“I’m not misleading you. Come.”
She held out her hand for Marina to take and she did. The first few steps made her left foot and thighs feel like something brittle and tight were being strained to breaking, but it wasn’t actual pain. That was driven back for the moment and would be further if these tablets worked. It was merely enough to remind her to be cautious.
They left the room and found that almost all of those who had been in the room were now lined up in the hallway. Marina wondered where they had been watching from to have returned. She nodded at each, confused by their solemn looks. Their expressions were complex and not easily decipherable. The head of IT, now missing his assistant, seemed sadder than ever where he stood at the end of the line of people. As she passed he fell into step next to her.
They didn’t walk far, only to the server room, and he pushed open the door for them to enter without a word. Inside, the faint hum that traveled throughout the hallways grew much louder and the air moved with currents from the large fans that kept the heat at bay. He took the lead and they wove their way through the servers, some quiet and still, others covered with frantically blinking lights and stopped them at one of the servers. Looking behind her, Marina realized this small area wasn’t visible from the window set into the big doors. The alignment of the servers along the path effectively blocked that view.
As the trio rounded the server and came to the rear of it, Marina saw that it was hollow and barely a server at all. She peered inside and saw boards and lights that probably once lit with dummy lights pressed against the front of the case, safe from discovery behind the securely locked doors of the cabinet. At the bottom of the server a black gap filled the space at the bottom.
The head of IT flicked a switch and the black square blazed with light. A set of steep metal stairs, treads ridged for a better grip, led downward.
She looked up at the two other people and asked, “What’s going on? What is this place?”
Greta answered for the pair, “It’s hard to explain and we were close by so we decided it would be just easier to show you.” She paused a moment and then asked, “Do you think you can get down that? With your legs, I mean.”
“Oh,” Marina peered down the hole again and her eyes took in the many treads she would need to climb, for it was a climb that was needed and not simple steps. “There’s only one way to find out.”
With that, she turned around, grabbed some sloppily welded handles set into the server cabinet and lowered herself into the bright light below IT.
Chapter Eight
Hours had passed and Marina felt a deep weariness in her body and mind. The porters, once she had remembered they were waiting, had been sent away long ago. She had made her laborious way up the ladder just once in the time she had been here. Her husband and daughter had asked to see her as they made their way back down to the hotel.
He had taken the news that she would need to spend additional time working out details of the reclamation with a confused good grace. Marina had tried to work up some excitement when Sela showed her all that they had purchased as gifts to take back, but they could sense her unease.
When Joseph asked her quietly what was wrong, his face growing grim, she had been able to convince him it was just the discomfort of her legs and foot that gnawed at her good humor. It wasn’t a lie, only a lesser truth. She had been so absorbed that she had completely forgotten to take the next dose. It wasn’t until the throbbing pain in her legs began to distract her that she remembered. Now it was taking a long time for the pain to recede again.
Once their minds were eased and they took their leave, Marina returned to the bright rooms below IT. She had needed assistance getting down the steep treads this time, Greta bracing her as she approached from above while Taylor paid out line on a harness and accepted some of her weight.
A meal was brought almost as soon as she came back and Piotr apologized for forgetting about it. Marina was surprised to find out that they had missed two meals already and that knowledge woke her stomach up. They said little as they ate stew and rounds of flat bread. They had even remembered her liking for tea over water and a steaming flask of strong tea was passed down with their tray of food.
Marina looked about her as she ate, still absorbing all she had been told. She had not revealed the presence of her hidden treasure but there was no hurry now. Piotr and Greta had made it clear that they were disclosing. It was their turn to reveal things to her. And reveal they had.
The rooms here were deep and private and were a closely guarded secret in the time before history, they surmised. They showed her the last charred remains of what had once been books. There must have been hundreds of them given the number of tins that were stacked in the back of a less burned room. Small portions of a few books had been salvaged, sometimes only a spine. For some there were wedges of partial pages, melded together into one chunk by either the fire, or the water used to try to put out the fire, in a time long past.
In another room, they had shown her bunks, now stripped, where they strongly suspected the holders of these secrets hid away. In yet another room she saw supplies, now mostly emptied with only the strange containers remaining stacked on the shelves.
There were the makings of a small portable kitchen created in a design she had never seen before. The stove and basin were smoother, somehow more attuned to pleasing the eye with their shape and form, than the boxes of metal with rough welds that were made now. The word ‘Coleman’ was written on the side and she wondered who Coleman was. Had he hidden down here once?
In yet another space in this warren of rooms, they had shown her hangers on a wall scarred by scorch marks. It was exactly the sort of arrangement they used in Fabrication when a diagram needed to be hung so it could be referred to by the worker. She had one in her workroom. In each clip was still secured the corner of a sheaf of thick papers, yellow with smoke and age.
She had asked permission with her eyes, received a nod in return and then touched the sheaf. Her hand was gently drawn back only when she tried to fold back the top sheet to see what lay underneath. Her quick glance showed her a thick clear border with notes scribbled in tiny handwriting above the tear. There was also what looked like a part of a circle bisected raggedly at the place where the sheets were ripped away.
Where they sat now eating their simple meal, Marina saw many other interesting things. Something like a small office or perhaps a schoolroom meant only for a few was in the next area in a room shaped like an L. Just above her head was a long row of jacks, exactly the kind she rebuilt for mechanical, hanging askew and destroyed. The important parts of it behind the jacks were ripped and burned into a forest of bristling wires and melted conduit.
A pair of headphones, broken and covered with residue ages old, had been flung into the corner at some point and now had a small barrier, made up of plastic rods tied into a lattice, around it to protect it. Nearby, just a few arms lengths away, another barrier protected a messy pile of blackened ashes molded by water into a haphazard solid lump at tall as her knees.
Protruding from one side of the lump was a stick of wood. A round metal disk stuck firmly to the end of the stick shone dully in the light. The piece had been finely worked, its grain clearly visible even now and a curve in the wood that made her think of a chair leg. Another shape showed in the pile, a book this time, but bigger than any other she had ever seen. That huge book was a single mass of once soaked ash not salvageable according to the Historian.
Marina tore a small piece of the bread, dunked it into her stew and chewed thoughtfully, trying to draw out the meal as long as she could. She needed time to integrate what she had been told and what she had seen.