Relic (The Books of Eva I) (26 page)

“Elizabet died right after that post,” I say. It isn’t a question. I know it for a fact.

“Yes.”

“The ship never made it to New North.”

“No. Not with her alive, anyway.”

“You didn’t find any other posts?”

“Nope. Just this one and the other one that you saw. I wish we had her flash drive.”

“Flash drive?”

“It’s a file that stores things like her posts. She wore it around her neck. You saw it on in that last image. In the other post, she mentioned that she placed Robert’s last video on it.”

“Do you mean the amulet?” I ask, even though the word sounds wrong. I pull Elizabet’s necklace out from beneath my sealskin cloak.

Lukas’s eyes grow wide. “You’ve had it this whole time?”

“I didn’t realize what it was. I thought she used it to offer up prayers to Apple.”

“Even though I told you they didn’t pray to Apple? That Apple was just some stupid symbol of the Tech?” Lukas sounds angry.

How dare he get mad at me? After all he’s asked of me. “Why are you talking to me like that? I’m telling you what I believed at the time. What was right to believe.”

Lukas casts a quick glance toward the shadowy hall here his
aanak
disappeared. Perhaps he’s worried she’ll hear us. But his eyes soften and he nods. Not deferentially—he hasn’t treated me with deference at all since he took my hand and we started running. Like an equal. “I’m sorry, Eva. You’re right.”

He gently takes this mysterious thing and sticks the silver head into the side of the … computer. I can no longer think of it as an altar. I know that now if I am to see its truth, even though the word “computer” has no meaning.

Just like I thought: it is a sort of a puzzle piece—only I’d never have guessed exactly what kind of puzzle. The screen brightens and comes alive again.

This time, though, we’re not gazing at Elizabet. A handsome young man—definitely a Gallant if he’d lived in the Aerie—appears. His dark hair and fair, freckled cheeks are wet, and his bright green eyes look kind of wild. He stands on a windy, crowded dock.

It must be Robert.

“Elizabet, my kultanen. I’m thinking of you snug and safe on your parents’ icebreaker ship. Heading toward some polar island where your family’s set up camp—as only they could manage at the world’s end. You’ve always rejected their money and their grand designs for you and your life. Even for the sake of your trashy English boyfriend. Now I’m damned grateful for them. For the chance they’re giving you
.

“It’s madness here at the docks, but I’m determined to get on one of these ships leaving the Helsinki harbor. My brother Alex has a friend from University who’s training as a marine biologist on one of the scientific boats. He’s trying to gain us passage. The ship’s called the
Kalevala.
I hope the name is a good omen.”

He looks away from the computer, toward the crowds. And then he speaks to the computer again, his voice low and quick.
“Remember your debut as Juliet at the Mariinsky? You looked so exquisite on the stage, so effortless in your pirouettes and leaps. I felt I was the only one who knew how long you worked. How much you practiced to make everything appear so fluid and easy. How much you sacrificed to pursue your dream. Leaving Finland. Leaving me
.

“Well, we are still together, my kultanen, are we not? Even now. Even as the polar ice caps melt and flood our world. What’s that famous line from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet?
From the last ballet I saw you perform? ‘Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.’ ”
His voice catches.
“We aren’t really parting, are we, my
kultanen? Just saying good night until the morrow. That is what I shall whisper on board the
Kalevala,
as we get closer and closer to you and this place, New North. Too good to be true, I think. An oasis, like from a myth. But I’ll try to believe. I have to. Until then, my kultanen, good night, good night, good night.”

He touches the screen and it darkens. “I don’t think I could stand another tick,” I admit. “Thank the Gods that screen is black.” I feel heartbroken and numb and angry and guilty all at once. Guilty because I’m glad it’s over. And heartbroken because I feel more bound to Elizabet than ever. Robert offered her what Lukas offered me: the promise that he would believe. For different reasons, obviously, but the word is aflame again.
Believe
.

Even Lukas seems moved. “It’s too hard, knowing what we know about them.”

I shake my head, doubt gnawing away at my thoughts. “Elizabet isn’t really the same person I wrote about in the Chronicle, is she? She loved to dance, and she made huge sacrifices to do it. She wasn’t forced. Dancing wasn’t the tawdry spectacle that we were taught about in School.”

I look at Lukas. He lowers his eyes.

“No, she’s not the Elizabet from the Chronicle,” he concedes.

“She seems ambitious—even a little ruthless. I mean, she abandoned her boyfriend and her family—defied her family’s wishes, even. For her own dream.” I pause; the words are hard to form and to speak. “It makes me wonder whether I understand any part of the pre-Healing history at all.”

Privately, I laud her strength. I wonder if it was common in pre-Healing women. Maybe they were tough and didn’t need the protection of Gallants.

“The Golden Age,” Lukas says quietly.

I frown at him. What do you mean?”

“The period of history, the one that the Aerie rulers say they used as inspiration for their own—”

“I know what the Golden Age is,” I whisper, cutting him off.

Lukas starts tapping away at those rectangular keys. “Take a look at this. Elizabet’s computer stored a bunch of books.” He points to the screen. “One of them is called
Life in a Medieval Village in the Golden Age
.”

I squint at a gorgeously vibrant painting, filled with images that are not unlike the Aerie: stone walls of a distant Keep, men and women in plain robes. The huts that dominate the foreground seem more like Lukas’s village, however.

“I think it’s a Schoolbook of some sort,” he continues. “Maybe Elizabet was still doing some studies. She looks young enough to still be in School.”

“She was eighteen.” I say quietly. “Exactly my age.”

Lukas clicks and words appear. Shoulders touching, we draw close. He touches the screen, whirling me to particular passages. The language is dense and dry, but I get it in a tick, a heartbeat. Talk of hunger, of servitude, of ignorance. Everything of value concentrated in the hands of a few. This was no Golden Age. So why does The Lex paint it that way? New North
is
better than this. Everyone—Boundary and Aerie—has adequate food, clothing, and shelter. It almost seems as if the Founders of New North built a society that’s like my Chronicle of Elizabet. On the outside, it could appear to be true. But there is no real truth.

After about a bell, my head is spinning. “Lukas.” My voice shakes. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”

“That’s how Eamon felt, too,” he answers, keeping his eyes fixed to words on the glowing screen.

I grab his shoulder. “Eamon knew about all this?”

“Yes, he’d learned something of the gap between now and the real past. But, Eva,” Lukas breaks his gaze from the computer and clasps his hand on mine. “I don’t want you to end up like Eamon.”

Panic takes hold. I crane my neck, looking for his grandmother. Where is she? As odd and confusing as she is, I want her here; I want to be rescued from the news I sense Lukas is about to give me. Maybe she got out of the way for this very reason.

I try to wriggle out of his grasp. “What do you mean ‘end up like Eamon’? Seeing this stuff doesn’t mean I’ll go careening down the side of the Ring. One has nothing to do with the other.”

He is insistent that we hold hands; he takes the other. “Eva, they have everything to do with one another. Eamon knew that The Lex was a fiction. That everything you were raised to believe was a fiction.”

I gasp at the word. “A fiction?”

Lukas’s voice is firm. “Yes. Eamon discovered something very dangerous. He learned that the story of the Healing was the same as an old, banned story about a flood that wiped clean the past. That story was in a book called the Bible. And people like Robert and Elizabet believed in the Bible as you believe in The Lex.”

Bible
. Haven’t I just heard that word?

Lukas continues. “The Bible was kind of like a pre-Healing Lex. For some people, at least. Elizabet was holding a copy of the Bible in her hands during her last post. She mentioned praying with it, when she was hoping for a post from Robert.”

“Is the Bible about Apple? Do you have a copy?” The questions tumble out of my mouth. Even in my bewilderment, it’s as if my appetite for truth has just been whet, and I am starving for answers.

He seems annoyed, or maybe just tired. He sighs. “No, we don’t have a copy. And it’s not about Apple. Tech came long after the Bible. Anyway, all Bibles were destroyed. We out here in the Boundary lands have never forgotten it, though.”

“How do you know that?”

“We pass down the past word by word, Eva. So my people have kept our own record of what happened here in New North before and after the Healing. And we remember when the Bibles were destroyed.”

“Why would the Founders have destroyed those books? Paper is precious.”

He lets go of my hands. He no longer sounds tired; he sounds angry. “Because the Founders needed to write a fiction. So they took the parts of the Bible that worked and fashioned The Lex out of them.”

I’m angry, too. “That’s heresy, Lukas. The Lex is a sacred
work, delivered directly to the people of New North by the Gods.”

“And everything that you’ve been taught has turned out to be true, right?” he snaps back.

I don’t answer. How can I? This one trip to the Boundary lands has burned every single one of my long-held beliefs. About the Aerie, the pre-Healing days, the Healing itself, The Lex … and now my own twin.

Lukas speaks to my silence. “Please look at this, Eva.” He taps on the computer again and pulls up another book that Elizabet stored on it. “I might not have a copy of the Bible, but Elizabet did. Here it is, on her computer.”

I push him to the side. Neither one of us wants him to spoon-feed me information anymore. I want to make my own decisions about Elizabet, the Healing, New North, and Eamon. No longer do I want to view the present or the past through anyone else’s prism. Imitating Lukas’s motions, I page through this … 
Bible
. The words and rhythm remind me of The Lex. The language that is at once beautiful and obtuse.

His hand jerks out to stop me at a passage.

I read the words over and over to myself, until I realize that I need to speak them aloud.
“In the eyes of God, the Earth was corrupt and full of lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt man had become, God said, “I will wipe out from the Earth mankind whom I have created, and not only mankind, but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air.” Then God said to Noah, ‘Make yourself an ark … Go into the ark, you and all your household, for you and you alone in this age have I found to be truly just and chosen … I will bring rain down on the Earth for forty days and forty nights, and so I will wipe out from the surface of the earth every moving creature that I have made…’ ”

I grow quiet. Lukas doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. We both know just how much “The Story of Noah”—a tale from pre-Healing times, from pre Golden-Age times—reads like the creation story in The Lex, supposedly divined to the Founders only two hundred and fifty years ago.

As if to comfort me, Lukas offers, “My people—who were once called the Inuit—have a flood myth, too. Perhaps all people do.”

“Do you mean the story of the Mariner?” Nurse Aga had told me the tale of the Mariner, who survived a great flood that covered the Earth but for a tall, icy mountain by making a raft. But I never connected that story with our history in The Lex.

“Where did you hear that?” Lukas looks alarmed.

“From my Nurse Aga. Before she became so old—so dotty, my parents called it—that she had to come back to the Boundary lands.”

“That’s what your parents told you about this woman?”

“Yes.” I don’t like how Lukas refers to Nurse Aga. I’m afraid to find out more; I don’t think I can handle it right now if something awful happened to her. So instead, I ask, “How do you know all this, Lukas? You sound like a Teacher.”

“We all would to you. Our memories are long. We remember well the times before the Healing.”

“But how did Eamon learn about it? Did you tell him?”

“No, I didn’t tell him. Do you remember when he spent all that time in the Archives, studying past Testing?”

“Of course. We fought about that.”

“He had come across a journal from a past Testor. The journal was over one hundred and fifty years old, and it
contained references to the Bible and the Noah story. It seems that our people aren’t the only ones who remembered.”

“And he told
you
about what he found?” The manner of Eamon’s epiphany is coming clearer. But why did he tell Lukas instead of me? To protect me? Or because he didn’t trust me, as I was just a Maiden and unequipped to handle the truth?