Book Two of the Travelers (8 page)

E
lli Winter lay staring across the floor as the masked men moved silently through the warehouse. She'd expected them to do something to her. But instead they more or less ignored her.

At first she had thought they were security dados. But they weren't. They were just normal people dressed in military-style clothes, black masks over their faces. They seemed to be searching for something.

Finally one of them spoke into a radio. “No sign of dados or bugs. Think it's safe for Tylee.”

The masked men stood around silently for a while. Elli lay motionless. Words and phrases ran through her head.
It's not just clean. It's Blok clean! It's not just clean. It's—

Then, finally, a thin woman appeared in the nearest doorway and walked toward Elli. She was the first unmasked person Elli had seen in the warehouse. There was something special about the woman. It was unmistakable. She had an aura of authority, of command. Everyone seemed to straighten up as soon as they saw her.

The woman paused, studied the entire area carefully.

“Who did this?” she demanded finally, waving her hand around her. Elli took it all in for the first time. The floor was spotless. The concrete chunks had been hauled away. The mud was gone. And every single picture that had been salvageable was now hanging in one of the hundreds of lines crisscrossing the air above her head. Remembering the incredible mess that had been here before, Elli was almost amazed at what she'd accomplished.

“I did,” she said softly.

Tylee frowned. “I was told this place was completely wrecked,” she said to one of the masked men.

“It was,” the man said, sounding a little puzzled. Elli recognized him as the big man who'd left her here before.

“Get up,” the woman said.

Elli sat up. She felt woozy and unstable, as if she were coming out of a dream. A forest of color hung above them.

“You did
all
of this?” the woman said.

Elli nodded. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?” The woman cocked her head, curious.

“I shouldn't have touched anything,” Elli said.

“Why? Why did you do all this?”

Elli frowned. She wasn't sure. She hadn't thought it through, really. She'd just
done
it. She looked up at all the bright-colored pictures above her. Her voice finally came out, haltingly. “It's just—they were so beautiful. I didn't want—I didn't want the world to lose all that beauty.”

The woman had deep brown eyes. Suddenly they seemed very warm. She nodded and smiled sadly. “Yes. That's exactly it, isn't it?”

Elli sat on the floor and looked up at the forest of brightly colored paper above her head. She felt a warm sensation of satisfaction filling her chest. Other than taking care of Nevva, this was really the first thing she'd done in her life that seemed to have any meaning.

“My name is Tylee,” the woman said to Elli.

“Do you mind my asking what this place is?” Elli said.

“It's a storehouse,” Tylee said. “All the things that have happened on Quillan, all the writings of the ancients, all our history, all our music and art and science and inventions—everything that we Quillans were before Blok—it's all stored here.”

Elli felt puzzled. “For what?”

“We are revivers,” Tylee said. “Someday we will rise up out of this place and destroy Blok. We're keeping it all for the time that comes after. For the revival.”

“Oh,” Elli said.

Revivers! She had heard of them before. Only in whispers, though. A strange group that sought to destroy the established order and bring chaos to the world. That's what people said, anyway. Mad bombers, crazed lunatics, criminals, bandits, killers!

Except…these people didn't seem that way. If they were trying to save all this beauty, Elli reflected, then how bad could they be?

“I can't let you leave here,” Tylee said. “You understand that, don't you?”

Elli shrugged. “I don't want to leave,” she said softly.

“You
what
?” the big man in the mask said.

Elli shook her head. “I have nothing. My life out
there…” She pointed at the great gash in the concrete wall. “My life out there is over. I'm at the end of the road.”

“You can't just
stay
here!” the big man growled.

“I like to clean,” Elli said. “I could clean.”

The big man looked at Tylee. “Come on, Tylee! I'm sure she's a nice lady and everything. But someday she'll destroy this place. We don't even know her name.”

“Maybe we don't need to,” Tylee said.

“I like to clean,” Elli said again.

“We have guards. We have archivists. We have a lot of people here. We'll keep an eye on her.”

“Tylee—”

“I've made my decision, Bart!” Tylee snapped. “If we kill her, we're no different from Blok. She stays. That's final.”

The big man shook his head in disgust.

“We needed a cleaning lady down here anyway,” Tylee said. She surveyed the damaged wall. “Now let's get people in here and fix that wall.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the big man said.

Tylee clapped her hands. “Now, people! Do it now!”

The people in the room began stripping off their masks. Soon everyone was hustling and bustling around.

Elli stood watching them.

I guess I should do something,
she thought. She walked around until she found a janitor's closet. There was a broom leaning against a shelf full of cleaning products that looked as if they hadn't been touched in decades.

She picked up the broom and began to sweep.

E
lli Winter's life quickly fell into a routine. Each morning she got up and showered. For the rest of the day, she cleaned. After she ate supper, she found a book to read. One section of the warehouse was basically a library, with thousands—maybe even millions!—of old books.

The revivers called the warehouse “Mr. Pop.” Which seemed like an odd name. But Elli Winter was not the kind of person to question other people's judgment.

The books Elli read told about a world that was very different from the one in which she lived. It was hard to put into words…but the people in the books seemed to live lives of greater intensity.

Then, after she got tired, she went into the broom closet to sleep. She had a small cot, her head next to the rack of cleaning products. Other than her clothes, she only had one personal possession. She had a worn picture of Nevva that had been in her pocket when she was swept through the collapsed tunnel. She had
leaned Nevva's picture against a bottle of Blok Super-Duper Floor Cleaner.

Each night before turning off the light, she kissed the tattered photo. And then she slept.

 

Elli didn't talk much. There were actually a lot of people who worked in the warehouse. They all wore green aprons and took care of the things that were stored there. The green-aproned caretakers spoke in hushed voices. None of them were unfriendly to her. But they were all slightly distant. She was different from them. She knew it and they knew it. They had all chosen to come here. Their very presence was a testimony to their courage, their belief, their strength. She, on the other hand, was here because she was weak and cowardly, because she couldn't face the world.

So she didn't mind that no one really spoke to her. “I'll just sweep over there, if that's all right, dear,” she'd say. Or, “If you don't mind, I'll just sneak in here and get your trash.”

After a while she heard them referring to her as “the cleaning lady.” It pleased her somehow to have no name, to pass almost invisibly, like a ghost, among them.

 

One day—not terribly long into her life in the warehouse, though time was difficult to measure there—a group of men and women was milling around near the main exit to the building. It was nighttime and the warehouse was empty. Most of the caretakers only came in during the day.

“Where's Gaff?” an athletic-looking woman said.

“He should have been here by now,” a tall man with red hair replied.

“We can't wait any longer,” the athletic-looking woman added.

“But if we're short a team member—,” the tall man said.

“This excav is important,” the athletic woman said. She seemed to be the leader of the group. “We've got to do it.”

Elli had heard people talking about excavs. But she had no idea what they were. And she didn't ask. It wasn't her place. Besides, secrecy was important here. Nobody used their real name. That way if the dados showed up someday, you couldn't give up the names of any of your fellow revivers.

“We can't do it if we're short a team member,” a dark-haired man said. Elli recognized him as Bart, the large man who'd discovered her when she first washed into Mr. Pop.

“So call off the excav,” another man said.

“No way,” the athletic woman said. “Find a way, Bart.”

“Look, I'm responsible for the digging, Olana,” the dark-haired man said. “And I'm telling you, we can't do it. Not with the time limits we're dealing with now. I need four people on shovel duty, or I'm not going. That's final.”

Bart and Olana. Elli had heard the names before in connection with the excavs. But this was the first time she had seen Olana.

“What about her?” the red-headed man said, pointing at Elli.

Elli blinked. The people standing by the door all turned and looked at her.

“Who…the
cleaning lady
?” Olana said skeptically.

“Why not?” Bart said. “I hear she works hard.”

“Somebody told me she's not allowed to leave here,” the fourth person said.

“That was a long time ago,” Bart said. “We need a digger.”

Olana shrugged. “You're okay with it, I'm okay with it.” She snapped her fingers at Elli. “Hey! Cleaning lady. Wanna go on an excav?”

Elli walked tentatively toward the group. “Um…probably it would be best if—”

“Can you use a shovel?” Bart said. “Can you dig?”

“Well—sure, I guess, but—”

“That's all we need to know,” Olana said. “Blindfolds on. Let's go!”

The next thing she knew, one of the team members had slapped a black hood over her head. Now someone was leading her out the door.

Wait!
Elli wanted to scream.
I'm not supposed to do this! I'm not approved to leave the warehouse.

But it was too late. She was in some sort of vehicle, tearing along at top speed. “Stay low,” a voice said. “Stay low and don't talk.”

Elli hunched down in her seat.

They drove silently for a long time. Suddenly the vehicle stopped.

“Hoods off!” a female voice called.

Elli pulled off the itchy black hood. She was in the back of a truck. Everyone was jumping off onto the ground. She followed.

They were obviously not in the city anymore. They
were
way
into the country now. A huge old house—a castle almost—stood to their left. Its roof had collapsed, but the stone walls still stood. There was a full moon overhead and very few clouds. It was bright enough to see clearly. Elli had not been to the country since she was a little girl. Most people on Quillan lived in the cities and didn't venture into the country very often. She found it quite frightening.

“Let's go, guys!” the team leader, Olana, called. “Hustle, hustle.”

They walked single file toward the spooky-looking old building. “So, um, what exactly are we doing?” Elli said.

Bart explained. “We've been assembling historical and cultural artifacts at Mr. Pop for many years now. When Blok first started taking over Quillan, they began to suppress anything that conflicted with Blok. At first they only suppressed political writing that attacked Blok. Then they suppressed weapons. But soon they began to grow afraid of anything they couldn't control. Art, music, poetry, advertisements—you name it. They started suppressing everything. So people began burying books, paintings, sculptures, recordings. The earliest revivers were part of this movement to preserve our culture. Once Mr. Pop was established, we began going back and digging up our treasures.”

Elli started to get it now. “Excavations,” she said.

“Right. Now we just call them ‘excavs.'”

As they walked into the old building, Elli smiled. “So we're here to dig up buried treasure?” she said.

“Kind of like that, yeah,” Bart said.

“So how do we know where to find the stuff?” She looked around the inside of the old mansion or castle or whatever it was. The roof had collapsed. There was old furniture here and there, rotted out, covered with vines. A small tree grew in the middle of the building.

“We have maps,” Olana chimed in. “Sometimes they're good. And sometimes—”

Bart held up an ancient, yellowed piece of paper. “And sometimes they're like
this
.”

Olana clicked on a flashlight, directed it at the paper. It was a crudely drawn map of the building with a red “X” drawn in one corner.

“There are the stairs down,” Bart said, pointing. In the far wall was a small stone doorway. The group walked to it and began to descend a spiral stair leading down. Elli could feel her heart thumping. She had never been anyplace like this before. It was very dark and chilly. Spider webs hung from the low stone ceiling.

A few moments later the stair came out into a large cryptlike space with a dirt floor and arched stone roof.

Olana scratched her head and looked at the map. “Oh, man,” she said. “This place is bigger than I thought.”

Elli could feel an odd tingling in her limbs. She was frightened by the strange place. But there was something…For a moment she couldn't put her finger on it. Then she realized. She was
excited
! That's what it was. She hadn't felt this way for…well, she couldn't really remember. It had been years and years and years. It was the feeling of doing something wrong, something forbidden.

She remembered once in her youth sneaking off to
a park with a boy. They'd taken off their shoes and played in a creek. They'd been caught and punished severely. But she could still remember the feel of the water running across her feet. The feeling of freedom. The feeling of—

“We'll start digging over there,” Bart said.

“No,” Olana said. “It says to dig right here.” She pointed to another location.

“You've got the map backward,” Bart said.

“No,
you
do!”

It was obvious to Elli by now that Bart and Olana didn't get along all that well. Elli looked around the room, thinking about where she would have buried something here if it had been her most valuable possession.

Not in either of the places that Bart and Olana were suggesting that they dig.

“May I?” she said, holding out her hand for the map.

Bart and Olana looked at her irritably. “You're here to dig, okay?” Bart said. “No offense, but we're the experts.”

“Okay,” Elli said mildly. But in the back of her mind, she knew that she knew something. She wasn't sure what it was. But she knew where to dig.

There were four diggers—Elli, Bart, and the two other strong-looking men.

Bart walked over to one corner of the crypt or basement or whatever it was and drew a square on the ground with his toe.

“I'm not sure—,” Elli said.

“Look, it's Olana's job to get us here and back. It's my
job to figure out where to dig. It's your job to dig where I tell you. Clear?”

Elli smiled and nodded. But she felt quite sure they were digging in the wrong place.

They started working. While they dug, Olana paced around nervously, looking at her watch. Every now and then Bart would say, “Faster. Dig faster.”

“I'm not trying to be difficult, but what's the rush?” Elli said.

“We used to be able to take our time,” Olana said. “But Blok security is on to us now. We don't know how. Tracking devices, spies—we're just not sure. But somehow they've managed to close in on us. And they get closer all the time.”

Bart paused in his digging and wiped his brow. “Right now we seem to have about a five-hour window before the security dados show up. Just in case they get here quicker, though, we've got lookout teams around us. If they spot trouble, we run.”

Olana nodded. “Which reminds me,” she said. “If the dados come, we don't wait. We drop everything and we go. We have ten seconds to get in the truck and go. Understood?”

Elli nodded.

“Ten seconds. Not eleven. We're in that truck and we're gone. We don't wait. If you hang around, you're left behind. Period. Understood?”

Elli nodded.

Olana stared down into the hole they'd been digging. It was all the way up to Elli's waist now. Her arms were exhausted from the digging.

“We're digging in the wrong place,” Olana said, shaking her head skeptically. “They never bury anything this deep.”

“That's not true,” Bart said. “Once we found—”

“Okay, so
once
we had to dig five feet down. I'm telling you, Bart, this is the wrong—”

Bart sighed loudly. “If you're such a genius, where
should
we dig?”

“Over…uh…over there,” Olana said, not sounding very certain.

“Exactly
where
over there?”

“Well, you know, the ‘X' on the map is uh, generally, uh—”

“We could be a foot off,” Bart said. “It could be right here.” He kicked the dirt by his foot.

The other diggers began muttering irritably. It was obvious everyone was growing impatient and nervous.

“We've got three hours,” Olana said. “That gives us time for one more hole. Where's it gonna be?”

“We'll just expand this one,” Bart said.

“I think we should—”

“No!” Elli was startled to hear her own voice coming out loudly and confidently.

Everyone turned and looked at her.

“Excuse me?” Olana said.

“Let me see the map,” Elli said.

Olana frowned, but handed it to her. The map only confirmed what Elli had been thinking since she walked down into this basement. She climbed out of the hole and began walking slowly to the opposite wall, scanning the ground with her flashlight.

Finally she stopped. She really wasn't sure why she knew. But she knew. This was the place.

“Here,” she said.

Bart snorted. “Oh great! So after a couple hours of digging, the cleaning lady has become an expert excavator.”

The man's sarcasm didn't bother her. “See?” she said, pointing at the moldy dirt below them. “There's a depression here. Somebody dug it out, then refilled it.”

“This was buried over a hundred and fifty years ago,” Olana said. “I don't think some little depression in the dirt would last a hundred and fifty years.”

“The map very clearly shows this isn't the right place,” Bart said. “See how—”

Suddenly Olana's radio squawked.

“We've got visitors!” Olana shouted.

“Back to the truck!” Bart shouted. “Go, go, go!”

The other excav team members went storming up the stairs. But for some reason, Elli couldn't move. She felt rooted to the spot. She knew that they had said she only had ten seconds to get to the truck. But…

Dig!
she thought.
I have to dig!

It was here. Right here. She was sure of it.