Relic

XLIII: Maius 20 Year 242, A.H.

I am sobbing. Lukas reaches out and touches my arm. “I know it’s hard to watch, Eva. But remember, this happened almost two hundred and fifty years ago. Elizabet’s anirniq has long been at peace. You saw her bones.”

He clenches my hand tightly as we stare at the black computer screen together. My face is wet with tears, just like hers. I’m not certain whether I’m crying over the loss of Elizabet’s life or my own, the life I’d always known.

“Elizabet died right after that post,” I say. It isn’t a question. I know it for a fact.

“Yes.”

“The ship never made it to New North.”

“No. Not with her alive, anyway.”

“You didn’t find any other posts?”

“Nope. Just this one and the other one that you saw. I wish we had her flash drive.”

“Flash drive?”

“It’s a file that stores things like her posts. She wore it around her neck. You saw it on in that last image. In the other post, she mentioned that she placed Robert’s last video on it.”

“Do you mean the amulet?” I ask, even though the word sounds wrong. I pull Elizabet’s necklace out from beneath my sealskin cloak.

Lukas’s eyes grow wide. “You’ve had it this whole time?”

“I didn’t realize what it was. I thought she used it to offer up prayers to Apple.”

“Even though I told you they didn’t pray to Apple? That Apple was just some stupid symbol of the Tech?” Lukas sounds angry.

How dare he get mad at me? After all he’s asked of me. “Why are you talking to me like that? I’m telling you what I believed at the time. What was right to believe.”

Lukas casts a quick glance toward the shadowy hall here his aanak disappeared. Perhaps he’s worried she’ll hear us. But his eyes soften and he nods. Not deferentially—he hasn’t treated me with deference at all since he took my hand and we started running. Like an equal. “I’m sorry, Eva. You’re right.”

He gently takes this mysterious thing and sticks the silver head into the side of the … computer. I can no longer think of it as an altar. I know that now if I am to see its truth, even though the word “computer” has no meaning.

Just like I thought: it is a sort of a puzzle piece—only I’d never have guessed exactly what kind of puzzle. The screen brightens and comes alive again.

This time, though, we’re not gazing at Elizabet. A handsome young man—definitely a Gallant if he’d lived in the Aerie—appears. His dark hair and fair, freckled cheeks are wet, and his bright green eyes look kind of wild. He stands on a windy, crowded dock.

It must be Robert.

“Elizabet, my kultanen. I’m thinking of you snug and safe on your parents’ icebreaker ship. Heading toward some polar island where your family’s set up camp—as only they could manage at the world’s end. You’ve always rejected their money and their grand designs for you and your life. Even for the sake of your trashy English boyfriend. Now I’m damned grateful for them. For the chance they’re giving you.

“It’s madness here at the docks, but I’m determined to get on one of these ships leaving the Helsinki harbor. My brother Alex has a friend from University who’s training as a marine biologist on one of the scientific boats. He’s trying to gain us passage. The ship’s called the Kalevala. I hope the name is a good omen.”

He looks away from the computer, toward the crowds. And then he speaks to the computer again, his voice low and quick. “Remember your debut as Juliet at the Mariinsky? You looked so exquisite on the stage, so effortless in your pirouettes and leaps. I felt I was the only one who knew how long you worked. How much you practiced to make everything appear so fluid and easy. How much you sacrificed to pursue your dream. Leaving Finland. Leaving me.

“Well, we are still together, my kultanen, are we not? Even now. Even as the polar ice caps melt and flood our world. What’s that famous line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? From the last ballet I saw you perform? ‘Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.’ ” His voice catches. “We aren’t really parting, are we, my kultanen? Just saying good night until the morrow. That is what I shall whisper on board the Kalevala, as we get closer and closer to you and this place, New North. Too good to be true, I think. An oasis, like from a myth. But I’ll try to believe. I have to. Until then, my kultanen, good night, good night, good night.”

He touches the screen and it darkens. “I don’t think I could stand another tick,” I admit. “Thank the Gods that screen is black.” I feel heartbroken and numb and angry and guilty all at once. Guilty because I’m glad it’s over. And heartbroken because I feel more bound to Elizabet than ever. Robert offered her what Lukas offered me: the promise that he would believe. For different reasons, obviously, but the word is aflame again. Believe.

Even Lukas seems moved. “It’s too hard, knowing what we know about them.”

I shake my head, doubt gnawing away at my thoughts. “Elizabet isn’t really the same person I wrote about in the Chronicle, is she? She loved to dance, and she made huge sacrifices to do it. She wasn’t forced. Dancing wasn’t the tawdry spectacle that we were taught about in School.”

I look at Lukas. He lowers his eyes.

“No, she’s not the Elizabet from the Chronicle,” he concedes.

“She seems ambitious—even a little ruthless. I mean, she abandoned her boyfriend and her family—defied her family’s wishes, even. For her own dream.” I pause; the words are hard to form and to speak. “It makes me wonder whether I understand any part of the pre-Healing history at all.”

Privately, I laud her strength. I wonder if it was common in pre-Healing women. Maybe they were tough and didn’t need the protection of Gallants.

“The Golden Age,” Lukas says quietly.

I frown at him. What do you mean?”

“The period of history, the one that the Aerie rulers say they used as inspiration for their own—”

“I know what the Golden Age is,” I whisper, cutting him off.

Lukas starts tapping away at those rectangular keys. “Take a look at this. Elizabet’s computer stored a bunch of books.” He points to the screen. “One of them is called Life in a Medieval Village in the Golden Age.”

I squint at a gorgeously vibrant painting, filled with images that are not unlike the Aerie: stone walls of a distant Keep, men and women in plain robes. The huts that dominate the foreground seem more like Lukas’s village, however.

“I think it’s a Schoolbook of some sort,” he continues. “Maybe Elizabet was still doing some studies. She looks young enough to still be in School.”

“She was eighteen.” I say quietly. “Exactly my age.”

Lukas clicks and words appear. Shoulders touching, we draw close. He touches the screen, whirling me to particular passages. The language is dense and dry, but I get it in a tick, a heartbeat. Talk of hunger, of servitude, of ignorance. Everything of value concentrated in the hands of a few. This was no Golden Age. So why does The Lex paint it that way? New North is better than this. Everyone—Boundary and Aerie—has adequate food, clothing, and shelter. It almost seems as if the Founders of New North built a society that’s like my Chronicle of Elizabet. On the outside, it could appear to be true. But there is no real truth.

After about a bell, my head is spinning. “Lukas.” My voice shakes. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”

“That’s how Eamon felt, too,” he answers, keeping his eyes fixed to words on the glowing screen.

I grab his shoulder. “Eamon knew about all this?”

“Yes, he’d learned something of the gap between now and the real past. But, Eva,” Lukas breaks his gaze from the computer and clasps his hand on mine. “I don’t want you to end up like Eamon.”