Relic

XLIV: Maius 20 Year 242, A.H.

Panic takes hold. I crane my neck, looking for his grandmother. Where is she? As odd and confusing as she is, I want her here; I want to be rescued from the news I sense Lukas is about to give me. Maybe she got out of the way for this very reason.

I try to wriggle out of his grasp. “What do you mean ‘end up like Eamon’? Seeing this stuff doesn’t mean I’ll go careening down the side of the Ring. One has nothing to do with the other.”

He is insistent that we hold hands; he takes the other. “Eva, they have everything to do with one another. Eamon knew that The Lex was a fiction. That everything you were raised to believe was a fiction.”

I gasp at the word. “A fiction?”

Lukas’s voice is firm. “Yes. Eamon discovered something very dangerous. He learned that the story of the Healing was the same as an old, banned story about a flood that wiped clean the past. That story was in a book called the Bible. And people like Robert and Elizabet believed in the Bible as you believe in The Lex.”

Bible. Haven’t I just heard that word?

Lukas continues. “The Bible was kind of like a pre-Healing Lex. For some people, at least. Elizabet was holding a copy of the Bible in her hands during her last post. She mentioned praying with it, when she was hoping for a post from Robert.”

“Is the Bible about Apple? Do you have a copy?” The questions tumble out of my mouth. Even in my bewilderment, it’s as if my appetite for truth has just been whet, and I am starving for answers.

He seems annoyed, or maybe just tired. He sighs. “No, we don’t have a copy. And it’s not about Apple. Tech came long after the Bible. Anyway, all Bibles were destroyed. We out here in the Boundary lands have never forgotten it, though.”

“How do you know that?”

“We pass down the past word by word, Eva. So my people have kept our own record of what happened here in New North before and after the Healing. And we remember when the Bibles were destroyed.”

“Why would the Founders have destroyed those books? Paper is precious.”

He lets go of my hands. He no longer sounds tired; he sounds angry. “Because the Founders needed to write a fiction. So they took the parts of the Bible that worked and fashioned The Lex out of them.”

I’m angry, too. “That’s heresy, Lukas. The Lex is a sacred work, delivered directly to the people of New North by the Gods.”

“And everything that you’ve been taught has turned out to be true, right?” he snaps back.

I don’t answer. How can I? This one trip to the Boundary lands has burned every single one of my long-held beliefs. About the Aerie, the pre-Healing days, the Healing itself, The Lex … and now my own twin.

Lukas speaks to my silence. “Please look at this, Eva.” He taps on the computer again and pulls up another book that Elizabet stored on it. “I might not have a copy of the Bible, but Elizabet did. Here it is, on her computer.”

I push him to the side. Neither one of us wants him to spoon-feed me information anymore. I want to make my own decisions about Elizabet, the Healing, New North, and Eamon. No longer do I want to view the present or the past through anyone else’s prism. Imitating Lukas’s motions, I page through this … Bible. The words and rhythm remind me of The Lex. The language that is at once beautiful and obtuse.

His hand jerks out to stop me at a passage.

I read the words over and over to myself, until I realize that I need to speak them aloud. “In the eyes of God, the Earth was corrupt and full of lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt man had become, God said, “I will wipe out from the Earth mankind whom I have created, and not only mankind, but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air.” Then God said to Noah, ‘Make yourself an ark … Go into the ark, you and all your household, for you and you alone in this age have I found to be truly just and chosen … I will bring rain down on the Earth for forty days and forty nights, and so I will wipe out from the surface of the earth every moving creature that I have made…’ ”

I grow quiet. Lukas doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. We both know just how much “The Story of Noah”—a tale from pre-Healing times, from pre Golden-Age times—reads like the creation story in The Lex, supposedly divined to the Founders only two hundred and fifty years ago.

As if to comfort me, Lukas offers, “My people—who were once called the Inuit—have a flood myth, too. Perhaps all people do.”

“Do you mean the story of the Mariner?” Nurse Aga had told me the tale of the Mariner, who survived a great flood that covered the Earth but for a tall, icy mountain by making a raft. But I never connected that story with our history in The Lex.

“Where did you hear that?” Lukas looks alarmed.

“From my Nurse Aga. Before she became so old—so dotty, my parents called it—that she had to come back to the Boundary lands.”

“That’s what your parents told you about this woman?”

“Yes.” I don’t like how Lukas refers to Nurse Aga. I’m afraid to find out more; I don’t think I can handle it right now if something awful happened to her. So instead, I ask, “How do you know all this, Lukas? You sound like a Teacher.”

“We all would to you. Our memories are long. We remember well the times before the Healing.”

“But how did Eamon learn about it? Did you tell him?”

“No, I didn’t tell him. Do you remember when he spent all that time in the Archives, studying past Testing?”

“Of course. We fought about that.”

“He had come across a journal from a past Testor. The journal was over one hundred and fifty years old, and it contained references to the Bible and the Noah story. It seems that our people aren’t the only ones who remembered.”

“And he told you about what he found?” The manner of Eamon’s epiphany is coming clearer. But why did he tell Lukas instead of me? To protect me? Or because he didn’t trust me, as I was just a Maiden and unequipped to handle the truth?

Lukas studies my face as realization after realization dawns. “And I shared with him what I knew. What my people know.”

Confusion melts away, like ice floes in the sun. I know now why he was so scared, so intent on his training. But one huge block remains. “I still don’t get what this has to do with Eamon’s death.”

“Eva, Eamon wanted to win the Archon spot to uncover the full truth about New North. But someone found out about Eamon’s knowledge and his intentions. So, before he could become the Archon and change everything, he was killed.”

I shake my head. This is impossible. Eamon was alone out there. “Who?”

“We don’t know. Our best guess is someone in the Aerie did it, someone with a lot to lose if Eamon became the Archon. But that could be so many different people. Or one of many different factions.”

“Like?”

“Well, the Triad—or one of their minions—is an obvious choice. But they could have been oblivious to Eamon’s work, and it could easily be one of their lesser cogs who had a lot at stake if Eamon really changed the rules of the Aerie. Or it could be one of the other Testors.”

Faces and names flash through my mind. The Triad? There is no way my father could have been involved in such an act, no matter the consequences. Unless some rogue member had the foresight to set me up to be the Archon because he believed I’d be a malleable Maiden? What about the Testors? Aleksandr, Neils, the others? Murder seems beyond their small selves, but it’s possible. Jasper? No, that’s ridiculous.

What about someone like Scout Okpik, who looked Boundary-born but benefitted so much from the Aerie ways? It would certainly explain his behavior toward me. He needed to make sure that I didn’t stand a chance of winning, just in case I knew what Eamon knew, and he became uninterested in me once he believed I no longer had a shot.

I feel sick. I start to retch and run out the front door. Lukas races out after me and holds back my hair as I empty the meager contents of my stomach in a snow bank just outside.

Once my breathing has evened, Lukas leads me back inside. He settles me onto a chair and moves to the kitchen. When he returns, he has a cup of steaming tea with him. I’m guessing his aanak prepared it for me. Has she been listening to our conversation? I bet she knows everything that Lukas has told me. Even before he said it aloud.

As he sits down in the other chair, Lukas opens his mouth. Then he closes it and takes a moment. “We of the Boundary have always suspected the same things that Eamon learned, but we’ve never known the full truth about the Healing and the state of our Earth. Only someone on the inside—someone with access to the information that the Triad has hidden away—could do that. Eamon wanted to be that person. I’m not talking about Chief Archon. I’m talking about someone who could bridge the many worlds with the truth.”

Now I see where he’s going. Why he brought me out here. It wasn’t simply to show me the secrets of Elizabet Laine. “He would have become the Angakkuq. He was the one your people have been waiting for. Like your aanak wants?” I ask.

“I guess so, Eva,” he says.

I whisper, mostly to myself. “So this is what Eamon meant. ‘Will they still love me when I do what I must?’ ”

Lukas stares hard at me over the steaming tea. “What did you say to him when he asked that question?”

For some reason, I don’t want to tell Lukas about the journal entries. Instead, I create a fiction. Why shouldn’t I? “Just that I would love him no matter what. But I am the Archon now. I will find out the truth—just like Eamon would have done.”

“No, Eva. I don’t think you should. It’s too dangerous, and they’d be watching you. After what happened with Eamon.”

I’m surprised. I was expecting Lukas to summon his aanak. To tell me what I could do in Eamon’s place.

Lukas’s voice grows urgent. “Why not stay here, disappear into the Boundary lands with me? We have ways of hiding people. If you really feel you have to continue Eamon’s legacy, why not undertake it more safely, from this side of the Ring? With me helping you?”

I draw back. “Why would you have encouraged me to come to the Boundary lands and hear Elizabet’s story unless you wanted me to learn the truth? Unless you wanted me to become the Angakkuq?”

Lukas shakes his head. “Maybe part of me wanted that, Eva. At the start. But now that you’re here, and now that I stare into your eyes, I don’t want you to become an Archon or the Angakkuq.” He lunges for me and grabs my shoulders, so forcefully that it hurts. “Do you really want to end up like your brother? Please don’t do this to me.”

“It has nothing to do with you, Lukas.”

“Are you blind? Can’t you see how I feel about you?”

I stare into his dark eyes, and see more truths. Maybe they were always there. Maybe I overlooked underneath Lukas’s stoicism. Maybe I’ve suppressed them in myself too. The Maiden in me—so trained in the ways of modesty—tries to convince me to lower my gaze and play dumb. But I fight her, and answer honestly, “I think I do, Lukas.”

“Do you share my feelings at all? I know it’s forbidden by your precious Lex, but even just a hint of—”

I press my finger to his lips. I think I do share his feelings—at least, a little—but we can’t think about them. Besides, I need time with my feelings. And I don’t have time. So I say, “How can I possibly act on that now?”

He kisses my finger and lets it go. “So where does that leave us?”

I say the answer he already knows. “I must fulfill Eamon’s destiny.”