“Maybe she was trying to warn us that we’re being too obvious.”

“Well, she might have a point there,” Jesry admitted. “We should stop talking out in the open where the whole math can observe us.”

“You have a better idea?”

“Yeah. The sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment, next time Arsibalt sends us the signal.”

As it turned out, this was only about four hours later. It all worked fine—superficially. Arsibalt sent the signal. Jesry and I noticed it from different places and converged on Shuf’s Dowment. No one was there except for Arsibalt. Jesry and I went below and got to work.

But in every other way it was wrong from the start. Whenever I went to Shuf’s Dowment, I took a circuitous route through the back of the page-tree-coppice. I never went the same way twice. Jesry, on the other hand, just crossed the bridge and made a beeline for it. But I couldn’t say his way was any worse than mine, because that day I encountered no fewer than four different people, or groups of people, out strolling around to enjoy the weather. Within a stone’s throw of the Dowment I almost tripped over Suur Tary and Fraa Branch who were enjoying a private moment together, all wrapped up in each other’s bolts.

When I finally reached the building, it was with the intent of calling the thing off. But Jesry wasn’t about to walk away. He talked me into going down there as Arsibalt looked on, growingly horrified, eyes jumping from door to window to door. So down we went, and crammed ourselves into that tiny place where I had spent so many hours by myself. But it wasn’t the same with him there. I’d grown used to the geometric distortion wreaked by the lens; he hadn’t, and spent a lot of time zooming in on different things just to see what they looked like. It was no different from what I had done on my first few sessions with it, but it made me want to scream. He didn’t seem to understand that we did not have time for this. When he got really interested in something, he would talk much too loudly. Both of us had to go out and urinate; I had to teach him about the “all clear” signal involving the door.

It seemed like two or three hours went by before we actually got around to observing the sun. The tablet worked as well for this as it did for looking at distant stars. It could only generate so much light, and so the sun appeared, not as a blinding thermonuclear fireball, but as a crisp-edged disk—the brightest thing on the tablet, certainly, but not so bright you couldn’t look at it. If you zoomed in on it and turned down the brightness, you could observe sunspots. I couldn’t really say whether there was an exceptional number of these. Neither could Jesry. By blacking out the sun’s disk and observing the space around it, we could look for solar flares, but there was nothing unusual going on that we could see. Not that either of us was an expert on such things. We’d never paid much attention to the sun before, considering it an obnoxious, wayward star that interfered with our observations of all the other stars.

After we became discouraged, and convinced ourselves that the hypothesis about Sammann and the goggles was wrong, and that we’d wasted the whole afternoon, we attempted to leave, and found the door at the top of the stairs closed. Someone else was in the building; it wasn’t safe to go out.

We waited for half an hour. Maybe Arsibalt had closed the door in error. I crept up and put my ear to it. He was carrying on a conversation with someone there, and the longer I listened to their muffled voices the more certain I became that the other person was Suur Ala. She had tracked us here!

Jesry had uncomplimentary things to say about her when I came back down to report this news. Half an hour later she was still there. Both of us were starving. Arsibalt must be in a state of animalistic terror.

Clearly our secret was out, or soon to be out, to at least one person. Squatting there in the darkness, trapped like rats, we had more than enough time to think through the implications. To go on as if this had not happened would be senseless. So, having nothing else to do, we pulled the poly tarp up off the floor and wrapped the tablet in it. Then we maneuvered and squirmed into the remotest place we could find—the utmost frontier of Arsibalt’s explorations—and used his shovel to bury the tablet four feet deep. When we were finished with that project, and nicely covered with dirt, I went up and put my ear to the door again. This time I heard no conversation. But the door was still closed.

“I think Arsibalt has abandoned us in favor of supper,” I told Jesry. “But I’ll bet she’s still up there.”

“It’s not in her character to leave at this point,” Jesry said.

“Say, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about her.”

“What do you think we should do, Raz?”

It was strange to hear Jesry asking for my views on any topic. I savored this novel experience for a few moments before saying, “If she intends to rat us out, I’m dead no matter what. But you have a chance. So, let’s go out together. You hood yourself and go straight out the back door and make yourself scarce. I’ll approach Ala and talk to her—she’ll be distracted long enough for you to melt into the darkness.”

“It’s a deal,” Jesry said. “Thanks, Raz. And remember: if it’s your body that she wants—”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” Jesry said, pulling his bolt over his head. But I could see him shaking his head at the same time. “Can you believe this is what passes for excitement around this place?”

“Maybe someday your wish will be granted and something will happen in the world.”

“I thought this might be it,” he said, nodding toward the sub-cellar. “But, so far, there’s nothing but sunspots.”

The door opened and a light shone on us.

“Hello, boys,” said Suur Ala, “lose your way?”

Jesry was hooded; she couldn’t see his face. He bounded up the stairs, pushed his way past Ala, and headed for the back door. I was right behind him. I came face to face with Suur Ala just in time to hear a terrible thud from down the hall. Jesry was sprawled over the threshold, covered by a mess of bolt—from the waist up.

“No point hiding, Jesry. I’d know your smile anywhere,” Ala called.

Jesry got his legs under him, let his bolt drop back down over his arse, and ran off. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light I could see that Ala had stretched her chord across the doorway at ankle level and tied it off between a couple of chairs flanking the exit. Lacking any other way to keep her bolt on, she had thrown it over herself loosely and was holding it up with one arm. She turned her back on me and shuffled over to retrieve the chord.

“Arsibalt left an hour ago,” she said. “I think he lost half his weight in perspiration.”

I couldn’t muster a lot of amusement, since I knew she was in a position to say equally funny things about me or Jesry if she wanted.

“Cat got your tongue?” she asked, after a good long while.

“How many other people know?”

“You mean, how many have I told? Or how many have figured it out on their own?”

“I guess…both.”

“I’ve told no one. As to the other question, I guess the answer would be, anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which probably means…no one.”

“Why would you pay attention to me?”

She rolled her eyes. “Good question!”

“Look, what do you want, Ala? What are you after?”

“It’s part of the rules of the game that I mustn’t tell you.”

“If this is about you trying to be some sort of junior Warden Regulant—her little protegee—then get it over with! Go and tell her. I’ll march out of the Day Gate at sunrise and go find Orolo.”

She was winding her chord about herself as I said this. Suddenly the bolt seemed to grow twice as large as all of the breath went out of her. Her chest collapsed and her head drooped. The big eyes closed for a few moments. Here was where any other girl would have gone to pieces.