The man named Press talked to Elli for a long time, telling her all kinds of things that seemed completely far fetched and unbelievable. People who could travel through time and space. Civilizations on other territories. An epic battle of good and evil. A demon named Saint Dane. Quigs. Flumes.
It all sounded…well…insane, actually.
And when he explained to Elli that she was one of these special people who was destined to do all these big things as part of some giant universal conflict? Well…come on.
Finally Elli burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay, okay, stop,” she said finally. “This is some kind of practical joke, isn’t it? Do you guys do this to everybody on their first excav mission?”
Press shook his head, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver ring. He held it out in his palm. Around the rim of the ring were tiny letters written in some kind of script that Elli had never seen before. They should have been invisible in the dark. But they weren’t. They glowed slightly.
“Normally each Traveler is trained and given this ring by his or her predecessor,” Press said. “But on Quillan things have worked out a little differently.”
Elli looked closely at the ring. She had never seen anything that glowed like that. Certainly not a piece of metal. If this was all a joke, somebody had sure gone to a lot of trouble.
“Take it,” Press said.
Elli kept looking at the glowing ring.
He was really serious, she realized finally. This wasn’t a joke.
“Take it, Elli,” Press repeated. “It’s yours.”
Finally Elli shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not for me. I’m not a courageous person. I’m a cleaning lady.”
“I know what you’ve gone through,” Press said. “I know that you feel like you’ve done a terrible thing by leaving your daughter without—”
Elli felt a flash of anger. “No, you don’t!” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like!”
Press was still holding out the ring. “Okay. Fair enough. But being a Traveler doesn’t mean you’re a superhero. It doesn’t mean you’re flawless. It just means—”
Elli Winter stood and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m just not the kind of person you think I am. You say that each Traveler has a successor, right?”
Press nodded.
“Then let it be Nevva. She’s stronger and smarter and more courageous than I could ever be.”
Press’s fingers closed slowly around the ring. He looked thoughtful. “Quillan is a special case,” he said, almost to himself. “Perhaps…” He frowned.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have work to do.” She turned to go back down into the crypt.
“Wait.”
She stopped and looked back at the man, his face half concealed in shadow.
“Here,” he said. “Why don’t you hold on to this, just in case.” He handed her the ring. “No promises, just take the ring, keep it safe. And also, let me give you this.” He reached into his pocket, stepped forward, and put something around her neck. She looked down. It was a necklace made of odd little beads. In the center was a slightly larger bead made from a gold-colored metal.
“Don’t tell Nevva I’m alive,” she said, fingering the strange necklace. “Let her think that I’m dead. Let her think that I’m a hero. Sometimes a lie is better than the truth.”
“And sometimes a lie is not a lie,” Press said.
Elli felt weary. She supposed that he was a good man, well intentioned. But the world seemed too complex when he was talking. Things were easier when you were cleaning.
Or digging.
“Good-bye, Elli,” Press said. Then the strange man turned and melted away into the darkness.
An hour later she heard noises above her—rapid, determined footsteps. Dados? She wasn’t sure. As long as she’d been digging, she felt okay. As soon as she’d stopped, though, she felt afraid. So she ignored the footsteps and kept digging.
Moments later the excav team bustled into the crypt from the spiral staircase. Their flashlights probed the darkness.
“She’s still here,” Bart said, his beam coming to rest on Elli as she leaned deep into the hole.
“False alarm, Elli,” one of the diggers said. “Turned out the watchers had spotted a herd of farm animals.”
“I know you’re probably upset that we left you,” Olana said, “but we told you very clearly that we couldn’t—”
She broke off. Elli looked up from the hole. The excav team stared as she lifted a small metal box free from the dirt and set it down gently on the ground.
“Oh my gosh,” Olana said. “She found it.”
“It was right where she said it would be,” one of the other diggers added wonderingly.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
Elli climbed out of the hole and dusted off the dirty knees of her pants. She was not a pushy person. But sometimes she just knew something.
“I think it would be best if you brought me on the next excav,” she said.
SEVEN
When the excav team got back to Mr. Pop, a team of green-smocked caretakers took the dirt-smeared old box.
“Could I…” Elli hesitated. “Could I see what we found?”
The senior caretaker looked at her curiously, then laughed. “Of course. Follow us.”
They took the box to a room far in the back of the warehouse and carefully opened it. The box was made of some kind of silvery metal. On the inside it was perfectly clean. In fact, it looked as though it might have been packed that morning. Inside was a book.
There was an intake of breath by all the caretakers surrounding the box.
“What?” Elli said.
The senior caretaker reached in with white-gloved hands and gently removed the book from the box. “It’s The Book of Five Runes,” the senior caretaker said. He stared at it. “Oh, my!” he said. And then he kept saying it. “Oh, my! Oh, my! Oh, my goodness! Oh, my!”
Elli looked from face to face to face. “What’s so special about this book?” she said.
The senior caretaker smiled and wiped his face. “We thought this one was gone forever. It’s a very important book.”
“What’s it about?” Elli said.
The caretaker raised one eyebrow. “Well, actually, we’re not sure. But many of the ancient writers refer to it.” He held it out to her. “You found it. You could be the first to read it, if you’d like.”
Elli felt uncomfortable with all the people looking at her. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. I’m just the cleaning lady. I wouldn’t even know what I was reading.”
The caretaker shrugged, then handed the book to the head librarian. “Dr. Pender, I’ll leave it in your care then.”
Elli walked away from the group and began sweeping the floor. When she looked up again, no one was looking at her. They seemed to have forgotten she even existed.
At the end of the day, Elli realized that she had made a mistake. She had found the book, hadn’t she? She should have at least looked at it. Not that she was worthy to actually read it. But maybe it would be okay to touch it. Maybe something about the extraordinary book would rub off on her.
Hesitantly she approached the head librarian, Dr. Pender, who was cleaning up his desk, as he was about to leave for the day.
“Excuse me,” she said. “May I talk to you?”
Dr. Pender was a young man, already balding, with only a fringe of blond hair around his head. He had always been pleasant to her. Like her, he was a shy man, and even though they had both been working at Mr. Pop together for several years, she had never really had a conversation with him. Dr. Pender looked up and smiled. “Of course, of course,” he said, gesturing to a battered chair next to his desk. “Please, sit.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right.”
“You’re, uh…forgive me, I don’t know your name. You’re the cleaning person, right?”
Elli nodded. She felt tongue-tied now that she was with him.
r /> “What is it?” he said.
“How do we know which books are important?” she said.
“Well…” He rubbed his face, then grinned. “That’s a really good question! I guess there are some books that affect lots of people. They affect how we think, what we believe, what we know. Other writers and thinkers refer to them. The great books, in a way, are what built Quillan.”
“Oh,” she said.
Dr. Pender cocked his head. “Was there something else?”
“Where are they?”
“You mean, where in the warehouse?”
She nodded.
“Follow me,” he said. He walked out of his office and down the hallway to a small room that was separate from the main warehouse. He opened the door and pointed inside. She poked her head tentatively into the room.
The walls were lined with cheap shelves, sagging under the weight of the books they contained. The volumes were mostly very old, some of them water damaged or moldy, some of them full of worm holes, some missing their covers. They didn’t look important at all.
“Huh,” Elli said.
“They don’t look like much, do they?” the man said. “But they’re very powerful. That’s why Blok banned them all.”
Elli stared at them. She felt intensely curious now. Before she came to Mr. Pop, she had never known anyone who was interested in books. No one ever talked about books on the popular video shows. The only books she had read as a child were the ones officially sanctioned—The Happy Children, Garden of Fun, Champion Fighter, Best of the Best, things like that. She could still remember all of them, could recite whole passages from them. But they hadn’t seemed interesting to her. She could hardly muster any enthusiasm for them.
“Would it be possible…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to finish the question.
“Would you like to read some of them?”
She nodded. “I mean—if it’s not a problem.”
Dr. Pender smiled. “That’s what they’re for, after all. To be read.”
That night Elli went into the room where the special books were kept. She walked around for a long time, afraid to touch them, looking at the titles. Many of them were written in languages that she didn’t understand. Finally she let her finger graze the spine of one of them. It was as though something electric had run up her arm.
Finally, after a long time, she selected one. It was a small book with a simple title. The Underground Spring.
She took it back to her room and began reading.
It was totally different from anything she’d read before. Most of the books she read were simple stories about women who fell in love or people who solved crimes or fought bad guys. But this book wasn’t like that. It was about a man who went down into a cave and encountered a race of creatures who mined for jewels deep under the ground. After a while the man lost the ability to speak. Finally, after a very long time, he came back up out of the ground and found that everything he had known about—all the people, all the cities, all the buildings—was gone.
It didn’t really make sense to her.
But she knew there was something going on under the surface of the story. Like a puzzle. If only she could figure it out.
Suddenly she realized that it was morning. She’d been reading all night. Hadn’t slept for even a single second.
She fixed her breakfast, stumbled bleary eyed to the pushcart where she kept her mops and brooms, and began cleaning.
As she worked, she found herself reciting the entire book from memory. It was something she had always been able to do—a completely useless skill. But now, it seemed comforting to her. If she kept reciting the words, she thought, she might discover their meaning.
That night she fell asleep reading another strange book that didn’t seem to make much sense. But the next day when she started working, she found herself repeating the whole book as she cleaned. The words that had seemed so puzzling the night before—well, they weren’t completely clear yet. But they seemed a little easier to understand as they rolled off her tongue.
Sometimes as she mumbled the words to herself, a picture of her daughter, Nevva, would appear in her mind. In the past this had only made her feel sad. But now, as she repeated the ancient words, she felt better. It was as though the words somehow connected her to her daughter.
She realized that something had changed. Something inside her. But what it was, she wasn’t really sure.
A week later one of the diggers from the excav team broke his leg. Olana and Bart had to make a special request to Tylee to add Elli temporarily to the team. But they got approval.
Next thing she knew, Elli was in the back of a van, hood over her head, riding along a rutted road. As they drew closer to the excav site, she felt a strange sense of peace inside.
The excav was done in daylight, in the middle of a huge field of grain. Robotic harvesters were moving through the fields, slowly cutting down the grain. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but the tall stalks of grass on which the grain grew.
There were no trees, no buildings, no landmarks at all.
Bart and Olana were scratching their heads as they looked at the old map.
“There’s supposed to be a tree here,” Bart said. “The map shows a tree.”
“The map’s a hundred years old, Bart,” Olana said. “They probably cut down the tree years ago.”
Bart shook his head, looking disgusted. “This is a waste of time,” he said.
The other diggers were scanning the horizon nervously. “I don’t like this place,” one of them said. “If the dados come, we’ve got nowhere to go.”
A robotic harvester was lumbering slowly toward them. “I don’t like that thing,” the other digger said.
“May I see the map?” Elli said.
“Please do,” Bart said, handing her the map.
She stared at it for a moment. It showed three hills, a tree, and a dirt road. She scanned the area. The hills and the dirt road were still there. She started walking toward the point where it seemed like the tree ought to be. But as she walked, she got the strongest feeling she was going the wrong way.
So she turned and walked in another direction. The long stalks of grain brushed against her legs. The sun was warm on her face. As she walked, she felt something on her neck. It seemed like the necklace that Press had given her was growing warmer. But maybe it was the sun. It was hard to tell.
She stumbled. There was something there! A little lump in the ground. She kicked the ground with her foot. And then smiled. It was the rotted stump of a tree, invisible unless you were standing right on top of it.
“Here,” she said. “The cleaning lady says we dig here.”
Bart and Olana looked at each other. Bart shrugged.
“Okay,” Olana said. “We dig here.”
Two hours later they were loading a dirty metal box into the van.
“So,” Bart said as they settled down onto the van. “How’d you do it?”
“I just looked at the map, dear,” Elli said with a shy smile.
Bart shared a glance with Olana. Then he turned back to Elli. “I think you should be a permanent member of the team. You okay with that?”
Elli hesitated. She could feel something lift and soar inside her chest. “Yes,” she said finally. “I am.”
EIGHT
Over time Elli read more and more of the books in the library. As she absorbed them into her brain, she found that they started to make a little more sense. She found writers who referred to other writers and other schools of thought. Things started adding up, making sense. But there was one thing that continued to puzzle her.
Finally she approached Dr. Pender and said, “I keep finding references to this book called ‘The Analects of Kelln.’ Where is it stored? I can’t seem to find it.”
Dr. Pender shook his head sadly. “As far as we know, the last copy of the Analects was seized and burned over a hundred years ago.”
“But it seems like it influenc
ed—”
“You’re exactly right.” Dr. Pender finished her thought. “It’s the central book in all ancient thought. The keystone, you might say. It influenced everything.”
“And we’ve never found it?”
“We keep hoping that one of the excavs will locate it. But so far, we’ve been unlucky.”
“What’s it about?”
“The Analects of Kelln—so far as we can know—was a book of great hope. It was a book about change. You see, hope is based on the idea that the world changes, that things can get better. Blok hates change. Blok wants you to think that things are as good as they can possibly get. If people can change, if the world can change—well, then maybe we wouldn’t need Blok anymore.”
“I see,” Elli said.
And from that moment she knew that, more than anything, she wanted to read that book.
As Elli worked that day, she thought about what Dr. Pender had said. Hope. She had put the whole idea of hope out of her head for a long time. Sometimes she found articles in the newspapers about her daughter. LOCAL GIRL NAMED BLOK STUDENT OF THE YEAR. TEENAGER WINS SCHOLARSHIP. WINTER ACCEPTS PRESTIGIOUS AWARD FOR SECOND YEAR RUNNING. That sort of thing. She would cut them out and paste them on the wall of the broom closet where she slept.
She felt hope for her daughter. Things might turn out well for Nevva. But for herself? Well…hard to say. Elli had to admit, she had begun to look forward to things. She looked forward to going on excavs. Getting out of the dull, windowless atmosphere of the warehouse was always a treat. She looked forward to reading every night. She looked forward to her occasional conversations with Dr. Pender.
But beyond that? Well, beyond that, it was hard to see much further. She still couldn’t imagine a life beyond this—living underground, cleaning, reading, eating, sleeping.
Over time she began to perceive a change in the mood of the people at Mr. Pop. They were more worried about the dados. More worried that Blok’s security division was getting closer to finding them.