Reed’s brow pitches up, but he turns and leads me from the room. Let him believe that I think I can do this. Let all the Loyalists believe it. If the General thinks I’m trying to read the map, perhaps I can buy more time for Ma.
Instead of working our way down through the Backbone as we had yesterday, Reed leads the way up several flights, then through a curtained doorway guarded by two Loyalists. Inside, I find a windowless room crowded with Old World artifacts. Shelves teem with salvaged tech, tarnished and worn. I can make out the door of a rusted rover and a sloped piece of scrap metal bearing a faded birdlike emblem leaning against the far wall. Dowels near the ceiling hold scraps of brittle paper. Countless crates are stacked haphazardly beneath them, their contents hidden from view.
It’s a treasure room, a scavenger’s paradise. I’ve never seen so much Old World tech in one place. And yet despite the wide array of items, none of them seem terribly useful. There are no goggles, like my trusted pair. No Old World rifles or the exceedingly rare Old World bullets. Not even plas, like I’ve seen Flint carry. Instead, everything looks like scrap. Garbage. Pieces of history rather than valuable assets. But all the junk has something in common: the Old World language, long lost to us, graces each item.
A lone woman sits at a table in the center of the room, head bent as she observes something before her.
“Oracle,” Reed says in greeting.
The woman looks up. She is young—perhaps just a few years older than I am—and she wears a long, sweeping dress the color of straw. Her braided hair is knotted atop her head with dark strips of cloth.
“Reed,” she says with a small smile. “I’m surprised to see you. I thought you’d been granted a station in the Barrel for a moon’s time.”
“Plans change.” He grunts. “This is Delta of Dead River, and she would like to study the map. Perhaps you can tell her what you’ve learned, and it will loosen her tongue. She’s withholding from the General.”
Withholding. I could spit on him.
“She is welcome to study with me,” the Oracle says, and she raises a pale, willowy hand to beckon us nearer. Reed nudges my back, forcing me into the room.
I approach the table slowly. The Oracle is studying the sheet of metal that the General had the brand copied onto. Beside her is a shallow tray of damp dirt, and she has scraped symbols into it with a twig. Some seem to match the markings of the map. Others are new shapes, illegible swirls and curves. She brings a palm to the dirt, wiping the surface clean before I can get a closer look.
“Guards remain stationed at the library door, so staging an escape would be futile,” Reed says to the woman. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” Despite his blunt tone, he nods to the Oracle and touches his forehead in respect, then leaves without another word.
The Oracle motions to the chair beside her. As I sit, I notice her necklace. Its chain is shorter than the General’s, and it holds just one pendant, but the style and size of the metal is the same. Slender and smooth, the length of my thumb. A star, my mother had called it yesterday.
“Did you help someone escape once?” I ask, still thinking of Reed’s warning to the woman.
“My father did. He was the Oracle before me.”
“What happened?”
“There was a fire. My father burned some of the General’s most prized relics. But that’s not what you came here for, is it?” She angles the map toward me. “What do you see?”
The markings shine up at me from the carved scrap metal, foreign and strange. Crisscrossed lines. Swirling curves. Dots and specks. “A thicket. A dust storm. An unreadable constellation.”
“You cannot read it?”
“Can you?”
The Oracle frowns. “This is an E.” She points to a symbol in the top left of the map, the line I’d noticed the other day with three smaller lines branching from it. “It repeats here.” She moves her finger to the right, where the symbol appears again. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“What’s an E?”
“A letter of the Old World language. When combined with others, the letters form words that can tell stories, reveal correspondences, give directions.” She scowls at the map and returns to writing in the damp dirt beside her. “My father never cracked the map in his time, and all his research was lost in the fire, along with the original map.”
Sir, the guard had said to the General yesterday. Metal can’t burn.
He had the map before, only to lose it. The Oracle’s father had helped the bearer escape.
Asher.
“Where’s your father now?” I ask.
“Dead. The General had him proved a fraud and executed.” The Oracle is stoic, seemingly unbothered by this tale of lost family. Her eyes search mine. “Are you sure you can’t read it?”
“It means nothing to me.” I take in the strange markings, lingering on the letters she says are Es.
“Maybe there’s a cipher or a key,” she says. “Some way to unlock it.” My confusion must show on my face because she adds, “Those would be ways to make a message appear, to change something from scrambled to legible. Think, Delta. Please. Is there anything you were told when receiving the map, anything that might unlock its truth?”
“Just to keep it hidden. Always.”
“Always,” the Oracle muses, and scribbles something into her damp dirt. I watch her work for a moment, writing additional lines and symbols, her brow furrowed.
“How was he a fraud?”
“Hmm?”
“Your father.”
“He wasn’t gods touched.”
“But I thought anyone who could read was gods touched. Isn’t that alone proof that—”
“After his execution, they opened his skull. There was no star, no sign of the gods’ blessing.”
Opened his skull . . . stars on a chain . . . gods touched.
I think of Astra and Cobel, their crushed skulls. The graveyard to the north, where all the skeletons bore the same fate. The blood on Old Fang’s crown, as though he’d been struck before the General’s men abruptly dispersed.
I swallow slowly, feeling ill.
The General has been searching for physical proof that marks one as blessed by the gods.
“His chain,” I say softly. “That means that . . . each of those pendants . . .”
The Oracle nods. “He’s collected them over the years. From graves and salvages, from traders who don’t know what they’ve found. They are a thing of the past, I fear, though many believe that a man with so many stars must be gods touched himself, or at least close to the gods. The star chain marks the General as mighty—as someone worth following.”
My eyes drift to the Oracle’s necklace. “And your chain?”
“It’s been passed down through my family for generations. The star is from a distant relative. Perhaps the last of the gods touched in our bloodline, but since the General can’t confirm that I’m gods touched without killing me, and because I’m the last person in Bedrock with knowledge of the Old World language, he holds out hope that my bloodline may have been touched by the gods again. That a star could burn within me. Just as he had hoped with my father.” She swallows heavily. “What about here? See these repeating waves?” She points to the center of the map, where three vertical lines have been etched. Unlike the vertical line of the E, these wiggle, like the path a snake makes when slithering across sand.