Memory of Water

CHAPTER NINE

We are children of water, and water is death’s close companion. The two cannot be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. They go together always, in the world and in us, and the time will come when our water runs dry.

This is how it happens:

Earth settles where water was, takes its place on human skin or on a green leaf sprouting from sand, and spreads like dust. The leaf, the skin, the fur of an animal slowly takes the shape and colour of earth, until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Dry and dead things become earth.

Earth becomes dry and dead things.

Most of the soil we walk on once grew and breathed, and once it had the shape of the living, long ago. One day someone who doesn’t remember us will walk on our skin and flesh and bones, on the dust that remains of us.

The only thing that separates us from dust is water, and water cannot be held in one place. It will slip through our fingers and through our pores and through our bodies, and the more shrivelled we become, the more anxious it is to leave us.

When the water runs dry, we are of earth alone.

I chose the place at the edge of the rock garden, under the tea plants. The sky was covered in clouds, and the thin grey light weighed on the winter-worn grass like sea on underwater landscape. It bent my bones and tilted the ground towards me. I thought of the silence of the earth, but air and water flowed under my skin still, and I had to make use of the brief daylight hours while they lasted.

I took off my coat, placed it next to the shovel and picked up the hoe.

I was careful not to damage the roots of the tea plants. I hoed and shovelled until my muscles ached and my mouth was dry. When the first blazeflies began to glow in the gooseberry bushes, the hole at my feet was large enough.

I washed myself in the bathroom with cold water and picked up the message my mother had left on the message-pod. Her voice was swollen with sorrow.

‘I’ve had no news from the visa office,’ she said. ‘All railway connections between Xinjing and Ural are still suspended, and no one’s allowed to travel further than the nearby villages. Noria, the only thing I can do is try to arrange a ticket and visa for you to come here once the connections resume. I only hope I can find a safe way to send them to you. I’d give anything to be there with you.’ There was a pause. I heard her breathing. ‘Please send me a message to let me know how you are,’ she added in a broken voice.

The pod beeped and went quiet.

I listened to the message again and then twice more. I knew I should choose her name from the list and talk to her, but my mouth was so full of silence there was no room for words. Eventually I pressed the green button. Recording, the screen announced.

‘I’m okay,’ I said and tried to make it sound true. ‘I’ll write to you tomorrow.’

I sent the recording and placed the message-pod back on the wall rack.

I went to bed and stared at the darkness until I could see the outlines of the furniture in the faint light of night turning to dawn.

When I eventually got up and went to the veranda, I couldn’t tell if the weather was unusually cold or if I was just feeling shivery because I hadn’t slept. I came back to my room and put on the thickest coat, trousers and shawl I could find, and pulled two pairs of socks on my feet before slipping on the sandals. On the way out my eyes fell on my father’s insect hood that rested folded flat and wrapped in protective fabric on the shelf at the entrance next to my own. I picked it up, took it to my mother’s study and closed the door.

The guests began to arrive around ten o’clock in the morning. The first were plasticsmith Jukara with his wife Ninia and sister Tamara, and Major Bolin with his helicarriage driver. Soon after them four tea masters who had been acquaintances of my father greeted me at the gate, followed by some cousins and second cousins of his from the nearby villages. I had had to compile the guest list partly by guesswork, because my mother’s family was from near New Piterburg, and she had no siblings or cousins this far north. My father had barely kept in touch with any family members of his. I couldn’t remember meeting most of his relatives more than once or twice as a child, when we had attended someone’s wedding or name-giving, where my father had been asked to perform a tea ceremony. These people were strange to me; we had no memories or words in common. I was alone among them.

The three lament-women of the village approached through the trees. They looked exactly the same as I remembered they always had. As a child I had been afraid of them. They wore loose, dark garments and their heads were covered with scarves, and expressions on their wrinkled faces changed like tides. Some people claimed they saw things that others couldn’t see. They spoke little, and followed death wherever it went, and when they lamented, stones seemed to ache around them.

I couldn’t remember inviting them, but I did not turn them away. Someone must weep on a day like this, I thought, and I had nothing but numb silence in me.

Sanja and her father Jan were the last to arrive. Sanja hugged me, and I was certain she could feel me shaking against her.

‘Mum had to stay at home. Minja’s not well,’ she whispered quickly before withdrawing from me and continuing with Jan to the garden where the other guests were already standing around the grave and the coffin. I closed the gate and followed in their footsteps.

The bamboo coffin rested on a stone bench where the men from the burial office had placed it the day before, and at the end of the bench stood the water urn. The coffin still looked too small to me. It was barely larger than the hearth in the teahouse floor, and I thought, not for the first time, of how fleeting death was, how impossible to grasp and see and understand. My father was not here, not in the coffin or in the urn. They held mere matter his spirit had been bound to, and he no longer belonged to it more than light belongs to a faded flower that it once made grow.

I had asked Bolin to take care of the speech formalities. He welcomed the guests and spoke about my father briefly. Then he opened the leather-covered book he was holding, and read out a passage. I was aware of him speaking, but the words drifted away, their husks strange and hollow.

He closed the book, placed it carefully on the ground and nodded to Jukara. Together they lifted the coffin from the bench, carried it to the grave and slowly lowered it into the hole. As the closest family member I was the first to leave my greeting. This early in the year there were no flowers yet, and most trees had shed their leaves months ago, so I had picked an evergreen tea plant branch. I dropped it on the coffin, and in the shallow grave its dark brown and green dissolved into the bamboo. Only the smallest, brittlest buds shone as scattered stars against the dark background.

Most guests left a pebble or a mussel shell found in the long-dried riverbed as their last greeting. Their rapping was rain-soft on the bamboo lid. Bolin sprinkled silver-grey knots of tea leaves on the coffin.

When everyone had left their greetings, it was time for the water urn.

The lament-women began to sing.

It started as a quiet song that grew gradually, beautiful and ugly at once, like weeping forged into a waxing and waning melody that shrouded everything within its reach. Their language was old and strange. Its words sounded like a spell or curse, but I knew it was one of the past-world languages, now nearly lost, only remaining in the songs they and few others knew.

The lament spun a slow web around me, divided into countless threads that floated far away as glowing paths, through the fabric of things remembered and lost and forgotten. I lifted the water urn from the stone bench and walked to the edge of the grave where the tea plants stood. The song of the lament-women rose and fell, it grew leaves and branches and roots on my skin and under it, and my own outlines faded, because what I carried within couldn’t be contained in them: I was a forest that reached upwards and crumbled down again, I was the sky and the sea and the breath of the living and the sleep of the dead. Strange words carried me; a lost language directed my footsteps.

I bowed down to pour the water on the roots of the tea plants.

When the urn was empty, I carried it back to the stone bench. The song waned like wind.

The ceremony is over when there is no more water.

The guests began to move towards the house. I stood on the pale grass among bare trees for a long time, looking at the tea plants, and they did not grow slower or faster. Only when Sanja stopped next to me and placed her arm around my shoulders, did I feel my own outlines again and was no longer floating shattered in space.

‘They’re waiting for you,’ Sanja said.

‘I think he’d want me to stay a little longer,’ I said.

‘The dead don’t need pleasing, Noria,’ she said.

If anyone else had said it, or if she had said it in a different way, I would have walked into the fell there and then and left the guests in the house and not returned until they were all gone. But Sanja’s hand was solid on my shoulder, and I had never heard her voice so soft.

She turned to look me in the eye and swept a strand of hair from my face that I hadn’t noticed. I followed her into the house.

It was too dark in the living room, because I had entirely forgotten to think about light. The spring equinox was still over half a month away, and the day behind the windows was not bright. Relatives I may never have met before held short speeches. Ninia and Tamara took care of bringing food to the table. I had promised them two weeks’ water supply in exchange, and since all water pipes in the village had been closed, no one refused such offers. The lament-women ate and drank more than anyone else, but I didn’t blame them. Sanja sat next to me all the time.

I looked around, trying to remember where I knew everyone from. There was one guest I couldn’t place: a blond-haired man sitting in the corner wasn’t talking to anyone and didn’t seem to know anybody. I was fairly certain he wasn’t family, and nearly as certain that he wasn’t from the village. Yet there was something familiar about him.

‘Do you know him?’ I asked Sanja.

Sanja glanced at the man.

‘Never seen him in my life,’ she said.

He was in civilian clothing, but something about his gestures and the way he was watching the people in the room made me wonder if he was a soldier. Around the same time as weekly water patrols were made compulsory for everyone and the punishments for water crimes became harsher, soldiers had begun to appear in all large gatherings, either openly in their uniforms or disguised as civilians. I hadn’t believed these stories at first, but I had once mentioned them to my father who was too ill to go to the village any more, and he had said, ‘They’re watching closely now. They don’t want to risk organised resistance after the events of Moonfeast. They’re gripping us tight and will squeeze until no one has the courage to stand against them. It has begun, but it will not end any time soon.’

An unexpected shudder ran through me and anger weighed in my throat like hot stones, and then tears were pouring down my face. I let them. After a while they dried up, but I could still feel them charring and stinging behind my eyes. They would burn their way through again.

The guests trickled out little by little. When nearly everyone had left, Bolin came to me.

‘Could I speak to you for a while, Noria?’ he said. I noted that he used my first name instead of calling me Miss Kaitio as usual. He had known my father for a long time and helped with the funeral arrangements more than necessary. I thought he wanted to talk about his next tea visit.

‘I’ll see you the day after tomorrow,’ I told Sanja. ‘Thanks for coming.’ She squeezed my hand.

‘Send me a message or come and see us any time,’ she said. Jan nodded his goodbyes to me, and they left.

‘Could you bring the chest from the helicarriage?’ Bolin told his driver, who gave a small bow and walked outside, boots clanking on the floor planks. We were alone in the dusky living room, where only a couple of dim lamps separated light from shadow. Bolin had been coming to my father’s tea ceremonies since I was six or seven years old, and he had always treated me well and with respect even before I had any skill with the ceremony. He had been my father’s friend, as much as my father had any, and I trusted him well enough not to be afraid. I offered him a cup of tea, but he shook his head.

‘Noria,’ he began.

I waited. He seemed to be looking for the right words. A lone blazefly was whizzing softly against the window, and I wondered if I had left a lantern unclosed somewhere. I would need to sweep up dead blazeflies from the corners later.

Eventually Bolin spoke again.

‘There are people who believe there is water on your grounds,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but—’

‘It’s not true.’

‘I’m not here to fish for information,’ Bolin said, and his face was grave. ‘I don’t know if your father ever mentioned this, but we grew up together, and once upon a time I would have trusted him with my life. He didn’t understand why I chose an army career, but we salvaged what we could of our friendship. Therefore I know he would have wanted me to warn you.’ He went quiet for a moment. ‘The power is no longer in my hands. In name, perhaps, but every day, every hour it’s slipping to someone else, and soon there won’t be anything I can do for you. The power that used to be mine is Taro’s now. You must be as careful as you can, Noria.’

I wondered then how much exactly Bolin had been doing for my parents and me. I remembered my father saying that we had his protection. I began to understand I didn’t know what it really meant. Protection – from whom? The image of the blond-haired, unfamiliar funeral guest crossed my mind, the memories of the soldiers investigating the garden.

There were always foods in our kitchen that many other villagers only had at Moonfeast or Midwinter celebrations, and almost no one else had a freezer. Did he have something to do with them – and had some of the books in the house come through his hands? Had he been keeping water patrols away so my father could continue to practise in peace? How much of this was his doing – and most importantly, how would things change if his protection was removed?

‘I will be careful,’ I said.

Heavy footsteps crossed the veranda, and there was a knock on the door.

‘That will be my driver,’ Bolin said. ‘I brought something for you. Come in!’ he shouted.

There was a clank, as something heavy was placed on the floor. I heard the door being eased open, wood scratching against wood, and a moment later the driver walked in. His face was very red, and he was carrying a large wooden chest, which he put down in front of me.

‘Open it,’ Bolin said.

I lifted the lid. Inside were dozens of old, leather-bound books.

‘I’ve no doubt that Taro found nothing of interest in them, or I wouldn’t have been able to get them back,’ he continued. ‘They’d have been destroyed if I hadn’t pulled the few strings that I still can. Think of it as my final favour to your father. I know how important these books were to him.’

Tears blurred my eyes again as I ran my fingers along the spines of the tea masters’ books. I recognised one as my father’s. He had not acquired a new one after the soldiers had taken it. Little else remained of him now.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

Bolin’s face had a weary expression I could only interpret as sadness. The lamps glowed softly, and nothing looked different, but everything had changed.

‘I will still be attending the tea ceremonies, and I know you will be able to keep up the quality of your father’s work,’ Bolin said. He hesitated and then patted me clumsily on the shoulder.

‘I’d like to know one thing,’ I said. ‘Why did you bring Taro here last summer?’

I knew the accusation was clear behind my words. His answer surprised me.

‘I had no say in the matter. There is no power that lasts, Noria. Even mountains will eventually be worn down by wind and rain.’

He looked old and vulnerable, and I didn’t know what else to say to him. I saw him hesitate, just like I had a moment earlier.

‘There’s also something I would like to ask before I go,’ he said. ‘I understand you may not want to talk about it, but I’d like to know. How did Mikoa die?’

I was quiet. The day grew darker, the year turned slowly towards spring, water flowed in its stone-shell of the fell, and I was as cold as if my bones had turned into ice.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I eventually said.

Bolin bowed low and left.

This is how it happens:

On the night of Moonfeast my father collapses to the floor, and he lies silent and still, while water and darkness creep into his clothes and hair and onto his skin.

Meanwhile, three unionists pour oil all over their clothes and hair and skin. Then they climb the stairs of the headquarters of the local military regime in Kuusamo and start the fire.

The next day an old couple from our village is taken away by men in blue uniforms, and by the evening everyone knows their son and two other people burned themselves as a protest against the Qianese occupation.

The weeping-song of the lament-women sweeps through the village for three days.

First there are more water guards each passing month. Then, just before the Midwinter celebrations, the water pipes are shut down altogether, and the only way to get water is to queue for rations on the central square.

The pod-news talks about tamed terrorism in the Scandinavian Union, about minor unrest in distant areas, fast-flaring and equally swiftly calmed riots in cities, as if the war is scattered, incidental, insignificant. Yet at the same time there is less and less food in the markets; passpods and visas are more difficult to get, and notifications about volunteers killed in battles are on the rise.

When the moon grows dark and new to mark the beginning of the year, my mother can’t come home because the railway connections are suspended.

I watch all this through my father’s illness, and while I see what is happening, it is like faint, shapeless mist at the edges of my life. My father is the centre holding it all: the pain chaining him that I can’t alleviate; his faltering life diminishing before my eyes that I can’t hold in the confines of the world. I let everything else pass by, even though I know I must face it later.

He lies in my parents’ bed, too wide for him alone, and his skin is sun-brittle paper, thinner every day. I can see the angles and arches of his bones through it.

Bolin tries to arrange medicines for him, but it is getting difficult even for military officers to find them. The doctor who comes shakes his head, sticks needles into his limbs, leaves and comes again, doesn’t know what is wrong with my father.

I think my mother’s absence gnaws on him, all change gnaws on him, and he just no longer has the strength to live.

Eventually he stops eating.

Eventually he stops drinking.

He knows, like in a dream you know that the other person in the room is familiar, even if you don’t know their face.

He orders me to prepare the last ritual.

He is my guest only once in his lifetime, and a tea master does not reveal any feelings in front of guests.

After he has finished the tea, he waits in the teahouse until death presses a hand on his heart and the water in his blood runs dry.

When Bolin hears what has happened, he arranges for a doctor from the military hospital to come and store the organs, because there is a shortage. When it is done, he sends a helicarriage for the body.

In the burial office I choose a bamboo coffin, which looks too small, and a silver-coloured urn, into which my father’s water will be gathered. The burial director tells me all will be ready in two days. I step back into the helicarriage and go to the baker’s shop to order the funeral cakes.

My mother is not here and she should be. There is no train she can board and no letter she knows will reach me, and every day I wake up hoping she is still breathing, even if I can’t feel it.

My father is not here and he should be. He is lying in a chamber of metal and stone, where the water that flowed in him is turning into ice and leaving him. After two days he will be nothing more than dust in a bamboo coffin and water in a silver-coloured urn.

I am here, and all words are mute ashes in my mouth, and no water will quench my thirst.

CHAPTER TEN

The queue dragged on at an agonisingly slow pace. The sun stung my eyes and my bare face was covered in the fine grit that the strong late-winter wind was whipping around. I regretted that I hadn’t unwrapped my insect hood in the morning. There weren’t many horseflies yet, but the sand clouds were no better. I kept glancing at the water-rationing point, which was still so very far away. I had other plans for the day and couldn’t wait to get out of the queue, but I knew I had to show my face at the village square at least twice a week in order not to appear suspicious.

I had walked to the fell first thing in the morning to check the surface level of the spring, and I had spent yesterday washing laundry and pruning gooseberry bushes in the still-bare garden and sowing vegetable seeds in burned-clay earthenware pots. Trying to keep the house as it had been while my father was still alive and my mother still lived at home felt like trying to catch wind between my palms. Dust gathered in thick, grey threads on the webs that spiders spun in the corners while I wasn’t looking. Long-legged, soft-winged insects that were the colour of dead leaves came seeking a faint glint of light inside the house and lost themselves in the maze of walls and closed spaces. Their dried bodies would crunch under my feet in unlit rooms, and I would find their lightweight debris slowly accumulating in places I had no time or energy to sweep often: twig-fragile legs, scale-glittery wings torn off hollow bodies, black-eyed heads with broken antennae twisted towards silence forever. The change was stronger and faster than me. The house was different, and my life was different, and I had to submit to it, even as my blood screamed against it.

The moon had only grown full once after I had dug the grave. The grass covering it was bruised and black earth showed through the stalks. Even though I saw it every day, my father’s death remained unfathomable and strange to me. I couldn’t place it in these rooms where his life had belonged. His imprint was so strong that it was like he still walked here, not knowing how to leave, stepping out of sight just as I turned around, leaving the teahouse right before I slid the door open. It was a gentle and sad presence, not a frightening one. I spoke his name sometimes, knowing he wouldn’t reply even if he heard me, wouldn’t place his hand on my shoulder. We inhabited different worlds now, and the dark river between us had only ever been crossed in one direction.

The queue moved forward and Sanja yanked the cart in which her family’s empty containers and my waterskins lay. Sand rattled in the wheels as they turned. There were still at least a dozen people ahead of us.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ a voice said behind me, and a short-fingered hand with chipped nails touched my shoulder. I turned around and saw Jukara’s wife Ninia, who had joined the queue. She was one of the few people in sight already wearing an insect hood. Behind its transparent mesh her round face looked colourless and the skin sagged on her bones. She had painted her lips a brighter red than usual. I wondered where she had managed to get lip-colour and what its price had been.

‘Hello, Ninia,’ I said.

‘Of course, you only need water for yourself these days,’ she continued, and her sun-bleached eyebrows drew into a woeful expression. She patted my arm. I felt something burning behind my eyes. ‘Have you heard from your mother?’

‘The pod-connections are weak,’ I replied, and my voice did not sound entirely solid in my ears. I had sent my mother several messages every week, but I had only received one back after the funeral. There was nothing but bad news coming from Xinjing, if any, and my mother’s silence frightened me more than I wanted to admit. ‘How are you?’

‘The little ones are suffering,’ Ninia said. I knew she was referring to her grandchildren. ‘Stretching the water rations for the whole family is hard work. Still, we’re lucky, because Jukara has regular repair jobs at the camp, and the officials often pay extra, if you know what I mean.’ She seemed to realise that she might have said too much. ‘It’s tough, it’s tough,’ she continued. ‘But you probably have it worse, poor thing, with both parents gone and only the tea ceremonies to support yourself.’

Sanja must have seen my reaction, because she interrupted.

‘Excuse me, there’s something on your face. Under the left eye. No, on the other side,’ she said when Ninia lifted her hood and brushed her cheek.

‘Is it gone?’ she asked.

Sanja inspected her closely and creased her brow.

‘I think I made a mistake. It seems like a wrinkle. Or maybe a shadow made by your new insect hood,’ she told Ninia, whose nostrils flared.

‘That’s right, decent hood fabric is hard to find these days,’ she said and pursed her lips.

I turned to look the other way, so she wouldn’t see the smile that twitched on my face despite the knot of grief in my chest. I knew Ninia’s insect hood wasn’t new. I had seen the lipstick stain permanently stuck to its hem which she usually attempted to cover with a scarf.

‘How’s your family, Sanja?’ Ninia opened the conversation again, although her tone had turned several degrees cooler.

Sanja’s expression darkened. Minja had been unwell for weeks, and Sanja was worried about her. The water given out at the village square had so far been clean, but there were rumours circulating about people in the cities and other villages who had fallen ill after drinking their water rations. Sanja had told me her parents whispered that the military was making people sick on purpose by distributing contaminated water. I didn’t want to believe it, but I still preferred to use my rations on washing or watering the garden rather than drink them.

‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘Dad has a lot of work, he’s been hired to convert those old outskirts buildings into living quarters for the new water guards.’

‘And your mother and sister?’ Ninia queried.

‘They’re as well as you are,’ Sanja said.

Ninia went quiet for a moment.

‘Give them my regards,’ she said then, and her face showed clearly that the conversation was over for now.

‘What a cockroach,’ Sanja muttered under her breath.

Eventually our turn came. I pulled out my message-pod and placed my finger on the screen. My identification code and name popped up. I handed the pod to one of the soldiers rationing the water. She connected it to her multi-pod and filled my waterskins. I watched her insert the information that my water quota for the week had been used up. Citizen: Noria Kaitio. Next ration: three days left, the screen read. The soldier handed the message-pod back to me. I switched it off and put it in my pocket.

I lifted the full skins into Sanja’s cart while she waited for her containers to be filled and her ration information to be entered into her family’s message-pod. The containers seemed terribly small to me. I used the same amount of water every day just by myself: washing and cleaning the dishes alone took half of it.

When the containers were full and Sanja had received her message-pod back, she placed lids on them and we began to pull the cart together out of the square. We walked past some stalls where people had put secondhand kitchenware, furniture and other items on display. An elderly woman was trying to swap a pair of shoes for a bag of flour. The day was surprisingly chilly, given the time of the year, and I felt cold despite the effort of hauling the cart on the uneven stones. A thick wall of hazy-dark clouds rested on the horizon of the bright skies like a wide, soaked stretch of grey wool fabric.

‘I hope it rains tonight,’ Sanja said. ‘I put the barrels and the gathering-pool outside already.’

I, too, longed for rain, a soothing, purifying torrent that would wash me and the landscape, would tint the world different and new even for a brief moment. I didn’t think the clouds promised anything more than a drizzle, but I didn’t say this.

There were blue-clad water guards and people returning home with their water rations on the streets, but otherwise it was quiet. In the months following Moonfeast, the villagers had begun talking in hushed voices while the number of soldiers increased and more barracks were built for them in the outskirts. As the water shortage worsened, a stagnant stench of people and life seemed to crawl into the houses, spreading its sticky fingers all over the streets and yards like lichen grows over rocks in a dried riverbed. Every time I walked into the village, it stuck to my nose, unpleasant, before I grew unaware of it.

The stench seemed to intensify when we approached the medical centre we had to pass on the way. The old brick building had a waiting room too small to contain more than a dozen people at a time, and at least ten women were waiting outside with their children. Two babies were screaming at the top of their lungs, while a few slightly older children seemed too weary to move or even speak. A young woman who couldn’t be much older than me was trying to get a baby with cracked lips and swollen eyelids to drink from a bottle. A black-haired, pale-skinned girl who was maybe three years old had soiled herself and the mother was desperately trying to calm her down. When she saw us, she took a plastic mug that was hanging from her belt by a piece of string and said, ‘Could you spare a cup of water for us? My child is thirsty and sick, and we’ve been waiting for hours.’

Sanja looked at me. This was new. The village had seen water shortages before, but no one had ever needed to beg for water. The little girl’s cheeks were hollow and eyes big.

‘Let’s stop,’ I told Sanja.

The woman was holding up her mug. I took my waterskin and poured some water in it. She clenched my arm with her free hand and squeezed.

‘Thank you, miss! You’re a good person. Thank you, thank you, may fresh waters flow your way!’ She continued her flood of thanks and I was beginning to feel embarrassed. Just as I had closed the waterskin and placed it back in the cart, another woman approached me. Two small children were holding on to her hands.

‘You wouldn’t have a drop for us, too, would you?’ she asked.

Sanja threw me a pointed glance.

‘We need to go, Noria,’ she said.

She was right. I saw everyone waiting outside the medical centre looking at me hopefully, pondering their chances and best ways of asking for water. If I stayed, I would have nothing left in my skins.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told the woman. ‘I’m really, really sorry, but I can’t. This is all I have for myself.’

She looked at me, her face settling to disbelief and then something nastier.

‘You’re the tea master’s daughter, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Come on, Noria,’ Sanja said.

‘I should’ve known. Tea masters have always thought they’re too good for this village,’ the woman continued.

Blood rushed to my face and I turned away, pulling the cart across the cracked surface of the street. I heard the crowd behind muttering and thought I made out my own name, but I wanted to hear nothing more.

‘Just ignore them,’ Sanja said. ‘It’s not your fault that you can’t help everyone.’

My face felt hot and my throat was thick. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of here. I tried to think of what was ahead, what had been the real reason for my coming to the village today. Even through the blend of humiliation and confusion, I felt a faint flash of excitement.

We turned from the street corner to take a circuitous route. I had time to see a low, grey-plastered house with a blue circle that had appeared on its door four weeks earlier, and the gaping dark windows with no movement or sound flickering behind them. Our feet chose a different direction on their own. These days walking in the village was not straightforward, but new paths born of wordless pacts had slowly come to replace the old ones as the mark of water crime had claimed space along the streets. There were now a dozen houses carrying the blue circle. The grey-plastered one was the latest among them. Their mute spectres stood along the edges of the roads, surrounded by a ring of silence that no one would cross unless it was unavoidable. The residents of the neighbouring houses continued their lives as if there was a swirling, all-swallowing emptiness in the place of the criminal house that would sweep them off the face of the earth if they as much as glanced in its direction.

There were whispers in the village that the people who lived in the water crime houses had been seen once or twice, picking something up from their doorstep or standing quietly outside, never leaving their own front yard, usually early in the morning or late in the night. These tales were received the same way as any ghost stories: with a mixture of fear and curiosity that faded into disbelief in daylight.

The truth was that no one still knew for certain what happened to the residents of the marked houses. It was easier not to ask.

Silence is not needed to chain tame things.

A cold gale tugged at the roof-corners and lashed us occasionally through the gaps between the houses. In one backyard a bone-thin man I recognised as a teacher at the village school was rubbing his scalp with light brown powder, a mixture of clay and bitter tree-bark flour, which was sold in market stalls as dry shampoo. I was used to soapwort, which grew behind the teahouse in thick tufts, and I liked the way it foamed between my fingers when mixed with bathwater. For the first time it occurred to me that someone might wonder why I never bought dry shampoos or soap flakes. I didn’t know how many changes I would have to make to make my life appear the same as any other villager’s.

As we approached Sanja’s house, I couldn’t wait any longer.

‘I’m going scavenging,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come?’

Sanja sighed.

‘I can’t. There’s too much to do at home.’ She glanced at my waterskins. ‘Do you want to leave those at my place and get them later?’ she asked. ‘You’ll never be able to haul them all the way to the plastic grave and back.’

‘You can keep them,’ I said.

Sanja looked at me as if I had just offered her a flight on the back of an Ocean-Dragon.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ she said. ‘You’re not going to get more water until next week. Of course I can’t take them.’

‘I don’t need them,’ I said. ‘I’ve got water at home for the rest of the week. Please, keep them.’

Sanja looked like she was going to insist, but let out a deep breath instead and said, ‘This once, but don’t you dare try this again.’

The pungent smell of the plastic grave floated towards me. I passed a place where people were trying to fill waterskins and buckets from the shallow, murky-watered brook that ran near the edge of the grave. My parents had always warned me to never drink from it. They said the water was contaminated by the toxins of the grave and would make me sick. Villagers had tended to avoid it in the past, but lately whenever I came here I saw someone trying to draw from it. I had once told an elderly woman the water was not good for drinking.

‘What would you have me drink, then?’ she had said. ‘Air, or sand, perhaps?’

That was the last time I had spoken to anyone at the brook.

I nearly stopped when I recognised a red-lipped face behind the insect hood among the handful of water-seekers. Ninia was crouched at the edge of the brook, filling a transparent skin with yellow-brown water. There really was something cockroach-like about her stubby figure, brown clothes and laboured movements, but just as this image took shape in my mind, I also felt a stab of shame. What is she doing but trying to survive as best she can? What is any one of us doing but that? I guessed Jukara’s employers weren’t paying quite as well as she had suggested. She turned her face away from me, and I couldn’t tell if she had not seen me or if she chose to pretend she hadn’t.

I walked past without stopping.

In the ever-changing, eye-betraying terrain of the plastic grave it was hard to discern landmarks, but I knew my way. Near the centre of the grave concrete elements twice as tall as me stuck out of the rubbish mountain. I stopped next to them and looked towards the edge of the grave, until I spotted an ancient, rusted-through carcass of a large past-world vehicle. The places where the wheels had been were still visible, as was the dead dashboard, but the seats and all still-usable metal parts were long gone. No one seemed to ever move this piece of dead weight, because it would have required the strength of at least five people, and there didn’t seem to be much to find in this corner of the grave. I walked to the skeleton of the vehicle.

Out of habit I pushed my hand through a hole in the dashboard and felt around until I reached the smooth surface of a plastic box approximately the size of a saucer. I didn’t need to take it out: it was enough to know that it was there. It was one of the time capsules Sanja and I had hidden in our favourite places when we were younger. They contained things like pebbles, dried flowers, homemade seagrass wristbands and treasures found in the plastic grave. We had always painted the date on the inside of the lid of each capsule, then dipped our fingers in paint and pressed our fingerprints next to it. On the outside we had marked the date when we were allowed to open the capsule, usually at least ten years in the future. This was the last one we had made, and for many years we had always checked that is was still in place every time we visited the grave.

I pulled my hand out, wiped it on my trousers and started walking towards the edge of the grave from the wrecked vehicle. After twenty steps I came to a shallow hole I had left a few days earlier. No one else seemed to have been there in the meantime.

I took thick gloves from my bag, pulled them on and began to move things.

I hadn’t talked about this to anyone, but the silver-coloured disc had brought me here. After my father’s death the quiet house seemed to wrap me in heavy sleep, as if the earth was pulling my blood towards its promise of unbroken rest. The silence wasn’t just the silence of the empty spaces my parents had left behind, the lack of their breathing and words and footsteps inside those walls. It was also the silence of everything they had left untold and unsaid, everything that it was now up to me to learn and find out without them. I was only beginning to understand how little I knew: of the spring and other tea masters, of the strange laws and threatened balances of secret alliances and bribery we had lived by, of this whole dark grown-up world stretching like a lightless desert in all directions around me and blurring into the horizon. I was angry with them for leaving me alone without the knowledge I needed. Why didn’t you tell me? But they were not here, there was only earth and wind, and they had no words.

I didn’t quite understand yet why the story of the silver-coloured disc was so important to me, because I didn’t know how to pull together the threads that made it so. One of them was my fear that one day I would find the surface of the spring too low, or blue-clad soldiers in the cave with their sabres pulled, and another was a budding notion, or perhaps a near-vain hope, that there had to be more than this to life, that outside the village, somewhere under the sky, there must be a reason to believe that the world wasn’t dry and scorched and dying beyond all repair. Yet the threads had begun to intertwine in my mind, and not knowing yet how to put the thought to words, I felt an urge to do what I could to restore the story of the disc and find the missing pieces. I looked for them in the books in my mother’s study, and I looked for them among the rubble of the past abandoned in the grave. I was aware of the hopelessness of the task, but it served to take my mind off the irreversible silence of the empty house, and there was something calming about it: a promise of change, a buried chance that might still see the light of day.

The wide and shallow hole I had dug within the weeks after my father’s death had a lot of broken past-technology. It had taken days to find the right place, but I was now fairly convinced that this was where I had first found the silver-coloured disc a few years ago. I had recognised some of the machines lying in the area, remembering that Sanja had rejected several of them because they were too broken to ever be made whole again. All the essential parts were missing, too, so they were no longer useful for her experiments. As far as I recalled, the disc had been close to the surface, but the plastic grave had changed several times since, and if there were any other discs, they could lie a lot deeper – or far from where the first one had been. Still, I didn’t know where else to start looking.

The shadow of the concrete elements turned and grew taller. The first stiff horseflies of the spring pushed their new and heavy bodies into the air around me, then landed on mushy garbage piles again to rest. I would need my hood soon. My limbs ached and my clothes were sticky against my skin. I kept finding nothing but the usual junk: pieces of kitchenware and tattered shoes with broken heels, unrecognisable fragments, endless plastic bags. I moved to the side a crushed past-machine with some wires sticking out from under the cracked shell – it was one of the things that Sanja had deemed useless, and therefore I had no idea what its original purpose had been – and stared at the plastic-bag tangle before me. I decided to go home after dragging it out of the grip of the grave, even though I didn’t believe I would find anything interesting under it. The bags were tied into a long chain that was painfully tightly stuck. Their brittle plastic ripped in my hands as I tried to get a proper hold of the rustling clot. Eventually I felt something give way, and the knot slid smoothly out of the grave. I gathered it into a large ball and threw it to the side.

In the hole I had just made I could see nothing except more plastic bags.

I closed my eyes. My neck muscles felt strained and a headache was creeping up the back of my skull. It seemed to pull my scalp into unpleasant knots, like a too-tight ponytail or plait.

It was time to go home after yet another fruitless search.

I opened my eyes. The broken past-machine I had moved out of the way earlier lay next to me. It wasn’t big. Its hard plastic shell was broken in several places, as if it had been smashed on purpose, and on one side there was a round glass lens that resembled the bottom of a small blaze lantern. The glass was badly cracked. Part of it had fallen out.

I must have seen the same wreck of a machine dozens of times on my treasure-hunts. I must have held it in my hand and moved it dozens of times. If I had looked at it closely years ago, when Sanja chose to leave it behind and I brought the disc back home with me, I wouldn’t have noticed anything worth remembering.

Now sunlight caught on a matte metal plate, no bigger than half of my little finger, engraved and embedded on one side of the machine.

I stared at the engraving, and the world seemed to stop around me.

I read the text again and again.

M. Jansson.

The machine nearly fell apart in my hands when I wrapped it in a rag, pushed it into my bag and climbed up from the hole. Plastic crackled, stirred and murmured under my feet as I walked across the grave as fast as I could manage.

Even if the past-world story recorded on the silver-coloured disc existed in the plastic grave, my chances of finding it had seemed non-existent. Now, for the first time, I dared to think that there might be a real possibility, no matter how minuscule, that I would be able to find a continuation to the story of the disc. The thought grew in my mind like a green and tender branch bursting towards sunlight.

When I got home, I walked straight into my mother’s study and took the machine from my bag. I unwrapped the rag around it and placed it on the only corner of the desk which wasn’t covered in books and handwritten notes. I rolled the blind down, because the sun had turned its light to this side of the house while I was away. A grey-blue shadow fell into the room.

I sat down on the chair and stared at the piles of books. I stared at the paper on which I had written in as much detail as I could everything I remembered of the recording on the silver-coloured disc. I stared at the past-world machine. It was as mute as a dead insect. The strands of late afternoon burned sharp and defined between the slats of the blind.

The Jansson expedition. The Twilight Century. The Lost Lands. M. Jansson.

I knew I didn’t have all the pieces, and that I might never have them. I also knew there was a place where I hadn’t looked yet.

The house was silent and still, the teahouse empty and quiet, and no one walked outside. If my father’s spirit wandered in the rooms or among the trees, it was peaceful, and guarded the landscape it had lived in. The light of the message-pod did not blink. Ants drew their thread-thin paths on the stone slabs of the garden and in the corners of the house, the wood of the walls grew wearier, dust fell on the shelves unnoticed, and there was no one to tell me what to do or ask me what I was doing.

It was dusky in the living room. The lid of the chest lifted easily when I propped it open against the wall, and a faint scent of old paper and ageing ink drifted into the air.

The spines didn’t have dates, years or tea masters’ names on them, so I had to look for the right book for a while by leafing through the first pages of the leather-covered volumes. Eventually I found the one that had the years I was looking for written on the front page in unfamiliar hand.

I turned the page and began to read.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I drained the last drops from the teacup and placed it on the floor next to a pile of books. My neck ached. Weightless speckles of dead dust drifted in the shaft of sunlight filtering through the window. I moved the books that I had already searched and the notes I had brought from my mother’s study, then settled on my back in the empty space created on the living room floor and closed my eyes. A crease in my shirt caught under my weight pressed against my muscles. My thoughts swirled in a tight tangle, and every time I grasped one thread, attempting to follow it, the rest clenched into a more persistent knot.

I had spent the past two days reading the tea masters’ books, and so far I had leafed through seven of them from the Twilight Century. In the latter half of the century four tea masters had lived in the house. The first of them, Leo Kaitio, hadn’t cared much about writing. He had only filled one leather-bound book during his lifetime. The entries were brief and their content dry. ‘Rain this morning. The tea visit of Second Lieutenant Salo and his wife went as expected. Must remember to have shoes repaired.’ ‘January even warmer than last year. A crack in the earthenware teapot.’ I had needed to check in my mother’s old books to make sure I remembered correctly what January was: it had been the name of the first month of the year in the old solar calendar. Despite this complication, I had skimmed Leo’s notes quickly. Near the end of the book the handwriting changed, and it took me a while to understand the reason. To be certain, I had opened the next book in order, with the name Miro Kaitio scribbled on the first page. He was presumably Leo’s son. A quick glance at Miro’s handwriting confirmed my suspicions: the writing on the pages Leo had left blank in his book was likely to be Miro’s.

Miro had not inherited his father’s curtness, but had clearly spent a large chunk of his free time writing. He had filled six books with tiny handwriting and also scribbled notes on small pieces of loose paper folded between the pages. Some of his entries were undated. The section on the final pages of Leo’s book was one of those. There must have already been a shortage of writing supplies at the time. Miro had probably adopted his father’s book for perusal in some moment of despair when he had run out of paper.

Miro’s entries were completely different from Leo’s. He wrote about his thoughts and dreams, about his feelings during the tea ceremonies and outside them. He would write lists of things that made him smile (a cat curling in one’s lap, the first bite of a crisp apple, sun-warmed grass under one’s bare feet) and things that made him irritable (a chafing shoe, spectacles so old one can no longer see with them, running out of ink when one most needs it).

I opened my eyes and got up to my feet. I rose too quickly: the room darkened and I had to lean against the wall until I stopped feeling dizzy. I went to the kitchen and poured myself another cup of tea, which had grown lukewarm. I came back, sat down on a cushion and picked up the final one of Miro’s books, which I had only read halfway through. The pages felt fragile and dry against my fingers, as if they might fall apart, scattering the thin black words across the floor for wind to carry away. This link to the past was brittle and threadbare, like a bridge too weather-worn to cross safely. Yet the words themselves were strong. They drew me in so that I lost track of time and had to remind myself of what I was looking for. I was enchanted by the way this tea master who had lived long before my time described his days, his full moon nights spent awake, grains of sand scattered across the teahouse floor by visitors’ shoes, snow that melted immediately into glistening-dark earth and that some winters didn’t fall at all. These stories and fragments of a life long faded reaching to me from the yellowed, delicate pages were so luminous, so detailed and colourful that I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The bones of this man and the water in his blood had returned to earth and sky long ago, but his words and stories were alive and breathing. It was as if I myself lived and breathed more truly and inevitably while I was reading them.

Shadows changed outside, and I listened to the rustling of paper under my hands.

I didn’t close the book until there was barely enough light left to see the words. Bridges fell apart and past was once again barely more than a web of indiscernible words behind an opaque screen, and the silence of the house enclosed me. Another day was gone, and I had not found what I was looking for.

Before going to sleep I went out to rake the rock garden. The faint lines in the sand grew nearly invisible in the late evening. As I was finishing, I happened to glance at the road going to the village, and I thought I could make out two human shapes watching the house at the edge of the woods.

I froze, and my heart was beating in my chest.

The rake slipped from my hands. I squatted to pick it up from the sand, and when I straightened my back, the edge of the woods was empty and still.

The following morning I went to look for traces, but the hardened ground and the thick-scattered rug of pine needles didn’t reveal anything. In the dusk, the shadows of trees may look like figures that are watching relentlessly.

A couple of days later I got an unexpected message from my mother. I walked into the house with two skinfuls of water I had queued for in the village and saw the message-pod light flashing. I almost dropped the skins to the floor and rushed to switch the pod on. The display lit up and I read my mother’s round, rolling handwriting.

Dear Noria, she wrote, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write more often. I miss you and hope you will be able to join me here soon. I’m doing everything in my power to make this possible. Meanwhile, could you please send me something of yours? Nothing large, but something you use often, such as a spoon from the teahouse or one of the pens you use to write in your tea master’s book. I would just like to have a keepsake to feel closer to you while we can’t be together. Don’t bother to clean or polish it; I want it just as it is. My pod is running out of power and I cannot charge it until tomorrow in daylight, so I must keep this brief. Love, Lian.

I sank down to the floor. My relief was enormous. My mother was alive. I hadn’t heard anything from her in over a month. I picked up the pod-pen and wrote, Are you ok? I miss you. I sent the note immediately, but there was no reply.

Then I read the message again, because something about it was bothering me.

The more times I read it, the stranger I found my mother’s request. I knew she loved me, but she had never much cared for material things. When she had moved to Xinjing, she had left most of her books behind without second thought, and she tended to recycle anything that could be recycled without attaching any sentimental value to it. I had watched her give all my toys away, convert my baby clothes into furniture covers or carpet rags and calmly dispose of a stone collection I had compiled on the windowsill of her study. As far as I knew, she hadn’t kept a single childhood drawing of mine, and the shawl I had received for my graduation was the only piece of clothing she had ever given to me that did not have a purely functional value.

It was unexpected that she would suddenly want something of mine as a keepsake. I was also concerned that she hadn’t told me at all how things were. It was possible that she hadn’t received all my messages. It was also possible I hadn’t received hers. The connections were poor because of the war, and the messaging services were probably being monitored. I had tried to keep my messages as neutral and harmless as I could, and I didn’t see why they would have been censored, but it was impossible to know all the workings of the military.

Although I didn’t understand my mother’s request, I placed the message-pod back on the wall rack, went to the kitchen and picked up from the worktop an unwashed spoon I had used that morning. There was a brown stain marking the metal where a few drops of tea had dried on it. I wrapped it in a piece of cloth, searched in a bottom drawer for a seagrass pouch used for sending mail and dropped the spoon inside. I fetched my tea master’s book from my room, tore out a page and scribbled a few lines on it: Dear mother, this is your keepsake until we meet again – Love, N. I folded the paper and pushed it into the pouch, then closed the mouth and fastened it with a piece of string. I could send it from the village the next day. I only hoped it would find its way to Xinjing.

Days grew longer and warmer rapidly over the next two weeks as the spring reached towards summer. Water flowed across darkness, dissipated from sun-baked stones and ran away. When I wasn’t thinking of the books or the expedition or my parents, I was thinking of Sanja. I wanted to talk to her, tell her how I had been searching for my way out of the silence since my father’s death, but I never seemed to find the right moment. She had been weary and quiet lately, and I thought there were things she was not telling me. She almost never had time to go scavenging. When I asked why, she would avoid answering.

I was still wading through Miro’s entries. I was trying to put his tales in some kind of order, although I knew it would inevitably be imaginary. The task was made more difficult by the fact that during Miro’s time there had been two other tea masters in the house. Miro had assumed the title when his father died, but he hadn’t had any children of his own, so his apprentice had been his cousin Niko Kaitio. However, Niko had died young, a mere few months after his graduation, so his son Tomio had inherited the apprenticeship and the title. Niko and Tomio didn’t have Miro’s literary tendencies, and Miro had unhesitatingly hijacked the blank pages in their books for his own writings.

The book I was currently leafing through had been written well before Miro’s time. I had earlier marked the final section, which was filled with Miro’s writing, but this was the first time I had come back to read it. The entry was dated the final year of the Twilight Century, which I knew by Tomio’s journal to also be the year of Miro’s death.

I know the time of my last ceremony is almost at hand, and I wish to record this story before my heart stops. I haven’t written it down before, because I didn’t consider it safe to do so. But now four decades have passed since these events took place, and I don’t believe that knowledge of them can any longer harm anyone. A time may come when it is all well that someone other than water remembers and knows, for too many stories are lost, and too few of those that remain are true.

I quickly counted forty years back from the date. It was consistent with the year mentioned on the silver-coloured disc. I crossed my legs on the cushion, placed the book on my lap and read on.

I had only been working as a tea master for a few years, and my father had died the year before, when one evening after dark there was a knock on my door. As I opened it, I found two men and a woman standing on the veranda. They told me their names and said they would be willing to do some work in the garden and house in exchange for food and water. This was nothing out of the ordinary at the time. Many people had lost their homes and possessions in the wars, and for many the only way to find water and shelter was to travel from village to village in search of work. Yet these people didn’t look like ordinary vagabonds. Their clothes seemed fairly new and they had the restless air of people on the run. One of the men was wounded. A stained rag was tied around his arm, and the surrounding skin was badly bruised. Under the edge of the cloth showed a tattoo: a narrow-bodied Ocean-Dragon that carried a snowflake in its claws. The way they said their names – one too quickly, another stammering – made me suspect the names were made up. But they were clearly exhausted, as if they had been travelling for days without sufficient rest, and they carried nothing but a small bag made of one of those old weatherproof materials. I decided they didn’t look too dangerous and accommodated them in the teahouse for the night. I didn’t keep anything of value in the teahouse, so I wasn’t worried about being robbed, and I’ve always been a light sleeper, so I knew I would hear if they tried to sneak up into the house in the middle of the night. There was a sturdy lock on the door that couldn’t be opened without quite a noise. I gave them some bread and tea, blankets and pillows and a lantern, and showed them the way across the garden. I then came back to prepare a soothing ointment for the wound, but when I returned with it to the teahouse, I found them all fast asleep. I left the jar outside the door.

The next morning while they were still sleeping the baker’s errand boy came to bring me bread and had some new gossip to share. He told me that soldiers had been making rounds in the village the night before, knocking on doors and looking for three war criminals. When my guests woke up, I invited them in for breakfast and watched them closely. They were hard to read. Their manner was good and fairly formal, as if they were highly educated. This supported the possibility that they might have been brought up enjoying some privileges of the military. At the same time, some of the remarks they made struck me as strange, even inappropriate for someone from a military background. I found that I could not place them. I needed to know more.

As we were having another cup of tea, I mentioned to them what I had heard earlier in the morning. They fell silent and their faces turned to stone, and I knew it was them the soldiers were after. I asked them to give me a reason why I shouldn’t report their location.

The men began to object to this, but the woman silenced them with a single movement of her hand. When her sleeve end moved, I noticed that she had a dragon tattoo on her wrist, similar to the one I’d seen on the wounded man’s arm.

She told me they were returning from the Lost Lands, where they had been investigating the drinkability of the water and the recovery of the areas from the catastrophe. This surprised me, because I had thought it was illegal to go to the Lost Lands. When I said this aloud, the woman admitted that their expedition was illegal and secret. I saw in her companions’ expressions that they would rather have kept all this to themselves, but the woman took a sip of tea, straightened her back and continued to talk.

The army of New Qian had somehow learned about their expedition and begun to trace them. Their leader had been killed on a water-fetching trip near Kolari, and they had been on the run ever since. A few days earlier one of their companions had gone missing and taken some of the backups of their recordings and the video camera they had used to shoot material. The rest of the backups were with them, and they didn’t want the army to get their hands on those. They didn’t know if their friend was dead or alive. Their intention was to hide near the village for a few days in the hope that the soldiers would head elsewhere.

The three of them were looking at me. The shorter, brown-haired man was holding a hand to his wound, which seemed to cause him constant pain. Sweat glistened on his face. The tall man’s expression didn’t give anything away.

The woman asked for me not to report them.

I asked them why they had come to the tea master’s house, and why they believed I would help them.

‘My father was a tea master,’ the woman said then. He had been killed in the water wars when she was very young, but she remembered his stories about tea masters who understood water.

I asked if there really was pure, fresh water in the Lost Lands.

The woman looked at the two men. I saw the taller one take a deep breath and eventually give a silent nod.

‘There is,’ she said. ‘And we want it to belong to everyone, not just the military.’

I thought about her story. I couldn’t see why she would lie to me about something like that. Their fate was in my hands. The rewards for catching war criminals were decent, and if I wanted to report them, all I had to do was call the village police right now. There were three of them and only one of me, that was true; but I was in good health, and they were weak. I would be out of the door and out of their reach before they knew it. They seemed to understand this, too.

I told them I would help them.

If their relief was not genuine, it was the best pretence I had ever seen.

I took them to the only place I trusted to be secure. It was important that even they themselves didn’t know the way there, so I had to take them one by one, blindfolded and along a circuitous path. This was the condition of my offer of refuge, and after short negotiations, they complied without a complaint. I knew there was a possibility they might be able to combine their knowledge and guesswork about the location into a certainty and track the route again later, but it was a risk I had to take. When they were all safely in the hiding place, I made another trip to the house to fetch food and clean clothes.

They stayed for two weeks. I went to see them every two days, and every time I told them the latest news from the village. They didn’t tell me much about themselves, but I learned some things: they were all academics, and they seemed to belong to some larger underground organisation striving to end the water restrictions. After a fortnight they wished to leave, because the place was beginning to get cramped for them, and they were worried (or so they claimed) about putting me in danger by staying too long. As far as I knew, the soldiers had taken their search to other nearby villages, so I believed it was as safe as it was going to be for them to leave. I drew a map for them showing a route out of the village that was the least likely to be guarded and gave them food and water. They wanted to make it to Kuoloyarvi first and then continue to New Piterburg. One by one I walked them from the hiding place to the slope of the fell, where I had left the food parcels. It was just before dawn and early spring, and the sky was already brightening into morning.

They thanked me for my kindness and said they had no way of repaying me. I replied that some things didn’t need repayment.

The woman smiled. Her eyes were dark in the morning dusk.

‘You do realise none of us will probably see the time when water runs free again?’ she said.

‘I do, but that’s not enough of a reason to give up hope that it might happen one day.’

‘To some it would be,’ she said.

They left, and I watched their narrow figures, until they vanished into the folds of the fell.

I don’t know what happened to them. I never heard of them again. I don’t know their real names, or if they saved the knowledge they carried with them. Perhaps the knowledge saved them. I’ll never know if they told me the truth or if I did the right thing. But this is my last story, and after I have recorded it on these pages, my water may run dry freely.

I closed the tea master’s book and stared at the paper-littered floor. The pieces were moving in my mind, trying to form an understandable image. Could these travellers hunted by soldiers who had visited the tea master’s house have belonged to the Jansson expedition? The likelihood seemed extremely small. On the other hand, it might have explained how the silver-coloured disc had ended up in this very village. If they had been afraid of getting caught and wanted to prevent the military from laying hands on their information about the Lost Lands, they could have thrown their recordings into the grave.

I was even more curious about whether Miro had really hidden them in the fell – perhaps even in the spring itself. It would have been unheard of. Everything about my father’s words and behaviour had made it clear that only tea masters and their apprentices, once they had learned enough, could go to the spring, and perhaps occasionally family members – I was certain my mother had been there. However, Miro would have violated all traditions and unwritten laws by hiding strangers he had no reason to trust in the cave. But what other place could he have meant? He hadn’t mentioned taking water to them, only food. It struck me as odd that he hadn’t described the hiding place at all. It was uncharacteristic of his detailed writing style, so it seemed like a deliberate choice.

The message-pod beeped at the entrance. I hoped it would be my mother. I hadn’t heard from her since she had asked for the spoon a few weeks ago. My leg muscles were prickling after the long sitting as I walked stiffly to read the message. It was from Sanja.

Could you sell a few skinfuls by instalments? Hurry!! Today if you can, she wrote. A cold weight fell into my stomach. Sanja had never asked for water. I thought of Minja immediately. There was still daylight left for several hours, and I would make it back from the village before the curfew.

I’m on my way, I replied. I left the books spread around the living room floor, filled three large waterskins, carried them to the helicycle cart and started the slow ride towards the village.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The front door was locked. I knocked on it, but there was no sound from inside. I knocked again. Nothing but silence. I took off my coat and cast it on top of the waterskins to cover them from sight. I walked around the house to Sanja’s workshop. I tried the door, but it was latched on the inside. I peered through the mesh walls: there was a half-assembled past-machine on the worktop next to a half-eaten seedcake, and the blades of a small solar fan were cutting the heat of the day. Sanja was nowhere to be seen.

I thought of the past-world stories I’d heard about ghost ships whose crew seemed to have evaporated without explanation: of a pen dropped on the table mid-sentence, of steaming laundry in the copper and still-warm tea in its cup when rescue arrived.

‘Sanja?’ There was no answer. ‘Sanja!’ I cried out again. ‘Kira? Jan?’

There was no sound from Sanja or her parents. Even Minja’s voice didn’t echo in the house. I turned to go back to the front door, but then I heard a clank from behind me. When I looked in the direction of the sound, I saw Sanja scrambling up from the workshop floor. Her face was flushed.

‘Is everything alright?’

Sanja turned to me and wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

‘You were quick.’ She switched off the desk fan, opened the door and stepped out of the workshop.

‘I didn’t see you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think there was anyone here.’

‘Oh, I was just rummaging under the table,’ she said, but avoided my gaze. I was certain there was no place in the room that I could have missed by mistake.

‘Is everything alright?’ I repeated. Sanja’s shoulders fell.

‘No,’ she said. I saw tears twitching behind her face. ‘Minja…’ Her voice was coarse and cracked. ‘She’s not alright. Mum took her to the doctor – again – but it was no use last time, either.’ She swallowed and raised her eyes. ‘The medicines need to be dissolved in water.’

I took a step towards her, then another, and she didn’t move away. I hadn’t seen her cry since she stumbled in the fell when she was ten and sprained her ankle. She gave one sob against my shoulder and then she was quiet. We stood there for a long time, in the scorching sun-sting of the late afternoon. Eventually Sanja withdrew from me and sniffed.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said and poked her arm. ‘I brought water.’

I was relieved that she could still try a smile.

‘I’ll do repair jobs until the end of the world, if you won’t accept another payment,’ she said. I opened my mouth to argue, but she interrupted, ‘It’s only fair. It’s not like you have a well in your garden.’

I didn’t look at her then; I wasn’t sure what she would see on my face.

‘I left the skins in the front yard,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, before someone snatches them.’

We collected the skins from the cart and carried them to the door. When Sanja opened it, a thick stench that made me think of dirty hair and sour milk pushed through the gap. There were empty mugs and greasy plates with food remains stuck to them on the living room table and under it. I noticed children’s clothes soaking in murky water at the bottom of a washing tub in the corner. Some of them had large dark stains. Piles of dust floated along the floor in the draft when we passed them.

Sanja looked at me and then she looked around, as if realising for the first time in days how the house looked.

‘It’s a dreadful mess,’ she said. ‘Minja can’t hold any food, and we haven’t even been able to wash all her diapers.’

I saw she was embarrassed, because she had asked me in to witness the traces of the illness.

‘You can do it now,’ I said and tried to smile.

We carried the waterskins into the kitchen. I helped Sanja pour a little clean water in a baby bottle. She rinsed the bottle, filled it again and took from a cupboard a fabric pouch, from which she dosed two spoonfuls of white powder in the water. She shook the bottle a little so the powder would dissolve. Its pale mist floated in the cloudy liquid.

We heard footsteps from the veranda. Sanja went to the door with the baby bottle. Kira stepped inside, holding Minja in her arms. I hadn’t seen Minja in a few weeks and my stomach turned. She was thin and fragile, and her usually bright eyes were just two shadows in her bone-sharp face. Kira was pale and her posture was sunken.

‘They can’t admit more patients,’ she said. ‘The nearest hospital that has space is in Kuusamo.’

‘What do they expect us to do?’ Sanja asked.

‘They said to give the medical solution to Minja and wait for the fever to go down.’

‘But that’s what we’ve been doing for the past two weeks! Did you tell them we haven’t got enough water?’

‘Sanja,’ Kira said. ‘The medical centre is full of patients who are even worse off than Minja.’ Her voice was weary and crushed. ‘They have two doctors and three nurses, and a few volunteers from the village. They owe three months’ worth of water debt to the black market. They don’t even know if they can continue to run the clinic next month.’

The air between us grew heavy. Sanja and I realised at the same time what Kira must have understood earlier: the doctors had no choice but to send Minja home to die.

Sanja handed the baby bottle with the medical solution to Kira.

‘Is it clean enough?’ Kira asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. Both Kira and Sanja looked at me sharply, and a realisation passed across Kira’s face.

‘You do know we can’t pay, don’t you?’ Kira asked. The words were addressed to Sanja as well as to me.

‘You don’t need to,’ I replied.

Kira sat down in a worn armchair, took the baby bottle and offered it to Minja. Minja barely had the strength to open her mouth, but after a long coaxing Kira got her to lick a few drops of liquid from the bottle. She carried Minja to the bedroom.

‘Sanja, would you come here a bit,’ she called.

‘I’ll wait here,’ I said to Sanja, who nodded. Kira lowered her voice behind the door, but I could hear her words nevertheless. I believe she wanted me to hear.

‘You shouldn’t have asked her for water,’ she said.

‘What else can we do?’ Sanja asked defiantly. ‘I can’t finish the water pipe. It’s nearly impossible to find the missing parts now, and the prices are sky-high.’

Kira sighed.

‘I know, Sanja. And finding water shouldn’t be your responsibility. If Minja was healthier, I might be able to make rounds doing sewing in the nearby villages with her, or try to find work at the army boots factory in Kuusamo. I just wouldn’t want to owe a debt of gratitude to anyone.’

I had heard enough. I walked out to the veranda and pushed the door closed carefully. I sat down on the step and looked around me: at the limp sunflower sprouts nodding in the sand, at the sunshade woven of seagrass sheltering a couple of dust-pale, straggly chairs, taut in their wooden frames. The surrounding yards and houses looked the same – drab, tired reflections of each other, exhausted under the weight of the afternoon.

I didn’t know how long it had been when Sanja got out of the house and closed the door quietly behind her.

‘They’re both asleep,’ she said. ‘It’s been a rare sight in this house lately.’

I kept my voice low, but the words left my mouth sharper than I had expected.

‘Are you out of your mind?’

Sanja’s head twitched towards me. My chest tightened when I saw the recent weeks on her face, but I continued.

‘Do you realise how dangerous it is for you to be building an illegal water pipe? If the water patrol finds it—’ I thought of the empty workshop, the clank, her sudden appearance. ‘It’s under your workshop, isn’t it? Your construction site.’

Sanja’s features were hazy with exhaustion, but annoyance, or perhaps despair, focused them for a moment.

‘The water rations are not enough for us, and we can’t afford to buy more,’ she said. ‘Dad has managed to make an arrangement and get part of his salary in water, but sometimes it looks and smells like dirty underwear has been soaked in it.’

I frowned.

‘Couldn’t you complain to someone?’ I asked.

Sanja snorted.

‘Who? The same officials that give it to us illegally?’

I saw what she meant.

‘Stop,’ I said. She stared at me in disbelief. ‘Don’t go anywhere near the water pipe again.’

‘You’ve clearly never had to choose,’ she said, ‘if you’d rather be thrown into jail for a water crime, or let your family die of thirst.’

I fell speechless for a moment, because she had rarely said anything this harsh to me. The hardness of her words seemed to have taken her by surprise, too. She took my hand and squeezed it.

‘I’m sorry, Noria,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘How much do you need?’

‘Noria—’

‘How much?’

She looked directly at me. Her eyes were dark and bright.

‘Much more than you can afford. Two skinfuls a day,’ she said.

‘I’ll bring it to you.’

She shook her head.

‘You need your own water. You can’t.’

‘Yes, I can,’ I said.

It seemed to me that she was going to ask something. I was grateful when she didn’t. I didn’t need to lie.

Something had changed between Sanja and me, something for which I had no words back then and perhaps have none even now. She hadn’t spoken to me about the water pipe or Minja’s illness. I hadn’t spoken to her about the spring.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone. On the surface nothing will shift, but things we cannot tell anyone chafe and consume us, and slowly our life settles around them, moulds itself into their shape.

Secrets gnaw at the bonds between people. Sometimes we believe they can also build them: if we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

I began to bring water to Sanja regularly. She accepted it without a word. Mist was dispelled from Minja’s eyes, her gaze was able to grasp things going on around her again. Words returned to her tongue. Her limbs were still thin as faded, winter-bare twigs, but her life was no longer in danger. Kira’s behaviour towards me was a mixture of gratitude and awkward, curt avoidance. Jan never mentioned the water at all when I saw him, which was rarely enough, but he asked me a few times if there was need in the tea master’s house or garden for repair or construction jobs that he could do. I always said no.

Meanwhile, I had reached a dead end in my search for more information about the Jansson expedition. Inspired by Miro’s last diary entry, I had leafed through all the rest of the tea masters’ books, but only found occasional, short notes, none of which told me anything I didn’t already know. The plastic grave guarded its secrets, if it had any. My visits produced no results save for a wound I got from a sharp piece of metal and a handful of components I put in my pocket for Sanja. Silence raised its wall against me everywhere. The light on the message-pod remained dark. Soft grass pushed mute stalks from the soil of the garden, and my father’s dust rested soundlessly in the shroud of the earth.

Then, one late spring morning, the silence was broken.

The day was like any other day leading to summer. The overcast sky arched in the colour of polished metal, and the tender flames of light-green leaves flickered on the branches of the sparse trees and bushes. The streets were quiet. I passed a house in front of which an aged couple was sitting under a seagrass sunshade. I saw tears streaming down the woman’s wrinkled cheeks. The man had put his arm around her shoulders. I turned my gaze away.

When I reached Sanja’s house with my waterskins, she was waiting for me at the door.

‘Have you heard?’ she asked. I saw her expression and my heart clenched.

‘What happened? Is everything alright?’

‘Yes. I mean, no.’ She paused and agitation crossed her face. ‘The grey-plastered house with the blue circle on the door. Near the medical centre?’

I remembered the blank windows and drawn curtains, the empty path across the front yard, the neighbours who averted their gaze on the street.

‘The residents had not been taken away, as everyone thought,’ Sanja said. ‘They were held inside for nearly two months under house arrest, guarded night and day. They couldn’t go anywhere, but the soldiers were bringing just enough water and food for them to stay alive. This morning they were forced out and…’ She tried to fit the word in her mouth. ‘They were executed.’

‘Are you sure?’ The bright blue circle surfaced before my eyes, glaring as a bruise against the chipped paint of the house, the colour of the sky reflected in water, the colour of military uniforms. I found it hard to believe, despite everything that had happened after last Moonfeast.

‘My father saw it,’ Sanja said. ‘He was on his way to the central square. He saw the soldiers drag the people out of the house and cut their throats in the middle of the front yard. Everyone passing on the street saw it.’

I tried not to imagine the scene, but my mind leapt ahead of me: the glistening metal pressing into the fragile skin and reflecting the colour of the earth, the movement of a blue-clad arm, the pool of blood spreading on the pale sand of the yard and the sunlight shattering in it.

‘Is this what it’s going to be from now on?’ Sanja asked in a tight, strangled voice. ‘Anyone can be executed in their own front yard or captured inside their own home any time?’

‘It will end,’ I said. ‘It must.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Sanja stared at me and I couldn’t remember ever seeing such bare despair on her face. ‘People won’t stop needing water. They’ll have to risk their lives building illegal water pipes. I—’

I realized what she was trying to tell me.

‘You haven’t continued building your water pipe, have you?’ I asked. She turned her face towards the ground, and her dark hair fell to cover it.

‘We can’t depend on your water forever, Noria,’ she said. ‘You’ll need it yourself.’

I thought of the past tea masters, their choices and their duties. I thought of Miro, who had done what he believed to be right, against all tradition. I thought of my parents, who were not here, and of Sanja, who was.

‘Come,’ I said. ‘I want to show you something.’

We walked into the fell as we had walked many times as children, playing wise and fearless explorers in a strange and wild landscape. Grave clouds were building a darkening wall on the horizon, gradually enclosing the sky. My feet knew the paths and did not slip on the stones. Behind the landscape there loomed another, bound in memory: its paths were wider and the fell-tops tall as distant mountains, boulders larger and harder to climb, dry riverbeds deep wounds in the sides of the rock. Compared to this image emerging from across the years, everything looked meagre and tame now; and yet I felt as if I was walking step by step further into a steep, dark, drowning landscape, even more overwhelming than the fell had been in my child-eyes. I could almost hear the stones of the path shaking behind me, its outlines crumbling into the sand. If I turned to look, I would only see desert and far in the horizon the sharp, dark-green tips of the forest, but the house and the village would be gone, all roads buried, and we’d have no choice but to continue towards the blind spot we were approaching.

Sanja didn’t ask where we were going, but followed me in silence.

When we reached the mouth of the cave, she said, ‘I remember this one! The headquarters of the Central And Crucially Important Explorers’ Society of New Qian.’

‘Follow me,’ I told her. I crawled to the back of the cave and sought in the folds of the rock the lever which my fingers found easily by now. The stone felt dry, coarse and cool. The hatch in the ceiling of the cave opened. The restless light of the blaze lanterns was reflected in Sanja’s eyes in the dusk, as if her thoughts were glowing and flittering.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘The place that doesn’t exist,’ I said.

The familiar coolness of the fell poured slowly over us, as we walked deeper into its heart. I heard Sanja’s footsteps behind me, and the strange enchantment that had begun outside didn’t let go. The faint echo of the spring bounced off the walls in whispers, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that if I turned around, Sanja would disappear into the folds of the cavern, become a shadow among underground shadows. Our movements haunted the walls, thin as cobwebs. I didn’t stop until we reached the cave in which the water rushed from the rock into its pond.

I heard Sanja gasp behind me. She stepped next to me and grasped my arm. I felt the shaking of her hand and the narrow moon-slivers of her fingernails on my skin.

‘This,’ she said. ‘All this water. Is it yours?’

‘Yes,’ I said. The grip of her fingers tightened. ‘No,’ I corrected.

Sanja turned towards me, and a start ran through me. She was furious.

‘How could you?’ she spat out. ‘How could you hide this? The people in that house—’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Minja. She could have…’

Shame flooded my face. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

‘How could you?’ she repeated.

Fear coiled into a heavy knot inside me. I didn’t know what I had expected – gratitude? Relief? Perhaps excitement, because I had given Sanja a part in my secret? I had known I’d be putting myself in danger by bringing another person to the spring, but I had never thought the danger might come from her direction. Now I was no longer certain.

‘You must promise you won’t tell anyone,’ I said more hastily than I had intended. ‘I can only help you if the spring remains a secret.’

‘You don’t have the right,’ she said. I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

‘Sanja,’ I said, and I could barely hear my own voice. ‘What do you think will happen if anyone finds out about this?’ She was still holding on to my arm. I raised my gaze.

Shadows thickened on her face and her body was tense. Then something moved behind her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed, her expression softened, and her voice was quiet again.

‘It’s still not right,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I replied.

It was cool in the cave, as always, and the humidity crept into my bones, but Sanja’s face was flushed from walking. Her tolerance of cold had always been better than mine.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. She had begun to take off her clothes. She dropped her cardigan on the stones, pulled the shirt over her head and undid her shoelaces.

‘Do you know how long it’s been since I last bathed in clean water?’ she asked. She shrugged off her remaining clothes and stepped carefully to the edge of the pond. She found a place where the rock was worn even and sloped into the water. I saw her shudder, when she pushed her feet into the spring, but she edged herself into the water without stopping, until it was up to her waist. She waded deeper and squatted.

The water enveloped her like a smooth stone thrown into it. She surfaced, shivering, black hair against her skull, and in the wavering lantern-light she was so pale and narrow that she seemed almost translucent: a water spirit caught on the edges of reality.

‘Is it cold?’ I asked.

‘Come and try for yourself,’ she said.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone.

If we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the spring. I hardened myself against the piercing chill of the water, letting it settle on my skin, even as it cut into my limbs and pinched along my back. The pebbles at the bottom of the cave were polished round and slippery, and I couldn’t see through the water where I was stepping in the semi-darkness. My foot slid, and Sanja reached out her hand to support me.

I took it. I closed my eyes.

Time trickled on somewhere far outside the cave, wind swept over rocks and light changed slowly, and we were silent and still.

On the surface nothing will shift, but slowly our life settles around the things we cannot tell anyone, moulds itself into their shape.

Eventually Sanja let go of me and stepped back. She took one step, then another. Her eyebrows knitted into a confused crease. She lowered her gaze, trying to see into the spring through the water in the twilight. She swept the bottom with her foot. I stepped closer and felt something smooth and even under the sole of my foot, like a plate made of some hard, shiny material.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said. ‘What’s this?’

The box was of polished wood, and there was a thin layer of dark, slippery algae on the surface. It was as thick as maybe two or three tea master’s books placed on top of each other, but more oblong. Two wide leather belts were tightened around it, holding it closed. There was no lock on the box. We turned it in the light of the blaze lanterns. I began to unbuckle one of the belts.

‘Are you sure it’s safe to open this?’ Sanja asked.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But don’t you want to know what’s inside?’

Sanja nodded and began unbuckling the other belt.

Inside the box there was another, metal one, tightly sealed, but that one wasn’t locked, either. Water had seeped through the outer layer, but there was no humidity inside the metal box. It held a thick, plastic wrapping through which we could see a knot of fabric. I peeled the plastic away and unfolded the cloth, which turned out to be a faded-brown shirt. We stared at the contents of the knot, speechless.

In the folds of the fabric rested six smooth, shiny, silver-coloured discs.

That night it rained, rained until the dust of the earth foamed mud-dark, and narrow brooks ran across stones and yards and withered tree-trunks. People opened their mouths and drank directly from the sky and thanked nameless powers. Water rattled into buckets and tubs and onto roofs, and its sounds enclosed the landscape within their soft fingers, stroking the soil and grass and tree roots.

I sat with Sanja on the veranda of the tea master’s house, watching the languid glow of the blaze lanterns on the walls and floorboards. I felt the warmth of her skin next to me.

Seven silver-coloured discs glistened on the wooden table.

Night came quietly, and nothing needed to be otherwise.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Could you play that last bit again?’ I asked.

Sanja pressed the button with two arrowheads pointing to the left on the past-tech machine. My wrist was aching from writing. I shook my hand while reversed words chirruped in the loudspeakers. Sanja took her finger from the button, and a voice said, ‘—until we have confirmed all results. It is nevertheless clear that at least Saltfjellet-Svartisen, Reivo and most of the land between Malmberget and Kolari belong to the areas where the water resources are partly potable already, and according to our estimates, will be entirely so in less than fifty years.’

‘Stop there,’ I said. Sanja paused the disc, and I wrote the last sentence down in my notebook.

We had arranged everything in a neat circle on the workshop floor: the past-machine, the discs, the books I had brought from my mother’s study. I reached for the heavy volume which included a map of the Lost Lands from the past-world era and traced the place names with my finger. Reivo was the first one to catch my eye. I drew a circle around it, and when I leaned back, the muscles in my neck and back tightened to painful knots.

‘I think I need a break,’ I said. We’d been sitting for hours.

Sanja shrugged.

‘You’re the one who wanted to write everything down. I’ll go get some tea.’

While she stood up, I continued to look for the places mentioned on the recording and marking them on the map.

‘I still don’t understand what you’re going to do with the info, though,’ she remarked on her way out.

‘Neither do I,’ I said, but that wasn’t entirely true.

The silver-coloured discs were laid in a row on top of the fabric they had been wrapped in. Numbers from one to seven were painted on them. We had been able to determine their order by the dates mentioned at the beginning of each. So far we had listened to four of the discs in full, and I had written the contents of each one down so I could try to organise them into a coherent story. However, there was a problem: occasionally the words were hard to discern, time had worn the sound threadbare in places and some sections were so badly scratched that the machine skipped them every time. On top of this long parts were missing, days and whole weeks between the log entries. I suspected there had originally been ten discs, perhaps more.

I was now certain that all the discs had come from the same place. There were two distinct male voices on them, and one was clearly the same we had heard on the first disc. I was also convinced that the mysterious group of explorers Miro had kept safe in the Twilight Century was what had remained of the Jansson expedition, and that he had hidden them in the cave in the fell. I couldn’t think of another explanation for how the discs would have ended up in the spring. I still hoped to be able to trace the route of the explorers, but listening with the notebook and map was agonisingly slow, and I knew already the story could never become complete and whole. There was too much time between our reality and the Jansson expedition, too many details blurred by years and images swept into the dust of the world that no longer was. We could only summon an indistinct shape whose features and outlines the distance dimmed down.

Yet despite the passage of time and decay there was something in all of this that made me burn and flicker, as if my skin was suddenly too strained and the confines of my life too close, whichever way I turned. The Jansson expedition had really existed. They had lived and breathed, they had packed their fast past-vehicle full of food and water and scientific instruments, and somehow they had carried it all and themselves across the guarded border to the Lost Lands. They had climbed stony paths that no one else had walked in decades, and looked from the slopes of the fjords down to the drowned, water-weary villages. They had dipped their fingers in the brooks running from the cliffs and in the dark, ice-still lakes, and when their equipment had shown the water to be drinkable, every step on their way had acquired a purpose.

In my dreams I was with them, in this strange landscape, where the voice of water was ever-present. Yet I couldn’t see their faces or talk to them. They were in the background, out of reach, almost as if I was nothing but a bodiless spirit myself, held by a dark stream, unable to cross to the land of the living. Sanja was always next to me, and everything around us was lucid: the white fell-tips, the crisp air, the clear water mirroring the sky, bright and incomprehensible as another world, flaring with light.

The distance from dreams to words is long, and so is the way from words to deeds. Yet the more I listened, the shorter it grew.

The door slammed. Sanja walked into the workshop and placed a lukewarm cup of tea in my hand. A drop she had spilled travelled down the side of the cup and over my fingers.

‘I don’t think I can do more today,’ I told her. ‘Will you walk me home?’

This meant, of course, ‘Are you coming to get water?’ But we never said this aloud. It wasn’t planned. Talking about water had not turned awkward only between the two of us, but everywhere in the village. It was too easy to make the mistake of sounding like one was either boasting of one’s own water situation or begging for water from others.

‘I can’t today,’ Sanja replied. ‘Mum’s got work for this week in the army kitchen, I need to stay home with Minja. I’ll come tomorrow.’

‘Can’t do tomorrow. I have tea visitors coming.’

Sanja looked disappointed, but I knew it would be impossible for me to make time for her. The vice mayor of Kuoloyarvi was a demanding customer, and tea visits always filled the day from the crack of dawn until late evening. I couldn’t afford to lose more guests. Many of my father’s regulars had stopped coming after his death despite their condolences and assurances that of course they would keep visiting now that I was the tea master in the house. In my father’s time new clients had usually found their way to his ceremonies via Major Bolin’s recommendation, but Bolin seemed to have been right when he had told me his time as our benefactor was over. I hadn’t heard a word from him since my father’s funeral.

‘Can you come the day after?’ I asked, and Sanja nodded. I pulled the insect hood over my head, took my notebook and my bag and stepped through the mesh door into the dust-dry afternoon.

As I passed through the gate of Sanja’s house, I saw a soldier approaching from the outskirts of the village. I averted my gaze. Everyone in the village had learned to do so. However, when we passed each other on the road, he greeted me. I looked at him in surprise. It took me a while to recognise him: he was the same blond-haired soldier I had seen talking to Sanja last summer, when Taro had come with his people to search for water on our grounds.

I turned to the road winding out of the village. I saw from the corner of my eye that the soldier had stopped at Sanja’s gate.

The tea ceremony wasn’t the first one I had performed alone after my father’s death. I had learned to seek comfort in his invisible presence: memories of him were so solidly connected to the teahouse that it felt as if he was still seated there, watching my movements, ready to guide me without strictness. Yet this time my mind reflected him as a dark and serious figure, as if he knew. I replied obediently to the vice mayor’s questions about the picture hanging on the wall, I offered the tea sweets prepared according to particular instructions and I brewed the tea until it was strong, just as he wished. Still, the whole time I couldn’t descend to the peace that focus demanded.

A broken promise is not light to bear. It’s hard to please the dead, and sometimes harder not to do so.

The tea visit left me feeling drained. When I eventually locked the teahouse door late at night and walked into the house in the light of the blaze lantern, my limbs felt heavy and fragile as glass, and I was too weary to prepare supper. In the thin night-light of the early summer I fell into my bed and slept.

Knocking at the door woke me up.

‘Noria?’ I heard Sanja’s voice from the veranda. ‘Are you home?’

‘Just a minute,’ I called and scrambled to my feet.

I looked out of the window. The sun was shining brightly into the garden. I slipped my feet into my sandals and walked a little shakily to open the front door. Sanja was standing on the veranda, holding four empty waterskins bound together in her hand.

‘I sent you a message earlier,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you forgot to reply, but I came as we agreed.’

I had completely forgotten that she was coming. I glanced at the message-pod on the wall. Indeed, the red light was flashing. I swept hair back from my face.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said. ‘What time is it?’

‘Not that late,’ Sanja said. ‘Nine at most. I’m a bit early anyway.’

I opened the door wider and stepped aside. Sanja came in with her waterskins and removed her insect hood. I only noticed now that she was holding a mail pouch woven of seagrass, which she handed to me.

‘I ran into the mailman in the village. When he heard I was on my way here, he gave this for me to carry. Said it would spare him the walk.’

I took the mail pouch. Because I was certain it was from my mother, I opened it right away. Inside was a message-pod, slightly battered, but still in relatively good condition, and no letter of any kind.

‘Strange,’ I said, and Sanja’s expression revealed that she agreed. ‘Are you sure it is for me?’

‘That’s what the mailman said.’

I tried to switch the message-pod on, but the screen remained dark.

‘The battery must be empty,’ Sanja said.

I felt like a rustling, hollow shell, and realised I had not eaten since yesterday morning.

‘Would you like tea?’

Sanja nodded and followed me to the kitchen. I placed the message-pod on the windowsill, where it was in direct sunlight. It wouldn’t take long to charge. When the water was hot and the tea was steaming in the cups on the table, I put my finger on the message-pod screen. The display flashed. Sanja had been right. The screen switched on and the recogniser was reading my fingerprint. There was nothing unusual about this: all message-pods had been coded to recognise the user’s account or family account by the fingerprint, and in theory every registered citizen could use their account on any message-pod available. Yet the name that appeared on the display was not mine. Aino Vanamo, the message-pod announced. The birth year was the same as mine, but the date was not. The place of birth was recorded as Xinjing.

‘What is it?’ Sanja asked and got up from her seat to look at the message-pod. Her eyebrows rose when she saw the screen.

‘You try,’ I prompted. Sanja placed her finger on the screen. Sanja Valama, the display told me. I put my finger on the display again, and the identification for Aino Vanamo reappeared.

‘Brilliant,’ Sanja gasped. ‘A fake passpod!’ I knew her expression: it meant she was already wondering about how the message-pod had been hacked, and if she could do the same. ‘It’s been programmed to connect the fake identity to your ID data record,’ she continued. ‘But in anyone else’s hands it’s a completely ordinary message-pod.’

A red light and number 1 were flashing in the corner of the display to show that there was one message. I tapped the light with my fingertip.

If this finds you, began the message, it’s important you do as I tell you. It is not safe for you to stay where you are. Contact Bolin. He will help you to get a train ticket. Once you know when you are coming, send me the information using this message-pod. Don’t use the other one, but leave it behind when you leave home. I hope to see you soon.

There was no signature, but I knew the handwriting: it belonged to my mother.

Sanja and I were quiet for a long while. Eventually she asked, ‘Are you going?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. I understood now why my mother had asked me to send some object. She had needed my fingerprint for the fake passpod, but couldn’t ask for it directly out of fear that our mail was being monitored. She must have had to bribe someone in order to make sure that I received it. I had sent the spoon over a month ago, so the passpod had probably been on its way for several weeks.

I should have been excited about my mother’s offer. If she was asking me to come, it meant that Xinjing was relatively safe despite the war. My life would be easier without the constant hiding and guarding of the spring, without seeing the narrowing faces in the village, without the fear of seeing which house would be the next to bear a blue circle on its door. I wouldn’t need to carry water from the fell or take it to Sanja, nor clean the house and tend to the garden and make the tea sweets alone. We could do things together again, as we had before her departure and my father’s death. The same weariness that had wrapped me the night before and was still clinging to my bones crashed into me so gravely that I suddenly wanted to lie down on the kitchen floor and just let things happen around me. I wished for someone else to take responsibility for my life, for everything that had only recently become part of my everyday routine. Xinjing shone distant, veiled in soft mist, easy and welcoming as a dream.

Yet the same thing I wanted to escape demanded that I stay. Who would look after the spring, if I left? Who would Sanja go to, when she needed water for her family? Would the punishment not be placed on her if I left the spring in her care, the military found out about it somehow and I was elsewhere, at the other end of the continent? I could not put her in such danger.

Behind all this loomed a possibility that had only begun to materialise into a clear path from scattered shards: the water that was not here, but in the Lost Lands. I could follow my mother’s wishes and travel to Xinjing, or my father’s and stay here to guard the spring. Or I could do as I wanted, and choose an unfamiliar path that was not dictated by either one of them.

That day all possibilities looked equal, but even then one of them had already begun to reach beyond the others, to bend me towards itself.

We drank tea and ate amaranth bread, which we dipped in sunflower oil. I saw Sanja trying not to devour the food.

‘I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to crack the ID protection somehow,’ she said. ‘I have an idea about it. I might be able to do the same.’

I knew she would have loved to take the fake passpod to her workshop to study it, but didn’t want to ask directly and I was not ready to offer it to her. I would need the pod if I decided to travel to Xinjing, and I was worried she might remove the fake information by mistake.

When we had finished our tea and bread, Sanja took her waterskins to the kitchen tap and filled them. I would need to go to the spring next week to close the spare water pipe leading to the house. We carried the skins together into her cart. We had begun to keep a large seagrass trunk in the cart in which we would lay the waterskins flat. On top of the skins we placed the fake bottom Sanja had built, and when it was in place, we loaded the trunk with old clothes and empty, broken waterskins. If the water guards stopped Sanja to check the trunk – which happened occasionally – they would only find repair and sewing jobs, which I had commissioned with Sanja and her mother.

I watched as the wheels of Sanja’s cart left tracks in the dirt of the road when she walked away. A threadbare shirt sleeve flickered from under the closed lid of the trunk like a white, wind-torn flame.

Sanja had begun to come with me whenever I walked to the spring to check the surface level of the water. The weather was turning hot, and many times the fell was the only place where it was cool. Those days we went to the cave only to escape the heat of the day. Previously I had walked to the spring, glanced at the surface of the water and turned back. Now our shared trips to the fell became frequent. We would sit by the dry riverbed, eating food we had brought or watching clouds passing in the sky. Sometimes I would read a book while she was drawing in a notepad I had given her. The core of these visits, however, was always the spring, and although we never spoke of it, I believe she felt the way I did: that the threat of the spring drying and being lost to us did not seem real, and when we walked into the cave and to the edge of the water, it was every time like entering another world. The boundless luxury of water belonged to us alone, and I didn’t want it to be otherwise.

Time is not to be trusted. A few weeks can seem like the beginning of forever, and it’s easy to be blinded when you believe nothing needs to change.

That day we had spent perhaps an hour, perhaps two at the spring; we had no reason to keep track of time. The sun was hot and the insects fierce, and the shadows of the cave rested soothingly against our skins burnt by the early summer. My garden was waiting to be weeded at home, and Sanja had a table full of repair jobs in her workshop, but we were loitering. Sanja was in a good mood and was designing an installation of loose stones in the faint light of the blaze lanterns we had brought.

‘What are those?’ I asked. She had fashioned an angular pile of stones and placed a circle of small stone figures with painted, angry faces around it.

‘That’s a house,’ Sanja said and pointed at the stone construct at the centre of the circle. ‘Those are water guards.’ She pointed at the stone figures surrounding the house. ‘And those two are us.’

A little further away outside the stone circle there were two more figures. She had moulded a piece of plastic to represent a bucket wedged between them. Both were smiling widely.

‘Don’t the guards notice?’ I asked.

‘They’re looking the wrong way,’ Sanja said. ‘I need a piece of your hair,’ she announced and began measuring it from a strand that had run loose from my ponytail.

‘What for?’ I asked and pushed her hand away.

‘So I can finish you,’ she said.

‘No, I’d rather be bald,’ I laughed, but she chased me around the cave, and eventually I let her cut a piece of the ends of my hair with her penknife. She placed the hair on top of one stone figure and a small, flat pebble to keep it in place. Then she cut a piece of her own hair and secured it the same way to the head of the other figure sneaking out of the sight of the guards.

‘The resemblance is unmistakable,’ she said.

We were still in high spirits when we started our walk back along the tunnel. We were certainly not quiet, and our footfalls and laughter echoed, multiplied by the walls. When we reached the hatch, Sanja turned the lever on the wall without warning, and a cold shower gushed from the water pipe on the ceiling to my neck. I screamed and slapped her face with my wet ponytail.

‘Come on, when we get out you’ll just be happy your clothes are cool and wet,’ she said with an innocent face.

‘Then I’m sure it’s not something you’d want to miss,’ I said and pulled her under the spraying water. She spluttered, wriggled herself free from my hold and closed the pipe from the lever. I was still wringing water from my tunic, trousers and hair, when she opened the hatch from the other lever and slipped through it into the cave.

‘I’ll be there in a second,’ I called out to Sanja. She was quiet, and I didn’t see her on the other side. I thought I heard a faint crashing noise. ‘Sanja?’

I filled the small skin I had brought with me and lowered it into the cave. Then I slid through the hole carrying two blaze lanterns and my soaked insect hood. When I raised my eyes, my voice fled.

Sanja was standing near the mouth of the cave with her back turned towards me, holding one blaze lantern. The other one was lying in shards on the rock floor next to her insect hood. At the cave entrance stood a man’s figure, outlines sabre-sharp against the jagged light of the day. In the pale-grown glow of the lanterns I discerned his features.

‘This is something we don’t see every day in this village,’ Jukara said. ‘Two young women appearing from the folds of the fell dripping wet.’

Sanja turned her face towards me then, and in my mind I have tried to read her expression thousands of times, to understand its every detail. The memory slips and slides and shatters, but of two things I was sure then, and am still now: Sanja was as surprised as I was, and yet under her surprise another feeling was surfacing.

She looked guilty.

We didn’t have any kind of cover story to offer to Jukara, of course. The mistake seemed ridiculously childish and careless afterwards, but it had been made, and neither of us knew how to correct it. We had been so certain of the security of the hidden cave that we had never stopped to think how we would explain our presence in the fell, if someone found us there. I guess we could have said we were just having a picnic, if the situation had been different. But Jukara had seen the hatch, and the gushing water, and our dripping clothes. We had no way of convincing him that there was no water nearby.

He didn’t ask, or threaten, or blackmail. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that if I didn’t offer water to him and his family, the cave would be teeming with soldiers the next time I went there – if there would be a next time.

‘It’s my fault,’ Sanja said later that evening, when Jukara had left the tea master’s house with five full waterskins. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know this would happen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘I had to go to see Jukara last week,’ she said. ‘I ran out of patching plastic, and I didn’t know of anyone else in the village who might have some to sell. He charged a high price and behaved oddly. Asked stuff about you.’ She looked at me.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, now wary.

‘Complained that you never take repair jobs to him anymore, even though your father was his best customer.’

It was true. Even before my father’s illness I had usually taken repair jobs to Sanja in secret, and after his death I hadn’t had anything repaired by Jukara.

‘He also said things about your father,’ Sanja continued. ‘He said he’d always wondered how your father had so many waterskins to repair, even though he wasn’t supposed to have more water than anyone else in the village. He…’ A flush rose to Sanja’s cheeks and she went quiet.

I waited.

She continued, ‘He asked me if I thought your family had a secret well or some other water source.’ Sanja raised her hands to cover her eyes. ‘Noria, I didn’t mean to give anything away! I was just so surprised I dropped the box of plastic patches he had sold me, and they scattered all over his workshop floor. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. But he must have suspected something before, and when he saw me startled, he must have decided to follow us into the fell…’ Sanja’s voice faded.

I didn’t know what to say to her, so I said, ‘It wasn’t your fault. If he suspected something, I’m sure he would have followed us anyway.’

Later, when Sanja had left, I unfolded my maps and opened the notebook in which I had written the contents of the discs. I looked for roads that had been in use in the Twilight Century, and others that might still be good enough for travelling. I began to connect place names I had heard on the discs, and draw a route towards them from my home village.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Once the silent space around a secret is shattered, it cannot be made whole again. The cracks will grow longer and wider, reaching far and branching out like an underground network of roots, until it’s impossible to say where it started and if it will come to an end.

I still don’t know for certain how the word spread in the village. I don’t believe Jukara meant for it to happen. Access to the spring was too great a privilege and gave him too much power. He wouldn’t have given it up voluntarily. I understand this now, because somewhere beyond words and light, in a place I could not see myself, I had felt the same: the spring was my privilege, a compensation for a duty that would have otherwise gone unrewarded. I had not yet realised that one cannot expect rewards for all actions.

Perhaps Jukara told Ninia. He must have, because he couldn’t have come up with endless stories about officials who had suddenly turned more open-handed and explanations for his visits to the tea master’s house, not with a wife like Ninia. And telling her was the equivalent of summoning a village meeting and announcing the news there. Whispers welled and grew into chatter, until even those who had not been present heard it.

In the end it doesn’t matter how the rest of them found out about the spring. It did not change the outcome. When a woman with greasy hair and unwashed clothes appeared at the gate with three sharp-boned children and asked in a frail voice if I could sell her some water on credit, I could not turn her away. After her came others, a wide-eyed young boy who said his parents were too ill to work, an old man who kept muttering about his son who had disappeared in the war, and more women – young women with babies, old women with dry wombs and a strained walk and weary eyes, middle-aged women asking for water for their parents or spouses or children.

I coiled a leather strap around Mai Harmaja’s arm to keep the waterskin in place.

‘Is it too tight?’ I asked.

‘No, you can tighten it up a bit more,’ Mai said. I pulled the strap tighter. ‘Feels steadier now,’ she decided. The waterskin was already fastened to her upper arm by the pit, and it seemed to me that her skin was turning purple around the leather band. Mai rolled her sleeves down and wrapped a thin sun-shawl over her shoulders, and nothing showed that there were five skins under her loose garments: two tied to her thighs, two to her upper arms and one to her waist. Water sloshed slightly, when her feet fell over the creaking boards of the veranda. Mai was one of the volunteers at the village medical centre, and my third water guest of the day.

‘Someone’s coming!’ Mai’s son Vesa called from near the gate. His footsteps sent small dust clouds flying, stains in the brightness of the day, as he came running towards the house. He was nine years old and feeling important, because we had given him the task of watching the road leading from the village to the tea master’s house and letting us know immediately if he saw someone on it. ‘They have a helicarriage.’

‘Go into the teahouse,’ I told Mai. ‘Wait for me there.’ She nodded. ‘You too, Vesa.’ Mai started walking towards the teahouse along the stone slabs of the path, and Vesa rushed after his mother in a galloping half-run.

I had to act fast. I ran into my room and changed into my ceremony outfit, which I always kept clean and ironed. On my way out I glanced at the veranda to make sure I had not left full waterskins there before turning towards the gate. I stopped on the small hillock next to the windchime hanging from a pine tree and looked out to the road. In the approaching helicarriage I saw a driver and two men in blue uniforms, whose features I could not discern. I knew I had arranged a tea visit for Thursday, but it was only Wednesday. Could I have mixed the days up? I tried to keep the teahouse clean, so I could carry out a tea ceremony with short notice if needed, but I hated visits for which I had no time to prepare. And now I had to get Mai and Vesa out of the teahouse with their waterskins without making the situation look strange.

Fortunately, the water pipe running to the house from the fell was closed. I only dared to keep it open one day a week, because if a water patrol had inspected the grounds, I wouldn’t have been able to explain why the water pipes were still working in the tea master’s house, unlike elsewhere in the village. Therefore I would store as much water as I could when I kept the pipe open, and usually filled the villagers’ skins from those reserves. Now I was grateful for my caution.

The helicarriage flitted between the trees as it made its way through and stopped under the seagrass roof by the gate. When the guests stepped down from the back seat, I saw their faces and started. One of them was a stranger to me, but the other one was the same blond-haired soldier I had seen outside the gate of Sanja’s house only a few weeks earlier.

‘Welcome to the tea master’s house,’ I said and bowed. ‘May I inquire the reason for your unexpected visit?’

The blond-haired soldier bowed back to me.

‘I don’t believe we have been introduced,’ he said. ‘I am Lieutenant Muromäki and I work under Commander Taro. This here is Captain Liuhala.’ His companion nodded towards me. ‘I come here by Major Bolin’s recommendation. I believe you are expecting us to a tea ceremony today.’

My lungs tightened and my breathing caught in my throat. The ceremony had been arranged in writing, as was customary, and as I had not been familiar with Muromäki’s name, I hadn’t made the connection with the face I now saw before me. I hoped my voice sounded steady as I replied, ‘I was expecting you tomorrow, Lieutenant Muromäki. The letter I received mentioned tomorrow’s date, and I confirmed the date in my reply to you.’

Muromäki tilted his head. He looked like a narrow-faced dog catching the scent of a prey animal in the wind.

‘That is strange, Miss Kaitio,’ he said. ‘I am certain I dictated this date to the scribe. Tomorrow is not at all possible.’

‘I have tea guests at the moment,’ I said. ‘But they were ready to leave. If you can wait for half an hour, I will have time to tidy the teahouse for you. I’m afraid the sweets are not quite fresh. I had intended to make some more tomorrow morning before your arrival.’

‘If you do have tea guests, why are you not in the teahouse?’ Muromäki asked.

‘I forgot to bring the sweets from the house before the start of the ceremony.’

‘We’ll return to the matter in half an hour, then,’ Muromäki said. I bowed to him again, and he and his companion returned to the helicarriage in the shade.

I went to the kitchen and found half a bowl of old tea sweets in one of the cupboards. I checked quickly that they were not mouldy and tasted one: it was dry, but not rancid. They would have to do. I carried the bowl to the teahouse. I nearly entered through the visitors’ sliding door, and at the last moment I remembered to use the master’s entrance behind the building. Mai and Vesa looked at me questioningly when I stepped into the room.

‘You must be careful,’ I told them. ‘There are two soldiers at the gate. They believe you are here as my tea guests. I will walk you to the gate. When you take your leave, thank me for the ceremony, call me Master Kaitio and bow low. Are you sure you can carry all these waterskins safely?’ I asked Mai. Her face had fallen and she had begun chewing at the nail of her little finger.

Mai made a couple of movements, as if to test her muscles against the weight of water.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Are you ready?’

Mai looked at Vesa. He nodded, his head moving up and down again and again. After that, she nodded too. I pointed at the visitors’ entrance.

‘When you are outside, wait for me.’

It felt to me as if Mai’s waterskins were splashing loudly on each step towards the gate as we walked up the garden path. I saw Vesa’s movements from the corner of my eye, and I was afraid he would start skipping or do something else unsuitable for a tea visitor.

When we eventually reached the gate, I bowed to Mai. She bowed back stiffly, and Vesa followed suit.

‘Thank you, Master Kaitio. It was a pleasure visiting you.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Harmaja. May clear waters flow your way.’

Muromäki had stepped down from the helicarriage to stretch his legs. When Mai and Vesa walked to the grit road between the trees, he spoke to Vesa.

‘You’re a little young to participate in a tea ceremony.’

I caught a glimpse of Mai’s alarm, but she collected herself surprisingly quickly. The presence of water patrols and soldiers watching the village had taught us all to cover our tracks; our muscles and faces and tongues still recalled the normal shape of life and were quick to resume it when needed. Mai placed a heavy hand on Vesa’s shoulder and said, ‘Just trying to teach the boy some manners. He wants to be an official when he grows up.’

Muromäki smiled, and I thought of a hungry dog again.

‘Is that so? Good luck with the career, lad,’ he said and mussed up Vesa’s dark hair with his hand.

Mai nodded to Muromäki and steered Vesa on.

‘Goodbye, madam!’ Muromäki called after them. They walked slowly, and Mai’s steps were not light. Vesa kept glancing back over his shoulder, his eyes wide, but Mai turned his head firmly towards the road ahead of them. The movement of her hand was stiff.

‘I will chime the bell, when everything is ready,’ I told Muromäki. I turned around and rushed to the teahouse, and at every step I wondered if he had noticed something out of the ordinary.

The cups tinkled against each other as I placed the tray on the teahouse floor, but Muromäki showed no sign of having noticed the trembling of my hands. I concealed my nervousness behind the form of the ceremony as best I could: I let the familiar movements flow on their own, and at the same time I attempted to furtively read traces of suspicion or victory in him. I found none. Muromäki was unexpectedly familiar with the etiquette and didn’t ask unusual questions. He spoke with Liuhala in a low voice and nothing suggested that this was anything more than a brief respite from work for them.

The soft roaring of the near-boiling water in the cauldron soothed me. I reminded myself of the idea built within the heart of the tea ceremony: before tea, everyone is equal, even if their lives never cross outside the walls of the teahouse. I slowly began to believe that he had come here only for the ceremony and was not carrying out Taro’s commands, and that his coming on the wrong day had really been a misunderstanding. Muromäki did not mention Taro again, and did not talk about anything but the quality of the tea, the teaware and the unusually cold last winter. I found myself thinking: could there be a world in which people don’t need to choose sides, where everyone can sit together drinking tea without some holding power and others living in fear? It was a world of which tea masters had always dreamed, which they had built, which they had guarded – but had it ever been real, could it ever be?

In that world, which perhaps was not this one, Muromäki bowed and took the tea I offered, and I didn’t need to label him a friend or foe in my mind.

In this world, I bowed to him at the end of the ceremony and walked out through the tea master’s entrance. The illusion of a space where power didn’t exist crumbled in the dusk of the teahouse. I walked Muromäki and Liuhala to the gate and didn’t know if I had just served a friend or foe.

Those weeks surrounding the summer solstice, when water flowed in secret from the fell to the tea master’s house, and villagers found myriad ways of transporting it to their homes – under their clothes, inside hidden compartments in carts, under scrap wood and furniture and garments I pretended to be selling or sending for repairs, and so on – I spent every moment I could spare behind the closed door of my room, examining maps and notes. I looked into place names, I looked into roads, estimating their usability, measuring distances, researching the terrain and guessing at the time it would take to travel by helicarriage from one place to the next. I spent a week calculating the hours and days it would take to journey to the Lost Lands and back, I estimated the amount of food and water the helicarriage could accommodate, and how much slower the weight carried would make the travelling. I captured a handful of blazeflies inside a lantern and began dropping fruit pieces for them in order to see how long they would live and produce light, if I didn’t let them go.

Eventually, on a cloudy day when Midsummer was already half a month behind, I told Sanja about my plan.

We were sitting on cushions on the floor of her workshop. I had an open notebook in my lap. A large fly trapped inside buzzed up and down the mesh wall, moving from the floor to the ceiling and back again. Sanja was fitting a silver-coloured disc with the number seven painted on it into the past-machine. The other six were piled in the box where we kept them. This was the only one we had not finished listening to.

‘Sanja,’ I began. ‘Have you wondered what it’s like in the Lost Lands now?’

‘Why would I?’ she asked and pressed the lid of the indentation on the machine closed. I shrugged, but didn’t reply. She raised her gaze and stared at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I think I only understood then how serious I was. I dug up a map from my bag that I had packed earlier to bring with me.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said. ‘You’ve got nothing but a few fragments of the past. Even if the expedition was real, we don’t have the whole account of their journey. If there was clean water in the Lost Lands in the Twilight Century, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that there is some now. And how would you ever get there?’

‘By the roads.’ I spread open the map on which I had drawn the possible route. ‘Rovaniemi is on the border of the Lost Lands. I think I’ll be able to get a helicarriage, which will be easy to drive all the way there. I’ve researched these maps, and these old books, and the notes, and current news, too. I’m fairly certain that there are several unguarded roads crossing the border north of Rovaniemi. Past-world roads were wide and well-constructed, they were made for fast vehicles. Many of them must still be usable, because there are people living in those areas, just outside the Lost Lands. The Jansson expedition used the past-roads, we can follow the same route they—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Sanja interrupted. ‘What do you mean, “we”?’

I realised I had spoken without thinking. I blushed.

‘I thought maybe you’d like to go with me,’ I muttered, embarrassed.

Sanja stared at me, and I realised I had never imagined I’d be going alone. In all my daydreams she had been there with me, reading the map, navigating by the stars, climbing the mountains and exploring the caves with me. I hadn’t really considered the possibility that she might not want to go, or what I would do if my only chance would be to go alone.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said, and her face was soft despite her words when she spoke to me. ‘How could I go? Mum and dad and Minja can’t make it here without me. I can’t leave them. Besides, all the roads are being watched. How could I even get to Rovaniemi, let alone further? I don’t have a fake passpod like you.’

‘You said you could maybe hack another one,’ I reminded her.

‘Maybe,’ Sanja sighed. ‘There are too many maybes in your plan. And if, if we could somehow make it to the Lost Lands, and there wasn’t any water there after all? It would all be a waste of time.’

‘I know there is water there,’ I said. ‘There must be.’

Sanja would not give in.

‘Even if there was,’ she said. ‘Then what?’

She was right, of course. Even if we did find water – if I did, I corrected in my mind – I’d have no way of bringing it to the village. How many villagers would be willing to leave for a strange land only with a vague promise of water? And even if some of them were desperate enough to look for a new place to live, the Lost Lands were forbidden, inaccessible. One or two travellers might be able to make their way there, but the more people making the journey, the more difficult it would be.

It felt insufferable to give up the plan that had been taking shape for weeks and months, but I might perhaps have been ready to try, to bury it under impossibility and quietly let go of it, if that day had taken a different course, if what happened next had not happened.

Sanja switched the past-machine on. The disc began to spin in its nest and a male voice recited the date, which I had already written down earlier. It spoke of research results and weather. I followed my notes, and began scribbling down what he was saying when the recording reached the part we had not listened to before. After half a page or so of new notes, the voice suddenly stopped mid-word. There was a click, then humming, and then a female voice sounded in the loudspeakers. It said, ‘Another try. Nils, if you hear this, I’m sorry to record over your log, but this is more important.’ She went quiet for a moment.

I glanced at Sanja and saw that she, too, had recognised the voice. I had lately been so concerned with the travel route of the Jansson Expedition that I had nearly forgotten the woman whose tale had been cut short at the end of the first disc. It had not appeared on any other discs. Yet this was undoubtedly the same voice, and excitement wriggled inside me like a fish in a net. The gap between this moment and the Twilight Century had unexpectedly closed. I held my breath, as the woman’s next words flowed into the room.

‘It’s hard to know where to begin,’ the woman said on the disc. ‘History has no beginning and no end, there are just events that people give the shape of stories in order to understand them better… And in order to tell a story one must choose what not to tell.’

She continued to speak, and we listened, and all words that were not hers vanished from us. Outside clouds were covering the sky, and behind them the sky was the colour of deep summer, even if we did not see it. Grass grew, people breathed, the world turned. But inside, in this workshop, in these words everything changed: changed what we knew, changed what we felt, changed like a sea that rises and swallows all streets and houses, will not withdraw, will not give back what it has claimed.

When the disc was finally spinning hollow silence into the room, breath fluttered wildly in my lungs. Something had shifted within me, within us, and when I looked out, it was as if I had opened my eyes for the first time and seen everything more sharply: the jagged stone in the middle of the backyard, the spiky limbs of a dried shrub, a cobweb broken on the hinge of a door.

Once the silent space around a secret is shattered, it cannot be made whole again.

‘Do you think it’s true?’ Sanja asked eventually. Her voice was frail, and the cracked void around us would not withdraw, it rested deep and impossible to banish like the ocean. ‘Everything she said?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s true.’

‘So do I,’ Sanja said.

She switched the past-machine off. The disc slowed down and eventually stopped. Of all silences I had encountered this was the gravest and most inevitable: not the silence of secrets, but of knowing.

That night, when the house was empty and the garden still, and no one was moving on the road, I walked to the spring. The sun was brushing the horizon, but would not drop below it, and the summer night was brighter than a midwinter day.

My lantern cast a glow on the dark rock walls of the fell. When I lowered it near the surface of the water, I saw what I had already sensed from further away.

The surface had sunk. Not dangerously so, but it was lower than I remembered seeing it before.

The white mark on the rock glinted below the water like a wide, blind eye, clearer than ever.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I lifted my insect hood, wiped my brow with a creased rag and drank a sip from a small waterskin. A swarm of dark-winged horseflies bounced about me when I lowered the hood back into place. I whirled the rag in a circle to chase them off. The heavy weather glued the garments to my skin. The summer had reached its sweltering core, and a soggy, molten sun was emanating heat behind layers of clouds. I had only managed one swap so far despite having stood on the village square for several hours. The bulky floor fan had been good enough for the baker, who had in exchange given me two shoulder-strapped sacks of dried bread. I knew the fan was worth more, but this was probably the highest price anyone in the village would pay at the moment. I needed food that was easy to carry and would keep for a long time, so it still wasn’t a bad swap.

A short, wide-boned man whose sand-coloured hair had thinned away almost entirely stopped in front of my stall. I could guess his thoughts when he observed with his pale-grey eyes the collection of objects I had gathered from the house: a couple of chairs decorated with woodcuttings, too gaudy for his living room; a handful of past-world books that no one in his house would have time to read; a tea set and a few plates he would find difficult to fill. The only thing he took a longer look at were the sandals – two old pairs that had belonged to my father, one pair that my mother had left behind. The man compared the sizes of the soles with his own well-worn footwear, but seemed to decide that he had no interest in trading those.

‘Is that cart for sale?’ he asked, pointing at the wagon of the helicycle in which I had placed some of the items on display.

‘No, it’s the only one I have,’ I replied.

‘Too bad. I’d have offered blue lotus or pipe-leaf for that,’ he said, nodded goodbye and continued on his way.

The atmosphere in the square was almost relaxed today. I had only seen two soldiers when I had arrived, and they had been leaning against a wall at the edge of the square, looking indifferent and drinking amber-coloured liquid from their waterskins. A couple of children were arranging frayed plastic mahjong tiles on the ground, someone was playing an accordion across the uneven puzzle of the stalls, and Ninia’s sister Tamara was selling trinkets and hair brooches a short distance away on the other side of the alley. It seemed strange to me that women would still want to decorate their hair. When I had mentioned this to Sanja, she had said, ‘People will hold on to what they’re used to, for as long as they can. It’s the only way to survive.’

I saw a blue uniform flashing among the stalls. It approached, until I discerned a familiar face. Major Bolin saw me as he was turning into the alley where I had set up my own table, and walked right towards me. His heavy boots left deep, sharp-edged patterns in the sand.

Bolin stopped in front of my stall. I bowed to him, and he bowed back.

‘Noria,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking the villagers where to find you.’ He looked around and lowered his voice. ‘I got your message.’

‘Would you like some tea, Major Bolin?’ I asked.

He nodded. I gestured for him to walk around my stall. I threw a cloth over the sales table to cover the items and left the curtain of the back wall slightly open so I would see if anyone came to trade. Behind the curtain I offered a stool to Bolin and sat down on another one myself. I poured us some warm tea from a waterskin and lit a bitter-smelling incense stick to keep insects away, but horseflies kept buzzing around us when we lifted our insect hoods to drink.

‘How have you been, Noria?’ Bolin asked and sipped his tea. His face was paper-dry, his movements slower than I remembered.

‘Hanging in there,’ I said.

Bolin was quiet, twirling the tea in his ceramic cup, looking sunken in thought. Eventually he said, ‘I can help you, but I can’t do it for free. Helicarriages are expensive these days, especially if you don’t want anyone to start wondering about what you need it for.’ He raised his eyes, and I heard an unspoken question behind his words.

‘I need it to be able to go and sell chattels outside the village,’ I said. ‘I know there are more buyers for valuables in Kuusamo and Kuoloyarvi. A skilled seller can make good profit.’

Bolin examined me, and I hoped he was thinking of what I had deliberately left unmentioned: the black market, the rarer items he knew were in the tea master’s house, because he had helped my parents acquire some of them.

‘Are you sure the risk is worth the price?’ he asked.

‘There are few tea visitors these days, and even fewer pay as well as they used to.’

Bolin considered this and said then, ‘I’ve heard that the monitoring of the black market is more lenient in Kuoloyarvi than in Kuusamo. Not that such a thing would be of any interest to you, of course.’

‘How much?’ I asked, congratulating myself on my success.

Bolin leaned forward on his seat and drew a five-figure number in the sand. It was more than I had expected, but I would be able to pay it.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said. ‘When do you need the payment?’

‘Beforehand,’ Bolin replied. ‘I can send someone to fetch the money from your house tomorrow.’

‘No, it’s better if I bring it here,’ I said. ‘Is that alright?’

Bolin nodded.

‘I will see to it that no one makes a connection between the helicarriage and me,’ he said quietly. ‘I expect you to do the same.’

He drained his tea and placed the cup in the sand next to the leg of the stool. The lines on his face were deep, and they grew deeper as he spoke.

‘This is the last thing I can do for you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Bolin bowed his head slightly. I bowed back. As he was walking away, a thread of ants climbed up the side of the cup to reach for the drop of liquid left at the bottom. I brushed off the numbers Bolin had drawn on the ground with the tip of my sandal, until there was nothing left but a smooth plane of sand.

The afternoon stretched towards the evening and little by little people began to collect their stalls and merchandise. I detached the curtain from the supporting poles and folded it. I arranged my items in the cart, lifted the bread sacks among them, and when everything was in place and I had bound straps to hold the load, I steered the helicycle towards the tea master’s house. I passed leather-brown, nodding gardens, the medical centre that stared out to the road with blank windows and people returning home from the market. From afar I could see a low, red-brick house and the bright-blue circle on its door. It was the latest house in the village to bear the mark of a water crime. The circle had appeared on the door five weeks earlier. I turned from my route to take a detour so I wouldn’t need to drive directly past the marked door.

More than once posters painted on canvas caught my eye on the roadside. They promised rewards to anyone reporting water criminals. The baker’s son, who was a year younger than me, was standing in front of one of the posters. I remembered him from the village school. He had been one of the swiftest sprinters in his class, was always impeccably dressed and got mediocre marks. He was wearing a blue uniform and painting a new, raised reward sum on top of the poster. A short distance away was another poster, its wet paint still shining faintly. If he was on military payroll, I thought, that explained how the baker’s family could still afford to swap bread for fans.

Back at home I did something I had been avoiding for weeks.

I opened a wooden box I kept on the bookshelf in my room, and took out the message-pod my mother had sent. I had not used it before. In spite of my mother’s request, I had written to her a few times on the old message-pod. I had not mentioned a word about the other, hacked pod, but I had wanted her to know that I was in good health despite the war and the circumstances in the village. I had not received a reply, so I didn’t know if my messages had made it to her. Yet now I had to let her know about my decision.

I placed my finger on the screen and waited as the display switched on and Aino Vanamo’s name appeared. I wrote in the field, I’ve decided to stay in the village until Moonfeast. I will leave for Xinjing the day after the feast and will let you know the date of my arrival. Aino.

I sent the message, switched off the pod and put it back in the wooden box. I knew the lie I had just told was not the answer she had hoped for.

Early in the following afternoon a young woman dressed in the blue of the army kitchen stopped at my stall.

‘Noria Kaitio?’ she asked.

I bowed. The woman handed me a sealed letter.

‘It’s from Major Bolin,’ she said. ‘He said you’d know what was needed in exchange.’

I pulled a sealed mail pouch containing the money from my bag.

‘He also sent a message,’ she said, leaned closer and lowered her voice. ‘Sunday before midnight.’

‘Sunday before midnight,’ I repeated. Today was Thursday. The woman nodded, turned on her heels and walked away. When she had gone, I walked behind my stall and looked around to make sure no one was paying attention to me. An old lady was dozing against the wall under the awning of the stall next to me; the two children I had seen the day before were drawing in the sand. I broke the seal and pulled the contents of the envelope out. A map was drawn on a piece of paper and a place outside the village, on the outskirts of the Dead Forest, was marked with a cross.

The messenger had told me when, but now I also knew where.

On Sunday I started walking towards the Dead Forest well before midnight, because the journey was long. The night-glow of the sun floated on the water-coloured sky, but the shadowy chill of the ground seeped into me, climbing my bones and washing me shivery inside. I didn’t know what to expect. I had no choice but to trust Bolin.

The village was quiet. I took the long route across the side of the fell because I was worried I might run into soldiers. A smoke-dark haze of insects hovered in the air like clusters of abandoned shadows. They would fall apart for a short while, scatter around me when I walked through them, and clench again into swarming statues dimming the landscape like ancient spirits risen from under stones or buried memories made visible. Stones shuffled under the soles of my walking shoes, grinding faintly against each other.

The Dead Forest had once been called Mosswood, a name that recalled deep-green leaves moving in the wind and verdancy so lush and moist that you could feel it on your skin. Even longer ago, when words for such greenness were not needed yet, because it was a given in these lands, the forest had not had a name at all, so my father had told me. Now its bare trunks and branches twisted towards the sky sand-dry and colourless like a cobweb woven across the landscape, or the empty husks of insects caught in it. Life no longer circulated in them, their veins were brittled and broken, their skins frozen into letters of a forgotten language, near-incomprehensible marks of what had once been. Some trunks had wrung themselves into the ground, where they lay speechless, still.

I followed the path drawn on the map, until I reached the place marked with a cross. I approached it cautiously, unsure of what was waiting for me. I listened.

The only sounds were the slow sinking of the forest, the wind clutching leafless twigs and the faint creaking of the trunks turned towards the earth.

It took me a while to find what I was looking for. The helicarriage was hidden with skill. I would not have seen it, if I had not known where to look. It had been driven into a shallow hole and covered with an earth-coloured, frayed seagrass rug and dry branches. I was content to notice that the road along which it had apparently been brought started some distance away. It meant the carriage was good enough for a more difficult terrain. I lifted the seagrass cover and examined the carriage. I knew little about helicarriages, but this one looked newer and seemed to be in better condition than Jukara’s. There were scratches on the sides and the tyres were slightly worn, but the solar panels and seats were unbroken. The start key was in the lock. I pulled the rug back over the carriage. I walked along a narrow path until it joined a slightly wider dirt road, which wound towards the village. The road was closed with a half-rotten beam and large boulders. Seen from the other direction, it looked like it had not been used in years. There were no tracks: Bolin had kept his promise about the carriage being difficult to trace. Yet someone knew it was here, so the sooner I could drive it away, the better.

I had given a lot of thought to where to keep the helicarriage. The easiest would have been to hide it in the tea master’s house, but I didn’t want to risk a water patrol discovering it loaded with food and water, obviously equipped for a longer journey. Therefore I had decided to hide it near the plastic grave under an old bridge. The grave was spilling over on the edges with old junk people had left around it, and the mouth of the space under the bridge was nearly blocked by earth and rubbish. From a distance it was impossible to know there was a hollow space inside. Sanja and I had found the place a few years earlier. If someone happened to be passing near the bridge and saw the helicarriage, the discovery would be impossible to connect with anyone. The worst that could happen would be losing the carriage. Transporting food and water to it would be more difficult, but if I took small amounts every day, I could do it.

Once I’d found the gap which had been used to bring the carriage into the forest – it was possible to move the beam, and I managed to pry one of the boulders to the side with a dry branch – I walked back to the carriage. I’d have to wait for the morning, when the nightly curfew would expire, and use the remotest roads possible. The route to the hiding place was difficult, but this meant the risk of being spotted was smaller.

I sat on the crackling dry ground and listened to the stillest essence of the night closing in around me.

I first noticed that the hacked message-pod was missing when I returned to the house in the morning. I opened the wooden box to check if my mother had replied to me, and I saw immediately that the message-pod was not where I had left it, on top of the things I had collected from the plastic grave. The weight of my heart fell into my stomach. I tried to remember when I had last taken the message-pod out and switched it on. The morning before? Or the day before that? I wasn’t sure. Several villagers had come to the house to get water in the past few days. The adults didn’t usually come any further than the kitchen, but the women had brought their children, who had been wandering around in the rooms as usual. My first thought was that one of them had gone into my room, found my wooden box and taken the message-pod without asking for permission. In theory it was possible. I tried to remember if I could have left the pod somewhere else. I searched in the kitchen. I searched in the living room. I looked behind the bookshelves and under the bed and between the piles of books and in the pockets of my garments, with no success.

I did not want to think about the most frightening possibility: that the message-pod had not been taken by any of the children, and not by mistake.

Sanja came for a visit in the afternoon. I was sweeping the veranda of the teahouse, and was not in the mood for talking.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she said and looked around.

‘There’s no one else here,’ I told her and placed the broom against the wall of the teahouse. There were things we only spoke of when we were alone, and others we didn’t speak of at all. One of them was what the voice of a woman had said on the last silver-coloured disc. I wondered if this was what she wanted to talk about now.

Sanja looked me in the eye.

‘I want to go with you,’ she said.

‘I’m not going to the spring for a few days,’ I said and started walking towards the house.

‘I don’t mean the spring.’ Her words sounded unusually heavy. I stopped and turned to look at her. Her face was tense, as if she was holding back grief or excitement. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I want to go to the Lost Lands with you. Mum and dad and Minja are alright now that she is better and mum can work again. Can I come?’

I wanted to pull her into my arms, so glad I was that she was stepping into my dreams after all, that we would finally be the real explorers we had played as children. But an unexpected problem was complicating my plans.

‘Of course I want you to go with me,’ I said. ‘But the message-pod my mother sent has gone missing. I don’t know where I’ve put it. I’m afraid someone may have stolen it. I don’t have a hacked passpod—’

A flush began to colour Sanja’s pale face, and she was moving restlessly.

‘Noria,’ she said. ‘I need to confess something.’ She pushed a hand into her bag and pulled out my message-pod. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I wanted to surprise you.’ She handed the hacked pod back to me, and I took it without a word. I was relieved, because no one from the village had taken it, and angry, because she had taken it without asking, and a little worried, because she had managed to take it without me realising. I switched the pod on.

‘Don’t worry, it’s every bit the same as it was,’ Sanja said. She rummaged in her bag again and pulled out another message-pod, a little older and more battered. ‘Look.’ She stepped next to me and placed her finger on the display. A paper-white light switched on, and a moment later a name appeared: ‘Lumi Vanamo.’ The birthplace was recorded as Rovaniemi and the birth date just over a year after Aino Vanamo’s birthday.

‘You were born in Xinjing,’ Sanja said. ‘But our parents, Outi and Kai Vanamo, had already decided to return to their homelands near Rovaniemi. They moved there across the continent when you were very small, and I was born only a year later. After our parents drowned in an accident on the seaweed fields, we completed the last three years of school in Kuusamo where we stayed with our relatives. We’re now returning to a small village on the outskirts of Rovaniemi to the family home our deceased parents left us.’ She raised her eyes from the message-pod and grinned at me.

‘Not bad,’ I said, impressed. Sanja shrugged.

‘I had already thought of two alternative ways that might work for hacking the pod. I needed yours to check which one would do the trick. It didn’t take too long in the end.’ She switched off her message-pod. ‘The most difficult part was to get my hands on another second-hand pod.’

‘You’re brilliant,’ I told her.

‘No. Just curious, and I work until my fingers bleed,’ she said. ‘Well, when are we going?’

Later, when she was checking the settings of the message-pod, I watched the movements of her fingers and the focused expression on her face through which I couldn’t see. She had taken the message-pod from my room in secret, but I wanted to block the space suspicion had carved in me. I told her everything about my plan, and the helicarriage, and the places I wanted to go. As if through a dream I could feel the flowing water on my skin, waiting for us clear and relentless, now nearly within my reach. Nothing else mattered.

I didn’t ask what had made her change her mind, and she didn’t say.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The residents of the red-brick house were executed the day when everything was ready for our departure, two weeks after I had acquired the helicarriage. I did not see it. I saw the rust-brown stains on the grit of the front yard, and the furniture that had been carried outside. At a glance, some distance away, I saw the door where a plank nailed across the frame split the blue circle in two.

‘Don’t look,’ Sanja said, but I looked anyway, and then wished I hadn’t. That was what we did nowadays: tried to avert our gaze from the things that were happening, and failed, and then tried to live on as if we had not seen them. All the while those things stayed with us, made their home under our skin, in the thrumming, dark-red space of the chest, their unbending slivers scratching the soft, wet heart. When I walked on the streets, I could see people carrying these sights within: buried, but not deep enough not to cast an afterthought across their faces, altering them as a slow shift in light.

We were on our way to the plastic grave. The sky was a hazy barrier of white and grey and pale blue, changing like the sea, but whether it was closing into a storm or opening up to a flow of bare light, I could not tell. The silver-coloured discs weighed in my bag.

‘We should hide them,’ Sanja had said. ‘Someplace where no one knows to look, but someone might find them. Those who recorded their story wanted someone to know. They realised that it could change everything people knew about the oil wars and the past-world. We should give the same chance to others. Just in case.’

I knew what she meant. We hadn’t said aloud, if we don’t come back. But I had thought about it, and I was certain she had, too.

We walked across the plastic grave, where the hollow bones of frail junk crunched under the thick soles of our sandals. We reached the carcass of the past-vehicle near the place where I had found the first silver-coloured disc and the past-machine that I suspected had belonged to the Jansson expedition.

I had sealed the discs in the same metal box they had been inside in the spring, and wrapped it in frayed fabric and tattered junk plastic. I pulled the parcel out of my bag. Sanja dug a hole where one of the rear tyres would have been, and we placed the discs in it. I thought of the woman’s voice on the discs and I silently thanked her in my mind. She, a tea master’s daughter from an unfamiliar time, had gone exploring long before us and shown it to be possible. Without her I might never have found the courage to put my plan into practice. I piled some loose junk on top of the discs, and we covered the whole thing with a ragged cluster of plastic bags. Nothing revealed that there was something important hidden in the place.

Sanja turned to go, but I asked her to wait.

I climbed into the cockpit of the vehicle and pushed my hand into the hole in the rusted-through dashboard. I took out a round plastic box. It was not heavy, and the items inside moved with a rustle to one side when I tilted it.

‘Do you remember this?’ I asked.

Sanja’s face changed, as if light had suddenly spread across it.

‘I’d forgotten!’ she exclaimed. ‘What did we seal in this one?’

She stepped closer and examined the year we had painted on the lid of the box to mark the planned opening date.

‘Still over twenty years away,’ I said.

‘We had a clause,’ she reminded me. ‘Not to be opened until the agreed date, except under extreme circumstances.’

‘You think this counts as an extreme circumstance?’

She was smiling, but I could see the underlying seriousness, when she replied, ‘If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.’

I looked at her. She caught my eye and nodded slightly. She took the box from me and held it. I turned the lid of the box, until the lacquer seal we had carefully melted over its edge cracked and broke. Inside the lid was painted a date from ten years earlier. We had been eight years old when we had collected treasures for this time capsule. We bent our heads to examine the contents together. There was a small, rust-stained metal lock and a key which didn’t fit in it, a yellowed page full of small print – I must have torn it from one of my mother’s books – a few smooth stones and a pair of old, scratched eyeglasses with one broken stem. The lenses were tinted with different colours: one red, one blue.

‘I remember those,’ Sanja said. ‘The Magic Glasses.’

I too remembered the game we had played with the glasses: as explorer-spies we had taken turns to wear them, look through walls into hidden places and describe to each other what we saw.

‘Should we take something with us?’ I suggested. ‘For luck?’

‘Every gram of extra weight will slow us down,’ Sanja remarked, and was right, of course. I put the glasses back in the box and was about to close the lid, when she stopped my hand and said, ‘Not yet.’

She handed the box to me, untied a worn-thin seagrass bracelet from around her wrist and placed it on top of the other items.

‘You too,’ she said.

‘Have you got your penknife?’ I asked.

Sanja searched for the knife in her pocket and handed it to me. I placed the box on the dashboard, drew the thin blade out of its sheath and cut loose a long strand of my hair.

‘It’s all I’ve got,’ I said and gave the knife back to Sanja.

I twisted the hair into a coil around my fingers, pulled it into a loose knot and placed it inside the seagrass bracelet. The knot loosened and unravelled a little, and settled against the bracelet, within its uneven loop: my dark hair and the dried grass of the sea that Sanja had carried around her wrist, together in an unbroken circle with no beginning and no end. Sanja closed the lid, taking care to fit the broken edges of the seal against each other.

It felt like a precaution against mortality, as if we had cast a spell that could not be undone. If we didn’t come back, something would be left of us – even if it was only nameless, childish and without value, but something we had chosen to be preserved, a trace that we had left behind.

That was what I thought.

I believed that was what she thought, too.

I still want to believe this.

When we left the plastic grave, Sanja said, ‘I’ll see you tonight.’ Her body was narrow and angular inside the rough linen fabric. The shadow of the insect hood was soft on her face. She walked away and did not look behind.

After Sanja had gone, I trudged across the uneven ground to the helicarriage to check once more that everything was in order. The underbelly of the bridge smelled of crumbling earth and decaying rubbish. I went through the contents of the wagon towed behind the helicarriage. I had calculated carefully the amount of food and water and added a little extra to be safe, but not too much. I didn’t know how accurate my estimates of our journeying speed would turn out to be, or what the actual condition of the roads might be once we crossed the border. Although my hopes were high, I had not dared to rely completely on finding water, so most of the space was reserved for carrying drinking water.

I moved the sacks of dried fruits, sunflower seeds and almonds in order to make space for one more waterskin, which I had carried on my back. The problem of transporting water had been our biggest headache, because we knew that we would certainly be stopped if we tried to openly carry several weeks’ worth of drinking water with us. We had gone through all the devices of water fraud and smuggling plans we had developed over the past weeks when the villagers had been taking water to their homes from the tea master’s house. Sanja had made some carefully planned adjustments to the helicarriage, and the result was her masterpiece: she had removed the seats, moulded a lockable empty space under them and concealed it again so meticulously that it was impossible to tell the carriage had been modified. You could fit a week’s worth of waterskins under the fake bottom of the cart, and furthermore we had built different secret compartments and containers in the food chests. To cover the cart, we had tightened a double plastic-and-canvas awning over a frame which would protect the contents and under which we could sleep.

One of my worries were the blazeflies. I didn’t know how many we would manage to find along the way – those we would take with us when we left the tea master’s house would not live until we came back. It was late summer, and daylight still stretched across nearly all hours of the day. Yet in just a few weeks’ time the nights would be growing darker again, and before two full moons passed, Moonfeast would turn the year towards winter. While our plan was to return to the village well before that, the fading of the blaze lanterns might become a problem and slow down our journey. The thought of their faded glow also made me uneasy for another reason: I didn’t know how deep in the veins of the earth the water was hidden, or what kind of darkness we would need to descend into in order to find it. Sanja had fixed two solar-powered past-torches for us, but their light was dimmer than that of the blaze lanterns, and one of them kept buzzing and hiccupping. ‘I couldn’t get good enough wires,’ Sanja had said, miffed, and we’d had to settle for that.

She hadn’t told anyone about our plan, not even her parents. She said she didn’t want them to worry. I suspected that she might not have been able to hold on to her decision to go with me if they had asked her to stay.

I spread a cracked plastic tarpaulin to cover the helicarriage and the wagon and piled dry branches and junk on top of it. When I was happy with the camouflage, I walked out into daylight. We had filled the mouth of the cavernous space with rubbish that was lying around, and I blocked the gap behind me so that it looked closed.

The sky was the colour of rock and lichen, and fresh bruises. The first drops fell on the linen fabric of my shirt at the edge of the village, spreading into large, uneven stains and soaking their wetness onto my skin. By the time I reached the road leading to the gate of the house, my trouser bottoms were dripping with water and the sand darkened into mud was tarnishing their light fabric. The crisp, wooden scent of wet seagrass floated in the rain-dimmed air.

Out of habit I had carried the rain-containers into the garden in the morning after I had looked at the sky, even if I had no reason to use them. Let the villagers take the rainwater with them when they come tomorrow and find the house empty, I thought. It is the last thing I have to offer them in a while. Jukara would lead them into the cave in the fell before I returned, I was sure of it; I suspected he already went there in secret sometimes, even though I had asked him to avoid it, because a sudden increase in fell trekking among the villagers would not go unnoticed by the soldiers.

I closed my eyes and stood in the rain. I stepped out of my sandals onto the grass. The slippery blades shifted and flattened, drawing latticeworks on the skin of my soles. Water streamed to the back of my neck from my hair, wetting my back and my arms, dripping from the tip of my nose. I shed my clothes like an old skin, and felt raw and fresh and ready.

The wooden gathering-bucket I had placed next to the veranda steps was nearly half-full.

I walked into the house, changed into dry clothes and sat down on the floor.

Until now, I had tried to keep the house at least superficially as it had been in the time of my parents, despite the fact that I noticed how it wished to bend out of shape under change. I still made the effort to do the same, but my reasons were different. I wanted to be sure that when the villagers came here after we had left, nothing in the rooms would tell them that I had gone far and might stay away for a long time. I left clothes on the backs of chairs, as if I had put them down only to pick them up a moment later. There was an open book lying face down on the living room sofa that I had no intention of taking with me. Half of my morning tea was still left in the cup on the kitchen table; I didn’t clean it away. I wanted to leave behind a still frame of a life in progress: the illusion of unchanging quality would conceal the big change. I wished to delay the suspicions of the villagers for as long as I could.

Until the night, or another morning.

Everything was ready.

I locked the door and swept the stone slabs that formed the path to the teahouse. The rain-soaked leaves and blades of grass clung to the bristles of the broom. I placed it against the wall on the teahouse veranda.

I walked to the edge of the rock garden where the three tea plants grew. The rain had stopped, and water drops glistened on their narrow leaves. My father’s grave was covered by grass, and nothing distinguished its outline from the rest of the lawn now. I wanted to say something to him, but my mouth held only silence.

The sand of the rock garden was ragged with rain. I picked up the rake from the ground and raked it until it was neat. The traces of the metal teeth undulated among the boulders like water that flows in the darkness of the earth without slowing or quickening its pace.

The notebooks weighed in my bag, and in the garden the shadows were thickening, when I closed the gate behind me.

When I reached the bridge, everything seemed as it should. The blocked opening was covered in junk, and there was nothing to suggest that the place had been visited after I had left it earlier in the day. I thought she had not made it there yet. I moved a broken armchair and a roll of useless cable to the side in order to manoeuvre myself into the hiding place.

I didn’t immediately understand what I saw. It took a while before my eyes adjusted to the dim space under the bridge, and it took longer before I could comprehend what they were telling me.

The helicarriage and the four-wheeler with their contents were gone.

Breath caught in my chest, and a heavy lump formed at the back of my belly. I felt as if I had swallowed a large, sharp block of ice.

I sent a message to Sanja’s message-pod, then to her family’s pod. There was no reply. Not knowing what else to do, I began walking towards her house. I took a shortcut across the plastic grave, where my feet slipped over the rain-soaked surfaces and dark crannies opening into the very core of the buried past. I passed a few people who had been drawing mud-stained water from the small brook near the edge of the grave. Some of them were trying to catch rain from the sky into their skins and buckets. I passed houses, and saw people letting the water falling from clouds wash over their thirsty faces and bodies and hands.

I turned to the street where Sanja’s family lived and stopped.

There were soldiers in blue uniforms outside Sanja’s house. The door was open, and I’m certain of this: there was no blue circle on it, only the washed-out grey colour that it always wore. I didn’t see Sanja or her parents, but the soldiers kept coming and going out of the door, and I saw two of them walking towards the backyard and Sanja’s workshop.

One tall soldier was standing in the front yard, and when he turned his head, I recognised him despite the distance. It was Muromäki, Taro’s blond-haired second in command.

I turned around and forced myself not to run. My feet swelled heavy on the mud-tainted road, and the clouds hung low, brushing the dark fell-tops and bursting with the weight of their water.

In this landscape where everything had shifted and the world had fallen out of joint, I walked back into the tea master’s house, and I waited.

No one moved on the narrow road. The lights of my message-pods did not switch on. The world did not spin slower or faster.

After midnight I went into my room and lay in bed in the grey-blue dusk of the sunless night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t move. Near the morning I fell asleep for a short while, and when I woke up, it was difficult to breathe. I went to the veranda for some fresh air.

The clouds had withdrawn. The brightness of the morning slashed my eyes. I walked over the moist grass to the gathering-pool that rested in the middle of the garden. When I bent down to drink from it, I saw my own reflection on the surface of the water briefly before it shattered.

I heard the door close itself slowly with creaking hinges.

I turned to go back inside.

The blue circle on the door was still glistening moist with paint, shining in the luminous morning like a ring cut from the sky.