第8章 The Sealed Record

The records hall was not a place students went. It was a place records went, a long low room under the east tower where a thousand years of academy business sat in iron cabinets, gathering dust the way the rest of the academy gathered dusk. Talia knew a way in. Of course she did. They went at night, after the lamps dimmed for the night watch, through a door in the kitchens that Talia had discovered in her second week and had been saving for exactly this. The records hall was cold, and it smelled of paper and iron, and the cabinets stood in rows like soldiers, and at the far end of the room there was a single desk with a single lamp that burned green, and a Curator sat at the desk with his back to them, reading. "Which one is it?" Maya whispered. "Section Seven. Cabinet Nine." Talia's voice was barely a breath. "The sealed ones are at the bottom, in the drawer that doesn't open." They crept between the cabinets, keeping to the shadows, and Maya's shadow went ahead of her, thin as thread, the way it had learned to, and it slipped under the cabinet doors and listened, the way it had learned to do when she practiced at night, alone in her tower room, folding herself around doorways and sending her shadow ahead to hear what was on the other side. The drawer that didn't open was locked with a shadow-lock, a knot of darkness the size of a fist. Maya had never seen a lock like it. She reached for it, and her shadow reached with her, and the knot loosened, the way a fist loosens when it recognizes a friend, and the drawer slid open. Inside there was a single folder, worn at the edges, with a name written on it in ink that had faded to the color of old blood. Mei Chen. Maya's hands were shaking. She lifted the folder out of the drawer, carried it to the edge of the lamplight, and opened it. The record was not long. A page of dates. A page of achievements, and every achievement was underlined, and some of them had been underlined twice. A page of assessments, written in a hand Maya recognized, because it was Seraphina's. And a final page, a form, the kind of form that gets filled out when a person stops being a student and becomes a fact. The form said: Mei Chen. Deceased. Cause: Working in the Deep Shadow. Circumstances: Accident. Investigated by: Warden Voss. Record: Sealed by order of the Council. Maya stared at the words. Accident. The word sat on the page like a stone. She had heard it all her life. Her father had said it, in his careful voice, the night she had asked, at last, what had happened to her mother. She had grown up with that word the way she had grown up with the smell of lavender. It was the shape of her grief. It was the story she had been told. And it was a lie. She knew it was a lie, the way she knew her own name. Nobody seals a record because of an accident. Nobody crosses a name out of a yearbook because of an accident. Nobody spends ten years trying not to say a name out loud because of an accident. There was a second piece of paper in the folder. It was not part of the record. It was a letter, torn, with the top half missing, and the hand that had written it was not Seraphina's and not the record-keeper's. It was a man's hand, tight and hurried, and it had been written in a hurry, and then it had been torn, and then it had been sealed away where no one would find it. "...the seal is failing faster than we believed," the letter said. "He knows. He has been drawing on the Deep Shadow for years, and he knows the door is almost open, and he does not intend to close it. I have written to Seraphina twice and she has not answered, and I am afraid that by the time she reads this it will be too late. If anything happens to me, find my son. Tell him I was wrong about everything, and that the only thing I ever did right was love him and his mother. Alaric." Maya read the letter twice. Her hands were very cold. "Alaric," she whispered. "That's the name of the Curator who died last year. They said it was an accident. They said he was testing a boundary in the Deep Shadow and he was careless." "It's never an accident," Talia said softly. "That's the thing I've been trying to tell you. It's never an accident. It's a word they use for people they can't explain." Behind them, the Curator at the desk shifted in his chair, and the green lamp flared, and Talia's hand closed on Maya's wrist, quick and cold. "We have to go," Talia said. "Now." They put the folder back, and the drawer slid closed, and the shadow-lock re-knotted itself, and they crept back between the cabinets, and through the door in the kitchens, and up the winding stairs to the floor where the students slept. Maya did not stop shaking until she was back in her room in the west tower, with the door barred and her back against it. She had found the record. She had found the letter. She had found the name of a dead man who had written to a woman who had not answered, and she had found the word that had shaped her life, and it was a lie. Warden Voss, the record said. Investigated by: Warden Voss. Accident. Maya sat on the floor of her tower room, and her shadow lay across the floor beside her, and she thought about the kind-eyed man she had seen at the welcome assembly, the one who smiled at the students, the one everyone trusted. And she thought that the academy had a secret at its heart, and that the secret had a name, and that she was going to find out what it was. ---