The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Five

Quara caught up to Lina just before she reached the staircase leading to the government level. She walked beside her smallest sibling, a comfortable silence falling between them with each girl entirely lost in her own thoughts. Despite Quara's adamant speech, her thoughts turned back to the library and her mind wandered through the aisles, her arms outstretched, her fingers trailing across the spines of a hundred thousand books, each just waiting to be plucked from the shelf and opened so that it could reveal its secrets to her.

Lina had walked the entire distance from the landing in the Lake Corridor, with a small smile playing at the corner of her lips. She had spent more time with Quara than she had spent with any other person on the face of the planet. Quara was the one person who she never really tired of being around. And knowing Quara as she did she knew that the library had an appeal that her sister simply would not be able to resist.

The library in the Walemont Caverns paled in comparison. It wasn't that it was too terribly shabby. But it was absolutely unimpressive. And Lina knew that now, every time her book loving sister glanced at a book she would be imagining all the books that had been left behind in the city that Lina was determined she visit. She doubted that her sister's imagination had truly captured the magnitude of the city that lay deep down in the rock below their feet, but she knew that whatever she was imagining was grand enough to do the work that needed to be done to convince her to come along for the adventure that Lina had been imagining since she first discovered the City nearly three years earlier.

Still, even if Quara, through some super human effort managed to resist the temptation of a city sized library, Lina knew that she had one last weapon at her disposal in breaking her sister's resolve. She'd brought it up out of the ground six months ago after strapping it onto her back and beginning the long, slow climb up the tunnel to rescue it from its millennia long resting place. It had weighed heavily against her back and in places she hadn't been entirely certain if she would be able to maneuver it through the narrow passageway. Occasionally she'd even had to slip it off her back and push it in front of her to guide it through some of the tightest places. It hadn't been easy to bring it back with her, but now Lina was certain that it had been worth it.

The next morning Lina was sprawled beside the outer door that opened onto the stairway. The small bag that held her tablet and chalk were flung on the floor beside her. Quara, who was usually the first one out of the house, was taking longer than usual to get ready but the small girl laying in the entryway, her head propped on her hand, was determined not to miss her. Lina could barely make out the sound of her footsteps somewhere in the back of their little home.

The residential apartments in this part of the city were fairly standard. They had been made long before the fall of the King, when Walemont had been a busy, prospering city, and this portion of the residential wall had overflown with children. By and large, most of the apartments had small bedrooms carved from the mountain, along with a common area, a small cooking area, and a water closet, where the two buckets of water they'd brought home the night before could be used for washing, in between trips to the long communal pools that they all visited several times a week.

Many empty residences lay off of the long corridors that snaked back, deep into the Dome. The members of the Kalena family who had first stumbled upon the Caverns had been allowed into the hidden city, but there were many within the community who had not been entirely sold on allowing outsiders to live next door to their families. As a result they had been given a home on the very edge of the area that was still considered habitable.

Still, Lina couldn't imagine living anywhere else. The walls of the cavern had been carved smooth and flat by one of her ancestors who had made the journey from the plains. Her father had explained that it was because they missed the look of the flat vertical walls and so they had carved them so that if a tapestry was hung across from one side to the other, the fabric lay flat against the stone, and the room resembled a room in one of the large Plains tents. And tapestries there were, aplenty.