Chương 53: Chapter 52: The Long Way Around

The gate closed. Ella drew her hand back from the panel and the light went out of it, the stone going still and grey under her palm. For a moment the two of us stood there in the silence where Bill had been.

"We'll come back," She said.

"I know." She turned for the archway and I followed her, and we went home. The days after that ran together. Not because anything was wrong. Because there wasn't much happening at all. Each morning, Ella went to the garden to take care of the crops. Then I took her to the gate in the carriage, dropped her off, and continued on to the castle. The suns rose and set over the whole thing, one day bleeding into the next before either of us had much time to notice. The garden grew. I even retrieved my car one day.

For Ella, the gate became part of her routine. So did the archive for me. I spent most of my time there, working my way through stacks of books. Some were written in Hadran, others in Cling. I'd been reading the archives for weeks now, slowly working my way through them. I searched for anything that might explain the vanishings. The gate. The people who had built all of this. What had happened to them. I found nothing of value. The records were thorough about almost everything. Just not that.

Ella's successors — Julius, the one who'd inherited the throne after she'd vanished, had been busy. The archives held whole shelves of it. Campaigns. Annexations. Names and names and names. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. The land below. They'd conquered it. Province after province, in the same patient official hand as the field reports.

The same deadpan entries about instruments, clocks, distances and measurements, except these weren't about teams failing to return. These were about expeditions succeeding. And suddenly I understood what Ella had meant in the vault. There is more. A great deal more than the last time she'd stood in that room. The gold. The gems. The sheer amount of everything we'd found. It hadn't simply accumulated while she was gone. They had been bringing it home. It had been taken. I didn't tell her. Not right away, at least.

I wasn't sure what I was waiting for. Maybe I wanted to find something that made it less ugly. A different explanation. Some detail buried in another record that would change what I'd already understood. I never found one. When I finally found the resolve to tell her, she was quiet for a moment.

"Is that so?" she said. Her eyes returned to the TV.

"I see." And then she moved on. No anger. No questions. Nothing. Apparently, it hadn't affected her. Or at least, that was what she wanted me to believe. The gate was finished. She told me one morning on the porch, hands on her hips, looking out over the garden.

"The activation panel is complete." Not triumph. Just the plain fact of it. But she kept working. I'd see her at the laptop for hours, switching between documents, copying numbers, checking calculations, and occasionally going back to something she'd written down in Hadran.

"What are you learning?" I asked her one evening. She looked up through the door at me.

"Your writing," she said.

"I am learning it." Then, when I waited, the rest of it, in slow careful English: The passage to the other side. The movement through it. She'd figured out how to calculate the relative coordinates needed to move the other end of the gate. But no human could calculate all of that in their head. She'd tried.

"Your machines do your thinking for you," she said.

"Information stored in computers is dynamic. You can change it. Add to it. Search it. Compute it." She gestured vaguely toward the world beyond the window.

"Mine..." She paused, searching for the right word.

"The panels all over the island. They only do what they were told to do. The circle is carved. It does not store new information between uses." I frowned slightly.

"So how did you keep records?"

"Manually." She pointed toward the castle.

"The throne panel, for example. Every report is carved into a stone and added to the system. When there is a new report, someone has to make a new stone." She looked back at the laptop.

"That is how we did it." The garden came in over the following weeks. Tomatoes, peppers, courgettes — the first fresh vegetables I'd had in months, if we didn't count the pizza. Ella carried them in from the small patch by the pond and set them down on the kitchen table, and for a moment we just stood there looking at them like we'd forgotten what to do with food that didn't come with blood and muscle. And one evening, about two months in, I was sitting on the porch with Yato on my lap when my phone buzzed.

I had received a message. It was from Bill. Dude, we screwed up.