He doesn’t have much time.
When the tremors first began, Alex had put it down to the well-warranted punishment of pulling yet another all-nighter. He’d batted Gil away hours ago, told him to go home and get some sleep before he gets cranky. He can already see him, arms crossed and glasses askew in the doorway of his home office, holding two mugs of steaming black jav and telling him, “You’re getting too old for this.” It’s a well-practiced routine by now, though he’s starting to think Gil may have a point. Not that he’ll ever give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
Only then the tremors got worse, and the floor beneath him began to rumble and sway like the rolling deck of a ship at sea, and it didn’t take long for him to realize. Swollen blue-veined tracks at each wrist. A sinking sensation deep in his gut, like the world was falling away beneath his feet, and he’s been drinking that whiskey all night. Alex had allowed himself about thirty seconds to panic before pushing away those unhelpful thoughts of unfair and please All-Mater no and I don’t want to die.
He is going to die.
And he doesn’t have much time.
It wasn’t easy going, making his way to the private attollo that took him from the top floor down to the sub-level stacks. Dusty sheafs and towering shelves and unsorted fraying tomes, and the door in back to which only he holds the key. A forgotten and barely used office workspace within, and that long hallway playing home to vault upon vault of restricted texts. Restricted, that’s a polite word for it. Red code–regulated. Not supposed to exist.
The tablet is in its case, inconspicuously shoved between two books in the seventh vault lest someone come looking. There’s only one person who would, of course, only one person who knows that it exists, and only then if she’s even still alive. He’ll have to change the privacy settings once he’s done—dig out the flimsy little sheet of see-through parchment from his desk, the one he’s kept his daughter’s thumbprint on since the day he inked it there as she slept, her calculus textbook repurposed into a pillow in the corner of his office.
For now, Alex presses his own thumb to the power button, locks the vault back into place behind him before setting himself down heavily on the hardwood office work chair up front, its wheels rusted from disuse and squeaking in protest. He used to spend so much time down here, losing himself in page after page after page of written Ynglotta. Alan Watts and bell hooks and Hildegard von Bingen and Ta-Nehisi Coates. So many ideas. So many could-have-beens. So many still-could-bes.
He was younger, then. He knows better, now.
The Stone flickers to life in the glowing pixels he’d once thought must be magic, the first time Mima showed him, back when she was fading fast and it was her turn to hand over the torch to him. “Not magic, Alex,” she had laughed, wheezing slightly through the smoking fever. “Just technology.” Call it what she liked, even his mother couldn’t deny there was something akin to magic about the knowledge and histories of countless forgotten years, all held in one small solaric tablet, ready and available with the brush of his fingers. Delena Kleios had lamented that their time to cover his training—his real training—would be so haphazard and cut short by her illness. (Radiation poisoning, that’s what she called it. That’s what smoking fever is. Courtesy of a rogue west wind on her way to Halcya.) Her own mother had worked with her over the course of five years, and the same for her grandfather in his day, and so it went all the way back to Antal Iveroa.
In the end, they only had two months.
Right now, two months feels like unimaginable luxury.
There’s an image of some long-forgotten receiver in the upper left-hand corner of the Iveroa Stone’s touch-screen. His thumb hovers just above it, and he still hasn’t decided.
She’s the only one who knows, the only one who can deliver this to Selah, the only one who can make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But what if she, too, is the wrong hands? He doesn’t know who she is, not anymore. He doesn’t know where she is. He doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. They had never seen eye to eye about what to do with the responsibility he bears, back when they were young and foolish and he had made the mistake of letting her in on the secrets he had been entrusted to keep.
If she’s still out there, somewhere, one touch of that button will signal the alert straight from him to her. It was the only piece of tech he had ever released from his grasp, because at the time Alex had thought that maybe, one day, she would find her way back. It was a moment of weakness. He had resolved, long ago, never to use it. But he’s broken that promise once before, and the situation then was far less dire than this.
He presses his thumb against the receiver’s image, and the dial tone begins to ring. It rings and it rings and it rings, bouncing its signal off a solaric satellite still floating four thousand miles above his head. No one answers on the other end, and he does not know that he could leave a message. He’s not a digital native, after all.
• • •
Somewhere in a repurposed atomic fallout shelter far beneath the Third Ward, a stout woman with black tattoos and a sea of beauty marks in a warm bronze face wakes to find a missed call from someone who’s contacted her directly only once in twenty years. He asked her to spirit away a verna girl from his home once, five years ago. She doesn’t know what he could possibly need now. But he didn’t leave a message, and she has no way to call him back.
She’s aware that it’s three in the morning. She’s aware that there’s a hurricane brewing. She calls her followers to her all the same.
• • •
But back in the here and now, because this is a matter of memory and history, a matter of life and death:
He scribbles a note instead, one he’ll shove inside the neat stack of Gil’s inbox on his way back up. Only Gil knows the secret cache in his office where they used to pass notes and hide bugs to scare Mima with back when she still sat in the Historian’s chair. The one that’s empty now except for an ancient atlas, one that he’s been exploring in his spare time—a good joke—but normally belongs down here with the rest. Gil may not know its true nature, but he’s the last hope for getting the Stone to Selah. He’s the last hope for keeping it out of the wrong hands. He’ll know where to find it.
Alex picks a different symbol then, because he has only one option left. He waits for the screen to load, and presses the round red circle that means record.
“Selah,” he says, and hates the way his voice breaks. “My Selah. I wish we could do this in person. I wish you never had to do this at all. I would have you happy and unburdened and free. But my time’s come sooner than I’d hoped, and there are things . . . things I must tell you. Secrets of the highest order. Secrets that can’t be allowed to pass out of knowledge. Because we almost killed ourselves, last time. It’s the Historian’s duty to remember that. To put a stop to dangerous ideas before they start, ideas that could make us go so very wrong again.”
Alexander Kleios inhales a shaking breath, then says, “I have so much to tell you, and I don’t have the time. But I’ll have to try. So then. To start at the start. Eight hundred years ago, in the calendar year 2113 AD. In this land called North America. When the Imperium won the war.”