Reached

themselves went to exchange poems and papers and information and who knew what else. As I skirted the holes in the ground and listened to the wind rustle the plastic coverings, I knew that I should be afraid, and somewhere deep inside, I was.
    “You’re going to have to wear this,” the woman said, once we were in the middle of the field. She pulled out a dark piece of fabric. “I need to tie it over your eyes.”
    I cannot guarantee your safety.
    “All right,” I said, and turned my back to her.
    When she was finished tying the cloth, she held me by the shoulders. “I’m going to spin you around,” she said.
    A little laugh escaped me. I couldn’t help it. “Like a game from First School,” I said, remembering when we covered our eyes with our hands and played children’s games on the lawns of the Borough during leisure hours.
    “A little bit like that,” she agreed, and then she spun me, and the world whirled around me dark and chill and whispering. I thought of Ky’s compass then, with its arrow that could always tell you where north was no matter how often you turned, and I felt the familiar sharp pain that I always had when I thought of the compass, and how I traded his gift away.
    “You’re very trusting,” she said.
    I didn’t answer. Back in Oria, Ky had told me that Archivists were no better or worse than anyone else, so I wasn’t certain I
could
trust her, but I felt that I had to take the risk. She held my arm and I walked with her, lifting my feet awkwardly, trying not to step on anything. The ground felt cold and hard under my feet but every now and then I felt the give of grass, something that had once been growing.
    She stopped and I heard the rasp of her pulling something away.
Plastic,
I thought,
that white sheeting covering the remains of the buildings
. “It’s underground,” she said. “We’ll go down a set of stairs, and then we’ll reach a long hallway. Go very slowly.”
    I waited but she didn’t move.
    “You first,” she said.
    I put my hands up to the walls, which were close and tight, and felt old bricks covered in moss. I scuffed my foot forward and took one step down.
    “How will I know when I’ve reached the end?” I asked her, and the words and the way I used them made me think of the poem from the Carving, the one I loved the best of those I found in the farmers’ library cave, the one that always seemed to speak of my journey to Ky:
     
    I did not reach Thee
    But my feet slip nearer every day
    Three Rivers and a Hill to cross
    One Desert and a Sea
    I shall not count the journey one
    When I am telling thee.
     
    When I reached the last step, my foot slipped, just like in the poem.
    “Keep going,” she said from behind me. “Use the wall to guide you.”
    I dragged my right hand along the bricks while dirt crumbled among my fingers, and after a time I felt the walls open up into the space of a large room beyond. My feet echoed along the ground and I heard different sounds; feet shifting, people breathing. I knew we were not alone.
    “This way,” the woman said, and she took my arm to guide me. We moved away from the sounds of others.
    “Stop,” the woman said. “When I take off the blindfold,” she told me, “you’ll see the items that someone arranged to be delivered to you. You may notice that several are missing. They were the payment for delivery, agreed upon by the sender.”
    “All right,” I said.
    “Take your time to look things over,” she said. “Someone will come back to escort you out.”
    It took me a moment—I was disoriented and the place underground was dim—to understand what I was seeing. After a moment, I realized that I was walled-in by two rows of long, empty metal shelves. They looked slick and clean, as if someone cared for them and smoothed away their dust, but even so they reminded me of the crypt of a tomb we saw once in one of the Hundred History Lessons, where there were little caves full of bones and people carved in stone on top of boxes.
So much death,
the Society told us,
with no chance of life afterward
.
There was no tissue preservation then.
    In the middle of the shelf in front of me, I saw a large packet wrapped in thick plastic. When I pulled back the top edge of the plastic, I found paper.
The pages I brought out of the Carving.
The smell of water and dust, sandstone, seemed to come up from the paper.
    Ky. He managed to send them to me.
    I put my hands flat on the papers, breathing in, holding