“I’m sure there’s at least one, cuz.” Daniel’s words are surprisingly well-enunciated under the circumstances.
“Cousin.” The librarian extends a branch to Ellie. “You must be Ellie, then. My condolences on your loss.”
Part of her wonders how she is supposed to behave when someone built like a robust oak fused onto a giant spider extends one of their branches to you. The rest of her wonders how they know which cousin. At the funeral, Ellie couldn’t have flung a floral bouquet without hitting one. A cousin that knows how to come here narrows things down a lot. Still, she’s not the only one.
Daniel’s eyes bulge, willing her to accept the clasp. Ellie stretches her hand out. They grasp it for a moment, their twig-like fingers gentle against Ellie’s skin, then let go. Insult avoided, she hopes.
“How did you know it was me?” Ellie blurts out, in the correct language to her surprise. “Daniel might have brought Chris.”
“Oh, no.” The librarian brandishes their fingers, and for a moment, Ellie thinks maybe she hasn’t avoided insulting them. “Chris is not welcome here. Not that Daniel would ever want to, but they know better than to bring Chris here.”
Ellie tries to compose a response. Suddenly, it hits her what language she’s speaking. Some things are easy until you realize what you’re doing. Then it’s like walking by explicitly choosing which muscles to tense, by how much and when. You fall over when if you’d simply let yourself walk, you’d at least take a few steps first.
“Oh, settle down, child.” The librarian’s tone is kinder than their words. “I’ve heard this language mangled far worse.”
The librarian curls their fingers away. The cast of their bark seems friendly, at least.
“Follow me.” They turn and start to leave. “Perhaps it is the reason why you are here, but you two have picked the worst time to show up.”
CHAPTER 18
The librarian who found them turns out to be the Head Archivist of the isolationists’ archive. This doesn’t occur to Ellie until she is ushered into their office. It barely has room for the three of them and is as typical as possible under the circumstances. More than anything else, what impresses her is that they have an office.
They sit on a round stool, their legs dangling around the sides. Neat stacks of papers and folded planes sit on a table that serves as their desk. To the side is a wall of cabinets with drawers. The drawers are deeper than the cabinets but Ellie doesn’t gather much more than that at a glance. Behind them, columns of pneumatic tube stretch to the ceiling and then splay out in all directions.
Ellie and Daniel are safely ensconced in comfortable chairs on the other side of the table. The chairs aren’t the over-the-top creations in Ahdi’s dining room, guaranteed to settle you in a position where you’re simultaneously absolutely relaxed and yet still able to feed yourself. They do reconfigure, though. One of them puffs itself up to deal with Daniel’s long torso and legs. Daniel forgets that he’s still irked at being caught in the stacks and reverts back to being the world’s biggest puppy. He eeks and claps as the chair accommodates him.
“Ellie, you’re a rare duck among maintainers.” The Head Archivist glares at Daniel to settle down before focusing their attention on Ellie again. “I don’t know how many of them would have done what you did.”
“Not very many, apparently,” Ellie says. “You should have seen how many people pretended I didn’t exist at my mom’s funeral.”
“Oh, I did. We livestreamed it.” Their upper set of branches spread. “Your mother’s will managed to be both quite specific and quite coy about who should set up the stream.”
“And Chris let you do it?” Ellie’s voice rises with disbelief despite herself. “They wouldn’t even tell me when to show up.”
“‘Let’ is putting it a bit strongly.” Their smile is a secret and they pause a moment before sharing it with Ellie. “Your mother took precautions to make sure all their friends could attend.”
“You knew my mom?”
“I did. We worked together for most of their life.” They draw in their branches, weighing their words before they continue. “Your mother spent a lot of time researching here. Most of their work involved removing perversions maintainers installed for their own personal gain.”
Ellie’s brows pull up in shock. Regardless of what Chris always insists, whoever chased Mom and Ellie whenever they made changes in the skunkworks couldn’t have been isolationists. Not if Mom had been here first, working out what needed to be undone. Not if the isolationists let her have access to their archives. Not if Mom insisted they witness her funeral. Chris lied about this, too.
“You shouldn’t be surprised.” The Head Archivist is sanguine. “There’s an appalling amount of drama among the maintainers of your universe.”
“Their sister takes hits out on them.” Daniel blanches when Ellie glares at him and the Head Archivist twists toward him in surprise. “What? I’m not wrong.”
The Head Archivist pivots back to Ellie. Unusually, their trunk seems to untwist inch by inch from bottom to top over the course of days.
“They aren’t joking, are they.…”
Ellie slowly shakes her head. Dread traps her like a slick of sweat on a muggy day. Isolationists aren’t out to kill anyone. That’s obvious now. The people who chased after Ellie and her mom when they fixed the skunkworks, the ones Daniel led away while Ellie dismantled the monstrosity that kept her mom stuck between life and death, they couldn’t have been isolationists. The room wobbles around her as she realizes whom Daniel must have led away: Neeson’s maintainers.
Admitting that, for most of her life, she thought isolationists were stone-cold killers out to prevent changes to the skunkworks at any cost would be humiliating. This seems to be the weekend for humiliating conversations. They’ve gone surprisingly well so far, but the Head Archivist has to find what Ellie used to think of isolationists insulting. Maybe if she ducks and swerves she can jump off the rails of this conversation.
“Chris has this thing about keeping me on my toes.”
“In case you found yourself on the wrong side of some faction of maintainers? Your sister wants to make sure you’d survive?” Their bark crinkles uncannily like a raised brow. “Chris? Even if one agrees with the highly questionable assumption that trying to kill you is the right way to go about that. Chris?”
