It isn’t forgiveness. Not really. Not from Tair, and not from herself. It doesn’t help Linet, and Selah knows already that she’s going to carry the weight of that forever. Vague memories of wiry muscles and worried eyes, forever lost. But she thinks she understands something else now, something that she didn’t before.
I was never set up to win in the first place.
For as long as Selah can remember, she has been taught that everyone has a part to play. A collective responsibility to the whole. And after Tair vanished into the night, she was so, so sure that the world was broken. That something had gone terribly wrong. That it had failed in its responsibility to her friend. She had thought it was her path to fix that, through reform and through education and through all the other resources she has at her disposal. She understands better than that now.
Nothing’s broken at all. The world works exactly how it was built to. She just has no idea what to do with that.
Tair can’t get within ten blocks of the Imperial Archives without someone recognizing her, both girls can agree on that. She was a constant fixture there for twelve long years, well known to all as Gil’s apprentice. So Selah leaves her at a jav on the district outskirts, makes her way alone up the gleaming limestone Iveroa Promenade. She knows better than to try using the front entrance. She won’t get three steps inside without being waylaid. Not by actual work business, of course—researchers in residence and admin staff alike know better than to try going around Gil to get to her—but any change in the status quo brings on the vultures, and Selah’s spent the last two weeks dodging the flock of well-wishers and rubberneckers camped out in the marble atrium, all hoping to catch her ear. She sneaks in through the back.
The Neutra Ward’s in one of the private science libraries, up on the fourteenth floor. Access to the level is heavily restricted, but Selah is one of two people in the building with free rein to go wherever she likes at any time. She steps into the attollo, dials the brass signal to the correct floor, and is about to close the grate when someone slips in beside her.
“Stalking me?” she asks as the attollo begins to rise, a rush of fondness pulling in all the same.
“That’s my job,” Gil responds, quirking the corner of his lip. “You’re in early.”
“Am I?”
There’s a brass-gilt clock on the wall of the attollo reading six fifty-eight in the morning. She’d completely lost track of the time. “Couldn’t sleep,” she tells him, and it is the truth. Sort of. “Figured I might as well get a head start.”
Selah doesn’t like lying to him, not even by omission. She likes lying to him about Tair, sitting at a javhouse only a mile from here, even less. She’s got to do it anyway.
“I have a handwriting expert coming in later,” Gil tells her then, the first in what she already knows after three weeks is his your-agenda-for-the-day voice. “That’s your three o’clock. See if we can’t get Alex’s notes on the Terra project figured out. Already ran a background check, but I assumed you’d want to interview her, too.”
“No need. Get her started when she comes in.” She trusts Gil’s judgment, and anyway, she has a feeling she may not be in the building very long.
“Of course.” He makes a note in his ledger. “Also, the Shikibu team are asking for a meeting.”
“Which one is that again?”
“They’re translating The Tale of Genji out of Nipponese.”
Selah rolls her eyes. “Haven’t they already asked to see the original something like six times? They know they need to go through the petition process. And they know I’m going to say no, same as Dad did. They were given copies for a reason. The original’s too fragile.”
“I don’t think that’s it. Word is they want to fire a member of the team.”
“If it’s a personality thing, they can—”
“It’s not a personality thing.” Gil hesitates. “One of the translators told me privately they’ve been having issues with this one from the start, they’ve just been trying to handle it internally. Apparently he isn’t happy with the more . . . Imperialist framing the translation’s shaping into.”
Selah frowns at that. When it comes to translation, a shift in narrative construction is normal. Edits are normal. That’s why Dad handpicked each member of the team himself, to ensure the right version was told. That’s a good half of the Archives’ work, after all. Safekeeping and restoration, yes, guarding the central hub of Imperial knowledge. But then they release it back into the world as needed, shaping and counseling progress in the course of people’s best interest. So why does she suddenly feel so uneasy about it? That little tendril of nausea like some shade of Linet—though the truth is, she doesn’t remember what the woman’s voice sounded like—asking who gave her the right to decide what’s best for everyone else?
Savage Quiet, she needs some fragging jav.
“It’s your call, of course,” Gil goes on, “but if you do fire him and the translator—Jankara—decides to make a thing about it, that’s going to bring down a world of annoyance that you do not want to deal with.”
“Tell the team no. For now. But I want to meet with Jankara privately.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Preferably.”
Gil glances at the dial then. “Fourteen?”
“Mm-hm. Palmar wants to install attollos in some Paxenos Imperial buildings,” she lies, quickly casting about for the nearest thing. Mechanics, too, are on fourteen. “Apparently they’re still living in the 600s over there. I promised him the schematics to take back.”
“We should think about taking those out of fourteen. Not like it’s really classified information. Anyone with half a brain and the extra manpower can rig a pulley system.”
Selah frowns. “This is manual?”
Gil raises a curious brow and nods. “Of course. Servae work the pulleys in teams.”
At that, her heart skips a beat. The attollo rattles steadily upward beneath her feet, and with a sinking, ugly roil in her stomach she wonders how in the savage Quiet she never thought to wonder about that before. The lift system that operates day and night to carry scholars and researchers and students and visitors up and down the vast expanse of the Imperial Archives’ thirty floors. The little brass dial, signaling which one. And somewhere deep below the ground, if Gil’s to be believed, teams of servae laboring and sweating, heaving and pulling, to get them all where they want to go. There’s twenty attollos in this building alone.
Selah sets aside the ever-growing nausea, that whisper of Linet, an iron clamp of resolve taking its place instead. Do better next time.
• • •
The Neutra Ward is small, at least compared to the soaring libraries of the first and second floors. A low-ceilinged room at the far corner of the fourteenth floor, creaking wood and cozy leather chairs. The domain of unproven scientific method and quackery, interesting in theory but potentially dangerous in irresponsible hands. The section on solaric technology comprises two books, both relatively new. An Introduction to Solaric Technology and Oddities of the Sun: Notable Curios of Solaric Origin. Selah shoves them both in her bag.
By the time she gets back to the javhouse on the district outskirts, the sun is well above her head. People out and about, the Universitas District fully woken up for the day. But she takes one look at Tair, sitting out front, and rather than feel any sort of worry for how exposed she is, Selah just laughs. “You look ridiculous,” she says, and plops down in the chair next to her.
Tair shrugs, and somehow manages to take a sip of jav. “I look,” she corrects her, “like a fundamentalist.”
“They let their women drink jav?”
“Well, now you’re just being offensive.” And Tair slaps a hand over Selah’s mouth, like they’re ten years old again or something. Selah licks a broad, salty stripe up her palm. Tair yelps and pulls away.
She has no idea, actually, what constitutes offense where the most extreme of Christian cultists are involved. But she does have to admit, when it comes down to it, that the heavy green veil Tair’s unearthed from somewhere is a genius disguise. Nothing remains to give her away but deep-set eyes.
“All right, all right,” Tair gripes, the shadow of a smile in her gaze. “What did you find?”
“The vast array of the Imperium’s knowledge when it comes to solaric tech,” she responds, and thumps both books down on the tiled table. “I’m getting some jav.”
But even caffeinated, there’s nothing helpful in either text. Nothing that connects to unusual glyphs or strange maps that match Luxana’s topography if not its infrastructure. Nothing, actually, except for theory and speculation, and the basics of solaric knowledge that both Selah and Tair already knew full well. While the interior mechanism remains unproved . . . and Rumors persist of private Ynglot knowledge . . . and Tair is taking furious notes, but Selah feels half a sentence away from screaming.
“This can’t be all there is,” she groans. Tair barely looks up.
“Did you miss a volume?”
“I didn’t miss a volume.”
“Then this is all there is.”
“You know what would be bona fide helpful?” she asks, leaning on the back legs of her chair with a groan. “If this Ontiveros lady actually knew what the frag she was talking about.”
That, for some reason, is what gets Tair’s attention. Her head snaps up at once.
“Who?”
Selah turns Oddities of the Sun to its back page, the little blurb and sketch of its author. “Dr. Diana Ontiveros,” she reads. “She wrote the other one, too. Listen to this—Dr. Diana Ontiveros, DSc., is the foremost expert in Roma Sargassa on solaric technology. She completed both her undergraduate and higher-level studies at Luxana Universitas under a self-directed course. Currently Dr. Ontiveros resides with her two children in the Seven Dials neighborhood of Luxana.” Selah snorts. “Foremost expert, my ass. More like the only one. Still, if she’s all we’ve got, we should probably go talk to her ourselves. There’s a very good chance she was censored from publishing all of her findings. Not to mention that these are about a decade old. She might have broken ground since then.”
Tair stares.
Then she stares some more.
And then, quite suddenly, she slams shut An Introduction to Solaric Technology and dives instead for her shoulder bag, pulls out a file, and begins furiously ripping through the disorganized papers inside.
“Uh,” Selah starts, honestly a little unnerved. “What’s happening?”
Tair ignores her, just keeps flicking through page after page until she finds what she’s evidently looking for. It’s hard to keep up, her face covered as it is, but there’s something in the tell of her dark eyes going wide. Wide, then narrowed, like she’s found what she needs but it’s not particularly good news.
“I knew I’d heard that name before.” She sets the file down on top of Dr. Ontiveros’s textbooks. “She’s not in Seven Dials right now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Xochitl.”
“Come again?”
“Xochitl Ontiveros,” Tair repeats, as though she’s speaking obvious, perfect Sargassan Latin. “Diana’s daughter, if my notes are right. Which they are. This case I’m working on with the Sisters, this girl, Xochitl—she got picked up by the Publica the other day for allegedly threatening an officer. Total bullshit. But there isn’t an advocate in the city who’ll help her with the case, so Pio and the Watchers are doing it. I’ve been helping build a few legal defenses, including hers.”
Selah frowns. Something doesn’t add up. “But why wouldn’t an advocate help? If her mother’s a well-known scholar—”
But Tair shakes her head. “I told you, Diana’s not in Seven Dials right now. She’s—wait. Bear with me a sec, this is . . . So there’s Xochitl, right?” she says, drawing a Publica intake sketch out of the file. “But this really starts with the brother, Diana’s son—Miro.” A second sketch, this one from a clavaspher pamphlet. Both Ontiveros siblings have wide, dark, intelligent faces framed by long black braids.
“Miro Ontiveros, classic underdog story. Local kid gets recruited to the city clavaspher league after a scout sees him play in some pickup game. Doesn’t lose a single match his first season. Makes MVP as a rookie, gets a patrician sponsor, looks like he’s tipped for the Imperial League. Rags to riches. People love it. Only then . . . he dies. He gets caught up by the Publica in a poppam bust down in the Kirnaval. He and his mother both.”
And here Tair pulls out the third sketch. Dr. Diana Ontiveros. An older woman, the same wide face and long braids twisted up into a bun. The very same as the author portrait in the back of both her texts. Selah feels her heart sink. “So she’s dead.”
Tair hesitates. “Maybe.”
“You said—”
“Maybe.” Tair’s eyes flash beneath her veil. “Look, Diana was a pleb, but she was a pillar of the Seven Dials community. Not the type you’d expect to get pulled down by drugs. So Xochitl’s upset. She wants answers. She goes after the Publica officers involved in the bust. Corners the one she thinks is responsible for killing them. Threatens him with a knife. The officer barely escapes with his life. That’s the official story, anyway.”
“It isn’t true?”
“Not according to Xochitl. Or the forty-eight witnesses who say the poppam bust never happened.”
Selah frowns. “How do you get forty-eight witnesses for a non-event?”
“Publica records put the poppam trade at Inanto Way, about six canals down from the Sisters’ clinic,” Tair says with a humorless smile. “Problem is, that entire jetty’s just one big children’s home. Bunch of tenements linked together. So even if they got the street number wrong on the report . . .”
“. . . it couldn’t have happened there.”
“Mm-hm. Someone would have noticed. Kids tend to do that.”
“But then,” asks Selah, mind racing, “what actually happened to Diana and Miro?”
“Yeah,” Tair says, grim. “Exactly.”
She slips an envelope from the case files. Sleek, pure white, containing a single sheet of scented vellum paper. Selah takes it from her and reads the neat, looping print of the letter’s contents with a jolt of startled incredulity.
“Cato Palmar.”
“Yep.”
“Why would Cato Palmar invite Miro Ontiveros and his mother to dinner?”
“Patrician sponsor, remember?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“What sponsor would actually bother hosting a pleb?” Tair offers, humorless. “I know. It’s weird. Either way, Miro and Diana went to his house for dinner, and they didn’t come back. Next thing Xochitl knows, she’s being told they died huffing poppam ten miles away, on the other side of town.”
Selah stares at the envelope. She can’t do anything else, because it makes no sense. Well, no, it does make sense, the pieces falling into place with alarming clarity, but even so she knows that a couple days ago she wouldn’t have let it make sense. Cato Palmar, who should be a paragon of the law. Cato Palmar, implicated in breaking it. She wants to shut her eyes, push away what this means, but Linet’s voice is conflating now somewhere with a phantom Tair’s.
Do better next time.
“Pio thought he had this case figured out,” the real Tair goes on, here in the light of day. “We took for granted that Palmar’s behind whatever happened to Miro, which obviously presents all sorts of its own problems. But we’ve been so focused on Xochitl and Miro, I never thought about Diana as anything but collateral damage.”
A long moment passes, and Selah rubs her temples hard. Of all the people to get caught in the crosshairs, it had to be Cato Palmar. “I’m guessing the Publica didn’t question the Consul about any of this.”
Tair snorts. That’s enough of an answer. Of course they didn’t, even with the evidence of the invitation in hand. Palmar knows something, but Palmar is untouchable, and the Publica are covering it up.
So Selah drains the last of her jav, and despite the jarring shift of her reality upending itself even further, manages to find a modicum of genuine optimism in this mess. Linet is gone. There’s no saving her now. And this can never absolve her of that, but Tair was right, her guilt and apologies help no one. What she can do now, what she can do better, is help this family who might still have a fighting chance.
“All right,” she says, taking a breath. “Well, it seems to me like we might be able to kill two birds with one stone. We find Diana, and maybe she can tell us something that’s actually useful about the Stone. We find Diana, and Xochitl’s defense also falls into place.”
“And where—” Tair laughs, an empty thing, “—do you suggest we even start to look for her?”
Selah doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a very near thing. They’ve done this a thousand times, traipsing through the Hazards in the dappled sunlight, waving fallen branches like Caesarian crusaders and looking for edible mushrooms and ferns to forage. Weekend afternoons in the little attic room as the rain pounds down on the roof above, bickering about the finer points of Homer’s influence on Peletor’s Sargasseia. Tair hanging upside-down off her bed, pointing out some unsolvable problem and Selah insisting that economics are just made up anyway, okay?, before a pillow hits her face. There’s a rightness to this, like something clicking into place. It’s the familiarity—that determined, slightly manic gleam of a challenge in Tair’s eye as she lights on the threads of an idea.
So she begins packing their research away. “For a start,” she says, “we talk to Xochitl.”