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When I reached the last step, my foot slipped, just like in the poem.
“Keep going,” she said from behind me. “Use the wall to guide you. ”
I dragged my right hand along the bricks while dirt crumbled among my fingers, and after a time I felt the walls open up into the space of a large room beyond. My feet echoed along the ground and I heard different sounds; feet shifting, people breathing. I knew we were not alone.
“This way,” the woman said, and she took my arm to guide me. We moved away from the sounds of others.
“Stop,” the woman said. “When I take off the blindfold,” she told me, “you’ll see the items that someone arranged to be delivered to you. You may notice that several are missing. They were the payment for delivery, agreed upon by the sender. ”
“All right,” I said.
“Take your time to look things over,” she said. “Someone will come back to escort you out. ”
It took me a moment—I was disoriented and the place underground was dim—to understand what I was seeing. After a moment, I realized that I was walled-in by two rows of long, empty metal shelves. They looked slick and clean, as if someone cared for them and smoothed away their dust, but even so they reminded me of the crypt of a tomb we saw once in one of the Hundred History Lessons, where there were little caves full of bones and people carved in stone on top of boxes. So much death, the Society told us, with no chance of life afterward. There was no tissue preservation then.
In the middle of the shelf in front of me, I saw a large packet wrapped in thick plastic. When I pulled back the top edge of the plastic, I found paper. The pages I brought out of the Carving. The smell of water and dust, sandstone, seemed to come up from the paper.
Ky. He managed to send them to me.
I put my hands flat on the papers, breathing in, holding on. He touched these too.
In my mind, a stream ran and snow fell, and we said good-bye on the bank, and I took to the water and he ran alongside it, bringing these words the length of the river.
I turned through the papers, looking at each page. And in that cold metal aisle, alone, I wanted him. I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed.
A figure appeared at the end of the shelves. I held the papers against my chest and backed up a few steps.
“Is everything all right?” someone asked, and I realized it was the same woman who had brought me. She came closer, the yellow-white circle of her flashlight directed down at my feet and not at my face to blind me. “Have you had enough time to look?”
“Everything appears to be here,” I said. “Except for three poems, which I assume are the price you mentioned for the trade. ”
“Yes,” she said. “If that’s all you need, then you can go. Come out of the shelves and cross the room. There’s only one door. Take the stairs back out. ”
No blindfold this time? “But then I’ll know where we are,” I said. “I’ll know how to come back. ”
She smiled. “Exactly. ” Her gaze lingered on the papers. “You can trade here, if you like. No need to go to the Museum with a cache like that. ”
“Would I be an Archivist then?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You’d be a trader. ”
For a moment, I thought she said traitor, which of course I was, to the Society. But then she went on. “Archivists work with traders. But Archivists are different. We’ve had specific training, and we can recognize forgeries that the average trader would never notice. ” She paused and I nodded to show I understood the importance of what she was saying. “If you bargain with a trader alone, you have no guarantee of authenticity. Archivists are the only ones with adequate knowledge and resources to ascertain whether or not information or articles are genuine. Some say the faction of Archivists is older than the Society. ”
She glanced down at the pages in my hands and then back up at me. “Sometimes a trade comes through with items worth noting,” she says. “Your papers, for example. You can trade them one at a time, if you like. But they will have more value as a group. The larger the collection, the higher the price you can get. And if we see potential in you, you may be allowed to broker others’ trades on our behalf and collect part of the fee. ”
“Thank you,” I said. Then, thinking of the words of the Thomas poem, which Ky always thought I might be able to trade, I asked, “What about poems that are remembered?”
“You mean, poems with no paper document to back them up?” she asked.
“Yes. ”
“There was a time when we would accept those, though the value was less,” she said. “That is no longer the case. ”
I should have assumed as much, from the way the Archivist in Tana reacted when I tried to trade with the Tennyson poem. But I thought that the Thomas poem, unknown to anyone except Ky and me, might have been an exception. Still, I had a wealth of possibility, thanks to Ky.
“You can store your items here,” the Archivist said. “The fee is minimal. ”
Instinctively, I drew back. “No,” I told her. “I’ll find somewhere else. ”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Are you certain you have a secure place?” she asked, and I thought of the cave where the pages had been safe for so long, and the compact where Grandfather kept the first poems hidden for years. And I knew where I’d hide my papers.
I’ve burned words and buried them, I thought, but I haven’t tried the water yet.
In a way, I think it was Indie who gave me the idea of where to hide the papers. She always talked about the ocean. And even more than that, it might have been her odd, oblique manner of thinking—the way she looked at things sideways, upside down, instead of straight on, seeing truth from unexpected and awkward angles.
“I want to trade for something right away, tonight,” I told the Archivist, and she looked disappointed. As though I were a child who was about to spend all these fragile beautiful words on something shiny and false.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“A box,” I said. “One that fire can’t burn, and that won’t let in water or air or earth. Can you find something like that?”
