Boundary (18 page)

“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
.

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.

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.