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I pull back, breathless. “Indie,” I say.

“I had to,” she says. “I’m not sorry.”

CHAPTER 17

CASSIA

S
omeone’s coming into the Archivists’ hiding place; I hear their feet on the stairs. Since I’m waiting in the main area with the others, I shine my flashlight up like the rest. The figure stops, expecting us.

Once I see who it is—a trader I’ve passed down here before—I drop my light. But many of the others don’t. She’s trapped there like a moth. A nearby Archivist signals for me to bring my light back up and so I do, blinking, though the girl standing in the doorway is the one caught in the glare.

“Samara Rourke,” the head Archivist says. “You should not be here.”

The girl laughs nervously. She wears a bulky pack and she shifts it down a little.

“Don’t move,” the head Archivist says. “We’ll escort you out.”

“I’m allowed to trade here,” Samara says. “
You’re
the one who showed me where this place is.”

“You are no longer welcome,” the head Archivist says. She’s somewhere in the shadows, and then she steps forward, pointing the beam of her flashlight right into the girl’s eyes. This is the Archivists’ place. They decide who stays in shadows and shades and who has to face the light.

“Why?” Samara asks, her voice finally faltering a little.

“You know why,” the Archivist says. “Do you want everyone else to know as well?”

The girl licks her lips. “You should see what I found,” she says. “I promise you’re going to want to know . . .” She reaches for the pack at her side.

“Samara cheated,” the Archivist says, her voice every bit as powerful as the Pilot’s. It resonates around the room. None of the lights waver and when I close my eyes I can still see their bright spots and the girl’s nervous, blinded expression. “Someone gave an item to Samara to trade on their behalf. She brought it here. We assessed its value, accepted it, and gave an item in return, with a separate, smaller item for the trader fee. And then Samara kept both.”

There are crooked traders in the world, plenty of them. But they don’t usually dare to try to work with the Archivists.

“You’re not out anything,” Samara says to the Archivist. “You got your payment.” Her attempt at defiance makes me ache with pity. What made her do this? Surely she knew she’d get caught. “If anyone should get to punish me, it’s the person I stole from.”

“No,” the head Archivist says. “You undermine
us
when you steal.”

Three of the Archivists drop their lights and move forward.

My heart pounds and I step back a little farther into the shadows. Though I come down here often, I’m not an Archivist. At any time my privileges—which are more than those afforded to most traders—could be revoked.

I hear the click of scissors and the head Archivist steps back, holding Samara’s red bracelet up in the air. Samara looks ashen but unharmed, and in the lights still directed on her, I can see her sleeve pulled up and her bare wrist where the bracelet used to be.

“People should know,” the Archivist says to the room at large, “that they can trust when they trade with us. What has happened here undermines everything. Now
we
will have to pay the price of the trade.” The others have dropped their lights down now and so her voice is the most recognizable part of her; her face is in shadows. “Paying the price for another is not something we like to do.” Then her tone changes and the incident is over, finished. “You may all go back to your trades.”

I don’t move. Who’s to say I wouldn’t do what Samara did, if something passed through my hands that I needed for someone else? Because I think that’s what happened. I don’t think Samara risked this for herself.

I feel a hand on my elbow and I turn to see who it is.

It’s the head Archivist herself. “Come with me,” she says. “There’s something I need to show you.”

She brings me through rows of shelves and through a long dark hall, her grip firm on my arm. And now we’re in another vast room ribbed with metal shelves, but these are all filled. They’re lined with everything anyone could ever want, every lost piece of a past, every fragment of a future.

Other Archivists move among the shelves while some stand guard. This room has other lights, strung along the ceiling and glowing faintly. I catch a glimpse of cases and boxes and containers of uneven sizes. You would need a map to find your way through a place like this.

I know where we are before she tells me, even though I’ve never been here before. The Archives. It’s a little like seeing the Pilot for the first time; I’ve always known of the existence of this place, but to confront it face to face makes me want to sing or weep or run away; I’m not certain which.

“The Archives are filled with treasures,” the Archivist says, “and I know every one.”

Her hair shines golden in this light, as if she is one of the treasures she guards. Then she turns to look at me.

“Not many people have been here,” she says.

Then why me?
I wonder.

“There are many stories that have passed through my hands,” the Archivist says. “I always liked the one about a girl who was tasked with turning straw into gold. An impossible piece of work, but she managed it more than once. That’s what this job is like.”

The Archivist walks partway down an aisle and lifts a case from the shelf. She opens it and inside I see rows and rows of paper-wrapped bars. She takes one of them out and holds it up. “If I could,” she says,“I would stay in here all day. This is where I began my work as an Archivist. I sorted the items and cataloged them.” She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, and I find myself doing the same.

The scent coming from the case is familiar, a memory, but I can’t place it at first. My heart beats a bit more quickly and I have a sudden rush of remembered anger; unexpected, out of place. And then I know.

“It’s chocolate,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “When was the last time you had any?”

“My Match Banquet,” I say.

“Of course,” she says. She closes the case and reaches for another and opens it. I see glints of silver that at first I think are boxes from Banquets but instead are forks, knives, spoons. Then another case, this one handled even more gently than the others, and inside I see pieces of china, bone white and fragile as ice. Then we move to another aisle and she shows me rings with red and green and blue and white stones, and over again to another row, where she takes out books with pictures so rich and beautiful I have to hold my hands together so that I won’t touch the pages.

There is so much wealth in here.
Even if I wouldn’t trade for silver or chocolate, I understand why someone else would.

“Before the Society,” the head Archivist says, “people used to use money. There were coins—some of them gold—and crisp green papers. They’d trade it with each other and it represented different things.”

“How did it work?” I ask.

“Say I was hungry,” the Archivist says. “I’d give someone five of the papers and they’d give me some food.”

“But then what would they do with the papers?”

“Use them to get something else,” she says.

“Did they have things written on them?”

“No,” she says. “Nothing like your poems.”

I shake my head. “Why would anyone do that?” Trading the way the Archivists do seems much more logical.

“They trusted each other,” the Archivist says. “Until they didn’t anymore.”

She waits. I’m not sure what she expects me to say.

“What I’m showing you,” the Archivist says, “are the things that most people find to be valuable. And we also have cases and cases full of very specific items for more eccentric tastes. We have been doing this for a long time.” She leads me back the way we came, to the rows where the jewels were stored. She stops for a moment to take down a case. She doesn’t open it, but carries it with her as we walk. “Everyone has a currency,” she says. “One of the most interesting ones is knowledge, when people want to
know
things, not possess them. Of course, what people want to know is a similarly varied and intricate business.” She stops near the end of one of the shelves. “What is it
you
want to know, Cassia?”

I want to know if my family and Ky and Xander are all right. What Grandfather meant by the red garden day. What memories I’ve lost.

A pause, in that decadent, deliberate room.

Her flashlight glances off the shelves, sending slants and glints of light in strange places. Her face, when I can see it, looks thoughtful. “Do you know what’s extremely valuable right now?” she asks me. “Those tubes that the Society had, the secret ones. Have you heard of them? The samples they take long before the Final Banquet?”

“I’ve heard of them,” I say. I’ve seen them, too. All rowed and stored in a cave in the middle of a canyon. While we were there in that cave, Hunter broke some of the tubes, and Eli and I each stole one of the others.

“You’re not the only one who has,” the head Archivist says. “Some people will do anything they can to get their hands on those samples.”

“The tubes don’t matter,” I say. “They’re not real people.” I’m quoting Ky, and I hope the Archivist can’t hear the lie in my voice. Because I stole Grandfather’s tube from the Carving and gave it to Ky to hide, and I did that because I can’t seem to let go of the idea that those tubes
could
matter.

“That may be,” the Archivist says. “But others don’t agree with you. They want their own samples, and the ones that belong to family and friends. If they lose a loved one in the Plague, they’ll want the tubes even more.”

If they lose a loved one in the Plague.
“Is that possible?” I wonder, but the minute I speak it I know it is. Death is always possible. I learned that in the Carving.

Almost as if she’s reading my mind, the Archivist asks, “You’ve seen the tubes, haven’t you? When you were outside the Society?”

For some reason I want to laugh.
The Cavern you are asking about, yes, I have seen that, with rows and rows of tubes stored neatly in the earth. I have also seen a cave full of papers, and golden apples on dark trees twisted from growing in a place with great wind and little rain, and my name carved in a tree, and paintings on stone.

And in the Carving I have seen burned bodies under the sky and a man singing his daughter to her grave, marking her arms and his with blue. I have felt life in that place, and I have seen death.

“You didn’t bring back any of those tubes to trade, did you?” she asks me.

How much does she know? “No,” I say.

“That’s too bad,” she says.

“What would people trade for the tubes?” I ask.

“Everyone has something,” the Archivist says. “Of course, we don’t guarantee anything except that the sample belongs to the right person. We don’t promise that there’s a way to bring anyone back.”

“But it’s implied,” I say.

“It would only require a few tubes to take you anywhere you wanted to go,” the Archivist says. “Like Keya Province.” She waits, to see if I rise to the bait. She knows where my family is. “Or home to Oria.”

“What about,” I say, thinking of Camas, “someplace else entirely?”

We both look at each other, waiting.

To my surprise, she speaks first, and it is then that I know how badly she wants those samples.

“If you are asking for passage to the Otherlands,” she says, very softly, “that is no longer possible.”

I’ve never heard of the Otherlands—only the Other Countries, marked on a map back in Oria, places synonymous with Enemy territory. From the way the Archivist speaks of the
Otherlands,
though, I can tell she means someplace entirely different and distant, and a little thrill goes through me. Even Ky, who lived in the Outer Provinces, has never mentioned the Otherlands. Where are they? For a moment, I’m tempted to tell the Archivist
yes
, to try and find out more about places so remote they appear on no map I’ve ever seen, even the ones belonging to the villagers who once lived in the Carving.

“No,” I say. “I don’t have any tubes.”

For a moment, we’re both silent. Then the Archivist speaks. “I’ve noticed that lately your focus has shifted away from trading,” she says. “I’ve seen the Gallery. It’s quite an accomplishment.”

“Yes,” I say. “Everyone has something worth sharing.”

The Archivist looks at me with pity and astonishment in her eyes. “No,” she says. “Everything done in the Gallery has been done before, and better. But it’s still a remarkable achievement, in its own way.”

She is not the Pilot. I know it now. She reminds me of my Official, back in Oria. They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.