Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 32
I snapped my mouth shut and reconsidered. They were going to drown me anyway when they found out I hadn’t turned in the device. There was no way around that. I was a fugitive already. It’s just that nobody knew it. I don’t even know what came over me, but I said, “I’m here to pick up a file on Moravas.” The name just bubbled up, the same one Hovana had told Solda to look into. I was just speeding that along, really. What did it matter, now? All I had to leverage was the case. If I could bring this Moravas in, I could pretend I’d gotten this device from her. Nobody would know. Or maybe I’d get out of here and just stage a relic hunt and tell them this was a new device. Whatever I did, I had to get out of this library, because no one was going to buy that I’d found a projector in here still covered in webbing.
Juleta raised a thick eyebrow. Her eyebrows were still black as pitch, like her eyes. “They letting Solda interrogate that little shit, are they?” she asked. She stuck out her meaty tongue and licked her thumb. She began to page through the massive book at her elbow, making little grunts as she sifted through the information.
Finally she wrote something on a card and handed it over to me. It still got me, watching somebody write something down so casu- ally, even if it was permitted in the library. “Consult that catalog on the name,” she said, and went back to her ledgers.
I took the card and hopped down the steps, the device thump- ing in my pocket as I did. Maybe someone else would worry about getting caught, but what did I have to lose? There’s something free- ing about knowing you’re completely fucked.
I surveyed the great wall of card catalogs, searching for the bank Juleta had written down. There were twenty-eight sets of cata- logs, all used for different types of information. I needed the one for whatever it was they filed Moravas under. I’d never searched through it before, which meant she wasn’t any type of relic dealer I’d been asked to look up. There was MAA-MAD, and MAE-MAG. I could compare letters, even if I couldn’t exactly sound things out very well. So I kept going, down and across, until I got to MOQ- MOR. I pulled open the drawer and found the card with Moravas’s name. It listed the full name, which I didn’t try and sound out, and gave a number for where the files were held. I could match that number to one of the big secret rooms that I’d never been in before. I knew it because I’d always wanted to go in there. I wrote down the location of the file on the card that the librarian had given me, giving a little illicit shudder as I did, and hustled my way up to the gated entry of that room. Through the slated bars, I could see rows of disks and crystals and baskets full of data drives.
I strode confidently up to the woman sitting at the desk inside the bars and pushed my card under the bars between us. I gave her my best smile. “Librarian sent me your way for this,” I said.
“I need your card,” she said. “That’s the card.”
She smirked. “Your Guardian card,” she said. “Unless you have a tattoo?”
“I lost it,” I said.
“Is that so? You lost your tattoo?”
I shrugged. “The card. I left it with Juleta up at the front. Lis- ten, if I wasn’t authorized, Juleta wouldn’t send me up here, would she? Give me back the card and I’ll just tell Grand Master Hovana I got pushback. Can I get your name?” I reached for the nub of a much-used pencil sitting on the counter on my side, purely for show. I could read after a fashion, but I wasn’t great at writing un- less I could copy the forms of the letters exactly.
“It’s fine,” she said, taking back the card. “Just keep it in the viewing room.” When I didn’t move, she pointed to the door to the left of me. “I’ll let you into the room from my side.”
I ambled to the door like I knew what I was doing, and tried the knob. Locked. The clerk came in from the other side and opened it for me. Inside it was even dimmer than the rest of the library, and I had to let my eyes adjust. She led me through a second door into a tiny room muffled by black drapes. There was only a desk and a projection screen on one wall.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” she said, and left.
I admit I sweated a bit while I waited, but what more could they do to me if they found out I wasn’t supposed to be here?
She reappeared with a flat black projection device a lot like the one we had retrieved from the Priory, and a sliver of a crystal. “I need to lock you in here while you’re viewing the contents,” she said, “and I can’t permit you to leave until I verify both are back in my possession. You understand?”
“Of course,” I said. “Old hat.”
A flicker of unease crossed her face, but the truth is that if you’re confident and pretend like you know what you’re doing, most peo- ple will believe anything. She left the two things on the desk and locked the door behind her.
I had dismantled one of these recording devices before while on a retrieval, so I knew where the crystal went. I inserted the crys- tal and waited, but nothing happened. It took a little poking and prodding, but the thing finally snapped on. A brilliant holographic image burst from the device, nearly blinding me, as I still had my head over the lens. I sat back, and a great jowly face filled the air above the device. The head was nearly as big as the desk. I leapt back, knocking the chair over, to get some perspective.
“This is all a lie,” the face said, and as I pulled back it came into focus. I didn’t recognize her. Was this the actual relic dealer? Wasn’t this supposed to be a file on her? The woman spoke with a heavy accent that I couldn’t place. There were different dialects among the floating cities, but she seemed to stumble with basic pronunciation, as if it was a new tongue entirely. She wore her hair in thick black braids wound around her round head. She smacked her lips when she talked, and was looking somewhere to the left of the recording device instead of straight into it.
“This world is a lie,” the face said. “I am a lie. My name is a lie. The sea is a lie. Until you accept all of these things, you will find no peace.”
I had heard some speeches like this from some of the other rel- ics used to disseminate propaganda. But what the projection said next was odd: “Consider this,” she said. “Why is it they don’t want you to write anything down? It’s because of the dates. They don’t want you to realize the truth about the dates, because then the whole story unravels.”
I heard a key rattle in the door, and the little desk clerk came in.
Her brow was furrowed.
“This must be the wrong recording,” she said. “This is not what’s on the number, this introduction.”
I reached into my pocket then, and tapped the device inside. I don’t know why I did it. Sometimes you just have a feeling for these things, maybe because I’ve been around them so much. The recording in front of us flickered. The gaze was straight at us now, repeating a name and address for Moravas, as well as a lengthy case history. I quickly memorized the data, which was repeated once more before the recording clicked off.
“That was very odd,” the clerk said. “I’ve never seen one do that.” “Oh, these things happen,” I said. I checked the materials back in and hurried from the room before she could question me any further. My palms were sweaty, and though I managed to keep from running, my pace was quicker than it should have been in a library.
I descended from the library and out past the palmist, through the forest of petrified sinners, and all but threw myself across the hurky-jerky bridge. What was this device I had in my pocket? Not just a recording or projection device. It did something to other pieces of old relics. It was a key of some kind. Or maybe a trigger. Did it unlock messages in other devices? That was a fancy bit of propaganda.
My heart thudded hard in my chest. I wrapped my red scarf over my face and waited for the next ferry out of the coven. I didn’t even look to see where it was going. I just knew I needed to get away as quickly as possible.
The wind whipped at my scarf as I watched coven island float away from us. In a few minutes it was lost to the clouds, and I finally looked up to see my destination. The ferry was headed toward the meatpacking district. From there I could take up another ferry to the lower islands and the traders’ square. Lots of techno-babblers down there, pinch pennies, prophets, and other assorted riffraff. I should have expected that this Moravas person would have an ad- dress there. I guess it just all seemed too simple, her being there. I mean, where else would she be, up in there with the Noted Families and Safety Custodians? Hardly.
Warm afternoon light turned the world orange as I arrived in the lower islands. The light down there was spotty at the best of times, as the lower islands were often in the shadow of the ones above, which were larger and constantly moving. The ones below were cabled in place in the sea, mounted on giant chains. The lower islands were below the clouds, so from here it was much easier to see the black swath of ocean that had swallowed the rest of the world. Black water for as far as you could see in every direction: the water that ate up all of our ancestors’ sins.
I found Moravas’s address without much problem. People got out of my way because of the scarf. It wasn’t until I reached the slapdash cloth-and-twine flap leading into the shop that I realized I was probably going to scare her off with that scarf, too. I had my truncheon out and ready as I strode in.
An old woman sat behind the counter, winding great lengths of red and black yarn onto paper cards. Antiques stuffed the shelves behind her: cloth toys, wooden clocks that no longer worked, coloring pencils and pens, toy carts, plastic soldiers, bits of foil but- terflies, seashell figures, old glass bulbs, buttons, tangles of fishing wire, and other odds and ends that I couldn’t name. It smelled of the sea, here, the scent of briny death, probably because it still lingered on all these things she had no doubt illegally brought up from the bottom. The woman was lean, burnished and brittle as a stick. She peered out at me from between tangles of long white hair thick as kelp.
“I’m looking for Moravas,” I said.
As I approached the counter, a little light blinked in the belly of a doll just behind her. The woman turned to it, then cocked her head at me. “I’m Moravas,” she said.
Then who was on the recording? I thought. I pulled the device from my pocket and set it on the counter with a thunk.
“This is your work,” I said.
“Is it?” she said, and her tone was playful.
“Come on, don’t fuck around. I saw the hologram over the Prio- ry. You tell me who you made it for or I turn you in as the one who pulled off the whole thing.”
A smile creased her face. “Will you, now?”
“I won’t repeat myself.” I set the truncheon on the desk.
She continued carding her yard. “You are a very cute young boy,” she said. “I haven’t seen a boy down here in weeks. You should stay for a drink.”
“You’re not taking this very seriously,” I said. “You haven’t come here for me,” she said. “What?”
“You have come here for the truth,” she said. She tapped the device. “If you were still a Guardian, if you ever were, you would have turned this in. What are you now that you’ve kept it, now that you’ve unlocked the message of the world?”
“There was no message,” I said, indignant. I stuffed the device back in my pocket.
“You’re a sinner, Arret. You always have been.” “How do you know my name?”
“Have you ever been down there, to the sea?” Moravas said. “No,” I said. “That’s illegal without a permit.”
“I went down often in my youth,” Moravas said. Her voice was low, soothing. “We would wing out down over the clouds from the upper islands and dip low, down and down through clouds like silky foam. When we burst free of the clouds, there was the sea, the flat blue sea sparkling with light. The sea, the sea, the world below, for as far as my gaze reached, and for as far as we could power a flying craft.”
“A what?” I said. “There are no flying craft.” But she continued on as if she hadn’t heard me.
“We had circumnavigated the globe and found nothing but sea,” she said, “just like they said we would. Oh, certainly, there were areas where the great old rubble of the past jutted up from the roiling sea, but at best what remained was sand bar or marsh- land, and as the tides went in and out, so too did that mythic thing all the stories called the land. It wasn’t so wonderful, I thought. I much preferred the sky.”
“What are you reciting from?” I asked. “My memory,” she said.
“There’s no land anymore,” I said. “Not since the sea buried it a thousand years ago.”
“Did you ever wonder why so many of you grew up in orphan- ages?” Moravas asked. It annoyed me that she was still wrapping the yarn, as if we were having a friendly chat instead of an inter- rogation.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“It’s easier to tell you all the same story,” she said. “The same story of what happened to the ones before you.”
“The sinners?”
“We’re all sinners,” she said.
“I need to bring you in,” I said. “You made this device and dis- seminated propaganda, and that’s illegal.”
“You’re a disgraced Guardian apprentice with no legal authority here,” Moravas said, “and that’s illegal. So it appears we are at an impasse.”
I yanked the truncheon from the table. “What is this? How do you know who I am?” I prided myself on staying calm during ter- ror, but she had unsettled me.
“Tell me the world you know,” she said.
“Why?” I said.
“Humor an old woman.”
“The world is here,” I said. “We are at the very apex of civiliza- tion. We rose up over the water and escaped the scourge that killed the sinners. We are God’s people. What is there to tell of the world but that?”
“What if I told you the world down there isn’t as full of sinners as you think,” she said.
“Is this more of your rebel propaganda?” I said.
“Why don’t you go down yourself?” she said. “You want the person who made that device? She is down there.”
“What . . . in the sea?”
“Yes,” Moravas said. “Climb down the chain and follow the red fishing line below the water. It’s not deep here. You’ll find her and you can bring her to your Guardians, and beg for their approval.”
“That’s illegal,” I said.
“As illegal as all of the other things you’ve done today,” she said. I gritted my teeth. “There’s no way down,” I said.
“There’s always a way down,” she said. “All you have to do is ask.” “If it will get me the person who made this relic, show me the way,” I said, because I had come this far, and she was right. What
did I have to lose?
She rose from her seat and set the yarn aside. She opened the door behind her and gestured me through. We walked into a dusty, cluttered back room to a trapdoor. She raised it and pointed into the dark. “Follow the stairs down until you reach the light,” she said. “Then you’ll come to the bottom of the island.”
I stuffed my truncheon into the loop at my hip and plunged into the darkness. This whole world is a lie, all their propaganda said. Well, it was time they proved it.
I climbed into the darkness. I glanced up once and saw Moravas gazing down at me. I expected her to be smiling, amused at my misery, but her face was dead serious. Then she closed the trap door, plunging me into absolute darkness. I stared down and saw the tiny pinprick of light that I was supposed to reach, and groaned. What a chase this was.
I don’t know how long I climbed, but when I reached the bot- tom my feet scuffed on solid rock. Someone had drilled a hole through the rock of the island and affixed a rope ladder to the long chain stretching into the sea. Already, I felt like a sinner. There was no greater sin than touching a piece of a world that wasn’t yours, the world God had abandoned. We were the people of the clouds, closest to God, and to descend meant hurling ourselves back to some gory, godless past full of heretics and charlatans. The sea was where you threw the cast-offs, the murderers, the unclean, the dis- eased, the stupid, the malformed. But the sea was where I had to go if I wanted to be redeemed.
So I wiped my hands on my trousers and took hold of the ladder and down I went. It was a good three hundred feet of rope ladder, all twisted with the massive chain that fixed the island in place. For a long time, I didn’t look down or up. The ladder was slippery, and I was breathing hard.
After a while, I chanced a look below. From certain angles, one could see the shadowy cities beneath the water on clear days from all the way up in the floating Conservatory. But as I descended, the dark peaks and squiggles resolved into what they were—not craggy rocks or coral or strange alien formations, but wreckage of a past so distant it only existed in story and myth and dusty old archeology manifestos recited from memory.
I turned my face back to the task at hand. I didn’t look down again until I found myself out of ladder. I found that I was stand- ing on a floating platform built around a giant buoy to which the chain was attached. Just one link of the chain was as wide as my torso. For the first time in my life, I gazed up at the lower islands and stared at the world from below. Much of the upper cities were covered in clouds, but the lower islands were visible, huge tangled masses of porous stone. Great hanging gardens of vegetation hung off the sides. Strangely, there were what looked like massive fans or portals of some kind in the stone underneath, large as buildings. I had never asked how the world stayed in the air. I wasn’t quite sure how it did now, but suspected it was something to do with those huge objects.
I turned then to the sea. From here it did not look as flat and black. Great relics jutted up from it, bits of metal, broken spires, weedy junk that collected mollusks and kelp and other, stranger things. I had expected the sea to be deep, but the old woman was right about it being shallow. I leaned over the platform and saw rocky ground just a few feet below. Real land, right there. The fishing line was easy to see, as well. It ran from the platform out toward one of the big tangled skeletons. It had been an old metal building once, now rusted out and covered in sea creatures.
