when I came to. I’d been alone, I guess, when I saw whatever illegal tech show it was, and she had stayed with me to make sure nothing happened to me while I was out. When you contain kids too young, sometimes they don’t wake up. It’s good form to make sure it takes. That was when I decided I wanted to be a Guardian, just like her. She was calm and reasoned and comforting, and she could remember all the world’s secrets, all the stuff they made the rest of us forget. I told the coven I wanted to be like her to protect people from the gory technology all the insurgents were bringing up from the dead world below us. But really, it was because I knew she had more knowledge of the real world than I ever would, and I coveted that. I wanted the truth of the world. Turns out, being a Guardian didn’t come with as many answers as I’d hoped. Not yet, anyway. The only hope to get more truth was to pass this apprenticeship, and Solda wasn’t too keen on seeing me do that.
Solda strode over to meet me. She had the black projection de- vice in her hand; it wasn’t much bigger than a heart. She thrust it at me. “Contain that,” she said, though she could have just as easily done it herself.
“Sorry,” I said, spraying the device with a signal blocker, “I’m not so good once fights hit the ground.” I didn’t have anywhere to put the device until the grunts arrived, so I slipped it into my pocket.
“You aren’t good at defense, period,” said Solda. “You aren’t good at offense, either.” She snapped her mouth shut. I saw the tension in her jaw from the rest of the words she had left unsaid. I could guess at a good many of them.
“Sorry,” I said again, but she was already walking away. “Grunts will be here in two minutes,” she said. “You got the number and date for them?”
“This is the eighteenth,” I said, “year four hundred and seventy eight. You want me to recite the relic pledge, too?”
Solda snorted at my sarcasm and popped something into her mouth. She went off to wait for the contained people to start wak- ing up.
The grunts arrived a little later, two young men, not much older than the girl in the cocoon, and they hefted her into a nondescript wheeled cart to take her back to the coven. Nobody wanted to see Guardians hauling bodies around the islands. There were rumors enough already about what we did. That was the excuse Solda gave me for divvying up tasks, but I figured it was more likely because it kept all of us knowing pieces about a thing instead of seeing the whole picture. The longer the Guardians had with the rebels, the more we could get out of them. As it was, I’d never see that girl again. We got off the Priory at the next island docking, just as the witnesses were starting to wake up. The island at the dock was the Seventh Day Restaurant. It wouldn’t dock near the coven for at least an hour, so we had some time. The wind was up, buffeting my face, and clouds were speeding past the island, obscuring the long drop between land masses that would, inevitably, lead to the sea.
I went to the edge of the island, to a little park, and Solda fol- lowed. I wasn’t going to be the one who broke the silence. I knew what was coming.
But when she sat down next to me, she didn’t say anything. In- stead, she pulled her lunch bar from her pocket and ate it sullenly, staring straight ahead.
“Sorry,” I said again, because I really was trying to make amends.
When she was angry at me the job was even more miserable. “Don’t be sorry at me,” she said. “Be sorry at the coven.”
And that’s all she would say, no matter how much I wheedled, until we finally docked at the soaring spires of the coven’s island ninety minutes later. We didn’t even make it to our rooms before a red-liveried little coven’s messenger summoned us to a meeting.
That’s when Solda finally said something. All she said was, “Shit.”
We followed the messenger deeper into the palatial compound until we reached the coven’s assembly chamber. The messenger pulled back deep purple curtains and admitted us into the half circle of stone where the five members of the coven stood, draped all in dark purple. At the farthest end of the half circle was the cur- rent Coven Senior, Hovana. Tall and plump, all I could see of her was her tawny face peering out at me, the dark eyes squinting out at me from a face with a dimple in the chin so deep that it seemed to split her jaw in two.
“Most apprentices see us just twice in their lifetimes,” Hovana said as the messenger closed the curtains behind us, “when they are accepted into service, and when they are removed from consider- ation or raised to become a Guardian. Yet this is already the fourth time you’ve sat before the coven. Why is that, Arret?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “We just disagree about protocol.”
Solda wasn’t looking at anything in particular, though her gaze tarried a long time on the floor. I could hear her sucking on some- thing, probably one of her hard candies.
“You mean the law,” Hovana said. “One cannot disagree with the law. Guardians uphold the law.”
“Laws change all the time,” I said.
“They aren’t changed by apprentices,” Hovana said. “That should have been a containment, not a catastrophe. As it was, we had to contain a good many people because you were tardy.”
“We can’t be everywhere at once,” I said. “You want us to take on too many looters with too few hands. The logistics of retrieval—” “I know very well the logistics of retrieval,” she said, and she recited the old code at me. “I know it,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “because a Guardian with a poor memory is not suited for the scarf.”
I started to recite the full book of lost relics. She stopped me. “That’s not the point,” she said.
“I spent a year as a librarian,” I said. “I can recite ten full trea- tises on martial law from the founding of the city. I know what I’m about.”
“We have enough librarians,” she said. “We have enough people around to repeat facts. I need Guardians. I know you have inven- tory after this, but I want you to give the shift to someone else and cool your head. You’re grounded at the coven until further notice. Maybe you’ll be a better librarian than a Guardian, you think? This may not be the profession for you. Solda, in the morning I want you to speak to Moravas. The customization of that device was clearly her family’s work. I recognized it immediately.”
“Then she should be drowned,” I said.
“We don’t make the rules,” Hovana said. “We only enforce them.
Got it, librarian?”
I gave her my biggest grin, because I’ve always found that jovi- ality rankles hard in the face of insult, especially with the coven. “Sure,” I said.
“Repeat it back,” she said.
“I’m not some first level kid,” I said.
“Repeat it,” she said, and she even used a teacher’s voice, like they all did in the classrooms when we had to give a summary of the day’s lessons. The Purity Corps insisted that no knowledge could be permanently marked onto any surface, which left us with our memories. The better your memory, the better you were in school, the better your life. I was lucky, with my memory. There’s not much to do in an orphanage after the day’s work, so I would spend hours going over lines and stories and formulas until I learned them back- wards and forwards.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, and that was the end of that.
They hustled us out of there like I’d set the place on fire. I don’t think anyone had ever told the coven to fuck itself. I wasn’t even sure why I’d said it. I was tired of being yelled at. Tired of being told I was stupid. Tired of getting only half the truth even though I was training to be a Guardian.
The big doors to the audience chamber closed behind us, and Solda and I stood together in the stillness. Solda put something into her mouth, another hard candy; I caught the faint scent of pepper- mint. The hall was cold. A couple of other Guardians passed by; neither looked our way.
“You go to the library and fill out the paperwork on today,” Solda said. “Then you’re suspended, like they said. Archival work. Present yourself to the head librarian after you file the paper.”
Solda stepped away.
“Wait,” I said, and grabbed for her sleeve.
She yanked her arm back, and when she spoke, her voice was low and gruff. “You listen,” she said. “You don’t know what I’ve put on the line for you. Entitled little sinner boys like you come and go around here, thinking they can fuck things up and everyone gives them a pass because there’s so few of them. But let me tell you this. We don’t need more than a couple boys to keep the world spinning, and the coven is happy to let you fly off the face of the world if you stir the pot here. Your actions are dangerous. Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on the right side,” I said. “I know there’s no better world than this. I’ve seen all that rebel propaganda and I know it’s shit. But blindly following laws is stupid. I don’t like how some things are set up. There’s no harm in saying that.”
Solda sucked on the hard candy, shaking her head. “Even you don’t get it,” she said. “You heard it in stories, but you don’t know how this world we’ve made is the end result of thousands of years of trial and error that led to failed civilizations. This society is the pinnacle of social progress. Human beings are naturally prone to chaos. You have to give them structure. You keep prodding at the structure like you’re doing, and it tumbles down.”
“If it’s really that weak,” I said, scoffing, “maybe it’s not what they say it is.”
“You’re going to get more than grounded, saying stuff like that,” Solda said. “I like you sometimes, Arret, I do. You are smart when you’re not distracted. You’ve got a great memory and a keen sense for how those relic looters think. But you have to bend to order. If you won’t bend, it’ll break you.”
Solda pulled away and moved out into the hallway, back toward the dining area. I was starving, too, but I knew following her would just result in more finger-wagging. I’d do the paperwork like she asked, just this once.
The coven library had its own floating island, connected to the main coven island by a flexible bridge that wasn’t for the faint of heart. In bad weather it lurched and juddered and snaked about like something alive. I kept both hands on the smooth, silvery rails, too stubborn to wait for a ferry.
Like the coven, the library was built to impress the weary with the weight of history. All along the path leading up the massive stone steps were twisted human relics that had been dredged up from below. Only the coven and its archivists were allowed to house these sorts of relics, and for good reason. The figures here glis- tened in the sunlight, their bodies encased in a sheer substance like glass, or clear amber. They were the remnants of the people who had come before, the ones buried by the sea a thousand years ago. They had been petrified and then drowned for their sins. Now they stood here at the archives as a reminder of what excessive hubris and decadence could lead to. Not enough rules destroyed them, the coven would say, but I always thought they were just dumb enough to get caught.
I gave my palm at the library entrance for identification, and the palmist spent her time tracing all the lines to ensure I was who I said I was, which was ludicrous, really. There were only four other men my age who ever set foot in the library, and we looked noth- ing alike. But we all had to pretend at being useful, so she studied my palm, and I let her, because I’d already yelled at Solda and the coven, and look at where all that had gotten me. But you couldn’t have anything outside of the archives written on paper, including identity cards. All the Guardians who had them picked them up at the front desk of the library to use to get into the secret stacks. But outside of the archives, writing stuff down got you thrown into the sea.
I walked up through the stacks. The big wood-and-steel book- shelves were oppressive, stretching up and up for six floors, all connected by the spidery veins of silver catwalks that gleamed in the sunlight streaming in from the multiple glass domes. Marbled light painted rainbows across the floor, intercut by strange, twisted shadows created by the catwalks. Just breathing the air made me cough. The air was clotted with dust and stank of old leather and unwashed old librarians too enamored of their work to pause for hygiene. It was easy to get lost in here. I’d never seen all of it. I still wasn’t permitted into most of the rooms, but I could see tantalizing glimpses of them through the stacks. Those were the rooms that housed all the machine recordings, the disks and crystals and lasers and tinny bits of metal and flickering screens and flashy holograms. Would I ever get in there, now?
The head librarian, Juleta, loomed above it all at her great desk, which was perched like a podium atop a slab at the center of the library. She always reminded me of a spider squatting at the cen- ter of her web. I went up the seven steps to her, trotting up each one. That’s when I finally noticed that there was something in my pocket, because it banged against my thigh as I walked. I reached into my pocket as I came to the top of the pedestal, and my mouth went dry. My fingers touched the cold, webbed coating over the projection device that I’d slipped into my pocket back at the Priory. I hadn’t turned it in to the grunts when they arrived. I’d com- pletely forgotten. Heat moved up my face. I’d be murdered for this. They’d drown me. How would I explain?
“Have they assigned you over to me yet?” Juleta said, breaking my frozen panic. She fixed her monocle into the deep trough beneath her massive brow. Her black eye swam in the watery lens, three times bigger behind the glass. Strands of white peppered her hair, and she had soft white hair on her chin and cheeks. Her position alone made her one of the smartest people in the world, but in that moment, I loathed the idea of ever coming back here again. At this rate I was going to end up a librarian, not a Guardian, or maybe just a dead criminal, based on what was in my pocket.
