I look at Lukas. He lowers his eyes.
“No, she’s not the Elizabet from the Chronicle,” he concedes.
“She seems ambitious—even a little ruthless. I mean, she abandoned her boyfriend and her family—defied her family’s wishes, even. For her own dream.” I pause; the words are hard to form and to speak. “It makes me wonder whether I understand any part of the pre-Healing history at all.”
Privately, I laud her strength. I wonder if it was common in pre-Healing women. Maybe they were tough and didn’t need the protection of Gallants.
“The Golden Age,” Lukas says quietly.
I frown at him. What do you mean?”
“The period of history, the one that the Aerie rulers say they used as inspiration for their own—”
“I know what the Golden Age is,” I whisper, cutting him off.
Lukas starts tapping away at those rectangular keys. “Take a look at this. Elizabet’s computer stored a bunch of books.” He points to the screen. “One of them is called Life in a Medieval Village in the Golden Age.”
I squint at a gorgeously vibrant painting, filled with images that are not unlike the Aerie: stone walls of a distant Keep, men and women in plain robes. The huts that dominate the foreground seem more like Lukas’s village, however.
“I think it’s a Schoolbook of some sort,” he continues. “Maybe Elizabet was still doing some studies. She looks young enough to still be in School.”
“She was eighteen.” I say quietly. “Exactly my age.”
Lukas clicks and words appear. Shoulders touching, we draw close. He touches the screen, whirling me to particular passages. The language is dense and dry, but I get it in a tick, a heartbeat. Talk of hunger, of servitude, of ignorance. Everything of value concentrated in the hands of a few. This was no Golden Age. So why does The Lex paint it that way? New North is better than this. Everyone—Boundary and Aerie—has adequate food, clothing, and shelter. It almost seems as if the Founders of New North built a society that’s like my Chronicle of Elizabet. On the outside, it could appear to be true. But there is no real truth.
After about a bell, my head is spinning. “Lukas.” My voice shakes. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”
“That’s how Eamon felt, too,” he answers, keeping his eyes fixed to words on the glowing screen.
I grab his shoulder. “Eamon knew about all this?”
“Yes, he’d learned something of the gap between now and the real past. But, Eva,” Lukas breaks his gaze from the computer and clasps his hand on mine. “I don’t want you to end up like Eamon.”
XLIV: Maius 20 Year 242, A.H.
Panic takes hold. I crane my neck, looking for his grandmother. Where is she? As odd and confusing as she is, I want her here; I want to be rescued from the news I sense Lukas is about to give me. Maybe she got out of the way for this very reason.
I try to wriggle out of his grasp. “What do you mean ‘end up like Eamon’? Seeing this stuff doesn’t mean I’ll go careening down the side of the Ring. One has nothing to do with the other.”
He is insistent that we hold hands; he takes the other. “Eva, they have everything to do with one another. Eamon knew that The Lex was a fiction. That everything you were raised to believe was a fiction.”
I gasp at the word. “A fiction?”
Lukas’s voice is firm. “Yes. Eamon discovered something very dangerous. He learned that the story of the Healing was the same as an old, banned story about a flood that wiped clean the past. That story was in a book called the Bible. And people like Robert and Elizabet believed in the Bible as you believe in The Lex.”
Bible. Haven’t I just heard that word?
Lukas continues. “The Bible was kind of like a pre-Healing Lex. For some people, at least. Elizabet was holding a copy of the Bible in her hands during her last post. She mentioned praying with it, when she was hoping for a post from Robert.”
“Is the Bible about Apple? Do you have a copy?” The questions tumble out of my mouth. Even in my bewilderment, it’s as if my appetite for truth has just been whet, and I am starving for answers.
He seems annoyed, or maybe just tired. He sighs. “No, we don’t have a copy. And it’s not about Apple. Tech came long after the Bible. Anyway, all Bibles were destroyed. We out here in the Boundary lands have never forgotten it, though.”
“How do you know that?”
“We pass down the past word by word, Eva. So my people have kept our own record of what happened here in New North before and after the Healing. And we remember when the Bibles were destroyed.”
“Why would the Founders have destroyed those books? Paper is precious.”
He lets go of my hands. He no longer sounds tired; he sounds angry. “Because the Founders needed to write a fiction. So they took the parts of the Bible that worked and fashioned The Lex out of them.”
I’m angry, too. “That’s heresy, Lukas. The Lex is a sacred work, delivered directly to the people of New North by the Gods.”
“And everything that you’ve been taught has turned out to be true, right?” he snaps back.
I don’t answer. How can I? This one trip to the Boundary lands has burned every single one of my long-held beliefs. About the Aerie, the pre-Healing days, the Healing itself, The Lex … and now my own twin.
Lukas speaks to my silence. “Please look at this, Eva.” He taps on the computer again and pulls up another book that Elizabet stored on it. “I might not have a copy of the Bible, but Elizabet did. Here it is, on her computer.”
I push him to the side. Neither one of us wants him to spoon-feed me information anymore. I want to make my own decisions about Elizabet, the Healing, New North, and Eamon. No longer do I want to view the present or the past through anyone else’s prism. Imitating Lukas’s motions, I page through this … Bible. The words and rhythm remind me of The Lex. The language that is at once beautiful and obtuse.
His hand jerks out to stop me at a passage.
I read the words over and over to myself, until I realize that I need to speak them aloud. “In the eyes of God, the Earth was corrupt and full of lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt man had become, God said, “I will wipe out from the Earth mankind whom I have created, and not only mankind, but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air.” Then God said to Noah, ‘Make yourself an ark … Go into the ark, you and all your household, for you and you alone in this age have I found to be truly just and chosen … I will bring rain down on the Earth for forty days and forty nights, and so I will wipe out from the surface of the earth every moving creature that I have made…’ ”
I grow quiet. Lukas doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. We both know just how much “The Story of Noah”—a tale from pre-Healing times, from pre Golden-Age times—reads like the creation story in The Lex, supposedly divined to the Founders only two hundred and fifty years ago.
As if to comfort me, Lukas offers, “My people—who were once called the Inuit—have a flood myth, too. Perhaps all people do.”
“Do you mean the story of the Mariner?” Nurse Aga had told me the tale of the Mariner, who survived a great flood that covered the Earth but for a tall, icy mountain by making a raft. But I never connected that story with our history in The Lex.
“Where did you hear that?” Lukas looks alarmed.
“From my Nurse Aga. Before she became so old—so dotty, my parents called it—that she had to come back to the Boundary lands.”
“That’s what your parents told you about this woman?”
“Yes.” I don’t like how Lukas refers to Nurse Aga. I’m afraid to find out more; I don’t think I can handle it right now if something awful happened to her. So instead, I ask, “How do you know all this, Lukas? You sound like a Teacher.”