Page 109 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“They’re not looking at us,” Evar said.

He was right. The assistants’ gaze lay upon something more distant. Livira turned and saw below them the city cradled between the mountain’s roots.

“Footprints!” She pointed but it hardly took her time in the Mechanism with a book on the subject to see this trail. The footprints led from the pools, one set from each, marked in silvery blood, fading to nothing after a few dozen steps. She set her own foot beside one of them. “Two small children...”

“What does it mean?” Evar glanced back at the departing assistants, half of them gone already.

“I have no idea,” Livira said. “None at all.” She rubbed at her arm as if some residue of the pool were still clinging to her. The turmoil of emotions still churned in her though they weren’t hers and were beginning to fade. Sorrow, love too, both the personal and the general. Even as she tried to analyse them, the feelings dissipated like mist before the sun. There had been pain and there had been determination and there had been loss.

Livira’s gaze followed the fading trail of bloody footprints down the slope. Two children? Born here amid the bucketing blood of... two assistants, before a veritable host of their own kind? If so, where were the parents? What had been the nature of these births?

“Well.” Evar stepped off the platform onto the stair that led down to the road. “At least we can see each other. I’d worried we might be ghosts to one another.”

Livira shot him a quick smile, glanced back at the thinning crowd of assistants, then followed him down.

“You’re sure they can’t see us? The assistants?”

“Oh, no. I’m sure they can,” Evar said. “And hear us too. At least the one I met could. But she wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Only, I had questions...” Livira glanced back again.

Evar laughed, the first time she’d heard him laugh, a deep, friendly sound that lit him up. “Almost everything about you changes each time I meet you. Your clothes, your hair... your height... but if you ever stopped the flood of questions, I’d know it wasn’t you even if you looked exactly the same.”

Livira couldn’t help but grin back. They walked on together with a bounce in their step. Livira remembered the many times she’d taken this road, alone, with Yute, with Meelan, with Arpix, never knowing that many hundreds of years before, her ghost had taken the same path.

“I want to see someone. I want to know I’m a ghost for sure. I don’t feel like a ghost!”

“How does a ghost feel?” Evar kept close to her as if worried she might fall on the steep trail.

Livira reached out and touched his leather-clad arm and found it solid. “Not like that.”

Evar smiled uncertainly. She noticed his hand moving unconsciously to hold his upper arm where she’d briefly laid her fingers. It was, she thought, the reaction of someone unused to being touched, someone unsettled by it, but wanting more. She wondered at the life he’d lived, trapped alone with his brothers and sister. His first venture outside that prison had been to witness carnage in the same spot at a different time. And then his first steps outside the library itself had shown him another slaughter. For all the deadliness he’d demonstrated battling to defend her from Escapes in the Exchange, she didn’t think of him as a killer. He might have something of Malar’s talent for it, but not the taste. She desperately wanted to show him a better world, a kinder one, with more wonder in it and less horror. No horror, preferably.

“Try picking that up.” Evar pointed to a fist-sized rock that lay by the edge of the path.

Livira went to squat beside the stone and reached for it slowly, her fingertips anticipating the roughness beneath them, her mind fascinated with Evar’s implied claim that she would be unable to.

“By all the little gods...” Her fingers closed on nothing, vanishing within the stone, feeling no more than if it had been just air, or a trick of the light. She looked up at Evar, grinning. “I’m a ghost! An actual ghost!” A sudden thought furrowed her brow. She reached down and pressed her hand through the ground. In fact, no pressing was required. She squatted there, staring at where her wrist terminated against the cobblestones. “But how—”

Evar caught her other arm and drew her rapidly to her feet. “Best you don’t ask that question. I don’t want to fall to the centre of the world.” He started off down the slope. “Come on!”

Livira would have argued with him or at least stayed to conduct further experiments, but she saw at that point that they were little more than two hundred yards from where Yute’s house would one day stand. The place was just bare mountainside, but even so she wanted to plant her feet there and imagine the towering storeys of his home rising around her.

—

“Where is everyone?” Livira sat on the rocky edge of the drop that would, in years to come, sit just beyond the back wall of Yute’s house. Evar stood behind her, looking out over the city below.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not my city,” Livira said. “It’s where my city is, but it’s not mine.”

“Perhaps it became the one you know.”

Livira shook her head, wonderingly. “Not by just expanding and improving. Those buildings are gone. New ones stand in their place. And not better ones. We’ve nothing like that tower.” She pointed to a delicate structure that seemed impossibly tall. “I still want to know where the people are.” She thought back to the twin pools of assistant blood at the library entrance and the two sets of footprints leading from them. Child-sized. She wondered, with a shudder, what might have been born from what could only have been the deaths of two assistants. And why so many of their brethren had watched on, doing nothing to stop it. “There’s nobody.”

At this distance the citizens would be specks, lost among the houses. But Livira felt she should be able to see some evidence of them in the great square, which lay where it did in her version of Crath City, though now somewhat smaller and surrounded by a different set of grand buildings.

“Maybe they’re still in bed?” Evar ventured.

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