Page 94 of Shadows of Perl

There isn’t a sound in the house and no one’s in sight. The mudroom smells like paint. We pass through a bare kitchen and a scantly furnished dining room. We’ve finally found one.

“How many?”

“Five adults.”

“Where are they?”

“I separated them. Caught them trying to get their story straight. Upstairs in the main bedroom.” A door beneath the stairs is slightly ajar. She opens it for me to go through. I enter the basement and the light of thousands of candles nearly blinds me. The walls are covered in pinned papers. A narrow path snakes between the candles, around the room’s perimeter.

“It looks like some kind of shrine,” she says. “Weird, right?”

“Did you examine those?”

“No. If a single one of those tips over, everything on these walls would be up in flames in minutes.”

“I think that’s the point.”

Carefully, I navigate the path for a closer look, snuffing out the flames I pass. At first the wall hangings appear to have no connection to one another, just a smattering of collected clippings. Most have torn edges, as if they were ripped right out of old books. Others are sketches, maps, diagrams of the Sphere, profiles about its casing engineers, myths about sun tracking. Each is hand annotated with intricate details. I grab my phone but think better of it. This isn’t something just anyone should see.

“This isn’t a shrine. It’s research.” Carefully plotted and thorough. I remove a stapled stack from the wall for a closer look. Sphere Health: Four Key Critical Signs of Distress. Gem Mining. Enhancer Composition. Binding and Unbinding. Perilous Truths About Toushana.

I study a diagram that is hand drawn. The page itself looks so old, its inked markings are hard to read. But someone’s gone over it in pencil, retracing what’s been lost to age.

A place like this would have to be watched constantly. “When you found this room, was someone in here?” I ask.

“Yes.” She points to a cot I overlooked in the corner.

I point out another paper that’s familiar. “This one is from Dysiis’s original findings.”

“But those are locked away in the hidden library at Yaäuper Rea.”

Yani says the words before I can get them out. The fellow in the red ball cap was stealing things with information similar to this. The next wall is full of notes on the chemical composition of the matter inside the Sphere, how it intersects with tracing magic and tethers it to the magic inside all of us. The whole place is more of the same.

Everything points back to the Sphere.

“They’re trying to find out if magic will indeed be lost if the Sphere bleeds out.”

“Why do people in a safe house care about the Sphere?” she asks.

“They don’t.”

* * *

Upstairs, the five people are huddled in a single bedroom with wall-to-wall beds. The windows are covered with thick sheets of fabric nailed to their frames.

“There were four doors off the hall; what’s in the other rooms?”

“Nothing,” Yani says.

“You searched them thoroughly?”

“I did.”

One of the women fidgets, her eyes darting to a curtain nailed to a wall barricaded by a bed. The thud of her heart rages as I approach the blocked window and drag the bed out of the way. I rip off the curtain and behind it is not a glass but a narrow door.

No one moves.

I pull on the knob but the door doesn’t open. I tug dark magic to my hands and press it to the wood until it rots in my fingers. The door dislodges and opens. Inside is a small bedroom. A petite desk sits beside a little bed the right size for a very young kid. The walls appear singed, as if the room’s survived some kind of fire.

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