The Reader (4 page)

As she inched forward, not knowing how far she had come or how far she had to go, with nothing but the noise of her own body and the darkness, it was the very
thingness
of the rectangular thing, pushed before her as she slid through the tunnel, that assured her she was still alive, that she had not perished in the aboveground world with her father.

At last she reached the end, where the tunnel terminated abruptly in a wooden hatch. Sefia crouched beneath it, scuffling at the splintered ceiling, and unlocked the door. Pushing upward with what remained of her quavering strength, she heaved it open and emerged in a tangle of bramble with summer's last shriveled berries still clinging to the vines. She pulled herself through the hatch, clutching the rectangular thing to her side.

It was evening. The fog had burned off, and the cool air was clear, the shadows bruised and purple. She rubbed her arms. The entire afternoon had passed, sucked up by the darkness of the tunnel. For a moment, Sefia crouched, scratched and dirty, in the deep knotted safety of the thicket.

Her parents had given her three instructions: Use the secret doors. Go through the tunnel. Find Nin. She'd done the first
two, and after she did the last, she'd have nothing left of them. Nothing but the strange object in her arms.

Sefia shut the hatch as quietly as she could and stood up. She recognized this thicket. Her father used to take her berrypicking here, and when their baskets were filled, they'd bring one to Nin. He'd always claimed these brambles had the sweetest fruit, but now she realized he'd been training her, showing her the way.

At the thought of her father, she began to cry again. Clutching the leather-wrapped object as if it were a blanket or a stuffed toy or a shield, Sefia stumbled out of the bushes and took off running through the dusk, ducking branches as they snatched at her hair. Saplings slapped at her face and arms. Ditches fell out from underneath her. But even though she sobbed and stumbled, even though her legs were weak and her body was shaking, she didn't stop.

By the time she got to Nin's back door, Sefia was lost and half-gone with grief, spitting, blind, blundering, falling into Nin's thick cushiony arms as if she were diving off a cliff.

Dimly, she heard Nin's voice: “It's finally happened, hasn't it? I'm sorry, girl, I should've been there. I should've walked you home.”

She had done what she'd been told. Use the secret doors. Go through the tunnel. Find Nin. And now it wasn't her father's empty dismantled body that frightened her so much, but the silence, that unbreakable silence of the dead, because there would never be another reassuring word, no familiar gurgle from laying her cheek on her father's stomach, no sneezes, no
coughs, no creak of tired joints, none of those everyday sounds of life. She had done what she had been told. And now there would be no further instructions, no way for another word to pass from her father's lips into the bright prism of the still-living world. He was dead. And gone forever.

T
he rain had not let up by the time Sefia awoke the next morning, and the little tent was filled with cold dingy light. As she lay there staring up at the stained canvas, she could have sworn she saw movement out of the corner of her eye: Nin stirring beneath the mound of clothing. Or there, Nin passing outside the tent. But it was just the water dripping out of her belongings, it was just a shadow falling across the canvas. Nin was gone. She had been cut out of the world like a paper doll, though Sefia could still see where she should have been, the vague outlines of her silhouette, the spaces echoing with the things she should have said.

Wincing at the pain in her ankle, Sefia sat up and stared at the unmoving tent flaps as the memories of the previous day washed over her again. The stench of metal. The pockmarked face of the woman in black. The
crack
of Nin's bones.

Nin had protected her to the last, and Sefia had done nothing to save her.

Twisting her damp hair away from her face, Sefia began digging her belongings out of the pack, laying them out in neat piles until her searching hands hit something flat and solid and firm.

This.

This was what they wanted.

She had kept it for six years, and though she remembered it often, she'd only taken it out once.

She'd been nine, and she and Nin had left the house on the hill two days earlier. Nin was off hunting, and Sefia had pulled it out of her pack. A heavy thing like a box, with dark damaged spaces along the edges that must have been for filigree and jeweled settings, though someone had torn most of that off a long time ago. The only gold pieces left on it were the caps on the corners and two tarnished clasps that kept it closed. She'd been on the verge of opening it when Nin came back.

“What are you doing?” Nin demanded. A dead rabbit dangled from her hand.

Sefia froze and looked up at her guiltily. “What is this?”

Nin stared at the thing like it was a bear trap, full of metal teeth. “I never asked,” she snapped. “Put it away. I don't want anything to do with it.”

“But Aunt Nin, it belonged to—”

“I'm not your parents.” Turning her back, she began to skin the rabbit. Among the sounds of ripping flesh and popping sinew, her next words came over her shoulder, cold and final: “If I see it again, I'll throw it in the fire with the logs.”

Sefia hadn't looked at it since then, but whenever she cleared out her pack, she touched it. Her hands knew the shape of the thing so well she could have recognized it in the dark.

The memories lanced through her chest again.

Her father.

Her aunt.

Sefia dug her fingers into the leather casing and ripped it away. Through bleary, angry tears, she stared down at the rectangular object in her lap.

The rich brown leather seemed to glow like varnished wood, and in the center was some sort of emblem, like the crests she'd seen over the shops in town, a circle inscribed with four lines:

The leather had been stamped and burned, so the lines were dark and sharp. A clue. As she studied the symbol, she tried to imagine what it was supposed to be.

A trident.

A rising sun.

A helmet.

Tipping the strange box on its side, she studied the gold clasps that held it closed. Whatever was inside must have been important. And dangerous.

Her mind flicked through the most dangerous objects she knew: guns, knives, poisons, magical items like the Thunder Gong or the Long Telescope that could see through walls, cursed objects like the Executioner or the Diamonds of Lady Delune.

Or maybe it would tell her where to find
them
—the people
who had taken Nin. And if she could rescue Nin, if she could get to her in time, maybe that would make up for letting them take her in the first place.

She hoped.

Sefia flicked open the clasps and raised the lid.

Inside was paper. Just paper, smooth and crisp as ice. She riffled through it, turning each sheet first one way, then another, expecting illustrations, but all she saw were patterns, line after line like ribbons of black lace.

Is this it?

Panicked, she dug through the paper, searching for clues, tearing faster and faster through the sheets until paper cuts crossed her fingertips and whorls of blood smeared the corners. Until at last she realized that no matter how far she flipped, she never reached the beginning or the end. There was always more beneath her frantic fingers.

She slammed the box shut and thrust it away. Her hands stung.

Paper. That's all they'd wanted. An infinite supply of paper, to be sure, but nothing more than paper, strewn with marks like debris from an explosion.

Tentatively, she lifted the lid again. With the tip of her finger she traced the strange markings: straight lines like beetle tracks through a dead log, or birds swarming in a white sky. Each tiny sign was perfectly formed, with little flags and short tails at the ends of each stroke, resting on invisible horizontal strings like pins perched on a clothesline. But they weren't guild signs or crests, and they didn't make pictures, like tiles in a mosaic.

They did repeat. She spotted individual marks recurring again and again on a single page, and found entire clusters replicated, sometimes ten or thirty times in perfect patterns.

But some figures stood alone, isolated by blank space like tents pitched on winter slopes or lampposts on white roads.

Sefia stiffened.

She'd seen these signs before.

They had been carved onto some of her toys, brightly painted wooden blocks, their sides engraved with symbols and simple pictures. There had been a whole set of them.

A mongoose.

An artichoke.

A ring.

She used to sit in the kitchen for hours, building caravans on the table while her mother sliced up garden vegetables or butchered hens at the counter, her knife quick and confident on the cutting board, her brown hands flecked with pale scars. Every so often she'd look out the window for Sefia's father, then turn back to Sefia and slide the blocks across the table—the snake, the elk, the feather—singing in her soft voice, “Ess-ee-eff-aye-ay.”

“Essie effai yay,” Sefia repeated, laughing.

“Yes.” Her mother brushed her cheek with the curve of her finger. “Sefia, my little Sefia.”

Sefia blinked tears out of her eyes and touched the mark, like she could impress it onto her skin.

“Ess,” she whispered.

The symbol had a meaning, and a
sound
, as if it had been
plucked from the real world and pressed flat, like some strange dark flower, between the pieces of paper. And that sound was a hiss, like a sting or the sizzle of water on coals.

She scrubbed at her face. Her mother had been teaching her to decipher the symbols, before the fevers, the awful hacking and coughing and the blood-spattered handkerchiefs, the way her mother wasted away to almost nothing.

Her father had burned the blocks the day after her mother died. She remembered him crouched in front of the stone hearth, feeding her toys into the flames.

“Daddy, no!” She tried to stop him, but he caught her, drawing her flailing body into his arms.

“It's not safe. You weren't supposed to know,” he said, murmuring into her dark hair. “It's not safe.”

Sefia let out a wail, crying for her mother.

“Mommy's gone.” Her father stroked her hair as the firelight flickered over the scar at his temple. “She's gone, Sefia. It's just you and me now.”

She buried her cheek in the extra folds of his sweater and watched the paint curl as the fire consumed the blocks.

“We're a team, you and me,” he said. “We're in this together, no matter what.”

The sound of his weeping blended with hers, and she squeezed him tighter, like she'd never let go.

Sefia was crying again, her tears smudging the ink. She dabbed at the smears with the cuff of her shirt.

The strange symbols were
words
. The paper was filled with them. Were they messages? Magic? Some ancient wisdom entrusted only to her parents?

Why hadn't her father continued teaching her?

Why hadn't he given her anything to go on?

She narrowed her eyes and curled her lacerated fingertips into her palms.

It
wasn't
safe. He was right about that.

They
wanted it, and they'd never stop until they had it.

They'd come for her father. They'd come for Nin. And they would come for Sefia sooner or later. No one was safe.

Unless she stopped them.

Sefia closed the lid and clicked the clasps back into place. She'd use it against them if she could, but they would never lay their hands on it again.

All these years, she'd had someone to protect her, but now she was alone, and
they
were still out there. With Nin, if she wasn't already . . . Sefia dug her fingers into the
, hissing as the pressure stung her paper cuts.
No.
Nin needed her now. Needed her strength and her resilience, her cleverness and her resolve.

There was only one way to protect herself from the people who had destroyed her family.

She had to stop them herself.

• • •

S
he tried to pick up the trail again a day later when her ankle hurt less, but the rains had washed everything through, eliminating whatever footprints they'd left in the jungle. Though crowds made her uneasy, she scouted populated areas for signs of the woman in black and her mysterious companion, asking after them in nearby villages and in lumber encampments in the forest.

But no one had seen them.

No one knew anything.

It was as if they'd disappeared altogether, leaving her with only one clue: the strange box of paper with the symbol on the lid.

So she retreated into the thick jungles of Oxscini to sharpen her skills and study the object. She turned every hunt into a challenge now, made sure every arrow found its mark. She figured out how to throw knives and make poisoned arrows from the skins of frogs, to sneak up on prey twice her size and track targets in the dark.

Because she knew they were out there, the people who came for her father, who came for Nin, and who would come for her too . . . if she didn't get to them first.

Sefia spent weeks stalking around Oxscini's interior, poring over the papers, inspecting, searching, wondering. She took to making her camp in the trees, in a hammock fashioned out of rope, and when she took out the strange object, she felt like someone were peering over her shoulder, scanning the lines for secrets just as she was.

It didn't take her long before she could recognize different marks as easily as she recognized animal tracks—the empty gasp of an
O
, the murmur of an
M
—but it wasn't until a month later, on a night with a full moon shedding pale light over the canopy, while she was lying in her hammock with the object propped up on her knees, that she began to read.