ELLI WINTER

ONE

Run!”

Elli Winter was at the bottom of the six-foot-deep hole. Her shovel had just hit the box. She looked up to see what the commotion was about. Elli was a short woman, and the hole was so deep she couldn’t really see anything. Just the blue, cloudless sky.

“Chopper!” somebody else shouted. “The dados are coming! Run!”

She could hear it then, the swoosh of the chopper blades over the horizon. She bent over and redoubled her efforts. Maybe she could get to the box before the security dados got there. She had a very strong feeling about this box. It was important. This was the last excav the team would ever do. She had to take a chance. She had to keep digging.

“Run!” Elli recognized the voice of the excav team leader, Olana Carlings. “Run for the trees!”

The hole was in the middle of a large meadow surrounded on both sides by small forested mountains. She supposed Olana was right. If she ran now, there was a good chance of escaping into the wooded hills, where the dados would have trouble finding her.

Instead, though, she jammed the blade of the shovel into the soft earth, tipped it back. She could see the whole box move. It was a long thin box. Maybe. Just maybe she’d get to the contents in time.

 

Olana Carlings pulled out her binoculars as soon as she reached the tree line. Everyone in the team had made it to the tree line. Everyone, that is, except Elli.

Elli had just stayed there in the hole, digging away. Even now, from her high vantage point on the mountainside, Olana could see that Elli was ignoring the oncoming black chopper. Painted on its side was the unmistakable logo of Blok—the powerful corporation that controlled the entire territory of Quillan.

“What is she doing?” muttered Olana.

Another team member shook his head sadly as the chopper swooped down over the hole.

Olana squinted, trying to make out details in the wobbly viewfinder of the binoculars. Elli was calmly working at the clasp that held the box shut. “She’s got the box. She’s opening it.”

As she spoke, four black ropes tumbled from the belly of the chopper above Elli Winter. Then four green-clad security dados appeared, grabbed the ropes, and began dropping from the sky.

“What a shame,” the other team member said. “I guess that’s the end of the road for the cleaning lady.”

TWO

Five Years Earlier

There is a road,” a voice said.

“Huh?” Elli Winter said, looking up to see who was addressing her. The voice had broken her from the terrible thoughts that had been running around her brain.

A smiling man stood behind a counter at the back of the video arcade. “There is a road,” the man said. “Even at the end of the road, a new road stretches out.”

She cocked her head. “I’m sorry, are you talking to me?”

The man motioned to her with his finger. He was a tall, good-looking man, dressed in a strange bright costume. Most people on Quillan dressed in shades of gray, so it was a little shocking to see someone dressed in bright colors.

“You’re in pain,” the man said. “I can see that. You’ve suffered a terrible loss. A loved one perhaps?”

She stared blankly at the man. How could he know such a thing? She had just received the letter this morning. The final nail in the coffin that was her life. Her husband of twenty years, Marvek Winter, had died working in the tarz. Gentle husband, devoted father—the sweetest man she’d ever known. Now he was dead.

“My husband,” she said simply.

“Yes.” The man nodded and his smile saddened. “I know. You think you’ve come to the end of the road. You think that you can’t take care of your daughter anymore. You think that you’re of no use to anyone.”

A part of Elli Winter’s mind wondered how he knew this, how he knew it so exactly. A part of her was angry that he was invading her little bubble of pain. But Elli was a polite and mild woman. It was not in her nature to snap at people. So she simply said, “Yes. But…how did you know?”

The man pointed at the sign on his counter.

 

SD FORTUNES
SUPER-DUPER!!!!!!
LEARN YOUR FORTUNE—ONLY 6 CREDITS

 

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t have any money. I can’t pay you.”

She turned and stumbled away.

“No problem!” The man’s cheery voice pursued her as she hurried toward the door of the video arcade. “This one’s free! On the house, compliments of SD Fortunes, a subsidiary of the Blok Corporation.”

She pushed the lever opening the door and stumbled into the street.

She could still hear the man’s cheery voice pursuing her as the door closed. “Even at the end of the road, there is a road!”

Elli Winter had never put into words the things that the man had said. But it was true. She had been like a sleepwalker for the past year, doing her best not to think about anything at all.

Until a year ago she had lived a perfect life. As perfect as anybody could have on Quillan, anyway. She had a good job working maintenance at the Blok building. Her husband too had a good job. Neither of them made much money. But they lived a stable, modest life. And they had Nevva, their beloved daughter. For the first ten years of their marriage, Elli had been told by the doctors that she would be unable to have children. Adopting children on Quillan was nearly impossible for people without lots of money. But then one day, a miracle had happened—a miracle that brought Nevva to them.

Nevva had been an extraordinary child from day one. And both she and Marvek had been devoted to the girl. When it had become clear that Nevva was unusually bright, Elli and Marvek had put every spare penny into sending her to the best schools. But schools on Quillan weren’t free. And the better the school, the more it cost.

The school Nevva attended had just been too expensive for their small incomes.

So Marvek had started betting on the games. At first he’d done well. But then, inevitably, his luck had changed. Finally, in desperation, Marvek had come to this very arcade. He’d placed the ultimate bet—betting his own life against the pile of debts he’d accumulated.

And he’d lost. Losing the ultimate bet meant being sent straight to the tarz, the power plants that supplied all of Quillan. They were poisonous places. To work there was a death sentence.

For the past year, since he’d lost the bet, Elli had gone on with her life. As long as Marvek was alive, she had held out a scrap of hope. Maybe things would get better. Maybe Blok would have mercy on him, let him come home.

It was a dream. But it was a dream that helped her get out of bed, comb Nevva’s hair, make her lunch, send her off to school. But Elli knew that, like all dreams, it was empty. For a year she’d barely been able to look Nevva in the eye. She hadn’t been able to love her the way a mother should love a child. Because every time she looked at Nevva, she thought; If only you hadn’t been here, Marvek would still be coming home from work every day, giving me a kiss, reading the paper, eating dinner, smiling, laughing…. It wasn’t Nevva’s fault. But Elli couldn’t help the thought coming into her mind.

What kind of mother would think a thing like that?

Well. The letter had come today.

The Blok Corporation Power Generation and Transmission Division regrets to inform you of the death of…

And that was the end. The end of all hope.

She had balled up the letter, thrown it in the trash, and then said to Nevva, “I have to take a walk, sweetheart. Keep working on your homework.”

“Okay, Mom.”

So trusting. Nevva trusted her mother completely. Elli didn’t feel worthy of that trust.

And now she was here. Now Elli Winter was here, walking down the street. A cold wind was blowing. A loud clap of thunder split the air, and then a frigid, driving rain hit her.

The street was crowded with tense, tired-looking people in gray clothes. Elli forced her way through them. Around her the tall gray buildings pressed in.

Elli looked at her surroundings as though she had never seen this place before. Had it always been such a miserable, cheerless, gray, ugly place?

Suddenly she came to a halt. In front of her was a low pedestrian barrier. On the other side of that lay a huge pit. Just a few months ago there had been some buildings here. They must have blown them up. Now they were building a new structure.

A large sign read,

 

FUTURE HOME OF BLOK CORP FUN DIVISION
THE FUN STARTS HERE!

 

The sign was cockeyed, one of the support posts hanging over the side, into the pit.

She stared in. From every direction huge streams of water flowed into the pit, turning it into a giant quagmire. Several pieces of earthmoving equipment were digging in the center of the hole. Over on the far side, a swarm of grim-faced, exhausted men were clawing at the earth with shovels. But the deepening water had turned the dirt into mud. Every time they lifted out a shovelful of gray mud, more mud flowed back into its place.

Digging a hole that just filled itself back in. Her whole life seemed like this pit. A hopeless, pointless waste. If it weren’t for Nevva…

Suddenly from the center of the pit came a scream. “Sinkhole! Sinkhole!”

A man, small as an ant, jumped from the seat of a giant earthmoving machine and started running. The mud came up to his thighs, so he seemed to be moving in slow motion.

“Run!” another man yelled. “Cave-in.”

Then she heard it—a loud cracking noise. Something in the center of the pit had given way. A massive jagged hole opened up, like the snaggle-toothed mouth of some buried giant.

The men in the pit were abandoning their shovels, running panic stricken for the thin dirt path leading up to street level.

The mud and water began to flow toward the sinkhole. The pit became a huge vortex of water and mud circling down into the earth. Screams filled the air. The hole was widening. Earthmoving equipment toppled and sank into the hungry maw growing in the center of the pit.

Is this is it? Elli thought. Is this is the end of the road?

For reasons she couldn’t quite express, she felt drawn toward the pit. She took a step forward. Then another. Carefully she climbed the barrier. When she reached the edge, she stood as if hypnotized. Chunks of clay the size of cars began detaching from the side of the pit and falling in slow motion toward the bottom. Huge splashes of mud and water.

I should go back, she thought. I really should. But she didn’t move.

Something gave way beneath her. And then Elli Winter was falling, the gray world pinwheeling around her.

THREE

Yellow sky. How strange.

The first thing Elli became conscious of was that the sky was yellow. She blinked.

“Look!” a voice said in a loud whisper. “She’s conscious.”

“Don’t let her see your faces,” another voice said. A man, harsh sounding.

Elli blinked. Not a sky after all. It was a ceiling. Who would paint a ceiling yellow? It was just the oddest thing.

She sat up, choked, coughed. Her mouth was full of dirt, and it felt as if there were water in her lungs.

It started coming back to her. She’d fallen into the pit. But after that? Nothing. Blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being carried along by water—spun, flipped, slammed into things.

“Where am I?” she said.

There were three of them. Two of them were covering parts of their faces with their shirts. The third, a very large man, wore a black mask. “Be quiet,” the large man said harshly. “And don’t move.”

She frowned. Was this some kind of dream? She looked around. She seemed to be in some kind of warehouse. Long rows of shelves filled the immense space. One wall was splintered and twisted. A huge slick of mud had poured through it into the large room where she was lying.

“But…what happened?”

“One of the old subway tunnels under the city caved in. A bunch of water flowed through it and tore out the wall of our—”

“Quiet!” the large man shouted.

But it started coming back then. She remembered standing by the edge of the pit. Feeling it pulling her forward. Falling. Then blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being pulled down into the ground by the flowing mud.

The large man whispered to the others. “We can’t let her…” He let his sentence die.

“Are you saying…” One of the others, a woman, spoke. She too couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.

The third one, a smaller man, said, “What? You want to kill her? That what you’re saying?”

The big man shrugged. “We have no choice. If we let her go, she’ll talk to Blok’s security people. There’ll be dados blasting through the doors in an hour.”

Silence.

“You know I’m right,” the big man said.

It took Elli a minute to realize it: They were talking about her! And yet, somehow, she didn’t really care. The end of the road. She’d come to the end of the road. Right?

The woman said, “Tylee will be here first thing in the morning. Let’s let her decide.”

“She can’t go anywhere,” the smaller man said. “Just leave her be. Tylee can decide.”

“We have to evacuate now,” the big man said. “If Blok’s people come down that tunnel, they’ll find us. We can’t risk it.”

“But we need to get this mess cleaned up!”

The man shook his head. “It won’t do us any good to clean up a few boxes, and then lose half our people.”

The two others nodded grudgingly.

The big man turned and looked at Elli. “This place is surrounded by guards. If you try to leave, they’ll shoot you on sight. Clear?”

Elli nodded.

“Stay here. We’ll be back in the morning.”

The three turned and walked away. Their footsteps echoed hollowly and finally disappeared.

Elli stood up, looked fearfully around. There was still a disconcerting gurgle in her lungs that made her cough every few breaths. Her clothes were slick with mud. She shivered and wondered if there was someplace to clean up. She wandered around for a few minutes, looking at the warehouse. There were huge shelves running far off into the distance. Each shelf was lined with cheap cardboard boxes, some of which looked quite old.

Elli couldn’t help wondering who these people were who had found her. They were obviously some kind of criminal organization.

But why would a criminal organization be guarding an underground building full of cheap boxes? She decided to take a peek into one of the boxes. Inside the box she found a stack of small paintings. Elli was no expert in art, but they appeared to be watercolors. She took one out and stared at it. She looked at the date in the bottom corner. It was over two hundred and fifty years old! But the colors were amazingly bright and vivid. It was a picture of a laughing girl in a bright-colored dress, playing in the middle of a field of flowers.

She had never seen anything like it. Something about it took her breath away. She looked at another box. More beautiful pictures. There was something about all of them—something so bright and colorful that they seemed almost to have come from another world. Another box. More beautiful pictures. Bright flowers in each one of them. Brilliant yellows, rich reds, deep blues and purples. A sense of peace and calm washed through her.

She looked around the area where the concrete wall had been ripped apart. Boxes were sprawled in heaps, covered in mud. With horror she realized that every single one of those boxes must have been full of the same kind of beauty she’d just seen. They would be ruined!

Elli crawled over the chunks of concrete and mud and started pulling boxes out of the mess. She had no awareness of time. She just felt impelled to save as much as she could.

Once she’d gotten the boxes out of the muck, she began opening them one by one. Sometimes the contents were completely ruined. After she’d carefully sorted through an entire box and found every single picture destroyed, she found herself bursting into tears.

What’s gotten into me? she wondered.

Suddenly it struck her—she had no idea what time it was, how long she’d been working. Was it night or day? She had no clue.

The only thing she did know for certain was that her daughter, Nevva, was sitting at home wondering what had happened to her mother. The thought made her clench up inside. But Elli knew that even if she could have left this strange subterranean place, she couldn’t have faced going home.

So she picked up another box and tried to put Nevva out of her mind.

With as much care as she could muster, she began cleaning the dirty pieces of paper. But she realized they needed to be dried. She wandered around the echoing building and found a room with some office supplies in it, including a roll of string.

She brought the string back, ran several strands from one shelf to another. If a painting was wet, she hung it to dry. Soon there were papers hanging everywhere overhead.

Elli worked and worked, cleaned and cleaned. The harder she worked, the more she cleaned, the better she felt. She felt as though she were cleaning her whole life away, leaving her old life behind.

Eventually her eyes grew gritty and her body became heavy with fatigue. But still she worked. If she slacked up for even a moment, so much of this beauty would be lost!

Finally, though, she couldn’t put off the inevitable.

She sat down in a chair and slept. When she woke, her back and neck were stiff. She looked around. The mess was still considerable. It seemed as if she’d barely made a dent.

She began to work again. As she worked, she began to mutter little phrases to herself. Advertising jingles, silly little poems she’d read. All her life Elli had been able to memorize pretty much anything she read or heard, so her head was full of thousands of useless little words.

As she worked, she repeated them. Over and over and over.

“It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean!” That was an advertisement for a cleaning product she used at home. There were plenty of other phrases that stuck in her head. They kept her mind occupied, filled up, so that she could stop thinking about what a terrible mother she was, so she could stop wondering where Nevva was or how Nevva felt.

“It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean…”

And so it went for a long time. Elli Winter had no clear idea of how much time had passed. The big man in the mask had said that he and the others would return the next morning. But they didn’t. And if there were guards anywhere, Elli never saw them.

No one came for a very long time. Maybe as much as a week. She had no clock, so she really couldn’t know for sure.

And in all that time, she did nothing but work. She found some food in a refrigerator. So when she got hungry, she ate. Eventually she cleaned her clothes in the bathroom, washed the mud from her face, her hair, her fingernails. But otherwise, it was just work and sleep.

And then, suddenly, armed men were streaming through a door.

“Get down on the ground!” one of them screamed. “Down! Down! Down! Do it now!” So Elli lay down, splaying her arms across the cold concrete floor.

The end of the road. She’d put it off by a few days. But now it was finally here.

Well, she thought, at least I saved some beautiful pictures.

FOUR

Elli Winter lay staring across the floor as the masked men moved silently through the warehouse. She’d expected them to do something to her. But instead they more or less ignored her.

At first she had thought they were security dados. But they weren’t. They were just normal people dressed in military-style clothes, black masks over their faces. They seemed to be searching for something.

Finally one of them spoke into a radio. “No sign of dados or bugs. Think it’s safe for Tylee.”

The masked men stood around silently for a while. Elli lay motionless. Words and phrases ran through her head. It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean. It’s—

Then, finally, a thin woman appeared in the nearest doorway and walked toward Elli. She was the first unmasked person Elli had seen in the warehouse. There was something special about the woman. It was unmistakable. She had an aura of authority, of command. Everyone seemed to straighten up as soon as they saw her.

The woman paused, studied the entire area carefully.

“Who did this?” she demanded finally, waving her hand around her. Elli took it all in for the first time. The floor was spotless. The concrete chunks had been hauled away. The mud was gone. And every single picture that had been salvageable was now hanging in one of the hundreds of lines crisscrossing the air above her head. Remembering the incredible mess that had been here before, Elli was almost amazed at what she’d accomplished.

“I did,” she said softly.

Tylee frowned. “I was told this place was completely wrecked,” she said to one of the masked men.

“It was,” the man said, sounding a little puzzled. Elli recognized him as the big man who’d left her here before.

“Get up,” the woman said.

Elli sat up. She felt woozy and unstable, as if she were coming out of a dream. A forest of color hung above them.

“You did all of this?” the woman said.

Elli nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?” The woman cocked her head, curious.

“I shouldn’t have touched anything,” Elli said.

“Why? Why did you do all this?”

Elli frowned. She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t thought it through, really. She’d just done it. She looked up at all the bright-colored pictures above her. Her voice finally came out, haltingly. “It’s just—they were so beautiful. I didn’t want—I didn’t want the world to lose all that beauty.”

The woman had deep brown eyes. Suddenly they seemed very warm. She nodded and smiled sadly. “Yes. That’s exactly it, isn’t it?”

Elli sat on the floor and looked up at the forest of brightly colored paper above her head. She felt a warm sensation of satisfaction filling her chest. Other than taking care of Nevva, this was really the first thing she’d done in her life that seemed to have any meaning.

“My name is Tylee,” the woman said to Elli.

“Do you mind my asking what this place is?” Elli said.

“It’s a storehouse,” Tylee said. “All the things that have happened on Quillan, all the writings of the ancients, all our history, all our music and art and science and inventions—everything that we Quillans were before Blok—it’s all stored here.”

Elli felt puzzled. “For what?”

“We are revivers,” Tylee said. “Someday we will rise up out of this place and destroy Blok. We’re keeping it all for the time that comes after. For the revival.”

“Oh,” Elli said.

Revivers! She had heard of them before. Only in whispers, though. A strange group that sought to destroy the established order and bring chaos to the world. That’s what people said, anyway. Mad bombers, crazed lunatics, criminals, bandits, killers!

Except…these people didn’t seem that way. If they were trying to save all this beauty, Elli reflected, then how bad could they be?

“I can’t let you leave here,” Tylee said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

Elli shrugged. “I don’t want to leave,” she said softly.

“You what?” the big man in the mask said.

Elli shook her head. “I have nothing. My life out there…” She pointed at the great gash in the concrete wall. “My life out there is over. I’m at the end of the road.”

“You can’t just stay here!” the big man growled.

“I like to clean,” Elli said. “I could clean.”

The big man looked at Tylee. “Come on, Tylee! I’m sure she’s a nice lady and everything. But someday she’ll destroy this place. We don’t even know her name.”

“Maybe we don’t need to,” Tylee said.

“I like to clean,” Elli said again.

“We have guards. We have archivists. We have a lot of people here. We’ll keep an eye on her.”

“Tylee—”

“I’ve made my decision, Bart!” Tylee snapped. “If we kill her, we’re no different from Blok. She stays. That’s final.”

The big man shook his head in disgust.

“We needed a cleaning lady down here anyway,” Tylee said. She surveyed the damaged wall. “Now let’s get people in here and fix that wall.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the big man said.

Tylee clapped her hands. “Now, people! Do it now!”

The people in the room began stripping off their masks. Soon everyone was hustling and bustling around.

Elli stood watching them.

I guess I should do something, she thought. She walked around until she found a janitor’s closet. There was a broom leaning against a shelf full of cleaning products that looked as if they hadn’t been touched in decades.

She picked up the broom and began to sweep.

FIVE

Elli Winter’s life quickly fell into a routine. Each morning she got up and showered. For the rest of the day, she cleaned. After she ate supper, she found a book to read. One section of the warehouse was basically a library, with thousands—maybe even millions!—of old books.

The revivers called the warehouse “Mr. Pop.” Which seemed like an odd name. But Elli Winter was not the kind of person to question other people’s judgment.

The books Elli read told about a world that was very different from the one in which she lived. It was hard to put into words…but the people in the books seemed to live lives of greater intensity.

Then, after she got tired, she went into the broom closet to sleep. She had a small cot, her head next to the rack of cleaning products. Other than her clothes, she only had one personal possession. She had a worn picture of Nevva that had been in her pocket when she was swept through the collapsed tunnel. She had leaned Nevva’s picture against a bottle of Blok Super-Duper Floor Cleaner.

Each night before turning off the light, she kissed the tattered photo. And then she slept.

 

Elli didn’t talk much. There were actually a lot of people who worked in the warehouse. They all wore green aprons and took care of the things that were stored there. The green-aproned caretakers spoke in hushed voices. None of them were unfriendly to her. But they were all slightly distant. She was different from them. She knew it and they knew it. They had all chosen to come here. Their very presence was a testimony to their courage, their belief, their strength. She, on the other hand, was here because she was weak and cowardly, because she couldn’t face the world.

So she didn’t mind that no one really spoke to her. “I’ll just sweep over there, if that’s all right, dear,” she’d say. Or, “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sneak in here and get your trash.”

After a while she heard them referring to her as “the cleaning lady.” It pleased her somehow to have no name, to pass almost invisibly, like a ghost, among them.

 

One day—not terribly long into her life in the warehouse, though time was difficult to measure there—a group of men and women was milling around near the main exit to the building. It was nighttime and the warehouse was empty. Most of the caretakers only came in during the day.

“Where’s Gaff?” an athletic-looking woman said.

“He should have been here by now,” a tall man with red hair replied.

“We can’t wait any longer,” the athletic-looking woman added.

“But if we’re short a team member—,” the tall man said.

“This excav is important,” the athletic woman said. She seemed to be the leader of the group. “We’ve got to do it.”

Elli had heard people talking about excavs. But she had no idea what they were. And she didn’t ask. It wasn’t her place. Besides, secrecy was important here. Nobody used their real name. That way if the dados showed up someday, you couldn’t give up the names of any of your fellow revivers.

“We can’t do it if we’re short a team member,” a dark-haired man said. Elli recognized him as Bart, the large man who’d discovered her when she first washed into Mr. Pop.

“So call off the excav,” another man said.

“No way,” the athletic woman said. “Find a way, Bart.”

“Look, I’m responsible for the digging, Olana,” the dark-haired man said. “And I’m telling you, we can’t do it. Not with the time limits we’re dealing with now. I need four people on shovel duty, or I’m not going. That’s final.”

Bart and Olana. Elli had heard the names before in connection with the excavs. But this was the first time she had seen Olana.

“What about her?” the red-headed man said, pointing at Elli.

Elli blinked. The people standing by the door all turned and looked at her.

“Who…the cleaning lady?” Olana said skeptically.

“Why not?” Bart said. “I hear she works hard.”

“Somebody told me she’s not allowed to leave here,” the fourth person said.

“That was a long time ago,” Bart said. “We need a digger.”

Olana shrugged. “You’re okay with it, I’m okay with it.” She snapped her fingers at Elli. “Hey! Cleaning lady. Wanna go on an excav?”

Elli walked tentatively toward the group. “Um…probably it would be best if—”

“Can you use a shovel?” Bart said. “Can you dig?”

“Well—sure, I guess, but—”

“That’s all we need to know,” Olana said. “Blindfolds on. Let’s go!”

The next thing she knew, one of the team members had slapped a black hood over her head. Now someone was leading her out the door.

Wait! Elli wanted to scream. I’m not supposed to do this! I’m not approved to leave the warehouse.

But it was too late. She was in some sort of vehicle, tearing along at top speed. “Stay low,” a voice said. “Stay low and don’t talk.”

Elli hunched down in her seat.

They drove silently for a long time. Suddenly the vehicle stopped.

“Hoods off!” a female voice called.

Elli pulled off the itchy black hood. She was in the back of a truck. Everyone was jumping off onto the ground. She followed.

They were obviously not in the city anymore. They were way into the country now. A huge old house—a castle almost—stood to their left. Its roof had collapsed, but the stone walls still stood. There was a full moon overhead and very few clouds. It was bright enough to see clearly. Elli had not been to the country since she was a little girl. Most people on Quillan lived in the cities and didn’t venture into the country very often. She found it quite frightening.

“Let’s go, guys!” the team leader, Olana, called. “Hustle, hustle.”

They walked single file toward the spooky-looking old building. “So, um, what exactly are we doing?” Elli said.

Bart explained. “We’ve been assembling historical and cultural artifacts at Mr. Pop for many years now. When Blok first started taking over Quillan, they began to suppress anything that conflicted with Blok. At first they only suppressed political writing that attacked Blok. Then they suppressed weapons. But soon they began to grow afraid of anything they couldn’t control. Art, music, poetry, advertisements—you name it. They started suppressing everything. So people began burying books, paintings, sculptures, recordings. The earliest revivers were part of this movement to preserve our culture. Once Mr. Pop was established, we began going back and digging up our treasures.”

Elli started to get it now. “Excavations,” she said.

“Right. Now we just call them ‘excavs.’”

As they walked into the old building, Elli smiled. “So we’re here to dig up buried treasure?” she said.

“Kind of like that, yeah,” Bart said.

“So how do we know where to find the stuff?” She looked around the inside of the old mansion or castle or whatever it was. The roof had collapsed. There was old furniture here and there, rotted out, covered with vines. A small tree grew in the middle of the building.

“We have maps,” Olana chimed in. “Sometimes they’re good. And sometimes—”

Bart held up an ancient, yellowed piece of paper. “And sometimes they’re like this.”

Olana clicked on a flashlight, directed it at the paper. It was a crudely drawn map of the building with a red “X” drawn in one corner.

“There are the stairs down,” Bart said, pointing. In the far wall was a small stone doorway. The group walked to it and began to descend a spiral stair leading down. Elli could feel her heart thumping. She had never been anyplace like this before. It was very dark and chilly. Spider webs hung from the low stone ceiling.

A few moments later the stair came out into a large cryptlike space with a dirt floor and arched stone roof.

Olana scratched her head and looked at the map. “Oh, man,” she said. “This place is bigger than I thought.”

Elli could feel an odd tingling in her limbs. She was frightened by the strange place. But there was something…For a moment she couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she realized. She was excited! That’s what it was. She hadn’t felt this way for…well, she couldn’t really remember. It had been years and years and years. It was the feeling of doing something wrong, something forbidden.

She remembered once in her youth sneaking off to a park with a boy. They’d taken off their shoes and played in a creek. They’d been caught and punished severely. But she could still remember the feel of the water running across her feet. The feeling of freedom. The feeling of—

“We’ll start digging over there,” Bart said.

“No,” Olana said. “It says to dig right here.” She pointed to another location.

“You’ve got the map backward,” Bart said.

“No, you do!”

It was obvious to Elli by now that Bart and Olana didn’t get along all that well. Elli looked around the room, thinking about where she would have buried something here if it had been her most valuable possession.

Not in either of the places that Bart and Olana were suggesting that they dig.

“May I?” she said, holding out her hand for the map.

Bart and Olana looked at her irritably. “You’re here to dig, okay?” Bart said. “No offense, but we’re the experts.”

“Okay,” Elli said mildly. But in the back of her mind, she knew that she knew something. She wasn’t sure what it was. But she knew where to dig.

There were four diggers—Elli, Bart, and the two other strong-looking men.

Bart walked over to one corner of the crypt or basement or whatever it was and drew a square on the ground with his toe.

“I’m not sure—,” Elli said.

“Look, it’s Olana’s job to get us here and back. It’s my job to figure out where to dig. It’s your job to dig where I tell you. Clear?”

Elli smiled and nodded. But she felt quite sure they were digging in the wrong place.

They started working. While they dug, Olana paced around nervously, looking at her watch. Every now and then Bart would say, “Faster. Dig faster.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult, but what’s the rush?” Elli said.

“We used to be able to take our time,” Olana said. “But Blok security is on to us now. We don’t know how. Tracking devices, spies—we’re just not sure. But somehow they’ve managed to close in on us. And they get closer all the time.”

Bart paused in his digging and wiped his brow. “Right now we seem to have about a five-hour window before the security dados show up. Just in case they get here quicker, though, we’ve got lookout teams around us. If they spot trouble, we run.”

Olana nodded. “Which reminds me,” she said. “If the dados come, we don’t wait. We drop everything and we go. We have ten seconds to get in the truck and go. Understood?”

Elli nodded.

“Ten seconds. Not eleven. We’re in that truck and we’re gone. We don’t wait. If you hang around, you’re left behind. Period. Understood?”

Elli nodded.

Olana stared down into the hole they’d been digging. It was all the way up to Elli’s waist now. Her arms were exhausted from the digging.

“We’re digging in the wrong place,” Olana said, shaking her head skeptically. “They never bury anything this deep.”

“That’s not true,” Bart said. “Once we found—”

“Okay, so once we had to dig five feet down. I’m telling you, Bart, this is the wrong—”

Bart sighed loudly. “If you’re such a genius, where should we dig?”

“Over…uh…over there,” Olana said, not sounding very certain.

“Exactly where over there?”

“Well, you know, the ‘X’ on the map is uh, generally, uh—”

“We could be a foot off,” Bart said. “It could be right here.” He kicked the dirt by his foot.

The other diggers began muttering irritably. It was obvious everyone was growing impatient and nervous.

“We’ve got three hours,” Olana said. “That gives us time for one more hole. Where’s it gonna be?”

“We’ll just expand this one,” Bart said.

“I think we should—”

“No!” Elli was startled to hear her own voice coming out loudly and confidently.

Everyone turned and looked at her.

“Excuse me?” Olana said.

“Let me see the map,” Elli said.

Olana frowned, but handed it to her. The map only confirmed what Elli had been thinking since she walked down into this basement. She climbed out of the hole and began walking slowly to the opposite wall, scanning the ground with her flashlight.

Finally she stopped. She really wasn’t sure why she knew. But she knew. This was the place.

“Here,” she said.

Bart snorted. “Oh great! So after a couple hours of digging, the cleaning lady has become an expert excavator.”

The man’s sarcasm didn’t bother her. “See?” she said, pointing at the moldy dirt below them. “There’s a depression here. Somebody dug it out, then refilled it.”

“This was buried over a hundred and fifty years ago,” Olana said. “I don’t think some little depression in the dirt would last a hundred and fifty years.”

“The map very clearly shows this isn’t the right place,” Bart said. “See how—”

Suddenly Olana’s radio squawked.

“We’ve got visitors!” Olana shouted.

“Back to the truck!” Bart shouted. “Go, go, go!”

The other excav team members went storming up the stairs. But for some reason, Elli couldn’t move. She felt rooted to the spot. She knew that they had said she only had ten seconds to get to the truck. But…

Dig! she thought. I have to dig!

It was here. Right here. She was sure of it.

Finally, though, she ran up the stairs. By the time she made it to the top, she could hear the truck engine starting. As she ran out the front door of the ruined building, she saw the truck tearing off into the distance, disappearing into the woods.

She’d waited too long. The ten seconds were up. They’d left her.

“Oh, dear,” she said mildly. What was she going to do?

She stood for a moment in the silence. The moon was tangled up in the limbs of the trees now, and long black shadows crisscrossed the ground.

For the second time this night, she felt afraid. Alone and afraid. She was shivering, and her heart banged in her chest.

Suddenly a shadow separated itself from the other shadows. The shadow became a man, his face hidden in blackness. He had something in his hand, a long sticklike thing. It looked like a weapon of some sort.

“Your shovel,” the man said, holding out the weapon. “You dropped your shovel, Elli.”

SIX

Elli peered at the man. He came closer, and his face became visible for the first time, lit now by the moon. He was smiling at her as if he were sharing some kind of joke with her. There was something familiar about him.

“Even at the end of the road, Elli,” he said, “there is a road.”

It came back to her then. The fortune-teller! He was the man in the fortune-telling booth!

“How do you know my name?” she whispered. Her heart was fluttering wildly.

“I know a lot about you,” he said. “I even know some things about you that you don’t know about yourself.”

She frowned. “Who are you?”

“My name is Press,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find you for quite a while. It never occurred to me that you were down there in Mr. Pop.”

Mr. Pop! He even knew about Mr. Pop! Her head whirled with confusion.

“Are you with Blok security?” she said.

The man named Press laughed loudly. “Not even hardly.”

“Then who are you?”

“That’s a long story,” he said. “The more important question is, Who are you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Elli,” he said, “your friends will be back in an hour or so. We don’t have much time. So listen carefully. You are not who you think you are. You are a Traveler….”

 

The man named Press talked to Elli for a long time, telling her all kinds of things that seemed completely far fetched and unbelievable. People who could travel through time and space. Civilizations on other territories. An epic battle of good and evil. A demon named Saint Dane. Quigs. Flumes.

It all sounded…well…insane, actually.

And when he explained to Elli that she was one of these special people who was destined to do all these big things as part of some giant universal conflict? Well…come on.

Finally Elli burst out laughing.

“Okay, okay, okay, stop,” she said finally. “This is some kind of practical joke, isn’t it? Do you guys do this to everybody on their first excav mission?”

Press shook his head, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver ring. He held it out in his palm. Around the rim of the ring were tiny letters written in some kind of script that Elli had never seen before. They should have been invisible in the dark. But they weren’t. They glowed slightly.

“Normally each Traveler is trained and given this ring by his or her predecessor,” Press said. “But on Quillan things have worked out a little differently.”

Elli looked closely at the ring. She had never seen anything that glowed like that. Certainly not a piece of metal. If this was all a joke, somebody had sure gone to a lot of trouble.

“Take it,” Press said.

Elli kept looking at the glowing ring.

He was really serious, she realized finally. This wasn’t a joke.

“Take it, Elli,” Press repeated. “It’s yours.”

Finally Elli shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not for me. I’m not a courageous person. I’m a cleaning lady.”

“I know what you’ve gone through,” Press said. “I know that you feel like you’ve done a terrible thing by leaving your daughter without—”

Elli felt a flash of anger. “No, you don’t!” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like!”

Press was still holding out the ring. “Okay. Fair enough. But being a Traveler doesn’t mean you’re a superhero. It doesn’t mean you’re flawless. It just means—”

Elli Winter stood and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m just not the kind of person you think I am. You say that each Traveler has a successor, right?”

Press nodded.

“Then let it be Nevva. She’s stronger and smarter and more courageous than I could ever be.”

Press’s fingers closed slowly around the ring. He looked thoughtful. “Quillan is a special case,” he said, almost to himself. “Perhaps…” He frowned.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have work to do.” She turned to go back down into the crypt.

“Wait.”

She stopped and looked back at the man, his face half concealed in shadow.

“Here,” he said. “Why don’t you hold on to this, just in case.” He handed her the ring. “No promises, just take the ring, keep it safe. And also, let me give you this.” He reached into his pocket, stepped forward, and put something around her neck. She looked down. It was a necklace made of odd little beads. In the center was a slightly larger bead made from a gold-colored metal.

“Don’t tell Nevva I’m alive,” she said, fingering the strange necklace. “Let her think that I’m dead. Let her think that I’m a hero. Sometimes a lie is better than the truth.”

“And sometimes a lie is not a lie,” Press said.

Elli felt weary. She supposed that he was a good man, well intentioned. But the world seemed too complex when he was talking. Things were easier when you were cleaning.

Or digging.

“Good-bye, Elli,” Press said. Then the strange man turned and melted away into the darkness.

 

An hour later she heard noises above her—rapid, determined footsteps. Dados? She wasn’t sure. As long as she’d been digging, she felt okay. As soon as she’d stopped, though, she felt afraid. So she ignored the footsteps and kept digging.

Moments later the excav team bustled into the crypt from the spiral staircase. Their flashlights probed the darkness.

“She’s still here,” Bart said, his beam coming to rest on Elli as she leaned deep into the hole.

“False alarm, Elli,” one of the diggers said. “Turned out the watchers had spotted a herd of farm animals.”

“I know you’re probably upset that we left you,” Olana said, “but we told you very clearly that we couldn’t—”

She broke off. Elli looked up from the hole. The excav team stared as she lifted a small metal box free from the dirt and set it down gently on the ground.

“Oh my gosh,” Olana said. “She found it.”

“It was right where she said it would be,” one of the other diggers added wonderingly.

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Elli climbed out of the hole and dusted off the dirty knees of her pants. She was not a pushy person. But sometimes she just knew something.

“I think it would be best if you brought me on the next excav,” she said.

SEVEN

When the excav team got back to Mr. Pop, a team of green-smocked caretakers took the dirt-smeared old box.

“Could I…” Elli hesitated. “Could I see what we found?”

The senior caretaker looked at her curiously, then laughed. “Of course. Follow us.”

They took the box to a room far in the back of the warehouse and carefully opened it. The box was made of some kind of silvery metal. On the inside it was perfectly clean. In fact, it looked as though it might have been packed that morning. Inside was a book.

There was an intake of breath by all the caretakers surrounding the box.

“What?” Elli said.

The senior caretaker reached in with white-gloved hands and gently removed the book from the box. “It’s The Book of Five Runes,” the senior caretaker said. He stared at it. “Oh, my!” he said. And then he kept saying it. “Oh, my! Oh, my! Oh, my goodness! Oh, my!”

Elli looked from face to face to face. “What’s so special about this book?” she said.

The senior caretaker smiled and wiped his face. “We thought this one was gone forever. It’s a very important book.”

“What’s it about?” Elli said.

The caretaker raised one eyebrow. “Well, actually, we’re not sure. But many of the ancient writers refer to it.” He held it out to her. “You found it. You could be the first to read it, if you’d like.”

Elli felt uncomfortable with all the people looking at her. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. I’m just the cleaning lady. I wouldn’t even know what I was reading.”

The caretaker shrugged, then handed the book to the head librarian. “Dr. Pender, I’ll leave it in your care then.”

Elli walked away from the group and began sweeping the floor. When she looked up again, no one was looking at her. They seemed to have forgotten she even existed.

 

At the end of the day, Elli realized that she had made a mistake. She had found the book, hadn’t she? She should have at least looked at it. Not that she was worthy to actually read it. But maybe it would be okay to touch it. Maybe something about the extraordinary book would rub off on her.

Hesitantly she approached the head librarian, Dr. Pender, who was cleaning up his desk, as he was about to leave for the day.

“Excuse me,” she said. “May I talk to you?”

Dr. Pender was a young man, already balding, with only a fringe of blond hair around his head. He had always been pleasant to her. Like her, he was a shy man, and even though they had both been working at Mr. Pop together for several years, she had never really had a conversation with him. Dr. Pender looked up and smiled. “Of course, of course,” he said, gesturing to a battered chair next to his desk. “Please, sit.”

“Oh, no, that’s all right.”

“You’re, uh…forgive me, I don’t know your name. You’re the cleaning person, right?”

Elli nodded. She felt tongue-tied now that she was with him.

“What is it?” he said.

“How do we know which books are important?” she said.

“Well…” He rubbed his face, then grinned. “That’s a really good question! I guess there are some books that affect lots of people. They affect how we think, what we believe, what we know. Other writers and thinkers refer to them. The great books, in a way, are what built Quillan.”

“Oh,” she said.

Dr. Pender cocked his head. “Was there something else?”

“Where are they?”

“You mean, where in the warehouse?”

She nodded.

“Follow me,” he said. He walked out of his office and down the hallway to a small room that was separate from the main warehouse. He opened the door and pointed inside. She poked her head tentatively into the room.

The walls were lined with cheap shelves, sagging under the weight of the books they contained. The volumes were mostly very old, some of them water damaged or moldy, some of them full of worm holes, some missing their covers. They didn’t look important at all.

“Huh,” Elli said.

“They don’t look like much, do they?” the man said. “But they’re very powerful. That’s why Blok banned them all.”

Elli stared at them. She felt intensely curious now. Before she came to Mr. Pop, she had never known anyone who was interested in books. No one ever talked about books on the popular video shows. The only books she had read as a child were the ones officially sanctioned—The Happy Children, Garden of Fun, Champion Fighter, Best of the Best, things like that. She could still remember all of them, could recite whole passages from them. But they hadn’t seemed interesting to her. She could hardly muster any enthusiasm for them.

“Would it be possible…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to finish the question.

“Would you like to read some of them?”

She nodded. “I mean—if it’s not a problem.”

Dr. Pender smiled. “That’s what they’re for, after all. To be read.”

 

That night Elli went into the room where the special books were kept. She walked around for a long time, afraid to touch them, looking at the titles. Many of them were written in languages that she didn’t understand. Finally she let her finger graze the spine of one of them. It was as though something electric had run up her arm.

Finally, after a long time, she selected one. It was a small book with a simple title. The Underground Spring.

She took it back to her room and began reading.

It was totally different from anything she’d read before. Most of the books she read were simple stories about women who fell in love or people who solved crimes or fought bad guys. But this book wasn’t like that. It was about a man who went down into a cave and encountered a race of creatures who mined for jewels deep under the ground. After a while the man lost the ability to speak. Finally, after a very long time, he came back up out of the ground and found that everything he had known about—all the people, all the cities, all the buildings—was gone.

It didn’t really make sense to her.

But she knew there was something going on under the surface of the story. Like a puzzle. If only she could figure it out.

Suddenly she realized that it was morning. She’d been reading all night. Hadn’t slept for even a single second.

She fixed her breakfast, stumbled bleary eyed to the pushcart where she kept her mops and brooms, and began cleaning.

As she worked, she found herself reciting the entire book from memory. It was something she had always been able to do—a completely useless skill. But now, it seemed comforting to her. If she kept reciting the words, she thought, she might discover their meaning.

That night she fell asleep reading another strange book that didn’t seem to make much sense. But the next day when she started working, she found herself repeating the whole book as she cleaned. The words that had seemed so puzzling the night before—well, they weren’t completely clear yet. But they seemed a little easier to understand as they rolled off her tongue.

Sometimes as she mumbled the words to herself, a picture of her daughter, Nevva, would appear in her mind. In the past this had only made her feel sad. But now, as she repeated the ancient words, she felt better. It was as though the words somehow connected her to her daughter.

She realized that something had changed. Something inside her. But what it was, she wasn’t really sure.

 

A week later one of the diggers from the excav team broke his leg. Olana and Bart had to make a special request to Tylee to add Elli temporarily to the team. But they got approval.

Next thing she knew, Elli was in the back of a van, hood over her head, riding along a rutted road. As they drew closer to the excav site, she felt a strange sense of peace inside.

The excav was done in daylight, in the middle of a huge field of grain. Robotic harvesters were moving through the fields, slowly cutting down the grain. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but the tall stalks of grass on which the grain grew.

There were no trees, no buildings, no landmarks at all.

Bart and Olana were scratching their heads as they looked at the old map.

“There’s supposed to be a tree here,” Bart said. “The map shows a tree.”

“The map’s a hundred years old, Bart,” Olana said. “They probably cut down the tree years ago.”

Bart shook his head, looking disgusted. “This is a waste of time,” he said.

The other diggers were scanning the horizon nervously. “I don’t like this place,” one of them said. “If the dados come, we’ve got nowhere to go.”

A robotic harvester was lumbering slowly toward them. “I don’t like that thing,” the other digger said.

“May I see the map?” Elli said.

“Please do,” Bart said, handing her the map.

She stared at it for a moment. It showed three hills, a tree, and a dirt road. She scanned the area. The hills and the dirt road were still there. She started walking toward the point where it seemed like the tree ought to be. But as she walked, she got the strongest feeling she was going the wrong way.

So she turned and walked in another direction. The long stalks of grain brushed against her legs. The sun was warm on her face. As she walked, she felt something on her neck. It seemed like the necklace that Press had given her was growing warmer. But maybe it was the sun. It was hard to tell.

She stumbled. There was something there! A little lump in the ground. She kicked the ground with her foot. And then smiled. It was the rotted stump of a tree, invisible unless you were standing right on top of it.

“Here,” she said. “The cleaning lady says we dig here.”

Bart and Olana looked at each other. Bart shrugged.

“Okay,” Olana said. “We dig here.”

Two hours later they were loading a dirty metal box into the van.

“So,” Bart said as they settled down onto the van. “How’d you do it?”

“I just looked at the map, dear,” Elli said with a shy smile.

Bart shared a glance with Olana. Then he turned back to Elli. “I think you should be a permanent member of the team. You okay with that?”

Elli hesitated. She could feel something lift and soar inside her chest. “Yes,” she said finally. “I am.”

EIGHT

Over time Elli read more and more of the books in the library. As she absorbed them into her brain, she found that they started to make a little more sense. She found writers who referred to other writers and other schools of thought. Things started adding up, making sense. But there was one thing that continued to puzzle her.

Finally she approached Dr. Pender and said, “I keep finding references to this book called ‘The Analects of Kelln.’ Where is it stored? I can’t seem to find it.”

Dr. Pender shook his head sadly. “As far as we know, the last copy of the Analects was seized and burned over a hundred years ago.”

“But it seems like it influenced—”

“You’re exactly right.” Dr. Pender finished her thought. “It’s the central book in all ancient thought. The keystone, you might say. It influenced everything.”

“And we’ve never found it?”

“We keep hoping that one of the excavs will locate it. But so far, we’ve been unlucky.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Analects of Kelln—so far as we can know—was a book of great hope. It was a book about change. You see, hope is based on the idea that the world changes, that things can get better. Blok hates change. Blok wants you to think that things are as good as they can possibly get. If people can change, if the world can change—well, then maybe we wouldn’t need Blok anymore.”

“I see,” Elli said.

And from that moment she knew that, more than anything, she wanted to read that book.

 

As Elli worked that day, she thought about what Dr. Pender had said. Hope. She had put the whole idea of hope out of her head for a long time. Sometimes she found articles in the newspapers about her daughter. LOCAL GIRL NAMED BLOK STUDENT OF THE YEAR. TEENAGER WINS SCHOLARSHIP. WINTER ACCEPTS PRESTIGIOUS AWARD FOR SECOND YEAR RUNNING. That sort of thing. She would cut them out and paste them on the wall of the broom closet where she slept.

She felt hope for her daughter. Things might turn out well for Nevva. But for herself? Well…hard to say. Elli had to admit, she had begun to look forward to things. She looked forward to going on excavs. Getting out of the dull, windowless atmosphere of the warehouse was always a treat. She looked forward to reading every night. She looked forward to her occasional conversations with Dr. Pender.

But beyond that? Well, beyond that, it was hard to see much further. She still couldn’t imagine a life beyond this—living underground, cleaning, reading, eating, sleeping.

Over time she began to perceive a change in the mood of the people at Mr. Pop. They were more worried about the dados. More worried that Blok’s security division was getting closer to finding them.

And the excavs were getting harder and harder to pull off. The security dados were arriving after only a couple of hours now.

In fact, there were rumors that Tylee was going to shut down the excav operations completely.

Then one day it happened. As she and the other excav team members arrived triumphantly at Mr. Pop with their latest discovery, they found Tylee standing at the entrance waiting for them, arms crossed.

“What is it?” Olana said.

Tylee’s angular face showed no emotion. “You have all done fine work,” she said. “Every reviver appreciates your service. But the time has come.”

“Wait a minute!” Bart said.

“I’m sorry,” Tylee said. “It’s just too dangerous.”

“It’s just a matter of adjusting our tactics!” Olana added. “We just have to—”

Tylee held up her hand, cutting them off. “The decision has been made. We’ve worked too hard to accumulate all of this.” She made a sweeping motion with her hand. “We can’t jeopardize it just to add a few last trivial items.”

“Trivial seems like the wrong word,” Bart said combatively.

“In fact, Tylee, I hadn’t had a chance to mention it,” Olana added, “but in our last find, there was another map. It refers to several ‘important items.’”

“What items?”

“It doesn’t say, but—”

“Then it could be anything, couldn’t it? Things that seemed important a hundred years ago sometimes don’t seem so important today,” Tylee said.

Elli spoke for the first time. “But sometimes they do.”

Everyone turned and looked at her. They weren’t used to hearing her speak. “Pardon me?” Tylee said. “You have something to add?”

Elli wasn’t sure quite why she’d spoken. The necklace that Press had given her felt uncharacteristically hot against her skin. “I don’t know exactly,” she said timidly. “It’s just—I feel as though this one’s important.”

“You feel?” Tylee said sharply.

Elli flushed. She really had no logical explanation. “I don’t—I just feel like we should really find out what’s there.”

“You keep saying that you feel. Do you have any evidence? Do you have any information?”

Elli said nothing.

“All right then,” Tylee said. “It’s settled. I’m sorry. You have all done magnificent work. But now our movement must pass into a different phase.”

Tylee turned briskly and walked away, her heels clicking sharply on the concrete.

The team members stared glumly after her.

“It’s not right,” one of the diggers said after Tylee had disappeared.

“I knew it was coming,” Olana said. “But you always think there will be one more, you know?”

Heads nodded.

“There will be,” Elli said softly.

NINE

It took Elli several weeks to work up the courage. Several weeks and a certain amount of planning. Among the many documents held in the warehouse were old maps of the city. She had to study them for a long time before she was completely sure. But eventually, she found what she was looking for.

One day she saw Bart working in the warehouse. She approached him and said, “What happened to the last map we found?”

Bart shrugged gloomily. “Who cares? We can’t use it anyway.”

“I think we can,” Elli said.

“Olana and I already tried talking to Tylee,” Bart said. “We about got in a fistfight. Tylee just won’t back down. No more excavs. Period.”

Elli could feel her pulse thrumming in her ears. She couldn’t believe what she was about to say. But she managed to stammer out what she’d been thinking for weeks. “So we go anyway,” she said.

Bart’s eyebrows went up. “What!”

“So we go anyway.”

“You’re talking about—” He paused, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “You’re talking about an unauthorized excav?”

“Why not?”

Bart looked around nervously. “Look, there are a lot of things that go into an excav,” he whispered. “Any one mistake could lead the dados back here. And then all our work would be for nothing. I supervise the dig. Olana organizes the excav—the timing, the location, and all that stuff. And the driver—well, he works directly for Tylee. We break everything up like this so that if Blok security ever captures somebody, they can’t give up all our secrets.”

“Yes, but—”

“Only Tylee and three drivers know the location of this warehouse. Even Olana and I enter and leave wearing blindfolds. Without one of Tylee’s drivers, we could never find our way back here.”

Elli took a deep breath. “I’m not so sure of that.”

“The drivers are absolutely loyal to Tylee.”

“We don’t need them.”

Bart narrowed his eyes. “You know someone who can get us in and out of here?”

Elli nodded.

“Who?” Bart demanded.

Elli’s voice was so soft, she could barely be heard.

“Me,” she whispered.

TEN

When Elli had been swept into the warehouse after the pit collapsed several years earlier, the wall had been quickly rebuilt. But after she started living in her broom closet, she noticed that the air in the closet had a different smell from the rest of the warehouse. It was an earthy, oily smell. Not bad—just different.

And it came through a vent in the ceiling.

After a while it occurred to her that the air was coming from the tunnel she had been propelled through by the mud.

She pretty much forgot about it—until the idea popped into her mind of doing the unauthorized excav. If she could get to the tunnel…well, the tunnel must lead somewhere. Right?

So she had looked at the old maps of the city and found what it had to be. Many years earlier the city had had a subway. Eventually the subway had been shut down and sealed up. But the tunnels were still there. There had to be a way to get in and out of them.

Elli felt the strongest compulsion she’d ever felt in her life. She had to go on this excav. She had to.

One night, after all the workers at Mr. Pop had left, she crawled up through the vent. As she shinnied on her belly through the narrow concrete shaft, she giggled to herself. Imagine me, a little gray-haired cleaning lady, sneaking through an air shaft like some hero in a movie!

She didn’t really even feel scared. It was an adventure!

After only twenty or thirty feet, she ran into a grimy old metal grate. She shined her flashlight through it. On the other side was a dark, tiled tunnel. She pushed the grate open, slid onto the dirty floor and looked around. On the floor below her, half buried in mud and debris, were rusting old tracks leading off into the distance.

Yes! This might work!

She began walking. Within an hour, she had found what she needed.

 

On the day of the excav, the team members had furtively slipped into Elli’s little broom closet.

Then Elli had led them through the ventilation duct, and through a maze of underground tunnels. Eventually they looked up and saw a thin beam of light coming from a tiny hole at the top of a very long, dark shaft. A rusty iron ladder led to the top.

“We’ll climb to the top,” she said. “At the top you’ll put your blindfolds on. Olana has arranged for a driver to pull a van up next to a certain manhole. The driver doesn’t know where we’ve come from, who we are, or what our mission is. He’ll be there at exactly ten seventeen a.m. The traffic light will turn red, and he’ll stop. We’ll have eight seconds to get into the van. I’ll lead you out of the shaft and into the van. Don’t make a move without me. Clear?”

The other members of the team looked at one another wonderingly. They had never seen this side of Elli Winter. She had always been a nice, quiet middle-aged lady who had an odd knack for finding buried boxes.

“You’re a woman of many surprises,” one of the diggers said. He poked her teasingly in the forehead. “What else have you got hidden in that head of yours?”

Elli felt a flush of pleasure. It was silly, this strapping young boy making a fuss over her. But still, it was nice.

She looked at the watch she had borrowed from Olana. “Let’s go,” she said.

 

Three hours later they were digging. It was an idyllic spot. Small forested mountains rose from each side of a flat, meadowed valley. In the middle of the valley, a small river babbled over smooth black rocks. It was spring, so the grass was full of beautiful yellow flowers that stretched off as far as the eye could see.

But the ground where they were digging was a hard-packed clay, full of rocks. It was miserable work, slower than Elli had hoped.

The necklace around her neck felt hotter here than it had ever felt. Something important was buried in this ground. Elli felt more sure of it than anything she’d ever felt in her life. But the hole was getting deeper and deeper. And they still hadn’t found anything.

Finally Olana said, “This is one of the deepest holes we’ve ever dug. Are you sure it’s in the right place?”

“As sure as I can be, dear,” Elli said.

“I’m getting nervous,” Olana said. “This is taking too long. And we don’t have any watchers to give us advance warning.”

As if on cue, Elli’s shovel struck something. It made a thump, rather than the clang of shovel on rock.

“We’re there,” Bart said.

They began to dig furiously. Elli could see that this was not a normal box. Usually the boxes were made of metal. This was made of some kind of unusual plastic.

“Five more minutes and we’ll have it,” Bart said.

Then Elli heard something that made her skin crawl. A sudden intake of breath.

“Oh, no,” Olana whispered. Then a louder shout. “Run!”

“Go!” Bart said. He interlaced his fingers, so that the two younger diggers could plant their feet on his hands and climb out. They were gone in seconds. “Come on!” he said to Elli.

“You next,” she said. “You’re taller. You can pull me out.”

Bart didn’t have to be asked twice. Elli simply bent over at the waist, and he used her back as a step, bounding out of the hole. Then he reached back in.

Elli looked up at him for a moment. She could hear the swoosh of the helicopter blades now. She wanted to go. In fact, she was completely terrified. She knew that the dados would be there very soon. But at the same time, she had to keep digging. She had no choice. Elli shook her head at Bart.

“Run, dear,” she said softly.

“Are you crazy?” Bart shouted.

“I have to keep digging. Go.”

“Run!” somebody shouted again.

Bart looked at her incredulously. She turned away and began digging. She heard pounding footsteps as Bart sprinted away toward the tree line.

She could hear the chopper getting closer, the whine of its engine piercing as a dental drill. She had never been more scared in her life. But she kept digging.

All this time she had been feeling drawn to come here and dig. But she’d never really thought about what was in the box. Something important—important to the movement, important to the revivers, important to Mr. Pop.

But now the security dados would have it. They’d take it back to some faceless building owned by Blok. There would be a brief review by some sour little man. And then a dado would take it to some dirty furnace and burn it. Whatever it was.

She managed to get the shovel under the lip of the box. Tilting the shovel handle back, she forced the box up, free of the hard clay. At least let me see it, she thought.

She snuck a glance over her shoulder. The security chopper was racing up the valley, its belly swaying back and forth as the aircraft tracked the gentle bends in the river.

Maybe there was time. With a herculean effort, she hoisted the box out, tossed it over the lip of the hole. Then she used the shovel to propel herself up onto the grass.

The chopper was hovering above her now. She looked up, but could see no faces, no signs of human life. And in fact, she knew, there was no human life up there. Just dados—mindless machines, intent on their mission.

The downdraft from the chopper blades whipped at her hair and clothes. The air was full of yellow flowers, ripped from the ground by the prop wash.

She bent over the box, flipped the lid open.

Above her, she heard a loud noise, like zippers being opened. As she looked up, she saw what it was—the sound of the dados sliding down long black ropes that hung from the belly of the aircraft.

Four dados slid toward the ground. All of them tall, hard faced, bulky. All of them armed with gold stun guns. Their faces showed no mercy.

“Lie down, citizen!” one of them shouted. “Lie down and lace your fingers behind your head.”

For a moment Elli thought, Well, maybe I should. It’s all over now anyway, right?

But instead, she reached into the box.

ELEVEN

From the top of the hill, Olana watched through the binoculars.

“What a shame,” Bart said. “I guess that’s the end of the road for the cleaning lady, huh?”

Through her fieldglasses Olana saw the small gray-haired woman reach into the box. Then she stood up. There was something in her hands—an odd-looking stick that glinted silver in the bright sun.

The security dados were moving slowly toward her, forming a loose circle around her. They had not even drawn their stunners. Four dados against one small middle-aged woman—it was no contest.

“What’s that in her hand?” Bart said.

“I’m trying to—” Olana broke off. The surprise of what happened next was so great that she was speechless.

As the first dado approached, Elli lunged suddenly. Olana’s eyes widened. The odd silver stick simply passed into the dado’s chest, as though it were made of butter.

The dado crumpled—a puppet with its strings cut.

For a moment no one moved. Olana was barely able to make out the expression on Elli’s face. The little woman looked shocked. The dados too were clearly taken by surprise. Whatever the silver stick was, it was not like any weapon they had encountered before. They weren’t programmed to respond to it.

Apparently, Elli’s moment of shock passed quickly. She immediately started chopping through the air with the silver stick, waving it wildly around her. It passed straight through the neck of the next dado. The second dado too went down. It hit the ground and didn’t move.

These dados were top-of-the-line combat models. They were built to adjust to changing circumstances. They clawed for their stunners.

One of the dados fired, missing narrowly. Elli dodged, brought her stick down on his arm. The hand flew off, still clutching its stunner. Before the dado’s limp body could fall, though, the little woman had grabbed it. Using the body as a shield, she staggered forward, the downed dado absorbing shot after shot from the last dado’s stunner.

Realizing that it wouldn’t be able to shoot her as long as she was holding its fallen comrade, the surviving dado simply charged at Elli. She chopped at him with her silver stick. But this time he was ready, blocking it with his stunner. Evidently the silver stick could pass through the body of a dado—but not through the metal stunner.

Using his sheer bulk, he slammed Elli backward. The silver stick fell from her arm, bounced, slid into the pit.

“No!” Olana said. “No, no, no!”

“What happened?” Bart said.

Olana lost track of the cleaning lady for a moment as she staggered out of the binoculars’ range of view. Then all she could see was a flash of cheap gray material falling into the pit. Elli’s coat.

Olana scanned the area looking for a sign of the cleaning lady. She was gone.

“They shot her, I think,” Olana said. “She’s in the hole now.”

The surviving dado cautiously approached the hole, its gold stunner extended. Olana sighed. Well, it was an amazing performance. Elli had offered up her life to give the rest of the team a chance to get away.

“We’ve got to go,” Olana said. “While we’ve still got a chance.”

“Wait,” Bart said. “Just wait. Another ten seconds. We owe her that.”

Olana lifted the binoculars again. Just in time to see a flash in the bright sunlight.

The silver stick came pushing up out of the hole. The dado tried to dodge—but it was too late. The silver stick sliced right through its chest.

The dado fell like a rag doll.

Olana stared.

“What?” Bart said, straining to see what had just happened.

“She did it!” Olana said wonderingly. “She—”

But it wasn’t over. The small woman clambered out of the hole. The dados were all down, but the chopper was still functioning. It had landed a short distance from the hole. When the fourth dado fell, its engine began spooling up as though it were getting ready to take off.

“Look out!” Olana shouted. “The chopper! Get the chopper!”

But Elli couldn’t hear. The sound of the chopper drowned out her voice. Olana wondered if she saw the gold stunner protruding from the nose of the chopper. It wasn’t aimed at her. But if the chopper got airborne, it could swing the stunner around at her.

“Elli! Run!”

Apparently, Elli noticed the threat at the same time as Olana. But instead of running away, she ran toward the chopper.

Elli reached the aircraft just as its wheels cleared the ground, and she jumped awkwardly, just barely landing on the craft. What was she doing?

The chopper bounced, then lifted up. Slowly the aircraft gained speed and began to scud across the ground. Suddenly a dark shape flew from the door.

It took Olana a moment to identify the dark shape. It was Elli. The little woman fell for what seemed an eternity—though it was probably only a fraction of a second. Olana screamed as Elli hit the ground hard, then lay motionless.

The chopper slowed, then turned. In horror Olana realized the big gold stunner was now swinging around toward her and the others in the group. The chopper kept turning and turning. The gun grew closer and closer.

“Down! Everybody down!” Olana commanded.

Finally the stunner was aimed directly at them. Olana waited for the blast. But nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except for an odd little wisp of smoke that began to trail from the side of the chopper. The chopper kept wheeling and wheeling, the stunner aiming farther and farther from Olana and her group. Something is wrong with the chopper! Olana realized. Elli had done something to the chopper!

Suddenly the chopper dipped, nosed over, and slammed into the mountain, obliterating itself.

“She did it,” Olana whispered. Then she shouted it. “She did it! She took ’em out!”

A ragged cheer rose from the excav team. They began to stream down the hill toward where Elli lay.

As they grew closer, Olana’s heart began to sink. Elli wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving at all.

TWELVE

Elli lay on her back. Every part of her body hurt as she stared up at the circle of faces. She felt confused.

“What just happened?” she said.

One of the young diggers grinned at her. “You were incredible! That’s what happened!”

Olana picked up a long cylinder. “What is this?”

Elli sat up, looked at the gleaming stick for a moment. It started coming back to her, her whole fight with the dados. It seemed almost like a dream, like something that had happened to someone else. Because Elli knew that she was not the fight-off-hordes-of-dados kind of person.

Elli blinked, took a deep breath, then took the cylinder from Olana, put it back in the box, and slammed the lid. “We need to get back to the warehouse right now,” she said. “The chopper will have sent out some kind of distress signal. More dados will come.”

She stood, tucked the box under her arm, and began trotting toward their vehicle.

 

The trip home was silent. Several times dado choppers buzzed over, heading rapidly in the direction of the downed aircraft. But no one stopped them.

They descended into the manhole and within fifteen minutes they were crawling through the air duct into Elli’s little broom closet.

They emerged from the broom closet to find a ring of people standing outside the door. Their faces were hard and angry. Standing at the center of the group was Tylee.

“You did an excav against my express orders!” she shouted. “What are you people thinking? Dados could be on the way here right this minute!”

“Look,” Elli said, “it’s all my fault. You see, I—”

Tylee cut her off. “If it was just some little cleaning lady, I’d be more understanding. But Olana? Bart? You two are supposed to be leaders. Responsible! Intelligent!”

Bart and Olana were ashen faced. “I’m sorry, but—,” Olana began.

“You’ve endangered everything. Everything we’ve worked for! Everything we’ve bled for! Everything we’ve—”

This time it was Elli’s turn to cut Tylee off.

“Dear,” Elli said. Her voice was soft. But it felt surprisingly firm coming out. “Dear, this was our final excav. We understand that it was a risk. But this was a risk worth taking.”

“You are in no position to evaluate what is or is not a reasonable risk. There are matters at stake here that—”

Elli smiled shyly. “I’m sorry, dear, but I think you’ll see that what’s in this box was worth the risk.” She set the long thin dirty box on a nearby table. “See for yourself.”

Tylee opened the box grudgingly, pulled out the long gleaming cylinder. She frowned at it skeptically. “What is this—a shower-curtain rod? A piece of an old vehicle?” She tossed it back on the table.

Bart stepped forward, picked up the cylinder. “It’s a weapon. Tylee, this little cleaning woman—as you call her—used this thing to destroy four dados and a security chopper. In about thirty seconds.”

Tylee looked at the weapon, then at Elli, then at the weapon again.

“Is this true?” she finally said to Elli.

Elli nodded.

“That ‘curtain rod,’” Olana said, “is our hope for the future.”

There was a sudden hubbub as everyone started talking. Olana began excitedly giving a blow-by-blow description of Elli’s fight with the dados. And all of the revivers began grabbing for the cylinder, anxious to figure out what its secret was.

Elli let them talk, feeling a pleased sensation moving through her entire body. During the excav, she had felt a nervous buzzing at the back of her skull. What if I fail? What if I take a wrong turn? What if the dados catch us? What if Blok tracks us back to the warehouse? What if… But now she knew that her faith had been repaid.

Finally she interrupted the clamoring voices. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me.”

Everyone quieted, then turned to look at her.

“Yes?” Tylee said.

“When I said that what was in the box was worth the risk, I was actually talking about the other item in the box.”

Tylee frowned curiously, then and reached into the box a second time.

“What is it?” Bart said.

Tylee pulled out a book—a very old leather-bound volume. Her eyes widened. Then she held up the book so everyone could see. On the cover were four words, set in faded gold type:

The Analects of Kelln.

There was a long moment of silence.

Olana spoke first. “Wow.”

“Oh, my,” said another voice.

“You found it,” Tylee whispered. “I’d like you to give it to Dr. Pender in person.” Then she handed the book to Elli.

The group turned away and started talking about the weapon again. Elli hugged the precious book to her chest. It smelled of ancient libraries.

I did it! she thought. I found the Analects of Kelln! It occurred to her—as it had every now and then—that maybe there was something to what Press had told her. Maybe she really was…

No. No, it was silly to even consider it. She was a cleaning lady. Maybe she had an odd gift for finding important old boxes. Maybe, with the help of the strange cylinder and about a ton of adrenaline, she had been able to fight off a couple of brainless robots. But that didn’t mean she was a Traveler. That didn’t mean she was special.

She left the group and began walking toward Dr. Pender’s office. The excited voices faded.

Elli found Dr. Pender standing in his office. He looked up, raised one eyebrow, and said, “You caused a bit of a fuss today. I must say, I really don’t understand why you would have done such a thing.”

Wordlessly, she handed him the book. He smiled tightly as he took the volume. She could tell that, like Tylee, he was angry that anyone would engage in an unauthorized excav. He was understandably protective of the warehouse and its irreplaceable contents.

But then Dr. Pender’s face changed. His mouth opened slightly as he stared at the cover of the volume. He opened it reverently and began to leaf through the pages. After a moment, tears began streaming down his face. Finally the librarian looked up at her with an odd smile on his face.

“You did it….,” he whispered. “How did you know? How did you—” His voice faltered.

She shrugged. I just knew, she thought. I just did.

Solemnly he closed the book. Then he held it out to her. “You must be the first one to read it,” he said.

“Oh, I couldn’t, dear,” she said. “Someone who understands these things better should—”

He pressed his finger against her lip. “Shhh.”

“But—”

“I’ve heard you whispering while you work,” he said. “Quoting the books you’ve read.”

Elli blushed. She felt embarrassed to think that anybody had noticed her. She had thought it was her little secret.

“You’re memorizing them all.” Dr. Pender stared at her intently. “Aren’t you?”

She looked at the floor. “I suppose I am.”

He pushed the book into her hands. “One day the dados may come,” he said. “Perhaps even today. Who knows. So it’s important that you put this in here.” He tapped the side of her head. “The sooner the better.”

She nodded and began walking back toward her broom closet. She wanted to store the book on her special shelf.

When she reached the broom closet, Tylee was there waiting for her. “Ah!” she said. “There you are.”

“I know you’re mad,” Elli said. “I’m sorry. I should have—”

“Don’t even think about it,” Tylee said. “What’s done is done.”

The leader of the revivers stood there awkwardly for a moment. “Do you mind if I speak with you privately?”

Elli nodded. “Come in,” she said, opening the door to the tiny broom closet. “I’m afraid you’ll have to sit on the bed,” she added.

Tylee looked around the tiny room. “You live in here?” She shook her head. “I never knew. I thought you had a real room. I’m sorry. We should have—”

Elli smiled gently. “I like it here.”

Tylee spotted the photographs cut from newspapers that covered the walls. Nevva winning prizes. Nevva holding up trophies. Nevva smiling at the camera. “Your daughter,” she said.

Elli nodded.

“You’ve never told anyone here your real name.”

Elli nodded.

“We had to find out of course. It was in the papers, a woman missing the day of the cave-in. We pulled up the records and identified you from the photographs. We had to be careful in case you were a Blok spy.”

Elli sat on the bed with her hands between her knees. “Of course.”

Tylee sighed, her face etched with worry. “We’re going to have to move Mr. Pop,” she said. “We’ve been thinking about it for a while. A site farther out in the country. After what happened on your excav…well, we suspect that Blok has a general idea of where we’re located. After what you did out there today, they’ll leave no stone unturned trying to find this place.”

“I’m sorry,” Elli said. “I know that we attracted too much attention with this last excav.”

“Don’t apologize. It was worth it.” Tylee hesitated, as though she were trying to find the right words. “In fact, today may well be the turning point in our movement. That cylinder, whatever it is—our scientists will try to figure out how it works. If we can reproduce it, make more, we can finally rise up and destroy Blok.”

Elli nodded.

“But something else happened today. Something I can tell only you. But first you must promise never to speak of this again.”

“Okay.”

“We recruited a new agent today. This person will be the most important, most highly placed agent our movement has ever recruited.”

“Oh?”

“With the new agent? And that weapon you found? We will triumph.”

Elli didn’t speak. Why is Tylee speaking to me about this? she thought. A highly placed agent of the movement—that’s something that a person like Tylee wouldn’t talk about. The more people you told a thing like that, the more chance of the information leaking to Blok security.

“The agent’s name…” Tylee paused. “Elli, it’s Nevva Winter. Our new agent is your daughter.”

Elli took a deep breath.

“I just thought you should know.”

Tylee rose and left the broom closet.

 

Elli sat on the bed for a long time. After the day she’d just had, she was exhausted. And the fight with the dados—the effect of it was just catching up with her. She began trembling.

I should get to work, she thought. I should go clean something. But her legs were trembling so hard, she couldn’t even stand up.

And then, as quickly as it had hit her, the feeling passed.

You know what? she thought. I’ve cleaned every single day for the past five years. Who’s to say I can’t take a day off?

She felt a strong glow spreading through her limbs. She was exhausted. But she was triumphant, too. In a funny sort of way, she felt better than she’d felt…well, before her husband had begun the long slide that led her to this tiny room.

With that, she picked up the book and began to read The Analects of Kelln. As she read the first sentence, a strange smile spread across her face. And like Dr. Pender, tears of joy began to run down her face.

Even at the end of the road, read the first sentence, there is a road. Even at the end of the road, a new road stretches out, limitless and open, a road that may lead anywhere. To him who will find it, there is always a road.