I resist the urge to spit at the map, and move on.
I follow the wall around the stacks until I reach the entryway again, where, tucked away in the far front corner, a little office is piled high with crap and labeled PROFESSOR SEANAN KAYMA, SENIOR ARCHIVIST. The room is dark, the lock intriguingly complicated for a room inside another already-secure room. The locks are digital, so I pull out my deck and go to work. Surprisingly tough for a professor’s office, but nothing compared to the MMC security I’m used to cracking. It takes less than a minute for the door to yield to me.
The lights in the office come on automatically as I step in, easing smoothly to full brightness rather than flash-blinding me. The place is an utter mess. Three different cups of coffee are clustered together next to the built-in deck screen on the desktop. All three are different levels of partially drunk, and one is topped with a thin film of greenish mold. I wrinkle my nose and step behind the desk, moving slowly so as not to disturb anything or trip on the piles everywhere. A photo of Seanan Kayma and what I assume are her husband and kids watches over the coffee cups with bright smiles, all a bit slouchy and disheveled, but brilliantly happy.
The cups and the photo claim the only part of the desk not completely buried under books and papers covered in cramped, barely legible handwriting. I’ve only seen physical books a few times in my life, and no one uses loose paper much anymore—except this woman and Ania, apparently. I can’t judge her much, since my own desk looks much like this if you replace books and paper with tools and parts, so I have to assume she has a system and knows where everything is.
I sit down at her desk and access her terminal, taking some time to dig through her files and emails. Her digital records are fortunately much more meticulously organized than her physical ones, but dreadfully boring. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but a cursory search of the computer returns no hits for maz-15, and way too many hits for Maz Management Corporation, spellplague, and spellsick. Nothing useful. I look up from the terminal and am about to stand—but there, in the opposite wall, in exactly the place where you can see it if you glance over the top of the screen, is a seam. It’s mostly blocked by another pile of books, but when I get closer to peek behind, there it is: a small, digitally locked door in the wall, barely noticeable unless you’re looking from the right angle—and just large enough to hold a single book.
Curious.
The security on this lock is much stronger than anything I’ve encountered to this point. It’s a challenge, a fun one, and I happily sink into the work, zoning out totally until a notification jolts me with its sudden appearance.
(private) Davon: Everything going okay in there? You going to need a ride?
What are you doing, anyway? I know I said I wouldn’t ask, but the curiosity is killing me. What does the archive have that can help your situation?
I blink the notification away with a scowl. I swear, if it’s not Ania, it’s him. They have the worst timing.
I work at the lock for another twenty minutes over wireless sync—hardwiring isn’t an option here, not without doing noticeable damage to the casing—and I’m about to despair when it finally whirs and releases.
Victory.
Inside is nothing more than a few handwritten letters. Who writes letters anymore? All are dated from within the last year and contain scrawled formulas and observations, but the thing that catches my eye is “maz-15.” It’s mentioned in every letter. I flip one over, looking for a signature. Who’s writing to the archivist about maz-15, and why letters? Untraceable, I guess, but—
I gasp aloud, then clap a hand over my mouth.
Yours truly,
Aric
I rush to the doorway of the office to double-check my memory, and sure enough, there it is. An enormously long sign hangs from the ceiling just in front of the stacks, in clear view of every single person who walks through the door: The Professor Aric Silva Memorial Archives.
Not so much of a memorial, I guess.
Holy. Shit.
I triple-check the dates on the letters, but they haven’t changed. The most recent one is from two weeks ago.
I’ll bet anything this is from THE Professor Silva. Remi’s ultimate hero. Dude literally developed the tech that scrubs contamination from maz for MMC, basically saved the world in the middle of the worst maz crisis ever, and he’s not dead.
We need him.
I run out into the main part of the space, pulse pounding in my ears. Remi is going to flip.
“Remi, stars, you won’t believe—”
“Diz, I have to tell you some—”
We nearly collide in the middle of the room, both clutching papers to our chests.
“Remi, you’ll wanna hear this first—”
“Diz, this is huge, I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”
I shut my mouth and take a step back, looking up from the papers for the first time. Remi is deathly pale, their eyes wide and frightened. Whatever it is must be bad.
“You go first,” I say. “Are you okay?”
They shake their head, biting their lip, their eyes squeezed shut.
“I found a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Silva from eight years ago, right before he died. It was ordered to be deleted, so there’s no digital record of it. But the archivist had a printed copy hidden behind the service desk. They were studying maz-15.” They pause for breath, then finally meet my eyes. “Dizzy, they proved conclusively that maz-15 is what makes people ill. Maz-15 isn’t new—it’s the spellplague. And their research was censored by MMC.”
Oh shit.
“Maz-15 is the contaminant that was released underground after the first big earthquake ten years ago,” they continue, flipping through the papers in their hands. “It’s attracted to other maz and binds to it, kind of like magnaz, so it just . . . got into everything. They still couldn’t figure out how exactly it acts on the human body except that it enters through the maz receptors, but—”
They break off and tip their head back, a few tears leaking from the corners of their eyes.
“His doctoral student got ill and died from the spellplague. Because of his research.”
My stomach lurches, and I take a step back away from Remi. Their eyes flash with hurt, but they just shake their head.
“I was so excited, Diz,” they say. Their grip tightens on the bound manuscript. “When you told me there was a new type of maz, I thought, how lucky that I get to live in a time when there’s a discovery like this! I can’t wait to get my hands on it and study it myself.”
They laugh bitterly, and it’s like a knife in my gut. I put Remi directly in contact with the cause of their illness. I took that job, I made everyone do it. After what the spellplague did to them, to my family, I turned around and made everything worse.
I can’t talk about this.
“So, wait,” I say, trying to salvage the situation, managing to sound almost normal. “What do you mean, they censored the research?”
Remi sighs. “Like I said, they wiped it from the records, but also, just look at the timing. This was right before Professor Silva was declared missing, then dead. And now there’s us. We discover maz-15, and we’re immediately targets for an attempted murder.”
I shake my head. “What I don’t understand is why they don’t want this public. Shouldn’t they want everyone to know that maz-15 causes the plague? The more people who know the cause, the more people can work on a cure, right? The scariest thing about the plague has always been the unknown factor. Where it came from, what exactly it was, you know?”