The Cartographer's Daughter

8. In Ruins

Looking onto the pirate colony, my bones rattle. I consider telling Bami about the map; maybe we don't need to stop in Alexandria after all. But I shake the thought away. Even if the map marks the spot, would we risk venturing to the end of the earth without some kind of proof? No, there's no way around it. If there's evidence that the copied Library really does exist, we would find it here.

Bami comes out of the cabin with a bottle of something amber colored. It's uncorked. He wraps his thumb over the top, tips some of the liquid onto his finger, and anoints his neck with it. Then he stumbles toward me, pretending to be drunk, and thrusts the bottle into my hands with a loopy smile. "Time to get your game face on," he says, crossing his eyes. For a moment I laugh, so relieved that this shy jokester is here with me. We splash the liquor on ourselves until we stink. The less seriously they can take us, the better.

"What is this?" I ask, sniffing its dark spiced scent.

"Rum," Bami says, winking.

Rum? I think. I'd only heard about rum as an exotic drink from the Caribbean islands, thousands of miles away. It was the kind of thing only the Imperials could procure. I'd certainly never seen it. Had my father really sailed so far? And how recently? My head spins even though I've had nothing to drink. How did Bami find rum in this little boat that we've already inventoried?

"Your father kept a secret little cabinet on board," Bami says, lowering the bottle. "It was rare, but sometimes when he missed the sea he used to ask me to sit with him on the boat. We'd toast the waves, the stars after it got dark. We'd toast the sailors he'd lost over his career."

His eyes shift to his shoes. "And we'd toast to big, bold dreams for the future." Bami tips the bottle up, nods, and takes a small swig, grimacing. Then he passes the bottle to me. I take the tiniest of sips and feel my mouth, nose and eyes burn. I cough, and Bami laughs. And I wonder what his big, bold dreams are, but I don't ask. With the map burning against my chest, I respect both our rights to secrets.

Finally, it's time. We have long loose shirts over our shoulders to disguise our knapsacks, which are filled with rope and tools and food and battered flashlights, and the money, since we don't trust to leave it on board. Our little boat inches to shore and we do our best to be raving lunatics, singing an ocean ballad at the top of our lungs and swinging around the mast.

A man with a salt-crusted beard saunters up to the moorings to tell us there's a fee to dock here, and we don't argue. We don't even break the song. I try to sloppily tie up the boat as Bami stumbles toward the man, shoving the still full bottle of rum to his chest. The man wraps both hands around it greedily and nods. The debt is paid. We can stay.

It's astonishing how close the Library ruins are. The sea walks right up to them. They are ruins on top of ruins now that a modern library was built over it, and then raided. The modern library is a husk; the exterior facing stones, whatever they were, have been lifted off and the steel girders beneath are crumbling in rust. Windows that faced the sea have been punched in, so that direct sunlight shines into the huge hall. The water level, higher now than it was then, spills into the windows in a thin but steady trickle.

There's no need to open doors; they've been pulled off already. We walk through the wide entryway and step cautiously into the main hall. It's littered with broken down bookshelves and rows upon rows of built-in desks where computers likely sat before they were pilfered. I know there's still a server farm in the Imperial City, the last working network. But the looting here looks crude, not like the surgical destruction the Imperials are known for. I wonder now if there are other networks still alive, limping along on century-old computers from before the Minesweep.

"Where should we look?" I ask, my voice echoing eerily against the gigantic pillars too heavy to steal.

"Underneath," Bami says. "Maybe we can access the old ruins from the foundation. Look for some kind of trap door, something unofficial that leads down. Maybe we can find a crawlspace." He's got a rope slung over his shoulder for just such a purpose. We wander over the inlaid floor, a geometric design that's been scratched and picked at by raiders and time. We kick tiles that might be loose, open doors looking for staircases, but find instead an expanding labyrinth.

In one room is a domed glass ceiling, the panes long since broken out, and pedestals that probably once held telescopes. One door opens onto a courtyard that may have held a garden but now secures a wild and choking patch of jungle. There's a laboratory which looks like it exploded and curdled in its own chemicals. It's here that Bami sees the shafts for the exhaust fans, and he starts to follow them.

"Wherever these lead, that will be the belly of the building," Bami says, tracing his finger in the air along the ductwork. "There may be maintenance access to the whole building from there."

He's right. Five minutes and eight hallways later, we've arrived at the boiler room. The opulence of the rest of the Library, however decimated, is absent from the maintenance quarters, where the rooms are suddenly square and tight, though the broken skylights above give them a little light. Cut in the floor is a simple plywood board covering exactly what Bami predicted: a tunnel below.

Bami throws the trapdoor open and I look down but see nothing but black. I whistle into the space. It rings cavernously. I look up at Bami, eyebrows raised. There's a small rustling below, and little clicks, and slowly the rustling grows into a low roar. We both freeze with our breath held. Instantly I think of the myth of the Minotaur. A little warning flickers in my mind, that as we're stepping further into the Library we're stepping out of the possibilities for a normal life. I know suddenly that nothing will be the same. That was decided the moment I hid my father's map.

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