Rook(19)

She was passing the last of the empty printer bungalows, at the place where the sea cliffs had eroded nearly to the road, when a glow caught her eye, up in the sky and far out to sea. Sophia slowed, and then stopped. There was a faint rumble, a short pop of very distant thunder, as if the storm had returned, and then the glow grew brighter, sharper. All at once a ball of light shot beneath the clouds. Sophia ran to the side of the road and jumped up to the first branch of a short, stunted tree, watching yellow fire make a streaking arc across the blackness.

She’d seen paintings that looked like that. On the walls of Parisian chapels. Fiery streaks of light that had led the dying to the underground of the Sunken City, sent to them by the saint that took the form of a rook. They were drawn as symbols of hope on those walls, like the black feather. But not long before her mother died, when Bellamy had been a different man, her father had told her that during the Great Death the nighttime had been filled with such streaking lights. That when technology failed, all the Ancient machines of the sky, the satellites, burned as they fell, rushing to the ground in pieces of flaming metal. So many machines that they’d fallen for years.

And she’d looked up into her father’s face and asked him why the satellites fell. He said he didn’t know. So she’d asked him what they were for, and why the Ancients had put machines in the sky at all, and he said he didn’t know. Did they keep them on the moon, to be tidy? And how could the Ancients climb a ladder high enough to put a machine up there in the first place? He’d said he didn’t know. And so she, in her seven-year-old wisdom, had decided that if he did not know, then she did not believe him.

Now she was not so sure. She watched the blazing light narrow to a pinpoint, falling away somewhere beyond the horizon. What would it be like, she wondered, to live in a world where everything that must have seemed so permanent was suddenly stripped away? Where the things you’d built dropped like fiery rain on your head? Would it be like waking up and finding no sea beyond the cliffs? Or that Bellamy House had disappeared in the night?

Sophia climbed down from the tree, feeling the chill of the wind now that she had been still. She stole quickly down the lane, wondering if she should take that streak of light in the sky as a sign of hope, like some had, or a sign of despair? Or maybe it wasn’t a sign at all; maybe it was just a streak of light, and the difference between the hope and hopelessness was entirely up to her. On her left she could just see the outline of the Holiday coming into focus, standing well back from the road. She decided that it was up to her. But that didn’t mean the light had no significance.

She cut across a field to the yard of the Holiday. The inn was dark, no lights showing, the squelching of mud beneath her boots the only sound beyond distant surf; even the fox kennels were quiet. Sophia circled the building, counting the second-story windows. Orla may not have gotten into LeBlanc’s room, but she had found its location. When Sophia saw the window Orla had described, she drew out a pair of gloves—her own, not Mr. Lostchild’s—and a thin rope with a small iron hook from beneath her vest. She tossed the hook lightly upward, landing it in the roof thatch.

She dragged the hook, looking for purchase, and on the third time the hook found a piece of the wood framing beneath the thatch directly over the window. Sophia leaned back, testing the rope. When she was sure it was snagged well she slid one foot from a mud-caked boot, snaked the rope around it, and pulled herself upward, using the wrapped rope like a stair. She pushed off the other boot, and then she was climbing, quickly, rewrapping her foot, scooting and pulling herself up the rope until she had reached LeBlanc’s window.

She got one stocking on the casing, then the other, and crouched, a hand still clutching the rope. She drew her knife from the sheath and slid it down between the two panes of glass until she heard a click and felt the latch give. The windows pushed inward, and Sophia dropped silently into LeBlanc’s room.

Even with her eyes adjusted to the night the room was black. But it was also empty. She could feel that. Or maybe hear it, or smell it. Sophia hauled up the rope, winding it carefully into a pile on the windowsill, and again went to the supplies she kept beneath her vest. She would have to risk a small fire, and a light. As soon as she had a taper lit, she smothered the flame she had begun in the hearth and drew the curtains over the slightly open window. She tucked away the steel and flint and went straight to a traveling trunk in the corner.

Careful to put her damp knees on the matting, Sophia opened the trunk and sifted through LeBlanc’s clothes—much less interesting than René’s—and then a box containing his correspondence—every bit as dull as René’s. The box was expensive, plastic that had been melted and reformed, its color dull and without a name. Something Ancient and irreplaceable had been destroyed to make that box, which was yet another crime of the Sunken City, in her opinion. At least the Commonwealth didn’t allow melters to operate within its borders; everyone would know it if they did. It was impossible to hide the stench.

She set the box away, studying the room. Bed with curtains, no canopy, small table with an empty drawer, plain chair. Nothing under the mattress, no wall hangings, just an imperfect cube of plaster riddled with tiny cracks. Nowhere to hide anything. Maybe LeBlanc kept important things with him. Or maybe he kept everything important inside his head.

She went back to the plastic box, took the papers out again in a precise stack, and held it close to the candle. The outside of the box was satin smooth to her fingertips, and so was the inside. Except at one end. Her finger paused, pushed, and the bottom of the box flipped up and open, showing a shallow compartment underneath. Inside was a stack of letters. Sophia smiled, and then she froze, one hand full of papers. A board had creaked in the hallway, just beyond the door.