Amatka

FIRSTDAY

When the thunder of breaking ice died down, it was as though it left a buzz in the air. Not quite audible, it was more a sensation than a sound. Nina was still in Ivar’s bed. When Vanja sat down on the edge of the bed, Nina turned her face to the wall and pulled the blanket over her head. Vanja went down to the kitchen. It was chilly, somehow bigger and emptier than before. She made coffee and porridge, too much porridge—since Ivar wasn’t going to have any. She filled two bowls and left the rest on the counter to cool.

Nina didn’t react when Vanja put a bowl and a cup of coffee down on her desk. Vanja ate her own porridge in the kitchen, washed the dishes, and sat back down at the table. The silence was compact, except for that low drone she couldn’t quite hear. Eventually it was time to put the leftovers in the fridge and go to work.

A janitor arrived midmorning, carrying a bucket and a stack of good paper. She greeted Vanja curtly and came in behind the counter uninvited. Then she picked a paintbrush out of the bucket and slathered some of its contents on the wall. She dropped the brush back into the bucket, leafed through the papers, and slapped one of them in the middle of the sticky mess on the wall. She walked around the counter to the front of the reception, repeated the procedure, and left without another word.

The paper had been hastily de-inked and reprinted. Here and there, Vanja could make out the faint remains of words that had previously filled the page: “beloved,” “waiting,” “mine.” A love poem. Vanja walked around the counter to inspect the other note. Part of a verse from a nursery rhyme was vaguely visible between the new letters. These were pages from the confiscated library books. This was apparently one of the things the committee needed all the good paper for: description.

Brisk steps approached from the stairs that led to the offices. A courier in gray overalls and tightly braided hair shot around the corner and snapped to attention in front of Vanja.

“Good morning!” she blurted. “I am here to announce that the committee has instituted an additional leisure night! Every Thirday night at eighteen o’clock all citizens will attend their respective leisure center to partake in delightful games, quizzes, and group conversations! Hooray for Amatka’s commune!”

“Hooray!” Vanja replied.

The courier turned on her heel and marched into the colony streets. In her wake, a swarm of vigorous boys and girls in identical overalls trooped down the hallway toward the exit.

Vanja fingered the note on the wall. Those kids probably had no idea why there were suddenly two leisure nights a week. But the committee must have known for some time.

Nina was sitting up in bed when Vanja went to check on her. The porridge bowl was still full, but the coffee cup was empty. When she spoke, she sounded lucid but monotonous, her eyes fixed on something in the far distance. Someone from the clinic had been there to check why Nina hadn’t shown up for work. She had been given a week’s leave for personal reasons.

“I have to go see Ivar,” she said.“They only keep bodies for forty-eight hours before recycling.” Her eyes focused on Vanja for the first time. “Could you come with me? Right now?”

“Of course.” Vanja picked up the sweater and trousers Nina had dropped on the floor sometime during the night or day. “Shirt, trousers. You need to eat something first.”

Nina got dressed, followed Vanja into the kitchen, and mechanically ate the reheated porridge Vanja put in front of her. When she’d managed half of it, she got to her feet. “Let’s go.” She put her jacket on without buttoning it and walked outside with long strides.

Ivar lay on a gurney. They’d wrapped him in a white shroud, leaving only his head uncovered. Nina sat down on a stool next to the gurney and just looked at him. Vanja stayed in the doorway. Britta had once told her there was nothing scary about dead people; they just looked like they were sleeping. When Vanja had pulled Ivar out of the water, she could still tell it was Ivar, but he hadn’t looked like he was sleeping. He had looked like he was dead. Ivar without Ivar inside. The thing on the gurney wasn’t even Ivar, just an object that resembled him a little.

Nina let out a shaky sigh and caressed the corpse’s cheek. “What am I going to tell the girls, Ivar? What am I supposed to say?”

When the names of the recently deceased were recited next Sevenday, Ivar’s name wouldn’t be among them. No one would observe a minute’s silence for him. Taking a life, one’s own or someone else’s, was the most disloyal action of all; every lost life put the colony’s survival in peril. Murderers were no longer citizens. Ivar would be sent to recycling, and then he’d be gone, erased.

“Tell them what happened,” Vanja said from the doorway. “They deserve to know.”

“Do you think they want to carry that around? That their father was a suicide?”

Vanja took a few steps closer. “No,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t Ivar, not really. You know whose fault it was.”

Nina rested her head on the edge of the gurney. “You win. I’ll tell you everything.”

It was Distillate x 2 this time, a little stronger. They sat in Ivar’s room with the door closed, curled up on his bed. Nina still hadn’t let Vanja touch her. She downed a whole cup before speaking.

“I’m telling you all this so you’ll understand,” Nina said. “We will never speak of this again.”

Vanja nodded.

“And after I’m done,” Nina continued, “there will be no questions, no discussions, nothing. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Nina poured herself more liquor. “I was nineteen. I’d just received my nursing diploma. A hundred people disappeared overnight. Poof, gone. Someone had left a manifesto at the commune office, signed by Berols’ Anna. I remember she’d just finished her Plant House series. She won an award for it. So, somehow she managed to organize all these people without anyone knowing. I had no idea what was going on. No one I knew had any idea. But everyone knew someone who had disappeared.”

“What did the manifesto say?”

“Don’t know the details. It was never made public. Those of us who went on the expedition were told a little, just enough to make sure we’d be prepared. It said something along the lines of they were going to found a new colony, and that it would be more real somehow. That they’d do it right. But people in Amatka didn’t know about the manifesto. At first, all we knew was that people had disappeared, but not why. People panicked. There were all sorts of rumors, like about a suicide pact or some kind of abduction. Then, after a few days, I was called up to join the expedition. That’s when I found out. The committee had decided we couldn’t afford to lose that many citizens, so even if they were disloyal, they had to be brought back home.”

Nina stared into space for a moment. “It took us a while to find them.” She took a swig from her cup. “We bumped about in a terrain vehicle for days. And, you know, no one had ever been that far from Amatka. We were so scared something would happen to us. We drove around the lake. There was nothing out there, just water on one side and tundra on the other, but it was still terrifying. Because it didn’t end, you know. It just went on and on.” Nina gesticulated with her free hand. “Completely featureless as far as the eye could see.” She topped up her cup again and drank half of it down, shuddered, then patted her chest. “And then we saw it. It was like a hole in the sky. It grew bigger as we drew near. And when we arrived… I thought it was, I don’t know what it was. We’d come to a halt, but we just sat in there, staring like little kids. Then someone said: There are houses there. And there were, right under the hole. It looked sort of like a colony—a ring of little houses and a commune office. We put our protective suits on, the supersafe kind with visors and everything, and we stepped out of the vehicle. It was like, like a bubble. No, not a bubble. But the sky was different there, right above the houses. There were lights in the sky. I have to go to the toilet.”

Nina abruptly got up and went downstairs. When she came back, her face was flushed and her breath sour. She waved Vanja’s concern away and refilled her cup. “Okay, so we’d left the vehicle, and the expedition leader went first. She walked right up to the edge of the town. The rest of us were standing there, looking in.”

“You said it looked sort of like a colony?”

Nina shook her head. “They’d painted murals on the walls. No words, no markings. But paintings of things that don’t exist. Everywhere.”

“But the people?”

Nina was quiet for a moment. “The things we saw in there weren’t people. She, Berols’ Anna, she came up to us. That’s what it called itself, anyway. It, she, walked up to that wall. She didn’t come over to our side, but we could hear her fine.”

“But why would you say they weren’t people?”

“Because…” Nina shook her head again. “They didn’t look human anymore. They looked… sort of human? But not quite. Something about the way they moved, the way they looked at us. Like we were children.” She took a deep breath. “Berols’ Anna, when she spoke… her voice filled your head. She said three things. She said to leave them alone. And then she said…” Nina frowned.

Vanja waited.

“‘We’ve given ourselves over to the world,’” Nina said. “That’s what she said, word for word. And then the third thing: ‘We’ll come to your aid soon.’”

“What did you do next?” Vanja asked.

“What could we do? No one wanted to head inside. We returned home. The committee swore us to secrecy. Anyone who talked about what happened would be taken care of and sent away. The committee was afraid that if others got wind of what happened, they’d try the same thing, they’d try to break out. Or that talking about what happened would spread Anna’s ideas. It would destabilize the colony. So when we came home, someone torched a leisure center, and they made the official story that the missing people had died in the fire.”

Nina cleared her throat. “I’m only telling you this so you’ll get it. Is this what you want, Vanja? You want things to be like Berols’ Anna made them?”

“But maybe they’re doing well in there,” Vanja mumbled.

“They’re not human anymore. You want to stop being human, is that it?”

Vanja looked away. She had an impulse to say yes but stopped herself and instead shook her head.

Nina emptied her cup. “So, that’s that. And since that happened, it’s been harder to maintain order—just look at the lake. Maybe it’s because there are fewer of us. Or because what Berols’ Anna did changed something. I don’t know. But we can’t afford to be lax like people in Essre apparently are. Of course, there are those who slack off. Fifteen years is enough for people to start to forget. And the children aren’t told about this. They have to believe there was a fire.”

She filled her cup again. Her speech had taken on the overly precise enunciation of the very drunk. “Maybe Ivar would still have been here.”

“What?”

“Maybe Ivar would still have been here. If people had just followed the rules, then nothing would have fallen apart. Maybe that chamber wouldn’t have collapsed.”

Nina sniffled and wiped her cheeks with her palm. Then she fixed Vanja with bloodshot eyes. “I don’t want to, because I care about you. But I’ll report you if I have to. Promise me I won’t have to.”

“I promise,” Vanja said.

Nina rested her head on Vanja’s shoulder. Before long, her breathing grew more even and deepened. Vanja caught her cup the moment before it tumbled from Nina’s hand.

She lay awake for a long time with Nina’s arms wrapped around her. Ivar’s gray face haunted her. Nina couldn’t be right. Ivar was in pain because the committee forced him underground, because they wouldn’t let him live his life the way he wanted. Not because of what he saw when the tunnel caved in.

When she finally drifted off, she found herself in the cave with the machine. The luminescent lichen festooned the surfaces in white and green. Everything was very still. The dripping noise had stopped. Then the engine shuddered to life with a screeching groan. The wheel tore free of the stalactites with a crash and slowly began to turn. Lichen and minerals scattered in a cloud.

She couldn’t see what the machine powered.

SECONDAY

Anders was back. He stood behind the counter, blowing his nose into a soiled handkerchief. In front of him sat a stack of papers and folders.

“You’re on time,” he said when Vanja entered. “Good. The research division has given us work to do.” He pushed the stack toward her. “These are requisitions and permission applications. We need them in triplicate, one copy for the archive and two for the office upstairs. They need to be processed and sent back to the research division immediately. So get going.” He looked oddly exhilarated.

Anders sat down in front of his typewriter and hammered out what looked like reports. Vanja fetched blank forms and copying paper. She spent the morning translating the short messages in the stack on her right into applications. The research division was applying for equipment and workers. Their purpose wasn’t stated very clearly; they made several references to some decision that the committee had reached the day before. It had something to do with object diagnostics and emergency protocols.

By the time she had finished typing up the forms, it was already time for the midday meal. Vanja delivered the copies to the secretary upstairs and then went straight to the canteen. Today’s dish was bean stew. The atmosphere in the canteen was oddly subdued. People spoke in short, indirect bursts:

“Did you hear…?”

“Yes. I got a summons. Hedda, too.”

“One wonders what’s going on.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“You’re right, it’s probably nothing.”

The last sentence recurred in all conversations, repeated by everyone within earshot.

In the early afternoon, a band of couriers came downstairs and filed past the reception. One of them stopped at the desk; it was the same girl with braids who had been there the day before. She waved at Vanja and Anders to get their attention, held up a note, and recited: “INCREASED MARKING. In a campaign to improve the commune’s well-being, normal activity will be suspended between fifteen and sixteen o’clock for marking of all objects in the area. This will be repeated every day until further notice. Hooray for Amatka’s commune!”

“Hooray!” Anders hollered.

“Hooray,” Vanja echoed.

Ivar’s death certificate was delivered. Date of birth, date of death. He was thirty-two years old. Cause of death: self-inflicted hypothermia and drowning. As Vanja stood in the archive holding Ivar’s file, she realized how easy it would be to just stuff the papers down her shirt or into the box of forms she’d brought downstairs. Nina could have some evidence of Ivar’s existence to keep. The children would be able to remember their father. She pulled the papers out and began folding them so they’d take up less space. “Anything exciting?” Anders was standing right behind her, much too close, eyebrows raised.

Vanja stiffened and waved the papers around. “Nah.”

“They’re going to be scrapped, I take it. Given that you’re not filing them.” He took the papers out of her hand. “I’ll do it for you, it’s no bother.” He tucked the thin stack under his arm and gestured at the door with his free hand. “Marking time!”

Anders tasked Vanja with marking office supplies in the small supply alcove. Every pen, paper clip, measuring stick, folder, envelope, and piece of paper might need to be named and re-marked. She started with the envelopes and went on to notebooks and paper. When she finished, it was already four o’clock. She would have to hurry if she hoped to get through the rest of the supplies in time. Behind her, Anders went downstairs to mark temporary folders.

Vanja emptied a box of pencils, lined them up on the shelf, and pointed at them one by one. “Pencil, pencil, pencil.”

It wasn’t long before the words flowed together. “Pencil-pencil-pencil-pen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen-cilpen—”

The last pencil in the row shuddered. As Vanja bent closer to look, the shiny yellow surface whitened and buckled. Then, suddenly and soundlessly, it collapsed into a pencil-shaped strip of gloop. Vanja instinctively shrank back. Her stomach turned. She had done it. She had said the wrong name, and the pencil had lost its shape. It shouldn’t have happened that quickly. She extended a finger and let it hover just above the surface of the transparent sludge. Then she slowly lowered it.

The substance was tepid, warm almost, and made her finger tingle. It was slightly springy to the touch. It felt much like touching a mucous membrane, as though life surged just beneath the surface. When she removed her finger, the surface kept an imprint of her fingertip for a few seconds before springing back up. This was the one thing everyone feared. But it didn’t feel dangerous. She touched it again. She’d always imagined that it must be cold and slimy, but the surface felt just like skin. Like a living creature.

Anders’s footsteps could be heard coming up the stairs. He was singing an old love song, a waltz they’d played in the leisure center last Sevenday: “Pia, my pioneer, please say you hold me dear, say that you’ll let me adooore youuu…”

“Pencil,” Vanja hissed at the gloop. “Pencil. Pencil. Pencil.”

Nothing happened. “Pencil,” Vanja whispered in desperation. With a faint snapping noise, the gloop contracted into an oblong shape. It almost looked like a pencil. The surface had cooled, but was still soft. “Pencil.” The material hardened slightly.

“…tralala, no other giiirl for meee!” Anders exclaimed, and slammed the archive door shut. “How’s it coming?”

“Just fine.” Vanja closed her hand around the unfinished pencil and continued marking office supplies with her back to him.

“Good. This is important work we’re doing! Important!” He patted Vanja’s shoulder so hard it hurt.

At ten minutes to five, Vanja’s throat was dry and her tongue felt stiff. “I’m done,” she told Anders. “I can leave, right?”

Anders threw a thin stack of forms onto the counter next to her. “You need to file these.”

They were forms Vanja had copied to fresh mycopaper earlier that morning.

“Go ahead,” Anders urged.

Vanja swallowed her annoyance and went down to the archive. Anders remained at the counter, stamping something with those hard little thuds of his. Vanja pulled out drawers, filing papers at top speed so she would finally be allowed to leave. Her gaze fell on the secure archive. She’d only be given access with a commission of some sort. Or if she got hold of a key. Vanja fingered the object in her pocket. Or if she made a key. Before she could follow her train of thought, Anders called down the stairs that it was five o’clock.

Evgen sidled up next to her as she exited the building. “Is there somewhere we can talk? We can’t go to the library.”

“Why not?”

“We’ll discuss it later. Is there somewhere? Your place?”

Vanja shook her head. Evgen pulled his hat further down his forehead and let out something between a whimper and a sigh. “What’s going on with you?” Vanja asked.

“Meet me by Plant House Seven. Don’t take the same route as me.” Evgen turned south.

Vanja walked west, curving slowly toward the southwest and Plant House Seven. The plant houses began to glow in the gathering darkness as the growers inside switched their lamps on. The cold deepened noticeably with the fading light. At first, Vanja couldn’t find Evgen anywhere. Then he stuck his head out from behind a stack of manure barrels at the far end of the plant house. In the nook between the barrels and the opaque gable wall, they were almost completely hidden from sight from all angles. Vanja huddled close to Evgen, who took his gloves off, wrung them, and put them on again.

“Listen,” Vanja said before Evgen spoke. “I can confirm the whole story about Berols’ Anna.”

Evgen blinked. “How? Where? In the archives?”

“No. Nina. She was part of the rescue team.”

Vanja recounted all she could remember of Nina’s story. Evgen listened, all the while gazing out toward the horizon and fiddling with his gloves. When Vanja fell silent, he didn’t speak at first. Finally, he nodded to himself.

“‘We will come to your aid soon,’ was that it?”

“Yes.” Vanja rubbed her mittens together. “What if they’re already here?”

Evgen hummed. “My thought exactly.”

“The tunnels. Ivar heard voices under the farm.”

“You’re thinking that they made the tunnels.”

“That, or they’ve used them to travel here.”

“And there’s the machine.”

Vanja shuddered at the thought. “Any thoughts on what it does?”

“No,” Evgen said.

“I dreamed that it started moving.”

“One should go down there to check,” Evgen said.

“There’s no way I’m going down there again,” Vanja said. “I can’t believe we did it last time.”

“You’re right,” Evgen said. “They’re probably there.”

“But why is this happening now?”

“Maybe they couldn’t do it before. Maybe it’s become easier. Because there are fewer of us, or because more people are thinking along the same lines as you and I. We can’t be the only ones.”

“It is easier now.” Vanja pulled her mitten off and took the pencil-thing out of her pocket.

Evgen leaned forward and squinted at it. “I dissolved it. And put it back together,” Vanja said.

“Really?” Evgen’s hand hovered over the pencil. Then he withdrew.

“Really.”

“It’s all happening at once.” Evgen rubbed his forehead. “I brought you here to tell you that the papers are gone.”

“What papers?”

“What papers? What do you think? In old Amatka. Someone took them.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean, am I sure!” Evgen’s whisper went up an octave. He took a deep breath. “Of course I’m sure. I’ve kept them in exactly the same spot since I started collecting them. And now they’re not there anymore, so someone must have taken them. Please tell me it was you.”

“No. I haven’t been back since the time you took me there.”

Evgen breathed out through his nose in one short snort. Beads of moisture had formed on Vanja’s eyelashes. Annoyed, she wiped them away and broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”

Evgen let out a shrill giggle. “It’s just a matter of time. Either they know who I am, and they followed me there. Or they’ll figure it out. Not a lot of people have access to those kinds of documents. It’s over, Vanja.” He pulled his coat tighter around him. “I’m going to be arrested. They’ll probably do a procedure on me, too. Do you know what they do with people after? They dump them in a secret camp and leave them to die.”

“I’ve seen it,” Vanja said.

Evgen seemed not to hear her. When she met his gaze, his eyes were blank and feverish. “The question is what I can do before they take me in. We have to act before… Look, it’s time. We have to do something, tonight. I have a plan. Follow me.” He held out his hand.

“What’s the plan, Evgen?”

“You won’t like it,” he said. “But if someone’s down there, I think we should talk to them.”

Vanja froze. “No,” she said.

“They’re coming to help us,” Evgen said. “Remember?”

“Evgen, wait,” Vanja said. “I have to go home to Nina, she needs me. And if I don’t come home… she’ll be suspicious. Could we just wait until a little later tonight?”

“It’s now or never, Vanja,” Evgen said.

“Just give me a few hours.”

“Fine. One o’clock.”

Evgen turned around and walked into Amatka, shoulders pulled up to his ears. He looked small against the plant-house wall.

Nina came down into the kitchen and ate the fried porridge Vanja served. She moved slowly as though she were in pain, but at least she ate. They didn’t talk. When Nina had managed a little more than half of her portion, she got up and put the plate in the fridge. Then she kissed the top of Vanja’s head and went upstairs. When Vanja came up a while later, she’d gone back to bed. Her own, this time.

Vanja went into her own room, closed the door, and sat down at her desk. She took the thing that had been a pencil out of her pocket and studied it. It still had the same approximate shape she’d managed to impose on it earlier. The whitish surface was cool and a little rough. She rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. “Spoon,” she whispered. “Spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon.”

A tiny shudder went through the material. Her marking pen lay next to the typewriter. She uncorked it and wrote SPOON. The tip of her pen punched through the surface in a couple of spots; it felt a lot like sticking a fork in a mushroom. Vanja leaned forward over the table. She closed her eyes and tried to make herself do that thing with her mind, that shameful thing, to truly imagine that a thing was something other than it was. “Spoon,” she breathed. “Spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon, spoon-spoon-spoon-spoon-spoon-spoon—”

She was close enough to hear the wet noise of the substance shifting, and she opened her eyes. One of the ends had flattened into a concave disc. It looked like a spoon, sort of. She took a deep breath and tried again.

After an hour and a half, she had managed to create something that actually looked like a real spoon, albeit transparent, rough, and a little dented. The effort had made her head feel empty. Still, she had found the way that seemed to work best: to use speech, writing, and thought to describe in detail something that didn’t exist, to make it come into existence. At first it had made her nauseous, but then the pit of her stomach had begun to tingle.

Vanja resisted the temptation to try to create something bigger. She wrapped the spoon in a sock and stuffed it into the pocket of her anorak. It was late. She got undressed, went into Nina’s room, and crawled into bed. Nina wrapped an arm around her. She would just lie here until Nina was deep asleep, then go to meet Evgen.

She fell asleep instantly.

THIRDAY

Vanja woke with a start to the breaking of the ice. How long had Evgen waited for her? Was he angry? Had he gone without her? There was no way for her to check until after work.

Nina was frying root vegetables in the kitchen. Her eyes were swollen but she was dressed and had made an attempt to untangle her curls. Vanja wrapped her arms around her and rested her cheek against her back, listening to the air rushing in and out of her lungs.

“Slept okay?” Nina’s voice vibrated against her cheek.

“Fine. And you?”

“Great. Hey, would you check if Ulla wants breakfast?”

Vanja frowned. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“I thought you knew.”

Vanja let go of Nina. “Not since… not for days.”

“Why haven’t we…”

They started for the stairs as one.

There was no reply when Nina knocked on Ulla’s door. She pushed the handle down, but the door wouldn’t budge. She ran up to her own room to get the spare key. Vanja put her ear to the door, but couldn’t hear anything on the other side. When Nina finally found the spare key and got the door open, they were met by silence. Nina went inside and shrunk back from something before Vanja had time to see what it was. She backed into the door on the right.

Now that Nina wasn’t blocking the view, Vanja could see into the room straight ahead, Ulla’s room. The door was wide open. In the light falling in through the window, the substance flowing out of the room shimmered yellow. Nina let out a breath that sounded more like a groan, turned around, and opened the door behind her. Then she crossed the corridor on stiff legs and opened the door to the left. After looking inside, she turned to the first room and leaned over to see inside. She turned back to Vanja. Her face had taken on a greenish hue.

“Ulla isn’t here. I’ll go get cleaners.” She pushed past Vanja and ran down the stairs three steps at a time.

Vanja stayed in the doorway. The mess before her no longer inspired the same terror. She walked over to it, crouched down, and gingerly put a hand on its gelatinous surface. It was warm, body temperature, and buzzed under her hand, twitching almost. She rose and craned her neck to look inside the room. Ulla wasn’t there. Neither was the furniture. But on top of a quivering, transparent mound rested a box she recognized. The last time she’d seen it was in Evgen’s hands, in old Amatka. The outer and inner lids had been removed. The box was still brimming with papers—the letters, the logs that told the true story of Amatka’s past. Ulla must have shadowed Vanja and Evgen to old Amatka and taken them.

The other rooms were empty. Vanja returned to the corridor and for a moment considered wading into the mess and grabbing as many papers as she could. If she took her boots off, she might be able to do it. She was unlacing one of them when she caught the sound of Nina coming back up the stairs. Vanja hastily retreated to the hallway.

“They’re on their way,” Nina said from the landing. “They’re coming. Shut the door.”

She bent over, panting, her hands on her knees. She didn’t seem to notice Vanja’s unlaced boot.

“Ulla isn’t there,” Vanja said, pointlessly.

Nina nodded. “Nope. We’ll have to report her missing.”

“I will,” Vanja replied.

She pulled her anorak on and left. The papers would have to stay where they were. There was no way she could sneak them past Nina.

Outside, an acrid stink filled the air. A pillar of grayish-black smoke rose toward the sky to the north. There were residential houses in northern Amatka, plant houses. And the library. The closer Vanja came to the pillar of smoke, the more citizens hurried down the street, all heading north.

When Vanja finally arrived, there was no doubt about it: the library was on fire. There were no flames, just thick black smoke billowing out through the broken windows. Part of the crowd had gathered around an old man leaning on a walker. He was holding forth in a deep and penetrating voice.

“…fetched the librarian,” he said as Vanja came closer. “I saw the whole thing. He came running out of the library and then it was on fire. And he lay down in the street and coughed. And laughed! He was laughing! Then the rescue workers came and took him. I told them what I’d seen. He started the fire himself, I’m telling you.”

His audience was mumbling to one another. “What happened?” someone at the back asked. “The librarian set it on fire!” someone else replied.

The old man started over. “I saw the whole thing,” he intoned. “It’s all ablaze. Nothing left in there.”

“Did he say anything?” Vanja asked.

“What?” The man turned his head.

“Did he say anything,” Vanja repeated.

“Oh, yes, but it was just nonsense,” the man said. “He said, ‘We’ll all be free.’”

Vanja turned around and forced herself to walk to the office at a normal pace. She breathed in, counted to three, breathed out, counted to three, breathed in. It didn’t help much.

The reception was crowded. Several couriers were heading out; at the reception desk, Anders was deep in intense conversation with what looked like two high-ranking administrators. One of them followed him in behind the counter and into the archive.

“What’s going on?” Vanja asked the administrator who had stayed at the counter and was drumming his fingers against the gray surface.

The administrator studied Vanja. “What’s your security level?”

“I’m not sure. I’m the reception assistant,” Vanja replied hesitantly.

“If you don’t know what your security level is, it’s not high enough.” The administrator graced her with a tight-lipped smile and resumed drumming on the desk. “Don’t you have work to do?”

On the third floor, in the department of civil affairs, there was an air of subdued but frantic activity. When Vanja came in to report Ulla’s disappearance, she was handed a stack of blank forms. The bloated clerk kept fiddling with his beard and glowered at Vanja across his desk when she couldn’t say how long Ulla had been missing, even though they lived in the same household. He shook his head and flipped through a binder, looking for yet another form.

“I’ll have to make a separate report of this,” he said, and took out a pencil. “Neglect of housemate. Names of the other occupants?”

“Neglect of housemate?” Vanja put her pencil down. “I don’t understand.”

“Here, in Amatka,” the clerk intoned, “whoever has a housemate with special needs, be it physical or mental, must ascertain daily that said housemate is in good health and having their needs met.” He looked at Vanja, his upper lip curling into a sneer. “Maybe you don’t do that in Essre, but here we take solidarity very seriously. It is your responsibility to acquaint yourself with the rules.”

“My apologies,” Vanja said. “There were circumstances. One of our other housemates died.”

“Were you close?”

“No.”

“Then why didn’t you have the presence of mind to visit poor Ulla?”

Vanja squirmed. “I forgot. I was taking care of Nina. A housemate. She was close to him.”

“Close to whom?”

“To Ivar. The man who died.”

“That’s all very well.” The clerk started filling out his own form. “There will be an investigation.”

When Vanja had completed her forms, the clerk skimmed through them, nodded, and sent her to the office next door. Next door, they took the forms for registration and forwarding to the police department. Vanja was told to return to work and go about her business as usual. They made her file a copy of her own report.

The rest of the day dragged. The buzzing noise, which until now had mostly felt like a vibration, came within her range of hearing as a deep bass note resonating in the background. If anyone else heard it, they didn’t mention it.

Every time someone walked past the reception, Vanja half expected them to stop and tell her that Evgen was dead, that Evgen had reported her, that they’d found Ulla’s body, that they’d found the papers in Ulla’s room, that Nina and Vanja were to be arrested on account of the papers. But each time, it turned out to be something else, and she breathed a bit more easily. The visitors looked harassed and tense. Anders’s virtually cheerful mood from yesterday had mutated into a kind of grim hysteria. He accompanied administrators to the archive and watched them come out again carrying sturdy boxes Vanja had never seen before, which must have come from the secure archive. She refrained from asking. It felt safer to go unnoticed.

In the afternoon, the same clerk who had taken Vanja’s report came downstairs and handed a form over to Anders. “They’ve arrested that librarian now,” he said.

Anders brightened. “Have they, now!”

The clerk nodded and ran his fingers through his beard. “Yep.”

Vanja tried to look suitably interested. “What will happen to him?”

The clerk peered at Vanja and then at Anders. “He’ll be interrogated. I suppose the next step is finding out whether he was acting alone or not.” He went back to combing his beard.

On the plaza around the commune office people walked with drawn-up shoulders and frequent glances toward the horizon. A couple of them just stood there, staring. Vanja followed their eyes. They were all looking eastward, in the direction of the lake. Beyond the low houses of the colony, a narrow silhouette rose toward the sky. It was curved at the end. It seemed to grow taller by the minute. Somewhere in the plaza, someone let out a shrill noise that went on and on. The rest of the colony had discovered the pipes.

FOURDAY

The children were sent away on Fourday morning. They were packed into the passenger car, the freight cars, the locomotive, the youngest children in the arms of the older. A huddle of parents who couldn’t let their children go without saying good-bye waited on the platform. They couldn’t touch them, just watch. Many of them tried to smile and look proud. Some called out, wishing the children an exciting trip, telling them to behave. Nina stood at the edge of the group. She was hugging herself, clutching Vanja’s hand hard enough to make it painful. Tora and Ida were nowhere to be seen; they had been among the first to get on the train. The last of the children were climbing up the stairs now, each with a small satchel slung across his or her shoulder.

A man left the group and rushed over to a blond boy who stood in line to board the passenger car. He picked the boy up and held him close. Over the boy’s shoulder, Vanja could see his father’s face contorting in pain, his teeth bared. She had to look away.

In the shocked silence that descended on the platform, the only sound was the man’s hacking sobs. Eventually, a platform worker took him by the shoulder—not unkindly—and pried the boy out of his arms. The father stood with his hands outstretched while the boy was lifted onto the train. The last door closed with a crash that reverberated down the platform. Nina winced, as though she had been struck. She turned around and walked back into the colony, her strides so long Vanja had to follow at a trot.

Through couriers and overseers, the committee saw to it that everyone remembered that sending the children away was just a safety precaution. After all, this had been done before, on occasion, just in case. Every time, the children had been allowed to return within a week.

Vanja was asked to telephone Essre to inform them about the children’s imminent arrival. The person on the other end sounded bewildered.

“You’re breaking up,” he said. “What’s that?”

“We’re sending the children,” Vanja repeated.

“I can’t hear you properly,” said the operator. “If there are more of you, please take turns speaking.”

“It’s just me,” Vanja said.

“I’m hanging up now,” the operator said. “I’ll try calling you up.”

The telephone went dead. Vanja waited for the call for fifteen minutes before trying herself. There was only the hiss of an empty line.

Paint and brushes were distributed at midday, to supplement verbal marking with text. Anders sent Vanja out to mark corridor walls, doors, and stairs. The departments were all buzzing with quietly frantic activity: hurried steps across office floors, agitated voices behind closed doors. Occasionally someone would open a door to peer suspiciously down the corridor where Vanja was marking a wall or a staircase. She tried to make out the conversations but was only able to catch random words here and there, none of which made her any the wiser. The black paint had an overpowering smell and wouldn’t quite stick to the walls; it took two layers to make the letters solid. When Vanja finally ran out of paint, her shoulder hurt and her right hand was cramping. She just made it back in time for the three o’clock marking in the reception.

The line to the leisure center wound all the way into the street. Everyone was on time and waited in line in silence. Nina looked pale and somehow shorter than usual. She clutched Vanja’s hand tightly.

Vanja had come home from work to find Nina in the kitchen with a pair of administrators. One of them had led Nina outside; the other had asked Vanja to sit down. The administrators had seemed stressed and distracted. They asked only a handful of questions: when Ulla was last seen, if Vanja had been into Ulla’s room (once), if she had noticed this one box on that occasion (no), if she knew whether Ulla harbored subversive opinions (no), if it was her opinion that Ulla might be senile (yes, maybe). They had soon made to leave, parting with an explicit promise to return.

“Where’s the next one?” one of them had asked the other as the front door closed behind them.

Vanja had gone upstairs. The door to Ulla’s flat was still sealed. Then it had been time for leisure.

When the evening meal, consisting of nothing more than mushroom and bean porridge, had been served and people were busy eating, committee member Jolas’ Greta climbed the dais. She talked about what had happened to the library. Her voice was firm, with an undertone of suppressed anger.

“A citizen has been apprehended. He is a librarian. We have received a confession.” Greta paused and looked out at her audience.

Vanja held her breath. What had he told them? Had he mentioned her name? Wouldn’t they have arrested her if that were the case? “During the interrogation,” Greta continued, “he confessed that he started the fire on purpose. He also admitted that his intention was to undermine the commune by destroying all our good paper.”

Greta paused again and looked down at her hands. When she raised her head again, she fixed on each citizen in turn. “We know that this type of act, this way of thinking, could not have… come to fruition… had not something been amiss in the group as a whole. In a healthy commune, each member safeguards the group. In a healthy commune, the librarian doesn’t burn down the library.”

Greta smiled wistfully. “This man was lonely. He had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. Loneliness is dangerous. Silence is dangerous. Through loneliness and silence, a small feeling of discontent can grow into illness. If only he had had someone to talk to. If only he had felt part of this community, if he had felt a sense of responsibility toward the commune.”

She shook her head. “Looked at this way, we are all to blame for what happened. We must never let our comrades feel alone.”

Someone began to clap. The applause spread like thunder through the hall. Greta raised her hands in a calming gesture until the crowd had settled down. “Tonight, we’re going to start treating the disease that is loneliness. We are going to talk about our pain, our thoughts, and through this become closer to one another. No one will be angry with you. No one will punish you. Your comrades will greet you with sympathy. Don’t be afraid! Come.” Greta took a step to the side and made a beckoning gesture.

As if on cue, a young woman stepped up onto the dais. She talked about how she had uncharitable thoughts about her housemates, but it was really because she felt inferior to them. The crowd applauded her. She stepped down from the dais with tears running down her face. She was met by her housemates, who embraced and kissed her.

People were almost launching themselves at the dais after that. Citizens stood up one after the other, shouting their loneliness to the commune, their disloyal thoughts, their petty thefts of office supplies, their unkind deeds toward their fellow comrades. One after the other, they were applauded and embraced by their friends. The atmosphere turned frenzied. The dais wasn’t enough. Some stood up on benches and tables to speak to those nearby. Vanja and Nina were still seated, Nina gazing into the distance, her hand in Vanja’s a warm, calm spot in the swirling chaos. The hysteria spread to their table. Their neighbors got up to tell everyone about doubt, pettiness, loneliness. They wept as they unburdened themselves of their minor infractions. Eventually a momentary silence descended. The others turned to Vanja and Nina.

“Say something,” a man next to them urged.

His face was streaked with salt and tears. He had confessed to once slapping his daughter for being loud on a Sixday.

Vanja’s arms and legs went numb. Next to her, Nina gave a start, as if only now realizing where she was. The silence grew longer.

The man with the tear-streaked cheeks took Vanja’s free hand and caressed it. “You can tell us.”

His hand was clammy against her skin. Disgust drove her across a line she hadn’t been aware of.

“I have nothing to confess,” she said loudly. “I’m not going to say sorry.”

The others stared at her, openmouthed. Vanja pulled free of the man’s grip. She took a clumsy step backward over the bench. Nina was still holding her other hand. She looked up at Vanja with something like horror.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Vanja told her. “I haven’t.”

Nina didn’t try to hold her back. Vanja pushed through the ecstatic crowd, out into the damp night.

“Wait!”

It was Nina. The rec center’s doors swung shut behind her. They were alone in the street, bathed in the murmur from the hall. Nina raised her hands and let them fall back down. She came close enough to put a hand on Vanja’s shoulder. “Where are you going?”

Vanja looked at the hand on her shoulder, her eyes tracing the length of the arm to Nina’s shoulder and face. Nina’s features had become hollow, gaunt. The solid security that Vanja had curled up against was no longer there. “I’m going home,” she replied.

Nina’s eyes welled up. Her chin trembled. “No you’re not. You’re a lousy liar.”

“I’m not going to sit in there and tell them I did something wrong. I’ve always had to do that, and I’m tired of it.” That part at least was true.

“Look, Vanja, everyone makes mistakes. That’s why we’re in there right now—not to point fingers, but to acknowledge that we all make mistakes sometimes so that we don’t have to feel like we’re the only ones….”

“Sometimes! It’s wonderful how you only make mistakes sometimes, isn’t it! Big and strong and healthy and two children and saving lives every day, but sometimes things go a little awry. It must be nice to go and have a nice little confession, then, so you can go home and feel pleased about being such a good girl.”

Nina had clapped a hand over her mouth. She took a couple of steps back, frowning. Vanja realized that she might have been yelling. It didn’t matter.

Vanja tapped her own chest. “But what about me. I’m nothing but wrong. I’m supposed to go inside and be sorry about it?” Vanja shook her head. “Go inside and do some confessing if it makes you feel better. I’m done.”

Nina was quiet for a long moment. “I understand.” Her voice was small. “So. Are you going home?”

Vanja was silent.

Nina swallowed and blinked several times. “I’ll leave you alone.”

She turned and walked back toward the leisure center. Shouts and cries poured into the street when she opened the doors and stepped inside.

Vanja set off westward. She slowed down when she passed Leisure Center Three. Two couriers in gray overalls were exiting, holding a woman who seemed to be struggling to break free.

“But we were supposed to tell!” she said, despair in her voice. “It was supposed to be good for us!” Her eyes locked on Vanja’s. “Hey, you! Can’t you see what they’re doing?”

The couriers halted and turned toward Vanja. “Go home,” one of them said. “Now.”

Vanja kept walking, her eyes on the ground in front of her. The arrested woman called after her until her voice was suddenly cut off.

Vanja stayed close to the walls, forcing herself to walk at a normal pace. She slipped into a side street whenever she spotted other pedestrians. Once, she encountered another pair of couriers escorting a citizen between them. Vanja walked over to a nearby residential building and pretended to be busy scraping dirt off her shoes.

When she finally reached the plant-house ring, it was deserted. The plant-house lamps were lit, but no night growers cast shadows on the walls. The first pipe loomed about fifty meters beyond the plant houses, faintly illuminated by the domes. Its angled top end cut a sharp silhouette against the dark gray of the night sky. Vanja halted by the outer edge of the plant-house ring. Snatches of song drifted through the streets behind her, along with cries of anger, drunkenness, or fear. The breeze coming in from the tundra smelled of wet grass and old vehicles. The sight of the impossibly huge pipes made it hard to breathe, hard to take the first step. Instinct shrieked at her to run before it was too late, run and go to ground, hide in a faraway corner, under a bed, in Nina’s arms, be quiet and invisible until the pipes moved elsewhere. But there were no safe places anymore. The only way was onward. She forced her feet forward, step by step, toward the pipe that led down to the machine.

When she finally found the right spot, she had come out on the other side of fear. Her skin felt stretched and prickly, her legs soft and unsteady, but it was like looking out a window. She was inside, her body and the tundra outside. The low opening was still there. The ladder was still attached to the inside. Resting her hand on the edge, she realized she hadn’t brought a flashlight. She would have to do this in the dark. Terror came creeping back.

“It’s only my body doing this,” Vanja whispered to herself. “It’s not me. It’s only my body.” She swung a leg over the rim.

The weak light from above faded almost immediately. When she finally set her foot on firm ground, the darkness was complete, aside from the colorful trails and blotches her brain created to fill the absence of light. The vibration was stronger here, the noise clear and suddenly complex; it wasn’t a single buzzing, but the sound of many small parts working in unison. She wasn’t alone in the tunnel. Something else was in there with her. Vanja stood still, waiting while bile rose in her throat. Nothing happened. There was only the awareness of a vast presence. She walked slowly toward the sound, sticking closely to the rough wall.

Her left foot hit the door with a crash that made her crouch against the wall and shield her head with her arms. In the echo that followed, she thought she could hear small, quick footsteps down the tunnel. She reached up and fumbled for the handle. It allowed itself to be pushed down. She slunk in through the opening and closed the door as quickly as she could without making a racket.

On the other side, the greenish-white lichen that dotted the ceiling beat the darkness into retreat and illuminated the staircase. Vanja sat on the steps until she no longer had to struggle to breathe, then continued down, to the door that waited at the bottom. When she opened it, the noise suddenly swelled to a deafening roar.

The air was damp and heavy with a stench of salt and sewage that stuck to the roof of her mouth. The machine working in the middle of the room seemed to have grown. The wheel had cut a deep furrow in the chamber’s ceiling. Shards and chipped stone littered the ground around the engine, which looked more rounded somehow. Someone was standing in front of the machine, watching Vanja.

Vanja’s eyes slipped when she tried to focus on whoever it was. It was a person, but what features or coloring or shape they had was impossible to tell. It was neither, indeterminate, not entirely there. Vanja had to avert her eyes. At the edge of her vision, she could see the shape approach. Looking indirectly seemed fruitful: she could make out an eye, hands that weren’t entirely hands, skin, but everything kept flowing and shifting. She knew who it had to be and took a deep and shaky breath.

“Are you Berols’ Anna?”

The figure paused. “Are you Berols’ Anna?” Its voice vibrated through Vanja’s chest. “Are you?”

“Are you?”

Laughter. “Are you are you?”

It came closer. Heat radiated from its mass. Something soft touched Vanja’s cheek, tracing the contours of her face. “Are you?” It no longer sounded like mimicry. A short pause. “Yes. Also.”

“Did you build the machine? And the tunnels? And the pipes? What does the machine do?” Vanja asked.

“Everyone built. We and you. The machine is ours.” The thing caressing Vanja’s face suddenly pinched her cheek. “You thought it. We thought it.”

Vanja tried to focus on Berols’ Anna’s shape again, only to be rewarded with a twinge of pain between her eyes. “Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you a happy commune?”

Berols’ Anna laughed again. “The word… the language. Is too small. Yes. We are everything. But you”—a soft touch against her cheek again—“you are not.”

“Happy? Or too small?”

Warmth twined itself around Vanja’s body. A heavy scent of something like blood crowded out the stench of sewage. The heat made her fear dissipate. “Yes,” Berols’ Anna murmured above her. “Wan-ja. Your shell is too small.”

Vanja grasped what felt like an arm. It was solid, yet not. It buzzed with restrained energy. “Can you come and save us? In Amatka?”

“Let us in,” Berols’ Anna crooned.

“But how?”

“Remove the names. Set the words free. Just a little more. Burn a little more.”

“Like the library.”

“Yes. A little more.”

“Then you’ll come?”

“Then we’ll come. You’ll be everything. You’ll all be everything.”

Berols’ Anna grazed Vanja’s cheek and raised her chin. Vanja opened her eyes and looked into Berols’ Anna’s face, and it suddenly snapped into focus.

The night after Lars had told her about the lights in the sky above the old world, Vanja had had a dream. The gray veil that enshrouded the sky had cracked and blown away. Against a deep black background, gigantic spheres, glowing in colors Vanja had never seen before, slowly moved through the heavens with a sound that shook the earth. The ground fell away beneath her. She hung suspended in the void, inconceivably small amid the glory of the spheres.

That same feeling returned when she looked into Berols’ Anna’s eyes. It blew everything else away.

Vanja didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d climbed down the shaft, but it was still late evening or night when she came back up. The pipes rising into the sky no longer terrified her. They belonged to Amatka. All around her was the low creaking of new pipes pushing out of the ground.

The streets were empty. From some houses noise as if from a party or a fight could be heard. The scrap boxes outside the buildings had been knocked over. From one of them a large puddle of gloop had leaked onto the pavement. Somewhere to the east was Nina, swept up in the hysteria.

The door to the commune office was open. Windows were lit here and there in the building, especially on the top floor where the committee was at work. The reception was dark, but when Vanja turned on a desk lamp, it became apparent that someone had been there at some point during the evening. Papers and logs were in disarray, and the door to the archive stood ajar. Downstairs, the sort of inventory lists that were plastered throughout the colony lay scattered on the floor. The door to the secure archive was still closed and locked. It would never open without a key. Vanja stuck her hand into the pocket of her anorak, fingering the coagulated piece of gloop.

There were plenty of marking pens in the reception. Once back down in the archive, Vanja closed the door behind her, took the spoon-shaped lump from her pocket, and wrote KEY on the shaft. “Key, key, key, key, key,” she whispered.

It twitched in her hand. Something inside Vanja resisted. Calling a thing by another name still gave rise to a vague, indeterminate horror that made her brain glitch. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. “Key, key, key, key. This is a key. I am holding a key in my hand.”

When she opened her eyes again, she was holding a stick that branched at one end. Calling it a key was a bit of a stretch. But then, she hadn’t given it a lock to open. She pushed the key-thing into the lock on the door to the secure archive. “Key, key, key.”

The key-thing let itself sink into the lock. Vanja pushed until she met resistance and closed her eyes again. “The key has cuts that fit the bolts in the lock. The cuts are hard enough to move the bolts. The key fits the lock. The cuts on the bit fit the bolts. The key can open the lock.” Her head hurt.

Eventually she opened her eyes again. She tried to turn the stick to the left but lost her grip—the key didn’t have a proper bow, after all. Vanja screwed her eyes shut. “The key has a bow, the key has a bow, the key has a bow.”

The gloop flattened between her fingers and her headache intensified, converging sharply at a point behind her left eye. But she could turn the key now. The bolts rotated with a series of clicks. She pulled the key out again and put it in her pocket. Then she opened the door to the secure archive.

It wasn’t much bigger than a bathroom; all it held was a filing cabinet with three drawers. The topmost drawer had a handwritten label that read INCIDENT REPORTS; the other two were labeled HISTORY and RULES AND REGULATIONS. Vanja opened INCIDENT REPORTS. It contained a suspension-file system with folders in receding chronological order. The oldest folders were thin, but the closer they came to the present day, the thicker the files grew. Vanja pulled out the outermost folder and opened the cover. According to a helpful little index, the folder contained one form per incident. The report titles referred to the type of event: Collapse, Increased Dissolution per Quadrant, something called Manifestations.

One Seconday, someone had seen a train arrive and then vanish from where it was parked on the rails.

A group of children had been playing unapproved games in a corner of Children’s House Four. Someone had begun to pretend that one thing was another. Suddenly every single object in the room had dissolved.

There were several cases of people appearing at the edges of the colony. The individuals could not be identified as citizens and “looked strange.”

The latest incident report was only a few days old. It concerned the collapse in the mushroom chambers and the subsequent discovery of the pipes. A summary of Ivar’s statement was attached to the form. There was no mention of yesterday’s events, or the day before that. Maybe they were too busy now to write reports. Vanja leafed back through the years. The same types of events occurred again and again.

At the far back, a folder containing a stapled bundle of papers. The title read Fish in Balbit. The reports described an event where the first generation of children had started playing a new game: they went “fishing.” The children had learned about “fish” from the books their parents had brought with them from the old world. Previous investigations had established that ocean life had evolved no further than algae. Even so, the children were pulling “fish” out of the water.

Vanja closed the drawer and opened the next one. The files had been shoved in haphazardly, meeting protocols jumbled with what looked like essays and lists. Vanja reached into the very back of the drawer and pulled out one of the oldest folders.

They had named Colony 5 after a light in the sky, and the world had replied.

Vanja put the papers back into the folder and looked at her wrist clock. It would be morning soon. She couldn’t waste the night reading if she were to have any hope of doing what she had come for. She pulled the bottom drawer out and off its tracks. It was so heavy she could barely lift it. She lugged it upstairs to the reception, where she left it under the front desk. She repeated the process with the other two drawers and returned to the main archive.

With all the drawers completely pulled out, the space left in the middle was just big enough to stand in. Vanja looked around. All this paper really only served one purpose: to anchor the colony’s shape, to keep people from breaking free. It would burn in no time at all. All she had to do was set fire to it. Set fire to it and scatter the secure archive in the streets. Then she would tell them. She would tell them all. People had a right to know how trapped they were, how much they had never been allowed to know, how they had never been allowed to choose what life they wanted to live.

Vanja abruptly realized she had nothing to light the paper with. She had never even owned a lighter. Evgen had had one, not she. She drummed her hands on her thighs in frustration. “Come on, burn,” she hissed at the archive. “Burn.”

A few of the papers rustled as if in a breeze. Of course. Vanja let out a laugh. She pulled a bundle of mycopaper out of the closest drawer and stared at it. “You’re burning,” she told the paper. “You’re burning, burning, burning.”

When the mycopaper flared up, it was so sudden it scorched her fingertips and made her drop it. It landed in a box of mixed good and mycopaper. The good paper wasn’t immune to the flames. It almost burned better than the mycopaper. Vanja took papers from the other drawers, lit them and put them back, until half of the archive was ablaze and the flames were spreading rapidly on their own. Black smoke roiled up toward the ceiling, choking her. She crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees.

They were waiting for her at the front desk. A clerk was crouched by the drawers from the secure archive, going through the folders. Two sturdy couriers were on their way through the reception toward the archive door. They stepped back as Vanja threw the door open and smoke poured out.

“There she is!” the clerk yelled.

Two shoulders slammed into Vanja’s ribs as the couriers both tackled her.

The sky was brightening as they led Vanja through the streets. One of the couriers had landed a blow on the side of her head. Her field of vision had darkened for a moment, and after that it was hard to think properly. Moving her head hurt.

The noise that cut through the air was low at first, then rose in pitch and volume, then fell again, up and down. Vanja and her captors all looked up. All around the colony, pipes loomed against the sky. They were wailing.

FIFDAY

It could have been any office: a desk with a notepad, one chair behind the desk, another in front of it. A few inspirational posters on the wall. Behind the desk sat a middle-aged man in rumpled overalls. His hair was a little too long, his beard slightly unkempt; it made him seem absent-minded in a friendly way. Vanja had been gagged. It happened after her head cleared up and she had tried—and almost succeeded—to set fire to one of the couriers’ overalls. In response, they had gagged her and tied her hands behind her back. The gag chafed at the corners of her mouth. The restraints cut into her wrists. Leaning back on the chair put an unpleasant strain on her shoulders. The fatigue and excitement had made her shaky and cold, and her vision wavered. When she shifted in the chair, a heavy hand landed on her shoulder, holding her still.

The man folded his hands on the desk in front of him and studied Vanja. He gave her a sad smile. “Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two. That’s you, isn’t it?”

Vanja glared at him.

The man sighed quietly. “No, you don’t have to try to answer. I know it’s you. Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, recently arrived from Essre to conduct market research. You met a woman, quit your job, and settled here. So far, so good. But now you’ve lost your way. Well.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ladis’ Harri. I’m the speaker of Amatka’s committee. First of all, Vanja, I have to inform you that you’ve been arrested for destruction of public property, endangering the public, and subversive activity. And I feel it’s important that you and I have a conversation about what happened. I would like to know how all this came to pass.”

Harri stood up and leaned across the desk. He smelled faintly of coffee and liquor. “I’m thinking I might take the gag off, Vanja. Otherwise it’ll be hard for us to talk. But I have to be sure you won’t do anything foolish. Leila is standing right behind you, and she’ll sedate you if you do. And that would be a pity, because I would really like to talk to you. Can you promise me that we can talk in a calm and collected manner?”

Vanja nodded. Harri smiled and gave the courier behind her a nod. The gag came off, and the pressure around her head eased. Vanja grimaced and licked the corners of her mouth.

Harri leaned back in his chair. “Well, then. So, Vanja. Were you working with someone?”

Vanja shook her head.

Harri nodded slowly. “I should tell you that Nina was the one who reported you.”

His words sank into the pit of her stomach.

“She came to us last night, after you disappeared,” he continued. “She told us everything. It wasn’t easy for her, you know. She really does love you. She said that you’ve displayed subversive tendencies, but that she’d been hoping you’d come to your senses. And then yesterday you absconded from the leisure center. You told her you were going home?” He pulled out a drawer and took out a thermos and two mugs. “Nina went home to make up with you. Of course, you weren’t there. Instead, she found your notes.”

Vanja gasped. Harri paused and looked at her. “That’s right,” he said. “So she decided to do what she thought was best for everyone. And that’s what you and I are going to talk about. Doing what’s best for everyone. Coffee?”

Vanja declined to answer and looked away. Harri looked a little hurt. He unscrewed the lid and poured himself a cup. “We have something of an emergency on our hands.” He sipped the coffee. The hand holding the cup shook a little. “In light of that, I’ll have to keep this short. We know most of it already: you’ve intentionally let objects in your home dissolve; you’ve been conspiring with the librarian Samins’ Evgen….”

Harri nodded when Vanja gave a start. “Yes, he confessed, too. He didn’t mention you, but Nina knew that the two of you were friends. And then there’s what we’ve gleaned from your notes—that you’ve been conspiring with Sarols’ Ulla, and that you’ve studied subversive documents she kept in her room. We found the box. Ulla sold you out, Vanja.”

When Vanja opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand. With the other, he opened the notebook. “I quote: ‘…that I know exactly how things really are and still claim that E.H.S.’s products are made of something else. Calls the cup a knife. U. refers to the bag and that I wanted it to dissolve because I’m unhappy with the order of things.’ Do you deny that you wrote this? No?” He leaned forward. “And as we know, it doesn’t end there. You’ve been outside the colony, and you’ve approached quarantined areas. And finally this. Looting the archive and exposing sensitive documents.” He leaned back. “That someone would do these things… it makes me so sad.”

He seemed to be waiting for an answer. Vanja couldn’t summon the strength to speak.

Harri shook his head. “You’re not the first to foment rebellion.”

Vanja could hear the quotation marks around the last word. “The powers that be, we’re tyrants, right? It’s oppression, right?” He tilted his head to catch Vanja’s eye. “Right?”

“Yes,” Vanja managed. It came out as an “uh.”

“You know how this place works. Everyone does. We’re a finite population in a world we don’t really understand. We struggle endlessly to maintain order. That struggle entails a society with strict rules.”

Harri turned the cup in his hands. “What’s less widely known is that we have nowhere else to go, Vanja. We can’t go back. The way is shut. Our only choice is to either follow the rules or be destroyed.” His eyes were welling up. “People will die because of what you’ve done, Vanja. People have already died.”

“We’re already dead.” Vanja forced the words out between dry lips. “This is no life. You’ve taken it.”

Harri raised his eyebrows. “Who do you mean by ‘you,’ Vanja? The committee is elected by the people. The committee is the people. We can be deposed at any time. Anyone can stand in the election. You’ve voted, haven’t you? Maybe you’ve even been a candidate?”

Vanja squeezed her mouth shut.

Harri sighed and got out of his chair again. “I’m given to understand that you’ve led a difficult life, Vanja. You’re angry and disappointed. We’ve all agreed on a set of rules necessary for our survival, but some people just can’t live by them. You’re raging against a system you feel protects the group but hurts you. So you’ve decided to overthrow the system and let the group perish. Have I got that right?”

Harri waited for a moment. When Vanja didn’t reply, he raised his voice. “You’re not very chatty, are you? Is this fair, d’you think? To let innocent citizens pay? If that isn’t taking someone’s life, I don’t know what is. Putting yourself above what the people have decided. Have you really nothing to say about that?”

Vanja drew a deep breath. “But that’s not how it is. People are unhappy….”

“You are unhappy. And you’re alone now. Your coconspirators have left you behind.”

A low rumble outside made them both jump. Harri got hold of himself. “Well, then. We’re out of time. I’m sorry about what has to happen now, but that’s just how it is. You’ve left us no choice.”

There was a stinging pain in her arm. “Berols’ Anna,” Vanja said. Pressure was spreading through her chest, making it hard to breathe. Her field of vision began to flicker and narrow. Through the haze, she saw the speaker lean in, his eyes widened. “Berols’ Anna is coming.”

“Keep her sedated until it’s done,” Ladis’ Harri said from far away.

LATER

The bed was comfortable. The pillow was so soft against Vanja’s cheek. The blankets were warm and snuggly, and someone had dressed her in soft sleep clothes. She considered getting up but abandoned the thought. She was warm. She hadn’t been warm for such a long time. Even her toes and the tip of her nose were warm.

Vanja was a little girl. Lars put his arms around her, and she burrowed her face into his shoulder. He smelled of soil and coffee and beard.

“I missed you,” she told him. “I missed you, too,” he said.

She drew away and looked at him. His temples were covered in black scabs. “They got you.”

He nodded gravely. “So they did.”

“I understand now,” Vanja said. “We don’t know where we are.”

“Good girl,” Lars said, and patted her cheek. “Good girl.”

Two voices were talking to each other above her head. She tried looking at the speakers but couldn’t seem to focus her eyes.

“Could you please be quick about it,” the lower voice said. “I have somewhere to be.”

“Calm down,” an older, higher voice replied. “It’ll take as long as it takes.”

Something tightened above Vanja’s left elbow. A couple of fingers tapped at the crook of her arm.

“I can’t find a vein,” the high voice said.

“I heard the whole first quadrant locked themselves in the mushroom chambers,” the low voice said. “But no one issued an order for that, did they?”

A sigh. The pressure around her left arm eased. “No.”

A tightening above the right elbow. Tap, tap at the crook of her arm. “There we go. No, there was no order. I guess the first quadrant panicked.”

“But why aren’t we heading down there? Why are we standing around in here? Everything’s going crazy.”

A wet cold grazed the inside of Vanja’s arm. “Because the mushroom farm isn’t safe. If we’re going anywhere, it’s to the commune office. And besides, hiding isn’t exactly sensible. If everyone hides, we have no defense. Amatka is here because we are.”

A sharp prick of pain sank into Vanja’s skin.

Vanja was a girl again. She was standing on the ice. Daylight fell across the lake, but the ice lay clear and black under her feet. Lars stood a couple of feet away, a little smile on his face.

“Let me show you something,” he said.

He stepped behind her, then took her head between his hands and pressed his thumbs against her temples. “Look up, Vanja. Look at the sky.”

The clouds drew aside. The sky opened. The light was unbearably bright.

Someone came into the room and gave her water. Her head hurt. She forced her eyes open, but they wouldn’t focus. Her eyelids closed again. She said something, and a hand lightly stroked her forehead in response. She asked where she was. The hand patted her on the shoulder and straightened her blankets.

A warm hand on hers. “Vanja?”

Fingers weaving themselves with her own. “Vanja, it’s Nina. Can you hear me?”

Vanja turned her head. It hurt. She said something.

“I’m so sorry, Vanja,” Nina said. “I’m so sorry. I did what I thought was right.”

It’s all right, Vanja tried to say, I’m all right. A noise came out, something that was not what she had wanted to say.

“Let’s give it some time,” Nina said. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

Cool lips on her cheek.

“I have to go,” Nina said. “They don’t know I’m here. I’ll be back.”

A voice Vanja recognized, a man’s voice. Someone leaning in close. The smell of coffee and liquor. “What’s her condition?”

A woman’s voice: “The procedure was successful. It’s still early on, but she’s shown signs of aphasia. What type of aphasia remains to be seen, but it’s clear that she can’t form words.”

“Good.”

“Why is she so important, Harri?”

“I’m not at liberty to tell you that. Only that it’s very, very important that she doesn’t speak.”

“Well, we’ve made sure of that.”

“Very good.”

“What’s really happening out there?”

“We need to stay strong,” Harri replied. “Let me know if there’s any change in her condition.”

“Will do.”

Ladis’ Harri’s presence disappeared. Vanja managed to open her eyes. A woman’s face swam into view, a very young nurse. “Can you hear me?” she said.

Vanja replied. “It’s all right,” the nurse said. “Just nod or shake your head for yes and no. Do you understand?”

Vanja nodded. “Do you understand what happened to you, Vanja?”

Vanja nodded again, slowly.

The nurse reached out and wiped her cheek. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t cry. I don’t know why they did this to you. I just do the aftercare. I have to go. Something’s happening out there.”

The nurse left. Vanja heard the sound of a key being turned in a lock.

There was a window on the left side of the bed. Darkness was falling. No one came to turn any lights on in her room. The sound of running feet and a murmur of voices came through the window. Vanja turned on her side. Her pillow was so soft her whole face sank into it. She could glimpse a piece of sky through the upper-right corner of her window. Little lights scurried back and forth up there. She watched them until her eyes fell shut again.

Vanja stood on the tundra. Ulla stood in front of her. Her funnel rested against her shoulder and her hair was sprinkled with frost. She looked at Vanja and nodded.

“It’s done,” she said. “Anna is coming.”

Clamoring could be heard from outside: short and long shouts; rumbling, mechanical shrieks. Vanja listened to them for a while. She had to pee. No one came to give her a bottle or a bedpan. Eventually her belly began to hurt. She sat up. When her vision cleared, she could see her legs stretch out from her body in a bed with three blankets. To the left there was a wall with a window, at the foot of the bed another wall. On the right stood a little table, and beyond the table there was a wall with a closed door. A pitcher of water stood on the table. Vanja reached for the pitcher with her right hand, but her fingers wouldn’t close around the handle. After a couple of failed attempts, she grabbed it with her left hand instead. The water was tepid and sweet. Some of it trickled out the right corner of her mouth. She put the pitcher back and took three shaky steps toward the door. Her legs were fairly steady, although the right foot dragged a little. She couldn’t get the door handle to budge.

She took the pitcher and set it down on the floor, fumbled her pants down to her knees, and crouched. The commotion outside continued unabated. She pulled her pants back up and crawled onto the bed. Sirens began to wail. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

A banging noise on the door. “Vanja! Vanja!”

More banging.

Was that Nina? It was Nina. Why didn’t she come in?

“Vanja? Vanja! It’s Nina. We’re evacuating to the commune office. I’ll come get you soon. I love you, Vanja. I don’t care what you did. I’m not leaving you here.” The voice broke and paused. “I don’t have the keys, but I’ll come back when it’s your turn, it’ll be your turn soon. I promise.”

Vanja woke up. She looked out the window, and for the first time, properly outside. The commune office towered in the middle of the plaza, angular and solid. Faces looked out from the windows. People were running over the plaza toward the tower. Patients in white robes were walking, hobbling, and rolling out through the hospital doors below. Above them all, pipes towered. Darkness seeped out of their curved mouths, bleeding into the sky. The gray vault was ripped through with dark streaks. Pinpricks of light glowed in the tears.

She sank back into the bed. She was still so tired.

She stood in front of the machine. It was running at full speed, its wheel turning so fast that the spokes were a blur. She could see the pipes now, running away from the machine and into the walls of the cave. The machine glowed with its own light. It made a noise like thunder.

She woke up in front of the window. She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there. The sky was dark; a glowing sphere hung in the black, striped in orange and brown. The plaza was deserted. Gaps had appeared in the innermost ring, which had been marked and re-marked with block letters; the pharmacy and the general store were gone. Through the gaps, parts of the residential ring were visible. The lights above the front doors had extended over the street, waving on thin stalks. The doors all stood open.

Vanja’s room was high enough that she could see the plant houses at the colony’s edge, if that was what they still were. One of them had stretched into a pyramid shape that reflected the light from the thing that sat in the sky. The plant house next to it was moving restlessly. As Vanja watched, it shook itself free and rose up in a rain of soil and roots. The windowpane vibrated against Vanja’s fingers as the plant house struck out across the tundra on six unsynchronized, rickety legs.

A man came into view, walking from a side street below Vanja’s window toward the commune office. He glanced up at the clinic but didn’t see her. It was the man who had held Vanja’s hand that night in the leisure center, the man who had slapped his daughter. He turned his eyes back toward the plaza, leaning forward as if against a strong wind.

At first it wasn’t there, and then it was: a small, half-shaped thing the size of a child, walking next to him. It climbed up the man’s trouser leg and onto his back, where it wrapped its arms around his neck. Vanja could hear his screams through the window. He fell to his knees and then onto his side before rolling onto his back. The child-shadow straddled his chest. The man’s screams had disintegrated into convulsive howls. He banged his head against the ground. After a while he stopped and lay still. The faces watched from the commune office’s windows.

Vanja slid off the bed and walked over to the door. She ran her left hand over the surface. She had opened a door without a key once. Thinking was such slow work, but there was a memory: making a key from something else, telling a thing what it should be. The room was empty except for the pitcher, and that was full. She fetched the pillow from the bed. It would have to do. “Aflar,” she told the pillow.

She frowned at the word that came out and tried again. Key. “Muleg,” her mouth said.

Vanja tried again and again. Each time her mouth spurted gibberish. She dropped the pillow and gingerly touched her temple, the shaved spot, the wound. They had taken her words.

The man was still lying prone in the plaza. The child-shape sat on his chest. The man’s mouth was moving. It moved quickly at first; he was speaking to the child. Then he shuddered and gasped. Then he spoke again, slowly, and his words sent shockwaves through the air. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He lay very still for a moment, like Ivar had, as though he had departed his body.

Eventually as the plant house to the left of the pyramid split down the middle and released a stream of furiously flapping greenery, the man opened his eyes again. He put his arms around the child. It curled up against his chest and sank into his body. Then it was gone. The man stood up on legs that seemed to bend in more than one place. He turned around and staggered off toward the residential ring and its swaying lanterns; he walked into a house and didn’t come out again.

Someone jumped from the top floor of the commune office. The ground split open where the body landed. Cracks rushed across the ground and a wedge-shaped section of the plaza fell away without a sound, exposing part of an underground tunnel. Its walls were covered in a pale network of heavy root threads that trembled and shrunk back as daylight rushed in. Round fruiting bodies in shades of faded pink and brown bulged from the mycelium. The fruits swiveled slowly on their short necks, and what might once have been the citizens of the first quadrant raised their white eyes toward the sudden sky.

Vanja remained by the window, watching people jump from the commune office’s windows or leave through the front doors and run for the beckoning lanterns of the residential ring. The walls of the commune office had begun to warp, as if buckling under great pressure. The remaining buildings around the plaza were falling in on themselves, one by one. Raw gloop from the dissolved buildings trickled into the exposed mushroom tunnel. The air in the residential and factory rings was turning blue and hazy. Seen through the haze, the low factories and workshops looked wobbly and deformed.

“I’m back,” Nina’s voice said behind her. “I’ve come for you.”

Nina stood in the doorway of what remained of Vanja’s room. The walls beyond the bed and the window had softened, sagging limply from where they were still attached to the ceiling. The door lay crumpled up next to the bed. Vanja hadn’t heard it happen.

It was Nina and yet not: she had expanded, as if her body had become too small to contain her. Heat pulsed from her in waves. She carefully enunciated the words one by one, as if speaking was an effort.

“I said I’ll come back for you. I’ve come back for you.”

Nina bent down, cradled Vanja’s neck in her hand, and pressed her lips against hers. They burned. Blisters formed where their tongues met. She drew back a little.

“Give up or give in,” Nina whispered. “I gave in. I gave myself to the world.”

Vanja tried to say her name, over and over again. Nina tilted her head, expressions flitting rapidly across her face. Her eyes leaked fluid.

“Don’t worry,” she said eventually.

Nina took Vanja’s hand and led her down the corridor. The floor yielded to their weight; the walls had assumed an oily, slithery shine. Flabby doorways to the left led to rooms where the furniture had dissolved into slime. All empty, except for the last one. Below the window in the last room sat a man with a red beard. Vanja strained to look. The room stank of old excrement, concentrated around Evgen where he huddled, knees drawn up to his chest. He was leaning against the wall, gazing with pale eyes at the sliver of sky that showed through the window. The wound on his temple looked infected. His beard was stiff with dried saliva.

Vanja poked Evgen’s shoulder. He didn’t react. Nina pulled her back up and led her onward, down to the ground floor. They stepped out of the clinic and into the open space in the middle of what had been Amatka.

To the east, between the undulating ruins of factories and beckoning residences, the view toward the lake was clear. The sky above was robed in black, adorned with brilliantly striped and mottled spheres. On the path from the lake came a crowd; ahead of them strode the being that was Berols’ Anna. No one else shone and shimmered like she did. At her side walked Ulla, back straight, eyes gleaming.

Berols’ Anna opened her mouth and spoke, and her voice billowed through the air: the voice that had once written the Plant House books, the voice that both mastered matter and belonged to it. She had come to fulfill her promise.

Berols’ Anna stopped in front of Vanja where she stood in Nina’s embrace. The brightening light from above had not made her features easier to discern; it merely made them glow more strongly than ever. Her eyes mirrored a different landscape than the one they occupied.

“Will you give yourself to the world?”

Anna’s voice crashed into Vanja’s body like a wave, making her gasp for breath. That’s what Vanja was supposed to do. Vanja said it, that she gave herself, that she surrendered, everything she was. A string of syllables dribbled out of her mouth, flat and nonsensical.

Berols’ Anna watched Vanja in silence, her hair floating around her like a living thing. After a moment, she grunted. “A person creates the word. Gives in to the world, and becomes the word.” It sounded like a sigh. “You have no words. You have been separated.”

Separated from her words. The world was built on a new language, and she would not be part of it, only an observer, a watcher.

Berols’ Anna turned her head and gazed out on the chaos. “When all of this has become, you will remain; the people like you will remain, all of you, as you are, separate. But we will carry you.” She stroked Vanja’s cheek. “We will always carry you, little herald.”

An observer, a watcher, but beloved. Nina would be with her; Anna would be with her.

Vanja watched as Anna drifted toward the commune office, the only building still standing in the middle of the chaos. It looked out of place, no longer with any meaning, surrounded now by the citizens of Anna’s colony. Terrified faces stared out from the windows. Berols’ Anna and her people settled down to wait.

Nina and Vanja stayed where they were. They watched from a distance as Berols’ Anna and her people sang to the last citizens of Amatka, invited them to take part of the new world or perish with the old. It was something like “The Marking Song,” but the words were different; it was a song of making and unmaking, a song not of things that were, but that could be.

Nina folded Vanja into her arms. She still smelled the same. The heat made Vanja drowsy.

She was wrenched from her torpor when Nina stretched and seemed to pull herself together.

“Now,” Nina said, “I’m fetching my children from Essre.”

She walked out onto the southern part of the plaza. Some kind of communication beyond hearing must have taken place, because from everywhere people came drifting into the plaza. They shone, flew, undulated. They filed out of the colony’s ruins, toward the railway in the southwest.

Vanja hung on to Nina’s hand. Her right leg wouldn’t quite carry her weight, and her bare feet had lost their warmth, but she kept walking. She would walk with them for as long as she could, and when she could walk no more, they would carry her. They all followed the railway south. It thrilled and sang beneath their feet.