THE MEMORY STONE

Day 80 of 100

The letter had come by way of Winnie Ostrander, who had delivered it, on the evening of the seventy-seventh day, with a rap of three fast knocks, two slow, and one, and a sniff.

"From the old man," she'd said, thrusting it into Mara's hand across Ruth Pellam's doorstep. "Left on the Athenaeum step at dawn, in a muffler. I should have burned it. I'm seventy-one, and I've no business carrying love-letters between Bureau spies." Then, more gruffly: "Read it, girl. He looked dreadful."

It was a single sheet. Rooke had it now in his breast pocket, folded to the size of a playing-card, and he could have recited it by heart.

My dear Mara,

I have not the courage to say this to your face, so I shall say it on paper, like a coward.

In 1884, on the night of the tear, I did a thing I have not told you. I am a scholar; I have a habit of collecting evidence. I had, in my coat, a small instrument of the Bureau's, a memory-stone, that I carried as a physician carries a lancet, in case a case should present. When I ran down to the dock and saw you, I did not think. I only knew that I had never seen a Division, and might never see another. I held the stone to the air. It drank the echo of the place: the light, the voices, the whole of that quarter-hour, as a sponge drinks water.

I have never dared to look at it.

It lies on the sixth level of the Blackfrost Vault, in the Records Annex, among the geological specimens, labeled "Merrow quartz, 1884." I put it there myself in 'eighty-nine, when I thought the Director might begin to search. He has never found it. He does not look among the rocks.

I do not know what it will show. I think it will show you something I cannot. Whatever it is, I believe you have the right.

Forgive an old fool.

—A.P.

Under it, in a smaller hand, a line of Greek, which Rooke could not read, and a brass key, taped to the sheet.

…

They went down together, the two of them, alone.

The others had stayed above. Okafor was holding the long hall of doors with a pistol and a pair of Bureau uniforms he had stripped from a sleeping sentry; Josie was in the cell with the Marsh women, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands moving over two thin gray bodies with the quick quiet competence of a woman who has learned her trade on ward-beds. And Vesper, who had said she would not go further, who had said she was a key and not a pilgrim, sat on the bottom step of the hall with her knees drawn up, staring at the floor, and did not look up when they passed.

It was two days since the Gate. In the two days they had learned the Vault's top levels as one learns a new house in the dark. There were twelve, Okafor said. They had seen three. The fourth was the Reservoir, and guarded. The fifth was barracks. The sixth was a place called the Records Annex, which was not on any plan.

He led the way.

The stair was an iron spiral in the rock, narrow, steep, glazed with ice. He went first, his lantern held high. He could hear her behind him, light, quick, a step and a half behind, with a faint rustle of skirts. He did not look round. He had not looked at her directly, for any length of time, since the Gate; he was afraid of what his face would do.

Neither of them spoke.

It was a curious silence. It was not the old silence of the cabin, warm, companionable, expectant. Nor the hard silence of the hut. It was something new, tentative and careful, like the first steps of a convalescent: a silence in which each was waiting to learn what the other could bear.

"Cal," she said, at the fifth landing.

He stopped.

"I'm not angry," said Mara.

"You have every—"

"I know. I'm saying that I'm not." Her voice was low, a little breathless from the stair. "I thought I would be. I waited for it. For twenty days, in Ruth's back room, with the cat. I kept thinking it would come. And I find that what I am is tired." She paused. "Tired, and rather frightened. And glad that you're here."

He closed his eyes.

"You needn't say anything," she said. "I only wished you to know."

He stood there on the iron stair, with his back to her, and the lantern trembling in his hand, and could not for the life of him have said a word.

After a time, she touched his sleeve. It was the lightest of touches. Then she walked past him, down into the dark.

…

The Records Annex lay at the end of a corridor of black glass.

It was a long, low, domed chamber, the floor paved with slate and the walls lined with shelves; and on the shelves, row on row, in hundreds of shallow niches, were stones. They were of every kind: slabs of milky quartz, shards of smoky glass, pebbles of river-flint, flat disks of polished jet. Each rested on a small stand of iron. Each bore a card. And each, as the lantern lit it, gave off a faint, shifting, pearly glow, like the light under a lake.

He had never seen so many.

"Memory-stones," he said.

"Yes." Mara had stopped at his shoulder. Her face in the gloom was awestruck. "I've read of them. The Bureau uses them in interrogation. A subject is made to hold one, and it takes an impression of his recollections. It's a way of making a record that cannot be forged." She drew a breath. "I did not know there were so many."

"Hundreds."

"Thousands."

"Whose?"

"The sealed, I think." She bent to read a card. "Garrity, T. Impression taken 1887. Subject's childhood. They took their memories, Cal. Before they drew the light." Her voice shook. "They have kept their lives. In a cupboard."

He said nothing. He moved on.

The geological specimens were at the far end, behind a rank of iron presses, in a dusty alcove under a sign that said, in the Bureau's copperplate: MINERALOGICAL (NON-ACTIVE). They were unglamorous. Lumps of feldspar. A chunk of lead ore. A cracked geode, a fossil fern in shale, a heap of gray cobbles in a tray. A little cardboard label curled over the edge of a shelf, in a thin scholar's hand, long faded:

Merrow quartz. 1884. A.P.

The stone beside it was the size of a hen's egg.

It lay in a wad of cotton, rough and grayish, translucent, like a piece of frosted window glass. In daylight one would have passed it without a glance. Here, in the lamp's glow, he saw that it was not quite dull. A faint light lay in the heart of it, very deep, as of a candle seen through a long fogged corridor. It pulsed, slowly. It was waiting.

He took it up.

It was warm. That startled him. It was warm as a living thing, and he held it in his scarred palm and felt, under his skin, a faint answering tremor, like a second heartbeat.

"What do we do?" he said.

"We hold it."

"Both?"

"Both," said Mara. "I think so. It was your hands. It was my light." She held out her own. "Give it here."

He hesitated.

"Cal."

"I'm afraid."

"So am I." Her mouth curved, a little. "I find it's rather a good sign."

He laid the stone in her palm. Then, slowly, he closed his own hands round hers.

…

It began with the sound of water.

He had expected a vision. He had thought it would be like looking in a glass. But it was not that. There was no seeing; he was simply there, in the dusk, on the boards, in the cold, with the lake slapping at the piles and the smell of rot and wet rope in his nose, and the wind on his face. He was on the landward end of the dock. He was nineteen years old. He had a coil of rope over his shoulder, and a rag in his hand, and in his throat the dull ache of a day spent mending a boat.

He knew it. He knew it as one knows a room in a house one grew up in.

At the far end, a girl.

She was in black. She stood with her toes over the edge of the last plank, small and straight and absolutely still, a hat in her hand. The wind lifted her hair. It was long, and chestnut, and tied with a black ribbon. He saw her light, a clear pale sheet of blue-silver, streaming off her in long thin tatters into the dusk, and his stomach dropped.

"Don't," said the boy he had been.

She turned.

It was the first time he had seen her face. He had forgotten how young she was. She was fourteen: a thin pale child with enormous gray-green eyes, ringed with red, and a mouth held tight against a thing too large to hold. She looked at him as one looks at a wall.

"Go away."

"I can see your light. It's going out." That was his own voice, cracked, boyish, shaking. "Miss. You're dying. You'll be dead by morning, you must—"

"Nobody can help."

"I can."

She looked at him. And he looked at her, from the end of the years, with all his grown man's grief, and saw what he had not seen then: that she had not said it in despair. She had said it in a kind of terrible, patient, exhausted hope.

"What can you do?"

"There's a book." He had come a step nearer. "There's a way to take the pain out. Just the worst of it. It's old, it's forbidden, but it works. If you let me, I can lift it. And then you'll be well."

"Will it hurt?"

"No. I promise."

Then she said it.

He had forgotten.

In ten years, in all his waking and dreaming, in all the thousand times he had gone over the scene, he had never once remembered this. His mind had edited it out. It stood now, in the bright dark of the stone, in the clear amber of the dusk, so plain that he felt a hand close on his heart.

She stepped away from the edge. She came toward him down the dock, quite slowly, with the hat dropped at her feet and her hands held open at her sides. And she took his two hands in hers, and put them against her breast.

"Take it," said Mara.

Her voice was a thread.

"Take it away. Please. Please. I can't bear it. I can't. It's too much, I'm too small, I'm— it hurts so much, I don't know how people live. I don't want to feel it. I don't want any of it. I want to be empty." She looked up. Her face was wet and naked and entirely sure. "Take everything. Take all of it. I don't care what you take. Just make it stop."

"Miss—"

"I'm asking you!"

She had screamed it.

"Please! I'm asking!"

…

He came out of it with a sound in his throat.

He found that he was on his knees on the slate floor of the Annex, with his hands still locked in hers, and the stone lying between them in the lamplight. It had gone dark. The pearly glow was gone. It sat in her palm, a dull gray pebble, as if it had never lived.

He could not breathe.

"I asked," said Mara.

She was kneeling facing him, her face white as paper. The lamp had guttered on the floor. In the dim light he saw her mouth working, and her hands, in his, shaking like leaves.

"I asked you. I forgot. I—" She drew a long breath and let it out in a shudder. "I begged. I begged you to take it. I said, take everything. I said, I want to be empty. It wasn't you. Not only. It was me."

"Mara—"

"I put my hands on yours. I did it with my own hands. I wanted it gone." Her voice rose. "I didn't want to feel. I was fourteen, and my mother was dead, and I couldn't bear it. I stood on the dock and I thought, if I could only be empty. And a boy came and said he could do it. And I said yes."

"You were a child."

"So were you."

"I—"

"I said take everything, and he did. He took everything. The grief and the rage and the wanting. All the things I hadn't the strength to feel." She laughed, a high wild broken sound. "And I've spent ten years being so proper. So good. So careful, and cold, and clever, and I never once knew why. I thought I was dull. I thought it was my nature. But it was only—" She pressed her hand to her mouth. "It was only that I'd given myself away."

He saw it then.

It came to him in a flash, and it went through him like a blade. He saw the whole of the shape: the girl who had given up her feeling, and the boy who had taken it; the grief that had walked out of her in a red dress; the ten years in the dark. It was not a crime with a single author. It was a transaction. It was two children in a gray dusk, each asking the other for something neither was able to give.

I thought I had stolen it.

She gave it.

He bent over his own knees as if he had been struck. A sound came out of him, ugly, wrenching, quite beyond his control; and he found that he was weeping, not with the clean brief storm of the hut, but with a slow, deep, ruinous weeping that seemed to come up from the soles of his feet.

He had carried it ten years.

He had carried it in his chest, a stone the weight of the world: I did this. I took her. I broke her. I am the man who ruins girls. He had lived by it. He'd built a life on it, the cot and the mended coat and the number on his collar; he had served the Bureau like a penitent, because he believed that he was a thief. And she had come to him on the dock and put his hands on her heart.

And I never remembered.

For ten years I never let myself remember that she asked.

"It was a mercy," he said, in a broken voice. "That's what I told myself. That I'd offered her mercy. And then the tear came, and I thought: no, no, I have no right. I never let myself think she wanted— that she could—" He lifted his head. His face was a ruin. "Mara, I took the rest of your life from you on the strength of one sentence, and I've spent a decade thinking I was a monster, and I was— I was only a boy who couldn't say no."

"Yes."

"I should have said no."

"Yes."

"I should have told you to go home."

"Perhaps," said Mara.

She was crying too. She had never stopped. But she was smiling, very faintly, through the tears, and she put out her hand and laid it against his face.

…

"Look," she said. "There's more."

He did not understand.

"The stone. It isn't dark. Not entirely." She lifted it between her fingers, and he saw that in its heart, very far down, a single point of light had kindled again, small and clear and warm. "It's showing something else. It's the end."

"The end?"

"After I fell."

She held it out to him. He put his hand over hers.

The dock again.

Night, now. The sky had gone black, with a rag of cloud across the moon. The boy knelt on the planks, with the girl across his knees and her hair spilled over his arm, and he was holding something in his two hands. It was a small blaze of fire, red-gold and flickering, no bigger than a fist.

It was the thing he had lifted.

It was alive. He could see it move, shivering, in his palms, as a fledgling shivers; and he could hear, over the lap of the water, a voice so soft that he had to strain to catch it.

"I'll keep you safe."

It was his own. Hoarse, childish, wet with tears.

"I don't know what you are. I don't know what I've done. But I won't let you go out. I swear it on my mother's grave. You're hers. You're part of her. I'll find a way to give you back."

He bent his head.

"Just stay."

And he kissed it.

He saw himself do it: the boy of nineteen, in the moonlight, on his knees, bending his dark head to press his mouth against a ball of flame. He saw the fire flare, and leap, and burn up gold and white; and then he saw it rise from his palms in a long soft ribbon, and curve away over the lake toward the shore, toward the chapel and its dark steeple, and vanish into the hill.

It went home, thought Rooke.

It went to the Stone.

It went where it would be kept.

…

They sat on the floor of the Records Annex for a long while, saying nothing.

The lamp had burned low. The stones glimmered in their niches like a thousand sleeping eyes. Somewhere far above them, through the rock and the ice, a faint tremor ran along the walls: Okafor's boots, or the settling of the mountain, or the beating of a great slow heart.

Mara still held the stone. She turned it over in her fingers.

"She was kept," she said at last.

"Yes."

"You kept her."

"I didn't know."

"You did, though." She looked at it. "You swore on your mother's grave. You told her to stay. And she did. For ten years, in the dark, in the Stone, waiting. And when I broke it, on the dais, she came out."

"Mara—"

"She remembers it. I think. I think she's been carrying it, like I carried the rest." Her voice trembled. "She told me she'd never been held. In the clock tower. She was weeping. I thought it was a lie. It wasn't. She hasn't known. She doesn't know it's you."

"Should I tell her?"

"I don't know."

"It might—"

"It might change everything." She raised her eyes to his, brimming. "Or nothing at all. I don't know, Cal. I don't know anything. I have just found out that I asked for it. That the worst thing in my life was a thing I begged for. And I do not know how to hold that."

He took her hands.

They were cold. They were thin as bird-bones. But they were solid, and warm at the center, and when he laced his fingers through hers they closed on his with a strength that surprised him.

"I'll hold it with you," he said.

She looked at him for a long time.

"We were so young," said Mara.

"Yes."

"I wish someone had come. An adult. One who knew. One who could have said, Not like this. Not you two."

"Pryce came."

"Too late."

"Yes."

"And it would have been the same." Her mouth shook. "It's the sort of thing that has to happen. A child asks for what no one should give. A child gives what no one should take." She drew a ragged breath. "We were both so frightened, Cal. We were both alone. And we were each trying so hard to be kind."

She raised his hands to her cheek.

"Both of us," said Mara, "are children who did something unforgivable."

"Then we are a well-matched pair," said Rooke.

She laughed. It was a wet, broken, helpless sound, and she leaned forward and put her forehead against his; and so they remained, on the cold slate floor of the Records Annex, among a thousand stolen lives, with the little dead stone between their joined hands, and the dark pressing round them, and the long stair above.