Livy — I just got back from watching you sing with the other children at the Null Day celebrations. You’re growing up so fast it’s almost painful. You won’t remember me but you are, in many ways, like a daughter. It occurred to me as I was making the trip back up that I’m getting old and I need to take care of things. One of those things is this book. It belonged to a good friend once and I’m leaving it to you. When I’m done with this, I’ll wrap it and hope that will be enough to ensure you get it. I’ll be sure it is in my will but I’ll never know, of course. What I most want is for you to read it and know that even though our circumstances may change, there is always hope. Have you ever wondered why we have a Null Day? Why do we insert a holiday with no number and no date, between the last day of the year and the first of the next every four years? Why do we adjust the lights so that we are always either increasing or decreasing the dim time, going toward long days of light or the reverse? I know why. If you want to know why, then you can. I left it all for you. Use the knowledge well if you can and if not, save it for another person and another lifetime. With love and gratitude.
She touched the words as she finished. They were intimate words that imparted the feeling of a final goodbye, of some last bit of crucial advice. The signature may be only initials but Marina knew exactly who it was. Wallis Grant. It seemed like he was following her around the silo now, appearing over her shoulder to push her gently in one direction or another. Whoever Livy might be, she either never got the book or turned it in. Kept with those boxes of banned or distasteful books, this little treasure had languished. Was some part of Wallis around, even now, speaking so quietly that no one could hear?
Marina looked around her room and into the corners, half fearing and half hoping she would see some spectral Wallis pointing in the direction he wanted her to go next. She gave a shiver and sat up, trying to shake off the creepy feelings she was giving herself. There were no specters, no voices from the past, only this book and a sad letter that was either rejected or never reached the intended recipient. She held the book up to her face and breathed in the pleasant musty smell of old paper and the past and said into the leather that bound it, “I got it, Wallis.”
Reading the book for further clues yielded nothing. There were lots of underlined words or words with tick marks or numbers with circles around them, but none of it made any sense. Much was done at different times. She could tell by the fading of the ink or the strange greyish brown marks used instead of ink. On top of that the whole thing was poetry. She hated poetry. She would rather read that nasty book she had found about doing it with an Other before poetry.
While she was eating dinner with the group, Piotr and Greta teasing Taylor to break him out of yet another sour mood, the unidentifiable something that had been nagging at her finally clicked into place. “Shit! Of course!” she exclaimed, spattering dressing off her fork with her sudden gesture.
Everyone at the table stopped mid-sentence and looked at her, Greta wiping a drop of oily dressing from her cheek.
“Ah, yeah,” Marina stumbled with her words. She needed something —anything— reasonable. “I just remembered something I have to do.” She dropped her fork to her tray and shoved it toward Taylor, who could be relied upon to eat anything on anyone’s tray that was left over. “Can you eat that for me? I’ve got to go.”
He gave her a cool look she assumed was related to the tray, but nodded. Greta and Piotr just exchanged that “she’s weird” look with each other they always did and waved her off. Squeezing her fists to keep from flying out of the room, she left as casually as she could. The squeak of excitement that escaped when she got to the deserted hallway was a quiet one. She broke into a run at the corner but she kept her footfalls as light as possible in her heavy boots.
The door shoved closed and her chair beneath the knob once more, she opened the book and looked again. Yes, there is was. What she ignored at first as a date of some sort could not possibly be a date. Null day had no date and it sure wasn’t in the fifth month of the year. She considered the possibilities. Sometimes older people wrote dates by their age rather than the year and this could be that. The fourteenth day of the fifth month of the sixty-fourth year of his life. What about the spare after it? What did that mean? No, Marina was sure of one thing and that was that she was following a trail not laid by accident.
What did he mean by ‘I left it all for you’ in the letter? It had to mean there was more than this book. And the only thing that doesn’t fit in was the date and the word spare. That was the clue. But what in silo did it mean? Compartment numbers were one possibility but they weren’t labeled that way. Compartments were by level but then it was all one number. Her compartment was 95-0916R. Level 95, section 9 compartment 16. If it was a compartment then it would be Level 5, section 14 and compartment 64. That didn’t make sense unless the compartments up there were a whole lot smaller there than the rest of the silo. She couldn’t imagine how tiny the quarters would be to get at least 64 of them on a single section.
Still, it was possible. But where in any compartment could anything of any real size be hidden? Nowhere. The walls are concrete, ducts are cleaned regularly. She looked around her room, seeking where that she might hide things if she were Wallis. Sink, no. Floor, no, nothing large anyway. No, no and more no. Still, she would have to go look. Maybe it was just the next clue. She let out a wry chuckle when she considered that maybe he hid a clue under a floor tile just as she had. How in the silo would she get the resident of that space to let her search it or start pulling up tiles?
Marina tucked the book back into her coverall, patting it like a puppy or child after she buttoned up her pocket. She tucked her mussed hair back behind her ears, gave her ponytail a tightening tug, smoothed her coveralls and plastered her normal smile back on her face before she went back out of the room. There was no one there to see the performance so she dropped it and rushed back to the archives where everyone was probably already at work.
When the others asked her what was up, clearly referring to her abrupt departure, she passed it off as a forgotten special occasion that needed a note sent. Piotr had apparently been in that situation before because he mumbled, “That never works,” as he turned back to his work. Greta laughed at that and nudged his shoulder. She wasn’t married but she could guess as well as Marina could that Piotr was either a forgetter of birthdays or anniversaries, or both.
Only Taylor didn’t join in on the revelry. The way he looked at her made Marina feel uncomfortable, though it wasn’t a mean look or anything of that nature. It was just sort of a vague look that crept under her skin. She gave him a nervous smile and resisted the urge to pat the book again while she made her escape back to her corner of the archives.
Chapter Seventeen
The group had been making tremendous progress and the archives were a different place. The shelves were absent dust and filled with organized files. The cabinets were beginning to empty and be refilled, now with newly greased skids and rust free rails. It was a beautiful thing, Marina thought. For decades this place had remained almost untouched. The historians had a case for expansion that couldn’t be argued with if the timeline really did verify out and a mere handful of generations had passed since Graham and his group had made their stand.
Sadly, not much more was being found but that didn’t matter when she considered all that they had done. It made her feel like they had accomplished something wonderful. The origins of the pocket watch would probably be forever lost, but in a way, that was fine too. It was a beautiful mystery for another time from another time.