Meet Me in the Future Page 10

  “This is all a lie,” the face said, and as I pulled back it came into focus. I didn’t recognize her. Was this the actual relic dealer? Wasn’t this supposed to be a file on her? The woman spoke with a heavy accent that I couldn’t place. There were different dialects among the floating cities, but she seemed to stumble with basic pronunciation, as if it was a new tongue entirely. She wore her hair in thick black braids wound around her round head. She smacked her lips when she talked, and was looking somewhere to the left of the recording device instead of straight into it.

  “This world is a lie,” the face said. “I am a lie. My name is a lie. The sea is a lie. Until you accept all of these things, you will find no peace.”

  I had heard some speeches like this from some of the other relics used to disseminate propaganda. But what the projection said next was odd: “Consider this,” she said. “Why is it they don’t want you to write anything down? It’s because of the dates. They don’t want you to realize the truth about the dates, because then the whole story unravels.”

  I heard a key rattle in the door, and the little desk clerk came in. Her brow was furrowed.

  “This must be the wrong recording,” she said. “This is not what’s on the number, this introduction.”

  I reached into my pocket then, and tapped the device inside. I don’t know why I did it. Sometimes you just have a feeling for these things, maybe because I’ve been around them so much. The recording in front of us flickered. The gaze was straight at us now, repeating a name and address for Moravas, as well as a lengthy case history. I quickly memorized the data, which was repeated once more before the recording clicked off.

  “That was very odd,” the clerk said. “I’ve never seen one do that.”

  “Oh, these things happen,” I said. I checked the materials back in and hurried from the room before she could question me any further. My palms were sweaty, and though I managed to keep from running, my pace was quicker than it should have been in a library.

  I descended from the library and out past the palmist, through the forest of petrified sinners, and all but threw myself across the hurky-jerky bridge. What was this device I had in my pocket? Not just a recording or projection device. It did something to other pieces of old relics. It was a key of some kind. Or maybe a trigger. Did it unlock messages in other devices? That was a fancy bit of propaganda.

  My heart thudded hard in my chest. I wrapped my red scarf over my face and waited for the next ferry out of the coven. I didn’t even look to see where it was going. I just knew I needed to get away as quickly as possible.

  The wind whipped at my scarf as I watched coven island float away from us. In a few minutes it was lost to the clouds, and I finally looked up to see my destination. The ferry was headed toward the meatpacking district. From there I could take up another ferry to the lower islands and the traders’ square. Lots of techno-babblers down there, pinch pennies, prophets, and other assorted riffraff. I should have expected that this Moravas person would have an address there. I guess it just all seemed too simple, her being there. I mean, where else would she be, up in there with the Noted Families and Safety Custodians? Hardly.

  Warm afternoon light turned the world orange as I arrived in the lower islands. The light down there was spotty at the best of times, as the lower islands were often in the shadow of the ones above, which were larger and constantly moving. The ones below were cabled in place in the sea, mounted on giant chains. The lower islands were below the clouds, so from here it was much easier to see the black swath of ocean that had swallowed the rest of the world. Black water for as far as you could see in every direction: the water that ate up all of our ancestors’ sins.

  I found Moravas’s address without much problem. People got out of my way because of the scarf. It wasn’t until I reached the slapdash cloth-and-twine flap leading into the shop that I realized I was probably going to scare her off with that scarf, too. I had my truncheon out and ready as I strode in.

  An old woman sat behind the counter, winding great lengths of red and black yarn onto paper cards. Antiques stuffed the shelves behind her: cloth toys, wooden clocks that no longer worked, coloring pencils and pens, toy carts, plastic soldiers, bits of foil butterflies, seashell figures, old glass bulbs, buttons, tangles of fishing wire, and other odds and ends that I couldn’t name. It smelled of the sea, here, the scent of briny death, probably because it still lingered on all these things she had no doubt illegally brought up from the bottom. The woman was lean, burnished and brittle as a stick. She peered out at me from between tangles of long white hair thick as kelp.

  “I’m looking for Moravas,” I said.

  As I approached the counter, a little light blinked in the belly of a doll just behind her. The woman turned to it, then cocked her head at me. “I’m Moravas,” she said.

  Then who was on the recording? I thought. I pulled the device from my pocket and set it on the counter with a thunk.

  “This is your work,” I said.

  “Is it?” she said, and her tone was playful.

  “Come on, don’t fuck around. I saw the hologram over the Priory. You tell me who you made it for or I turn you in as the one who pulled off the whole thing.”

  A smile creased her face. “Will you, now?”

  “I won’t repeat myself.” I set the truncheon on the desk.

  She continued carding her yard. “You are a very cute young boy,” she said. “I haven’t seen a boy down here in weeks. You should stay for a drink.”

  “You’re not taking this very seriously,” I said.

  “You haven’t come here for me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You have come here for the truth,” she said. She tapped the device. “If you were still a Guardian, if you ever were, you would have turned this in. What are you now that you’ve kept it, now that you’ve unlocked the message of the world?”

  “There was no message,” I said, indignant. I stuffed the device back in my pocket.

  “You’re a sinner, Arret. You always have been.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Have you ever been down there, to the sea?” Moravas said.

  “No,” I said. “That’s illegal without a permit.”

  “I went down often in my youth,” Moravas said. Her voice was low, soothing. “We would wing out down over the clouds from the upper islands and dip low, down and down through clouds like silky foam. When we burst free of the clouds, there was the sea, the flat blue sea sparkling with light. The sea, the sea, the world below, for as far as my gaze reached, and for as far as we could power a flying craft.”

  “A what?” I said. “There are no flying craft.” But she continued on as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “We had circumnavigated the globe and found nothing but sea,” she said, “just like they said we would. Oh, certainly, there were areas where the great old rubble of the past jutted up from the roiling sea, but at best what remained was sand bar or marshland, and as the tides went in and out, so too did that mythic thing all the stories called the land. It wasn’t so wonderful, I thought. I much preferred the sky.”

  “What are you reciting from?” I asked.

  “My memory,” she said.

  “There’s no land anymore,” I said. “Not since the sea buried it a thousand years ago.”

  “Did you ever wonder why so many of you grew up in orphanages?” Moravas asked. It annoyed me that she was still wrapping the yarn, as if we were having a friendly chat instead of an interrogation.

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

  “It’s easier to tell you all the same story,” she said. “The same story of what happened to the ones before you.”

  “The sinners?”

  “We’re all sinners,” she said.

  “I need to bring you in,” I said. “You made this device and disseminated propaganda, and that’s illegal.”

  “You’re a disgraced Guardian apprentice with no legal authority here,” Mor
avas said, “and that’s illegal. So it appears we are at an impasse.”

  I yanked the truncheon from the table. “What is this? How do you know who I am?” I prided myself on staying calm during terror, but she had unsettled me.

  “Tell me the world you know,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Humor an old woman.”

  “The world is here,” I said. “We are at the very apex of civilization. We rose up over the water and escaped the scourge that killed the sinners. We are God’s people. What is there to tell of the world but that?”

  “What if I told you the world down there isn’t as full of sinners as you think,” she said.

  “Is this more of your rebel propaganda?” I said.

  “Why don’t you go down yourself?” she said. “You want the person who made that device? She is down there.”

  “What . . . in the sea?”

  “Yes,” Moravas said. “Climb down the chain and follow the red fishing line below the water. It’s not deep here. You’ll find her and you can bring her to your Guardians, and beg for their approval.”

  “That’s illegal,” I said.

  “As illegal as all of the other things you’ve done today,” she said.

  I gritted my teeth. “There’s no way down,” I said.

  “There’s always a way down,” she said. “All you have to do is ask.”

  “If it will get me the person who made this relic, show me the way,” I said, because I had come this far, and she was right. What did I have to lose?

  She rose from her seat and set the yarn aside. She opened the door behind her and gestured me through. We walked into a dusty, cluttered back room to a trapdoor. She raised it and pointed into the dark. “Follow the stairs down until you reach the light,” she said. “Then you’ll come to the bottom of the island.”

  I stuffed my truncheon into the loop at my hip and plunged into the darkness. This whole world is a lie, all their propaganda said. Well, it was time they proved it.

  I climbed into the darkness. I glanced up once and saw Moravas gazing down at me. I expected her to be smiling, amused at my misery, but her face was dead serious. Then she closed the trap door, plunging me into absolute darkness. I stared down and saw the tiny pinprick of light that I was supposed to reach, and groaned. What a chase this was.

  I don’t know how long I climbed, but when I reached the bottom my feet scuffed on solid rock. Someone had drilled a hole through the rock of the island and affixed a rope ladder to the long chain stretching into the sea. Already, I felt like a sinner. There was no greater sin than touching a piece of a world that wasn’t yours, the world God had abandoned. We were the people of the clouds, closest to God, and to descend meant hurling ourselves back to some gory, godless past full of heretics and charlatans. The sea was where you threw the cast-offs, the murderers, the unclean, the diseased, the stupid, the malformed. But the sea was where I had to go if I wanted to be redeemed.

  So I wiped my hands on my trousers and took hold of the ladder and down I went. It was a good three hundred feet of rope ladder, all twisted with the massive chain that fixed the island in place. For a long time, I didn’t look down or up. The ladder was slippery, and I was breathing hard.

  After a while, I chanced a look below. From certain angles, one could see the shadowy cities beneath the water on clear days from all the way up in the floating Conservatory. But as I descended, the dark peaks and squiggles resolved into what they were—not craggy rocks or coral or strange alien formations, but wreckage of a past so distant it only existed in story and myth and dusty old archeology manifestos recited from memory.

  I turned my face back to the task at hand. I didn’t look down again until I found myself out of ladder. I found that I was standing on a floating platform built around a giant buoy to which the chain was attached. Just one link of the chain was as wide as my torso. For the first time in my life, I gazed up at the lower islands and stared at the world from below. Much of the upper cities were covered in clouds, but the lower islands were visible, huge tangled masses of porous stone. Great hanging gardens of vegetation hung off the sides. Strangely, there were what looked like massive fans or portals of some kind in the stone underneath, large as buildings. I had never asked how the world stayed in the air. I wasn’t quite sure how it did now, but suspected it was something to do with those huge objects.

  I turned then to the sea. From here it did not look as flat and black. Great relics jutted up from it, bits of metal, broken spires, weedy junk that collected mollusks and kelp and other, stranger things. I had expected the sea to be deep, but the old woman was right about it being shallow. I leaned over the platform and saw rocky ground just a few feet below. Real land, right there. The fishing line was easy to see, as well. It ran from the platform out toward one of the big tangled skeletons. It had been an old metal building once, now rusted out and covered in sea creatures.

  I tentatively stepped off the platform and into the water, half expecting the sea to open up underneath and swallow me. I held the fishing line like it was some sturdier safety rope. The sea was cool, not as cold as I expected. Little fishes darted all around me in shimmering colors. I knew fish; we ate fish often in the city, but I’d never realized that fish lived in the seas down here, too. I’d assumed everything was dead here. I followed the length of the line all the way out to the structure. As I entered what had once been the grand entrance, I stopped dead.

  Inside the structure was a ring of petrified figures just like the ones that lined the path up to the library. And here, too, was a library of sorts. Great rusted metal lockers hung along the wreckage of the walls. Some had been eaten through by rust. Others had tumbled open and surrendered their contents to the sea, or maybe looters.

  The red fishing line was attached to the arm of one of the frozen ancestors, her face twisted in misery. There was a device on her wrist that I had no name for, but the display was frozen. I couldn’t make out anything on it, though if pressed I would say it wasn’t a foreign language at all, but something a lot like ours. Seemed odd, that a language hadn’t changed much in a thousand years, since the sea rolled over everything, but maybe that was just the writing that stayed the same. I didn’t know enough about writing to judge.

  Some joke this was that Moravas had pulled, telling me this would lead to the one who made the device. If it was this woman who’d been dead a thousand years, I couldn’t exactly bring her up to pay for it. I thought back to the conversation with the coven, and what Hovana had said. The customization of that device was clearly her family’s work. I recognized it immediately. That was exactly what she’d said. But if Moravas was stealing these devices from people down here, it couldn’t be her family’s work, could it?

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and kicked around the little circle of petrified people, these anachronisms from another time. I tapped the device in my pocket and ran my gaze across the metal lockers. I imagined that the lockers were like card catalogs, maybe, or library shelves, everything neatly labeled. I walked up to the lockers and wiped away the rust and grime at the top, trying to match up letters I knew the way I had with the card catalog. But there weren’t letters here. These looked more like numbers. Dates.

  The dates. Hadn’t that hologram said something about dates?

  The lockers up top were less damaged. I hauled over a locker already on the ground and stood on it to get a better look at the top row. I rubbed at the top. 425. 426. 427. No, those were too recent to be dates, only fifty years prior to the current date. Were they just locker numbers, maybe, catalog numbers, and not dates?

  A deep unease stirred in my belly. I got down and turned back to the group of monuments. The water was starting to pool up higher. The tide was coming in. I had no idea how high the tide reached down here because I’d only ever seen it come in from way up there.

  I sloshed closer to the relic people and peered at them. A thousand years underwater, and there was a lot left down here, wasn’t
there? I shouldn’t have come down here. This was a bad idea. I started to feel something about the world tilt in my brain, some core truth. It was so big it took my breath away, and I stumbled in my haste to get back to the platform.

  This was foolish.

  I scrambled back to the platform and grabbed the rungs of the ladder. I looked up and was overcome with the sheer number of steps it was going to take to get back up. The water curled softly against the platform. I was going to drown down here if I stayed, and likely going to be drowned by the people up there if I went up.

  I climbed. God knows I didn’t want to, but I did, because the future beneath me was bleak. I climbed and climbed as the world went dark. I had only the sound of my own breath for company. I had to rest often. I slipped, once, dangling there in the salty wind, wondering if I should let go.

  The world is a lie, their propaganda said.

  God, what a lie.

  I crawled back up into the belly of the lower island and collapsed on the soft stone there, desperate to catch my breath. Someone was there holding a lantern, and it hurt my eyes.

  When my vision adjusted, I saw that it was Moravas. She knelt beside me and handed me a sling of water.

  “Did you get what you came for?” she asked.

  “That was a trick,” I said. “Those are all ancient people.”

  “No,” Moravas said. “Those are my parents.”

  “You’re a liar,” I said.

  “Your parents are there, too.”

  I pressed my hands to my ears. “Stop with this. It’s propaganda. It’s lies.”

  “They tell you the world is dead down there,” Moravas said, “but it’s not true. It’s only sleeping. They put them all to sleep and buried the world so they could make this one. They had no power in the other world, and that frightened them.”

  My arms were too tired to keep them pressing my hands to my ears. I relented. I gazed at the ceiling. “I’m an orphan,” I said. “The relics are a thousand years old. A thousand years ago God punished us and buried the world in water.”