It is hard to say just how monstrous I felt. I leaned back against the wall and let my head thud back as if attempting to escape from my own, hideously guilty skin. But there was no way out of it.

She had opened her eyes. They were gleaming, but they saw everything. Anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which means no one.

In a voice almost too quiet to hear, she said, “You need to take a bath.”

For once in my life I actually managed to see the double meaning. But Ala was already gone.

I’d have become a Deolater and gone on a pilgrimage of any length to find a magic bath that would wash away the mess I’d just made. The hardships of the journey would have been pleasant compared to my next week or so in the math. Not that Ala told anyone. She was too proud for that. But all the other suurs, beginning with Tulia, could tell she was suffering. And by breakfast the next morning, everyone had decided it must be my fault. I wondered how this worked. My first hypothesis was wrong on the face of it: that Ala had run home and narrated the story to a chalk hall full of appalled suurs. My second hypothesis was that she had been seen coming home miserable after having missed supper; I had been seen skulking home a little while later; ergo, I had done a bad thing to her. It wasn’t until later that I understood the much simpler truth: others had noticed that Ala had her eye on me, and so if Ala were miserable, it could only be because I had done something—it didn’t matter what—bad.

In a stroke I had been Thrown Back by every young female in the math. All the girls seemed to be aghast, all the time, because that was the look that would come over every girl’s face when she saw me.

The thing grew over time. If Ala had simply written up an account of what I’d done and stapled it to my chest, it wouldn’t have been so bad; but because the amount of information about what I had done was exactly zero, people’s imaginations went crazy. Young suurs cringed away from me. Older ones glared at me through supper. It doesn’t matter what you did, young man…we know you did something.

I did not see Ala again for four days, which was statistically improbable. It suggested that other suurs were acting as lookouts, tracking my movements so that they could tell Ala where not to be.

Arsibalt was so rattled that he could hardly speak until three days later, when he came to supper all dirty, and told me in a whisper that he had dug up the tablet from where Jesry and I had buried it (“ridiculously easy to find”) and hid it in a much better place (“safe and sound”).

Jesry and I knew better than to try to find any object that Arsibalt considered to be safe and sound. All we could do was wait for him to calm down.

I figured out why I never saw Ala: she and Tulia were spending an inordinate amount of time at the Mynster, doing some maintenance on the bells, practicing weird changes, and passing their knowledge down to the younger girls who would eventually replace them.

Sunny days came more frequently. I could look up to the top of the spire sometimes and see Sammann eating his lunch and staring fixedly into the sun through his goggles. Jesry and I discussed smoking a pane of glass and using it to do likewise, but we knew that if we did it wrong we’d go blind. I even contemplated going over the wall, running off to the machine hall, and borrowing a welding mask from Cord. But all of these were really nothing more than distractions to get my mind off the Ala problem. Early on, I had thought of this as a matter of salvaging my reputation. But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear: I had made a mess inside of someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me. Now it was closed. I was the only one who could clean up the mess; but in order to do this I first had to get in there. And I had no idea how, especially in the case of someone as fierce as Ala.

But it occurred to me, one day, as I was pursuing the weed project, that unilateral disarmament might work with someone like her. The work Lio and I had been doing along the riverbank was bringing me into contact with many spring wildflowers. The girls were up in the Mynster doing maintenance on the belfry. Suddenly it all seemed obvious. I put the plan into motion before I’d really thought it through. Ten minutes later I was sleep-walking up the Mynster stairs with a bunch of flowers on my arm, covered under a fold of my bolt because one of them was of the Eleven and I was about to carry it straight through the Warden Regulant’s court.

The portcullis was still locked down, the stair up the buttress inaccessible, the upper Præsidium off limits. Our carillon was in the lower reaches of the chronochasm, reachable by a ladder that ran up from the Fendant court. This route dead-ended in a sort of maintenance shack just below the carillon; you couldn’t go any higher up the Præsidium that way, so I could go there without arousing any concern that I might be attempting to look at the forbidden sky.

The bells themselves were open to the weather. Below them was this shack that sheltered some of the machinery that made the bells ring. I could hear Ala and Tulia up there talking. The ladder led up to a trapdoor in its floor. My heart was bonging like a bell as I climbed; I gripped the rungs hard so I wouldn’t fall off. I’d stuffed the flowers into my bolt to leave both hands free, and now I was sweating all over the blossoms. Disgusting. Ala laughed at some witty remark of Tulia’s. I was happy to hear that she was capable of laughter, then chagrined, in a weird way, that she’d already gotten over me.

There was no way to make a smooth entrance. I shoved the trapdoor up and out of my way. The girls became silent. I heaved the bouquet through the aperture and dumped it on the floor to one side, thinking that this would make a more favorable first impression than my face, which of late had practically made young females run screaming. But this was only delaying the inevitable. My face was attached to the rest of me. It and I would have to arrive together. I poked the sorry thing up through the door and looked around, but couldn’t see a thing; the shack had windows, but they’d been covered. The girls, however, recognized me with their dark-adjusted eyes, and became even more silent, if such a thing is possible. I hauled the rest of me up through the door.

Tulia made her sphere emit light. She and Ala were sitting side by side on the floor, leaning back against the wall. I wondered why. But I was leery of opening my mouth for any purpose other than the one at hand. So I knelt to one side of the trapdoor and regathered the bouquet. This gave me a few moments to realize I had no plan and nothing to say. But having grown up with Suur Ala and knowing how she reacted to things, I reckoned I couldn’t go wrong asking permission. “Ala, I would like to give you these, if it wouldn’t kill you.”

At least one of them inhaled. Neither raised an objection. The place was larger than I imagined, but so cluttered with beams and shafts I wasn’t certain I could stand up, so I knee-walked over to where they were sitting. Something brushed past me—a bat? But the next time I took a count of persons in the room—which was much later—there were only two of us. So it must have been Tulia teleporting herself out of the place like a space captain in a speely.