“Sorry. I don’t see what is important there,” Marina apologized. Then she got it. If this maintenance log covered a section of a level then one could go back and count the cleanings. She smiled.
Greta saw the comprehension come over her face and smiled too. “Exactly. If we can find all the maintenance logs for just one section, then we can count how long they’ve been maintained. It looks like this particular section gets the intake duct cleaned every twelve months. One year.”
“How could we have missed that before?” Marina asked, taking in the piles again. They had all been gone through because she distinctly remembered the groans and complaints coming from the rows where Taylor and Piotr had been working. Out of sight, but definitely not out of earshot. They seemed to feel about maintenance logs the exact feelings she had harbored against the farm logs.
The older woman gave a short little half shrug. She was just as confused as Marina it would seem. “I honestly don’t know. I got the first one from the overflow pile at the end of the row. It was obvious to me so I just can’t imagine them missing it. Especially with so many of them,” she finished with a wave at the collection of dusty paper.
Marina took in the piles her wave encompassed. There were a lot of maintenance books and they must have simply dismissed them after not realizing what they held in the first book. Blame wouldn’t help so she moved the conversation back on track. “So, we’re looking to match up the logs with the sections?” she asked.
Greta nodded and pointed to the pile she wanted Marina to look through, “Right. So get to it!”
By the time Piotr and Taylor came in, fresh and happy from their home time, the two women had well and truly lost that excited glow from a fresh discovery. Instead they were frustrated, covered in dust and only recently settled after a rather harrowing encounter with an unexpected spider guest that raced along a book Marina had picked up.
Piotr saw them at the table and dropped his pack to see what they were doing. His face went from jovial and amused at something Taylor had been saying to serious and interested in a flash. Marina saw it and gave him a little smile when his searching eyes happened to fall on her. His return smile was a distracted one and he looked at the book in her hand.
“Did you find something?”
Greta glanced up for only the partial second it took to dutifully register their presence without being rude and went back to studying the lines of print. She pushed a bead down the line of her counter to register her count every few seconds. The rack of beads, strung as they were on stiff wires, was some long abandoned and archaic toy that showed children how to count. It had found a new and far more important purpose as Greta’s new method of counting years in the maintenance logs.
Her head back down and counting, she answered him with a distracted, “Yep.”
Taylor hung back a little and Marina saw the briefest pass of something like anger cross his face. Perhaps she was mistaken because when his eyes met hers his normal friendly expression fell into place. She put it down to his being absent during a discovery and gave him a sympathetic look. She shrugged and said, “Greta found it while we were all gone.”
Piotr moved to stand behind Greta and looked over her shoulder at the logs. The historian didn’t need to explain or say a word. Her finger moved down a few lines and one more bead clicked and that was all it took.
“That’s brilliant!” he exclaimed and bent down further so as to read what was written. “I can’t believe we missed that.” He stood and faced Taylor, who remained at the far end of the table, not quite joining the group yet. “You didn’t notice that?”
Taylor followed the line of Piotr’s pointing finger and gave a dismissive shake of his head. “Notice what? It just looked like maintenance reports. It doesn’t mean anything.”
His caster’s eyebrows lifted at the tone. He stayed as he was, just looking at Taylor with an almost evaluating stare. When Taylor broke eye contact and looked at his feet, Piotr said, “Well, no need to be embarrassed about it. It seems obvious now but it probably looked very different to you then. We weren’t looking for that, really, were we?”
Taylor didn’t look up but he shook his head. It was a picture of an embarrassed shadow found wanting, or it was supposed to be. Piotr didn’t seem to notice, but the whole pose struck her as purposeful and a little false. She couldn’t think what the purpose would be. It was probably some other dynamic at work between caster and shadow. They all developed their own sort of codes with each other, distinct manners of speaking or acting that smoothed out rough edges and avoided conflict. She dismissed it and waved Taylor over to where she sat amongst her piles.
“Come help me, Taylor. I’ve got plenty to share.”
Chapter Sixteen
The days of counting backward continued but the gaps were just too much to overcome using just the books. Marina stayed with her previous tasks, filtering through the years of farm records until she overturned the last box and final filing cabinet and ran out of books to search. The pile was prodigious and her search wasn’t exhaustive but it would take an army of careful readers to truly search each book.
What she couldn’t overcome was the number that simply weren’t in the archives. Greta hadn’t been certain, but she had a notion that there might have been some purge in the past. Marina had found a sheaf of papers in a dusty drawer comprised of summary sheets for production and consumption that may have been related to the farms, but the identifiers were something she had no way of understanding. What could 2053 mean? 2051?
Greta was doing better with the maintenance reports, but like the farm reports, much was missing. Receipts for recycling started to outnumber the books. Piotr came up with a stunningly simple yet effective idea. They decided to average out the books in terms of years and then decide on the number of books between known books and count that way. It wouldn’t be highly accurate and Marina had a feeling that it would end in the same dead end she had encountered. Something fundamental had changed and she was pretty sure all the books of all kinds would lead back to the same undefined nowhere.
Marina checked in with the others and found Piotr and Greta with their heads together and working hard. Taylor was doing something else but related, his eyes flicking up and listening intently as they spoke. His easy smiles had disappeared somewhere. He appeared tense and drawn instead of the enthusiastic man of before. Something was going on with him and Marina wished she knew how to help him. It was a lot to take in, all that they had found so far, and she supposed that must be taking a toll.
The other end of the vast room was the one in the most disarray. It was the end where boxes were stacked in haphazard, leaning towers hiding filing cabinets with drawers that were crooked and permanently ajar. Marina walked toward them through the dim patches between the sparse bright lights. Only every other row of lights was lit, like every place in the silo that didn’t absolutely need brightness. It always sent a shiver along her spine when she walked such paths in quiet places.
She dismantled one of the leaning towers of boxes and sat amongst them, determined to sort them properly. Her reed pen was sharp and her ink pot full so there was no excuse not to finish the task. She gave a little grin and thought that she might even find something. So far she had been quite the lucky one.
The first box was filled with an uninteresting assortment of voter records and usage reports for power and water. She put them into piles and delved into the next, which held more disorganized bits though she did find a copy of a book she hadn’t read before. It looked like a fantasy novel about the outside. Something to do with a battle over some woman by the name of Helen in some place called Troy. It was neatly done, the writing almost as perfect as any she had seen. The binding needed work but it should be in the library so she set that aside.