August nodded in acknowledgment.
“But where are they now?” Merletta pressed. “We can find out who they are! Did you unmask them after you knocked them out?”
“We did,” said August heavily. “But their faces meant nothing to us. One was skinny, with pale hair and a silvery tail, the other was stockier, with a deep blue tail.”
Merletta frowned. “Very nondescript tail colors,” she muttered. “Not likely to stand out.”
August nodded again. “Whoever they are, they must be under orders.”
“Take me to them,” said Merletta, with sudden resolution. “Maybe I’ll recognize them.”
“It could be dangerous,” said August warningly, but Merletta waved him off.
“My life is at risk anyway, I think we’ve established that. With four of us to two of them, surely we’ll be all right.”
She saw the three guards exchange looks, but she didn’t give them the opportunity to say that as a trainee, she didn’t count for the purpose. She rose into the water and turned toward the door, but August’s voice called her back.
“Wait, don’t you want your item? The one we replaced with the spears?”
“Oh, yes!” Merletta turned back. She’d momentarily forgotten about the object of the test.
“This is what was on the shelf when we got there.” August pulled out a rolled-up writing leaf and held it out to her.
She took it, frowning. It was tied with a thin length of weed, and she pulled it open. For a moment she just stared at the page, unable to make sense of what she was seeing. It was a list of names, each with notations that made no sense to her. They were common names, ones she’d come across in Tilssted plenty of times, but there was nothing particular tying them together. Her eyes continued to scan the page, and her heart gave a great leap of fear at the sight of her own name. Running her gaze back over the whole list, she suddenly realized it was familiar after all.
“It’s the page from the orphan records,” she whispered. “My page. The one which was damaged.”
Her mind raced back to the time, in her first year, when she’d found her entry in the Center’s orphan records. She’d been shocked to see that, contrary to what she’d been told, she hadn’t been abandoned at the charity home by unknown parents. Her entry had listed parents, but the record had been damaged, so that their names were no longer legible. This, surely, was an exact copy of that page. The other names and annotations meant nothing to her, except that now she was looking for it, she recognized that the common names all belonged to orphans from the home, of similar age to her.
Trembling, hardly knowing whether she wanted to see it, she followed the line next to her own name. Her date of birth was there, and two names which she’d never seen, never so much as heard.
Elminia and Elric, Hemssted.
Merletta stared at the names, drinking them in. Were those really the names of her parents? Elminia…that sounded unusual. Perhaps unusual enough to enable Merletta to track her down.
And her parents came from Hemssted? The room seemed to rock wildly around her. It was so central to her identity that she was the Tilssted trainee, and she didn’t actually come from there? She didn’t even like Hemssted! All the Hemssted trainees she’d met had been unpleasant, at the very least. Of course, she had no way to know if this record was accurate. Someone had written it out—if she’d learned anything, it was that this fact gave no guarantee of the record’s truth. But still…what was the point in giving her a false record, when no record was necessary at all?
She looked up, her eyes wide and her mind racing. “Why would they put this in the maze?” she croaked.
A stolen item indeed! Truer words had never been spoken. As a nameless orphan, her history had been stolen from her as surely as the Center stole history from the whole triple kingdoms.
“I don’t know what it is, or what any of that means,” said August, and his unemotional voice steadied her. “But we know that their usual approach is to find a way to weaken their targets before they attack. I suspect that they hoped the test itself might finish you off, and if it didn’t, they wanted to make sure you’d be weakened as much as possible when you emerged.” He looked her up and down with a shrewd glance. “And no offense, but you don’t exactly project strength at this moment.”
Merletta looked down at herself, still clutching the record, floating in shock, immobile except for the violent trembling that was rocking her from head to fin.
“You’re right,” she acknowledged, swallowing. “I would have been rattled, and not at my most vigilant.”
August nodded, satisfied. “Well, if you still want to see where we left the guards, we’d better go. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d already woken.”
Pulling herself together, Merletta retied the record and stowed it in her satchel. She tried to project steadiness as she followed August and the others from the room, but on the inside, her mind more nearly resembled the maelstrom she’d just survived. When they emerged into open water, Merletta glanced back, and let out an involuntary cry.
“It’s…it’s a ship!” she gasped.
August looked back, studying their temporary haven with the impassive expression that seemed habitual for him.
“Yes,” he said. “A human ship, like the legends.”
“But it’s underwater,” Merletta protested, studying the rotting wooden structure. It was lying at an odd angle, half-propped against a large rocky shelf that protruded from the ocean floor. The tall spire of wood that she’d seen rising from Heath’s ship was broken on this one, more than half of it dangling down, barely connected to the rest.