Veracity (12 page)

I thought this over carefully. She was right that I was allowed to say it, and I couldn't see the harm in letting her know that it was actually a fact, as the pretence for the expedition would involve everyone knowing it anyway. "Yeah. There were people out there. There were cultures and communities all over the world. But they're gone now."

For some reason, Kara acted like I'd thrown a weight onto her back with this. It seemed that, even though she'd heard the story re-circulated countless times, she'd always taken it as a kind of impossibility. But it wasn't; and that fact seemed to be settling onto her for the first time. "How...? I mean - what happened to them all?"

I scratched my chin. Things were getting a bit more delicate. I'd been afraid that the answering of one question was only going to lead to the asking of another. I wondered what the best way to go about this was. If I told her anything, it would have to be evasive, yet conclusive, it would have to be something she couldn't really follow up on with a series of new and awkward questions. I worded and reworded a few wily statements in my head, but realized that, in the end, she would see through it all anyway. No, if I was going to give her an answer - and I
wanted
to give her an answer - there would have to be some element of truth to it. So, I finally decided to offer a very blanketed and vague piece of truth that she'd probably already come up with on her own. What could be dangerous in that?

I sighed before I began. "Well, as I'm sure you've witnessed yourself, we're beings with a fairly self-destructive nature. I guess it was only a matter of time before something happened on a global scale. And it did."

She turned to face the waves, shaking her head. "Wow," she said, and fell into a thoughtful silence, scanning the blue of the water, the crashing waves, the foam that those waves shot into the air, the few bubbles that bounced onto the dry rock, the dark circles of moisture they left behind. Her expression was constantly changing, her face lighting up with a painful grin for a moment, then an anxious glare, a distracted frown.

After a while, she started speaking out at the ocean, quietly. "You know... sometimes, if I really listen hard, it's like there're voices out there, under the waves. Not normal voices; more like a low moan, a murmur. Anyway, I was just thinking that, maybe that's where they come from; from all those people that died, from all the horrible and beautiful things they did to each other. Because that's what it sounds like. There's this deep sadness in it, a kind of relentless suffering, but also something that seems to say: Everything's okay. Everything's - I don't know -
healing
."

I sat there, dumbfounded. This was Kara; this was her world, a reality where, no matter how hard I tried to keep up, I always felt left behind, deficient.

"Can you hear anything in them?" she asked, turning to me and catching me gawking at her.

"Uh... no. I can't."

But I didn't
need
to hear them to recognize the wisdom in what she'd said. Without knowing a single thing about The Goal, she'd both explained, and justified it in a few brief sentences better than the Elders had done in a over a week of drawn out discussions. She was exactly right. There had been an enormous amount of suffering, of unnecessary pain, yet now, finally, it had stopped, and the earth was recovering from it, slowly mending what we'd destroyed.

Something unexpected happened that day. It was true that I hated the way the Elders had gone about things, the way we were all being funnelled toward a decided end. It was true that the lie they'd constructed and maintained was unfair to us, oppressive, even cruel. But none of that - absolutely none of it - meant that they were mistaken about our species. All of their rules, secrets, strategies, and actions weren't a measure of how misled they were, it was a measure of how desperate they were, of how far they'd been driven to do what was right with a creature that was wrong. It all clicked into place. After listening to Kara, if there were any doubts in my mind, if there was any part of me that was still wavering, still holding off, waiting to make a definitive choice, it was suddenly gone. Something inside of me caved in looking at those waves, trying to hear the same voices that she was hearing, ones that spoke of the great consequence of our collective actions, yet also of the chance to start things anew.

Yes. I had finally been pushed over the edge. I believed. I'd become a believer.

Which, incidentally, was exactly what Mikkel thought I would be - and was busily preparing himself to deal with.

11

The manner in which the Elders talked about the expedition, the way it was unquestionable, imminent, and the way it was taken for granted that everything would go wonderfully, all helped to engrain the idea of becoming the leader in my mind. But as much as I wanted to be chosen, I never really thought of it as an exceptional opportunity, rather, it was just a better alternative than staying on the island under ever-stricter control. However, when they brought me into the disclosed wing of the Great Hall and showed me some of the things that I'd be delving into throughout my training, that all changed. Every map that they unrolled across the table, every sea chart they held up against a wall, every atlas they rotated to face me, all began to open my eyes to something I hadn't seen before: the magnificence of adventure itself.

It struck me, except for our island, I'd never visited, known, traversed, explored, or touched any of the vast globe of possibilities that existed. But the expedition would do this. We would be seeing the unseen! There would be something to learn with every mile travelled, in the same way that we'd learned as children - touching things for the first time, turning them over in our hands, fascinated - there would be a new lesson under every leaf and around every corner, something fresh to our senses, some event we'd never before experienced. And as soon as I realized this, something else deep inside of me amended itself, and the thought of setting sail out across the ocean had become something unbelievably intoxicating.

I would put my hands down on either side of the atlases and lean overtop of them, arms straight, eyes scanning the terrain like a hungry frigate bird. There were waves of sand that must have spread out like the limitless ocean, forests that belted across the belly of the largest landmasses, freshwater lakes that one could sail in for days without seeing a shore, jungles, grasslands, tundra, and strangest of all, ice, endless sheets of ice that were kilometres thick, swathing whole continents! And mountains, folds and ripples of the earth's crust that had been heaved into the air so high that the temperatures plummeted, and something called snow (which, incidentally, looked exactly the same as ice on the maps, so I'm not sure why they insisted on calling it something different) stuck to the peaks like saliva to teeth.

And this was only the land. One of the first things that I'd realized while being lectured and taught about the different periods of our atrocious history was that, besides the sameness of the violence, oppression, cruelty, etc., the various cultures of the world had been quite distinct from one another. They spoke different languages, ate different foods, believed in different gods, and built different styled dwellings; and this would be yet another thing the expedition would learn about, simply by walking through and inspecting the ruins. I would flop into the chair behind me, my mind teeming with new questions, and the enticing thought of answering every one of them in our travels; and in the meantime, I decided to set out and gather as much groundwork as I possibly could.

I was a model student, and seemed to become more devoted with every new thing that they taught me. As time passed, and my opinions began to match theirs more acceptably, more naturally, new doors opened for me, as we were finally free to move away from the slow ideological subjects, and into topics that I was more enthusiastic about.

Though, admittedly, the Elders hadn't really set out to spark my imagination, nor had they intended on spending any great amount of time teaching me about the landscapes in different corners of the world, or about the cultures that once existed there, which, of course, was what I was most curious about. No. What the training was intended to do was solidify my understanding of the maleficence of our species, and then begin building the skills and knowledgebase that I would need to run the expedition should I be chosen. The interesting things were only a spin-off from the requisites, and they tried to make sure I wasn't too distracted by them.

They gave me a lot of information to go through, study, and then discuss, and after I was caught once, pouring over maps and encyclopaedias instead of reading the material they'd given me, they took their role of 'keeping my interests focused' quite seriously. They would often walk in to check that I was learning the right material, and sometimes even sit down with me and ask me to summarize what I'd just read. But I didn't find this frustrating; because they weren't really keeping me from my interests, they were only forcing me to be more creative in researching them. And I soon discovered that I could pick up obscure, and often even forbidden facts from almost anything they gave me. I spent a lot of my time reading between the lines of the history books, uncovering all sorts of answers to outstanding questions. For instance, I'd learned from reading about kings and queens that, in fact, men and women did have long-lasting relationships and often even lived together, that our gestation period was nine months, and that our offspring seemed to be decidedly adept at killing one another off to vie for 'crowns' and 'thrones'.

But among this swamp of both revealing and interesting information, sometimes I was given material to study, which, regardless of how hard I looked, didn't seem to have anything hidden beneath the surface. When this happened, it was just a matter of bowing my head, reading it, and memorizing points to talk about later. Of all the Elders, Chalmon - who was a stocky man with a pale complexion and strange, pitted features on his cheeks - was the one who seemed most determined to give me these boring topics to study. Sometimes he would come to visit me while I was wading through volumes of his tedious selections, and ask me about what I was reading as if he were genuinely interested, the tone of his voice rising enthusiastically at the end of every sentence. I would reply in the dreariest monotone I could muster, but he never seemed to get the hint. However, little did I know that, one day, it would be his dull subject matter that would lead me to stumble upon the most dangerous thing that existed in the disclosed wing; and it certainly wasn't censored facts or volatile information that was buried inside one of his books, but rather a tiny wafer of metal that I discovered, and only
because
the book was so boring.

I was on the third or fourth day of suffering through chemical theory - which, I was assured, would be an essential basis for learning how to create sterilization mixtures later on - when I'd finally had enough. I slid my chair back (as silently as I could, so as not to trigger any of the Elders to come and check on what I was doing), and folded my arms across my chest, sprawling my legs out lazily in front of me. I was nauseated with chemistry, and began to look around the room for something to distract me, anything, maybe another book, which would have to be thin enough to hide under the one in front of me, should the need arise. I scanned the few shelves of books on my right. Nothing. But as I moved my inspection from one side of the room to the other, something caught my eye. It was on the floor in front of my feet, directly underneath the table, and I was sitting at just the right angle for the light, which was coming from a window opposite me, to reveal it as plain as day. It was a handprint.

Odd. Why exactly would there be a handprint directly underneath of a large table in the disclosed wing of the Great Hall, one might ask? I couldn't begin to guess. I tried to remember a time that I'd
ever
seen an Elder crawling along the ground, let alone on a library floor, but couldn't bring one to mind. I squinted at it again and could see that it wasn't a negative imprint, but a positive one, meaning: it wasn't a handprint missing out of a film of dust, but a handprint of natural oils left behind on a spotless floor. And this lead me to wonder just how moist a hand would have to be to leave such an accurate profile behind. I ventured to guess quite moist, as if the person who was crawling under the table were nervous. I smiled. Finally, something interesting.

First, I listened for any movement in the next room. None. Then, I memorized where the handprint was on the floor, stepped out of my chair, walked around to the side of the table, and knelt down. I put my hand exactly on top of the print, ducked under the table, and there it was, right in front of my face.

A lip of wood followed the perimeter of the table and was grooved deeply enough to hide small objects on, and, realizing this, the person who'd left behind the handprint, had also left behind a tiny piece of metal. I reached out and plucked it from its place. It was incredibly thin, rectangular, tapered on both sides, and had a strange geometric shape missing from its centre. It looked like it was sharp, and to test if it really was, I ran my thumb against one of its edges. A fine line of skin parted into a bloodless gap. I held it for only a moment more before putting it back in exactly the place I'd found it, and returned to my seat.

Thinking of it now, it's a wonder that such a wafer of an object could, in terms of action to reaction - to overreaction - nudge every one of us in a specific direction, begin us all plodding toward that horrible day. It was, after all, just one tiny piece of sharp metal. But, as it turned out, that was enough.

It was clear to me why this blade was hidden in that part of the library, and also why the person who hid it was nervous when they did so - they had a lot to be nervous about: they were smuggling forbidden information out of the Great Hall. But exactly what information they were smuggling, or to whom, or for what purpose, I couldn't know. And so I was quick to brush it off as just another one of the mysterious things that the Elders were involved in, yet another particular that I would never learn more about. Instead, what was much more pressing in my mind was the egocentric question: what could
I
do with this blade? What information was worth trying to smuggle to people in
my
life? I perused the titles of the books for all of three seconds before it occurred to me. Kara.