Page 101

The tender was lashed to the port side of The Tufan, which was sailing in slow circles just beyond the sightline of the Alexandria lighthouse. Asha held the rudder, keeping them off the rocks.

Six wooden crates of provisions and half a dozen sealed clay urns had already been transferred to the tender, along with two bedrolls wedged into whatever floor space remained. Sailing to Etruria had been Amrita’s recommendation and Soraya’s choice. Whether it was the right one, she had no way of knowing. She hoped Soraya’s daughter was reason enough. She hoped the distance from Alexandria would be sufficient to keep her safe from the thieving scholars. She had no historical record to draw from, nothing to tell her how the journey ended, and the not knowing had marked her the way certain experiences do—not a wound with a visible scar, but an ache she would carry nonetheless.

The process of transferring the text to the atlas had surprised her. They had spent the better part of a week loading the texts from the hold into the atlas, and the work had left them both hollow-eyed and quiet.

First the scrolls had been brought to Soraya’s cabin and unrolled across the long table, each one laid flat, its wrinkles gently soothed. Soraya chanted while Amrita worked beside her, applying salt water to the surface of the writing with a soft broad brush, stroke by stroke.

“The sea water is a stand-in for tears,” Soraya had explained the first time she demonstrated. Preservation was a bittersweet act. It could not be done without acknowledging grief.

Amrita could not argue with this. She’d dipped her brush and continued.

The ink did not blur or bleed as she’d expected. Soraya’s chanting held it steady while the salt water did its work. When the page dried, the words lay loose on the surface of the paper, separated from it, like seeds waiting to be carried by the wind.

The next step was the most exacting. Every fragment had to be gathered, every stroke of every letter, because a missing vowel or a flake of punctuation could corrupt an entire meaning. Amrita thought of the scribes who had produced these texts, hunched over identical tables in rooms not unlike this one, building these texts from nothing over the course of lifetimes. She and Soraya were doing the same work in reverse. Unmaking what had taken half a lifetime to make, to save it.

Then Soraya would take up the atlas and pour.

The gathered text spilled out like black sand, and as it hit the page it turned clear, like glass, like water, and for just a moment it was still legible. Amrita could read it. Then it dissolved and was gone, and the page was smooth and blank, the atlas was heavier, and that was all.

“This can never be undone,” Soraya said, every time. At least a dozen times over the course of the week. And every time Amrita looked at the empty scrolls left on the table, she understood again what that meant. The paper left behind was a body without its soul.

When the seal on the last urn was broken and the hold contained nothing but a vast collection of blank pages, Asha steered the boat toward the harbor and Soraya began to spin up the storm.

Like all her storms, it came up quickly. Thunderclouds and squall lines raced across the horizon. In between them, the sky was lit with jagged bolts of lightning. For an instant, Amrita thought she could see letters burning in the intersections of the lightning’s crackling branches.

The Tufan still sat steady in its bubble at the storm’s center. But soon, everything beyond this capsule was utter chaos.

“It is time for us to go,” Soraya called to Amrita. They both took one last look around the cabin. Soraya tucked the atlas under one arm and proceeded to the rail outside the cabin door. She swung one leg over the edge, then the other, and jumped down into the tiny boat that was waiting for them there.

Amrita hesitated, gathering up the items she was planning to take with her. Her wand. The binoculars. A shell that Zara had gifted to her. She placed them in the pockets of her trusty traveling skirt. Then she looked back over her shoulder one last time at the blank sheaf of paper laid on the table, pale as a corpse.

She stepped out onto the deck toward the rail. But before she could take a second step, she was blocked.

Asha stepped in front of her, arms outstretched, somehow making herself larger than she’d ever seemed before. She blocked Amrita’s passage like a locked gate. Her empty eyes were unapologetic.

You may not pass.

Amrita stepped to the left. Asha moved with her.

Amrita stood on the tips of her toes, trying to see past her, over the rail and into the tender. Nell and Zara were advancing now. Nell with her hand on her sword. Zara strumming her bony fingers against her shells.

They forced her back into the cabin.

The sky had grown so dark that it was difficult to see. Nell struck a flint to light a candle.

“Amrita, please! You must come now, I cannot hold off the storm. It is time for me to set the Fates free and for us to set off on our own course.”

On the other side of the door, Amrita heard Soraya calling for her, her voice straining to be heard over the roar of the storm.

Amrita also heard Fortune’s wings flapping and the soft, concerned call of her hoot.

Zara reached into a drawer and withdrew a small, familiar looking, glass bottle. Ptolemaic, blue green, the glass iridescent. It was glowing like a jar of fireflies.

It is time.

Amrita understood, even though no words had been spoken. Nell used her blade to slice off a small square of parchment.

It was time for her to write the note. The one that she would someday find in the Museum.