City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(61)

Shara nods. She understands, and Irina sees she understands.

“Do you hate me for this?” asks Irina.

“I might have, once,” says Shara, in a moment of such honesty that she surprises herself.

“But you don’t now?”

“I don’t have the time or the energy to hate,” says Shara. “I only wish to understand. People are what they are.” She smiles weakly and shrugs: What can one do?

Irina nods. “I think that is a wise way to look at things. I was not so wise. I went to these meetings. I was angry. We all were. And these men found me there.”

“Who?”

“They never told me their names. I asked, but they said it was not safe. They said they were in danger, always in danger. From who, they did not say.”

“How many were there?”

“Three.”

“What did they look like?”

Irina describes them, and Shara takes notes. Her descriptions for the first two—short, dark-eyed, dark-haired, excessively bearded—could describe nearly any man in Bulikov. But the last one is different: “He was tall,” she says. “And pale. And terribly starved. It was like he ate only broth, the poor thing. He could have been quite handsome, if he took care of himself. He spoke the least. He only watched me, really. Nothing I said seemed to surprise him. They knew I worked at the university—how, I don’t know. But they asked me to serve them, to serve Bulikov. Just like the old ways. And I did.” Irina coughs again. “I was to spy on him, the professor. I was to pilfer his pages, open his drawers, look among his folders.”

“For what?”

Irina colors, but does not answer.

“What were you looking for, Irina?”

“I was not going to look for anything.”

“Then how were you to know if you’d found something?”

Irina turns an even brighter red. “I would just … I would just have to guess.”

“Why?”

“Because, the words …” She is on the verge of tears again. “I look at them on the page, and they don’t make sense to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was never taught such a thing, you see? We had no school here, in Bulikov, when I grew up. And when they brought schooling to us, I was too old, and I could never figure it out. … I could only pretend. I would hold a book, and pretend to look at it, and …” She purses her mouth; Shara gets the strong impression of a humiliated child. “I tried.” She reaches into her pocket, and pulls out a crumpled-up piece of what looks like anti-Saypuri propaganda. “I tried to learn. I wanted to learn to be righteous. I wanted to know. But I could only ever pretend. …”

Shara is not surprised: much of the Continent is still illiterate. “So what did you do, when they asked you to spy on him?”

“I told them I would. I did not want to let them down. And I … I hated him. I hated the professor, always so giddy to be reading our histories, when we, when I …” She trails off. Then: “What I chose to bring to them was a list.”

“A list of what?”

“I do not know. The professor worked out of this list all the time, so I knew it had to be important. But to me, it was just a list, with lots of information. Many squares, going all across the page, up and down, side to side, with letters and numbers in them. I did this over a period of weeks. I could not take it out—he would know if I did, and he only had pieces of this list at a time—so I would sneak out one page, maybe two or three or four, and take it to the broom closet and copy it, sketching it. The first time was hard, but after that I could do it in minutes. Even if I didn’t know how to read, I knew how to copy,” she says with a slight sniff of vanity. “Then I would bring them the copies.”

“How many copies of pages did you bring them?”

“Dozens. Maybe more than a hundred, over the course of many weeks. I was quite good at it,” she says, pleased with herself. “And they were so pleased when I first brought it to them. They were overjoyed. They wept. I felt … I felt …” She trails off, unable to finish the thought.

“Why did you stop?”

“They asked me to. Not at first—after the first time, when I brought them copies, they were less and less pleased. ‘Oh, this is good, but it is not what we were looking for, not what we need at all.’ As if it was all my fault! But then, one day, the tall pale one, he saw something on the list, and he did not smile, exactly, but his eyes, they crinkled, and he nodded. And the men laughed and said, ‘Good! Good, good, very good.’ As if they’d found what they needed. And they never asked me to get anything else again.”

Shara feels an immense dread welling up in her. “What day was this?”

“Day? I am not sure. …”

“Month, then.”

“It was still warm, then. It must have been late fall. The month of Tuva, I think.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about this list?”

“I do not know anything more than what I said.”

“You copied it. You copied hundreds of pages of it. What was on them?”

Irina thinks. “Well. There were page numbers.”

“Besides those.”

“Besides those, there was … There was a stamp in the corner. No, not a stamp—a sign of some kind, in the corner of every page. Like a … a bird atop a wall.”