Arran isn’t speaking to her, and Selah can’t blame him. She wouldn’t speak to herself either, if she could.
A child, he’d called her. Irresponsible. Selfish.
And he’s right, because this is exactly how she lost Tair in the first place. What in the savage Quiet is wrong with her?
Linet was in charge of her safety, but to Selah she’d just been an obstacle. She hadn’t spared a single thought to how giving her guard the slip would put her in harm’s way. Would see her punished, sent back to the Institute Civitatem, her children sent away to various assignments outside the city, never to come back. Savage Quiet, she hadn’t even considered that Linet might have children. She’d never asked. And now Linet is gone.
She learned this lesson five years ago. Didn’t she? That grand revelation, a sudden break in understanding about how power moves through the world. Some fissure that opened her eyes about the responsibility she has to make the world better, lit a fire in her gut to force that march toward progress. For Arran and Tair and Gil and all the people she loves, who deserve so much better than this.
But she didn’t love Linet.
She’d barely even noticed Linet.
And the simple fact of that had, in the end, sealed Linet’s fate.
The horror had sunk in slowly, then all at once. The realization of what, precisely, she had done. Selah had still been stupid in that moment, stupid enough to think that a message from the Imperial Historian would be enough to reverse the course Mima had set into motion. It wasn’t. There’s strict protocol surrounding reeducation, and the Institute Civitatem is, after all, an Imperial institution. Once a serva enters reeducation, there’s no having them released. Linet and her children are gone, and it’s entirely Selah’s fault.
The queasiness pools at the bottom of her stomach as the night drags on, and it’s no more than she deserves. Because that, too, was a lesson she thought she’d learned five years ago. Maybe it was what Dad was trying to teach her all along, that the mere act of throwing her power around could be ineffective at best, a dire mistake at worst. So she sits in it, and she wonders what the point of being paterfamilias or even just patrician at all is, in the end, if you’re only going to get people hurt without holding any real power to intervene. She sits in it, and feels it bubble up in her chest, the near-hysterical notion that there has to be a better way than this.
You people can only be tall when you’re standing on our necks, and one cog’s as good as the next as far as the great machine is concerned.
And.
You inherited me. You own me. And if things hadn’t gone tits up I would have been your client and you still would’ve fucking owned me.
She sits in that, too, Tair’s words ringing an echo in her ears. She hadn’t understood, not really. Not then. It had been too much, too harsh, too filled with an anger she couldn’t make herself come to terms with, too at odds with the collective responsibility Sargassans are taught since childhood. Only that, too, is cracking open. Horror and guilt oozing in at the seams. She sits in that, too. She sits in it right up until the moment she wakes in the early hours of the next morning to find Tair, fully dressed, sitting cross-legged at the end of her bed and examining the Iveroa Stone’s sleek surface.
“You’re here,” she blurts, the fog of sleep rapidly rolling back.
“Apparently,” Tair responds, casual, as if her sneaking into Selah’s bedroom at four in the morning is a thing that still happens on a regular basis. Her gaze is calm and intent, almost unnerving, and suddenly Selah finds it almost impossible to look at her.
Because they were supposed to know each other. In the vast, confusing, too-quickly-changing world, they were Selah and Tair, and that was supposed to stay constant. Even when one of them was no longer around. She had spent years searching for ghosts, for a glimpse of red hair or sun-browned freckles in a not-quite-so-brown face, the missing piece that made her whole. Selah and Tair, or Selah-and-Tair, as they’d been. Whispers in the other’s mind, equal parts caution and encouragement to the other’s worst impulses. Two souls in equal balance. On a fast current toward something more. Something that was always there, waiting.
The idea that was Tair, anyway. The real thing is here, now, and stood in front of her last night with words like a flinch, and Selah doesn’t know what was real or imagined anymore. What was them, and what was Tair just trying to survive.
“Any luck poking around?” asks Tair, now.
“Not exactly,” she says. She’s been a little distracted. “But I did have a thought. Can I have another look at the Stone?”
There’s a thrill she finds sometimes in the depths of a research project. A sudden bright spot of clarity that doesn’t leave her with a final answer, exactly, but does open up an entirely new avenue of inquiry she hadn’t previously considered. She’s grateful for the distraction now, even if it’s not nearly enough to permeate the ugly roiling in her gut that means she just wants to bury herself in blankets and rot.
She slips out of bed anyway, ignoring the sharp twinge in her still-healing ankle, and crosses over to the abalone mother-of-pearl vanity where she nearly fell asleep looking over the old atlas. The other half of the strange duo Dad left behind. It lies open to where she left it—one page depicting an island off southern Fornia that she’s fairly sure doesn’t exist, the other a wall of illegible, incomprehensible text. She’d wondered about that last night, because Dad had wanted her to have this, too, after all. That can’t be coincidence.
A quick glance is all she needs to confirm her suspicions.
Selah hands the atlas to Tair, watches as she takes it with an unmistakable air of interest, because of course she does. From six to eighteen she was raised by Gil in the shadow of the Archives’ hallowed halls, and you don’t emerge from that without a healthy respect for books. When Tair flips it open, her gentle handling of the worn spine and peeling bindings is nothing against the awed light that grows in her brown eyes.
“What is this?” she asks, reverent wonder creeping into her voice.
“Look at the alphabet,” Selah says, holding up the Iveroa Stone to give Tair a clear view of the string of glyphs etched into the thinnest edge, the same ones she recalled last night in a momentary flash of insight, then the certain realization that she had, in fact, seen them somewhere before. “It’s the same thing.”
• • •
Day breaks slowly over the Sargasso Sea’s far horizon, the blue-black sky shot with pink and gold that refracts against the dark clouds. The glimmer of a rising sun dances across Tair’s drawn and stubborn face as she perches on a nearby rock.
Selah tries instead to focus on the surprisingly sour apple in her hand, on the eddies and whirls of salt and silt in the tide pools between outcroppings of rock. Tries to push down the nagging voice that wonders where Linet is now. Tries not to notice her once-friend’s delicate fingers as they scan the pages of the atlas, or the blue veins beneath the soft skin of her wrist. It’s rude, frankly, the way Tair bites her bottom lip in concentration, and Selah sets her gaze on the crashing waves instead.
It wasn’t easy work, getting down here. Her twisted ankle isn’t especially bad, but Tair—begrudgingly—had had to help her down the sloping dirt path, packed smooth by years of foot traffic with only the odd root or spiny crabapple bush for handholds. After, one hand resting on Tair’s shoulder, she’d felt the prickling heat where skin met skin, the lines of tension in her old friend’s body as they moved one step slowly after the next down the little stone staircase, crude gashes carved into the cliff’s face by some forgotten someone long ago.
But they’d needed privacy, and time, and no doubt some scullion downstairs was already awake lighting the fires, so Selah had shoved a note about where she’d gone under both Mima and Arran’s doors and braved it down to the gravelly shore’s protected cove. Tair’s set to work some yards away, muttering under her breath as she examines the signs and symbols written down on the arcane maps. The Iveroa Stone sits quietly on a nearby rock, cover open, soaking in the warm morning sun.
“Anything?” Selah asks, after several more minutes of itchy quiet.
“Be a lot closer if you stopped asking,” comes the curt response, and she winces. Tair’s already snapped at her twice for interrupting. Only then she lifts her head and says, “Nearly done. Look.” Unceremoniously she tosses her notebook over, and Selah fumbles to catch it, almost ripping out a couple of pages in the process.
Tair was not, evidently, taking down notes on the atlas’s alphabet after all. What Selah sees instead when she looks down at the notebook are crudely drawn lines twisting this way and that, some in curves and others straight, here and there little labels affixed.
“Uh. What am I looking at, exactly?”
Begrudgingly Tair gets up from her rock, then plops back down on the sand next to her. Selah doesn’t know whether to shift over to give her more room or not.
“Luxana,” she says, trading her the notebook for the atlas, thumb stuck to keep it open to one page in particular—a city. She rips out the sketch, lays it atop the city map. “This one’s Luxana.”
It’s an absolute mess of a rendering. Now that she points it out, Selah can decipher within Tair’s rudimentary sketch the familiar city streets and neighborhood quarters of their hometown. All the same, she raises a skeptical brow. Because the simple fact is that when the thin notepaper is laid out on top of the atlas’s map, Tair’s drawings and squiggles in no way match up to depict the same city.
“Uh,” she says.
“You were coming at it from the wrong angle,” says Tair, a slight edge to her voice that can’t be anything but annoyance, only it’s the kind that seems to say, You’re smart enough to have figured this out on your own. “If you can’t read the language, you’ve gotta read the landscape. I recognized Seven Dials—see here?”
She points to the very center of her sketch, a minuscule roundabout from which seven thoroughfares disperse in an even spoked wheel, the smaller streets between them twisting and curling to connect. A perfect match to the black lines poking through the notepaper from the atlas underneath. Selah’s mouth drops open.
“And then there was the Plaza Capitolio—” her finger moves to a square formation some ways northwest “—and the Archives . . . the intersection of these two cross streets—that would still be around the Universitas District, I’m pretty sure—and . . . well, Breakwater.”
It isn’t possible. Selah hasn’t spent much time with this map in particular, it’s true, but she’s read this atlas back to front and failed to identify so much as a single city or town. They’ve all sat in the outer wilds or on the ghosts of other urban centers she knows to be there instead, but not a single one has actually been real. In fact, she had begun to suspect that the places in this book never even existed at all, that this was some kind of urban planning scheme that had never taken off, an ambitious dream forever left unrealized. How could her own home have been here the whole time, unknown to her, warped and alien and labeled under a foreign tongue?
“But,” says Selah, still trying to wrap her mind around the impossible, staring at the ancient little dot that marks her house. “How? Luxana’s only—”
“Eight hundred years old, I know,” finishes Tair, taking the atlas back into her lap. “But places are built on top of each other all the time. Maybe there was something here before that. Something before Luxana. Or Roma.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something else.”
“Roma was here before the Quiet.”
“Maybe something else was, too.”
They stare at each other for a long moment, the weight of her words lingering heavy between them. Something before Luxana. It’s possible. The Great Quiet took so much from them, and left behind so little. But before Roma? You might as well say before human civilization itself. Selah can hardly conceive of such a thing.
But this atlas was in Dad’s possession, and so was the Iveroa Stone, with its etchings in the same, archaic language. Perhaps it’s just coincidence. Perhaps this goes deeper than even Selah can comprehend.
“Tair . . .” she says slowly, alarm bells beginning to sound in her head. “What if this is all connected?”
“What do you mean?”
Selah shoots to her feet, all at once incapable of staying in one place. There’s a sudden itch where the pleasant mystery of academia once was, and she doesn’t know if it’s just the spillover of her own rotten guilt clawing toward something else, but it feels dark. It feels wrong.
“These both belonged to Dad,” she says. “My dad, who asked Gil to keep them secret and give them to me, who thought it was important enough that he asked him to do it while he was dying. It was the only thing. And now someone’s blackmailing you to get the Stone. And the Stone is in the same language as this atlas, a language neither of us have ever seen, and we’re probably some of the best-educated people in the fragging province.” She’s talking in circles, she’s very much aware of that, but that’s because this is a circle. “It just . . .” she finishes lamely, “it has to be connected. It just has to be.”
Tair is staring at her, still inscrutable, and very suddenly she’s unsure what to do with her hands. Her mind is still going a hundred miles a minute, and just standing here talking about it feels so profoundly not enough.
“You think I’m spinning out,” she says.
“No,” says Tair. “I just think it’s none of my business.”
“What?”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” she snaps. “So someone’s blackmailing me, big fucking deal. I have more than just my own skin to worry about.”
“Exactly,” Selah says, voice rising to match Tair’s. “That’s exactly my point. What if this is bigger than you and me? My dad was custodian of the Imperium’s knowledge. So maybe he knew something.”
There’s a long moment of silence between them. Selah had forgotten about this part, the way that they can get under each other’s skin like no one else. But she also knows that look on Tair’s face, the one that says she’s intrigued despite herself. Selah holds her breath, stops herself from pushing it over the edge. She needs the Stone. She needs Tair’s mind. She needs her for so much more than that. But she isn’t going to push. She holds for what comes next.
At last, Tair pushes her red hair back with a groan, and Selah’s gut flips on itself. “Does the Neutra Ward still have a section on solarics?” she asks.
Selah nods.
“All right, then,” says Tair, brushing sand off her wrap pants as she stands. “If we’re going to get this thing working, then we should see what the experts have to say.”