Memory of Water

EPILOGUE

She steps through the doorway.

‘What’s your business, miss?’ asks a blue-clad porter sitting in his glass-walled lodge. The entrance of the university building is quiet this early in the day.

‘I’m here to see Lecturer Kaitio,’ the girl says. She looks weary and narrow in the dim artificial light of the foyer, no older than twenty. ‘I haven’t arranged an appointment, but could you let her know I’m here, please?’

‘May I see your passpod?’ the porter asks and slides open a small window in the glass wall. The girl hands the pod to him. He reads the ID information on the screen, lifts the receiver of the internal phone off its hook and dials a short number. ‘Lecturer Kaitio?’ he says into the speaker. ‘There’s a young lady here who is asking to see you. Miss Vanamo.’ He measures the girl with his gaze, and something resembling a smile surfaces on his face. ‘All right, then.’ He places the receiver down. ‘She will come to meet you here.’ He hands the message-pod back to her.

The girl notices Lian Kaitio’s expression freeze for a passing moment when she arrives in the foyer. The porter is not looking at them, because he is busy fiddling with his mahjong game, and there is no one else in the hallway.

‘Please, follow me,’ Lian says, and the girl does.

When they enter Lian’s office, she pulls the door closed behind her, turns the key in the lock, seizes the girl’s shoulders and asks, ‘Where is Noria? Is she alright?’

She reads the answer in Sanja’s expression and pulls her into her arms, and all words are lost to them.

Sanja tells her everything, later.

She tells how the village was crushed in the grip of the military, and water was taken from people, and the spring became a shared secret.

She tells how Noria wanted to search for water in the Lost Lands and how it was their plan to go together.

She tells how she saw a water patrol behind her family home the same day when they were meant to leave, how she ran for the hiding place of the helicarriage and drove the carriage into the Dead Forest where she hid for weeks. She sent Noria one message after another, but each one of them bounced back. Eventually she crept into the village in secret, only to find out that her family had been taken away by soldiers and that there was a blue circle on the door of the tea master’s house.

She tells how she decided to travel across the continent to Xinjing, because she had no other place to go.

When she has told everything, a silence falls into the room, and Lian is crushing a wet handkerchief in her hand.

‘I don’t know what you want to do, Mrs Kaitio,’ Sanja says at length. ‘But I know what I need to do.’ She goes quiet for a moment. ‘I brought you something.’ She takes a threadbare roll of fabric from her bag and places it on the desk. She unfolds the knot.

Seven silver-coloured discs are glistening on top of the worn cloth.

This morning the world is dust and ashes, but not devoid of hope.