Chapter 10: Secrets in the Kitchen

To say that Vekaya could not remember being as excited as she was would not, obviously, have been saying much. However, it was on the same level as realizing that she could make decisions for herself, which, if you’ve ever lost the ability to do so and I hope that you do not, is quite a wonderful feeling. She could barely sleep that night. She waited in the dark. Vekaya schemed as to how she would slip away there the next day. What excuse could she make to find her way into the kitchen? Could she volunteer to help clean as a gesture of charity? Might someone be suspicious? Excitement turned to worry. Sleep would not come, and she wondered how she would make it until the next day. Then, it occurred to her, that she didn’t have to. It was obviously expected that she stay in bed, but the idea of sneaking out was not exactly a new idea for her. And, she could only remember the past few days. Originally, she had thought to leave the House of Civius behind, but before Vekaya could do that, she had to find whatever was hidden in the kitchen. So, that’s where she was going.

Without much effort, Vekaya stayed awake until after the crying of the other children in the dormitory had stopped. Then, she listened to the shamassons as they glided through the halls like other worldly creatures, making just enough noise to be vaguely menacing. She had watched them at this. If she were to crawl on her hands and feet, she’d be noticed before she got out of the room. Her old plan was going to need some altering, but she could do it. There was, after all, more than one way in and out of this dormitory.

Vekaya imagined Nerod’s bunk being the last one in the room. Imagining the coldness of his one syllable laugh punctuating the night was not difficult. It was just as easy to imagine him telling the nearest shamasson that she needed some tea. He was awful.

And that was how Vekaya first learned that she hated heights. In her haste to open the window before she was discovered, she put her weight on it a bit too much and spilled out into the night, almost completely tumbling into the yawning blackness of the city streets below. It was then that she remembered how high up she was, though she had no memory of ever having been outside of the House of Civius. With the tiniest of yelps, she pulled herself back inside, scanned the room for shamassons, and regathered her courage. Outside of the window was a rain gutter. It looked stable, and Vekaya was underweight, uncomfortably so.

Again, she opened the window, swallowed hard, bit her lip, and made herself go out into the cold night air. She closed the window behind her, seeing the shamasson reenter the room. In moments, her ghostly robes would rustle past the bed where Vekaya had balled up the straw of the mattress into a vaguely - she hoped - human form. Perhaps, it could pass for her under sheets in the middle of the night. Regardless, the point of no return had come and gone.

She crept along the drain pipe, trying not to look out at the gleaming city below. Hundreds of lights lit up the night for people who had things to do, people who were unconcerned with Vekaya and her plight. She crawled on. The next few windows were the same dormitory. Then, she clambered slowly but steadily up the roof, her feet and hands still numb. When she came down the other side, she was looking into a hallway beyond where the children slept. The same red decorations adorned the walls. Ornamental scales, for that is all that they could be, were on a pedestal just at the edge of what she could see through the window. At this point, she was so cold that she almost didn’t care if she got caught. Still, she resisted the inclination to enter the first window as it was still too close to where the children were sleeping and therefore the patrolling shamassons.

After ducking in quickly from the roof outside, Vekaya got just enough of an eyeful of the hallway to gauge whether or not there were any adults of any sort wandering the hallways at that late an hour. None she could see. Then, she heard something outside. There was a sound of wagon wheels turning. She couldn’t place how she knew what they were, but then, no one had had to explain what a tree was in the teachings of Civius that they read. Someone was awake. Someone was probably meeting the person or people with the wagon.

Trying to remain optimistic, Vekaya told herself that it was good that a wagon was coming in at this late hour. Whoever was meeting the people with the wagon wouldn’t be there to see her. At the pit of her stomach, she felt unsettled that something would be arriving at the House of Civius this late - what could it even be? What business could conducted in that darkness? Whatever it was, it wasn’t important to her at that moment. She continued on toward the kitchen. Twice, she had to slip blindly into other rooms to avoid people coming down the hallway. The second time, it was a small group, and she recognized Mrs. Praner’s voice. Both times, she only let out her breath when she saw that she was alone.

Why would Mrs. Praner be up at this hour?

It didn’t bear further questioning because Vekaya realized that she didn’t know enough of her own world to even deny whatever they were saying about Civius. It just struck her as deeply, deeply wrong. She could only go with what she felt was right, and for Vekaya, anyone whose voice could rob you of your will was someone who needed to be watched very closely. I might add, that I think anyone would agree.

She continued along the corridor and finally made it to the dining hall. The floors were still slick from having been scrubbed. The piney smell of the cleaning potion still hung in the air. Quickly, she tiptoed through the room and into the kitchen. Now, what was she looking for? What? She looked at the piece of paper. She looked at her arm. She looked around the kitchen.

The kitchen was small for having to feed as many children as it did. The stone walls were dark in the moonlight. A few very large pots, kettles, and pans covered the wooden surfaces where the cooks worked. They had had trouble looking at her. Had she known them? Had they helped her hide a backup plan here? What else could it have been, her imagination? Perhaps. Vekaya felt as though her mind was so empty from having no memories that it wanted to grab whatever it could for knowledge.

An enormous oven sat at the back of the room under a brick chimney. There was a partially open pantry halfway along the wall. In the deep darkness of its interior, she could see an enormous sack of flour. It was braced against the wall, preventing the door from closing entirely. After sneaking over to the pantry, Vekaya was disheartened to find that the door creaked loudly. What little she could see inside did nothing to jog her memory or give her any clue as to what she should be looking for.

The note had said “like your arm.” Well, what was like her arm? She looked back and forth between it and the diagram. Where were rectangles in the room? Odd angles and sloping curves dominated the kitchen. It was almost hard to imagine where a shape like a rectangle could be. Vekaya looked all over the dark room. It would be difficult to see anything that wasn’t immediately obvious or brightly colored. She tried to imagine the kitchen in the light of day. What might be rectangular? The pattern in the note looked like bricks. It could be bricks. Bricks. The chimney? There were two rows of off colored bricks there, three on the bottom, two on the top. Walking toward it, she looked her arm up and down. What was it? Vekaya turned her arm over a few times to see all of it.

There they were: a cluster of five little round freckles on the inside of her arm. She might have missed them if they hadn’t been in the same basic layout as the bricks. One of them was slightly pink. It didn’t quite match the brown of the others. Top right.

Vekaya sidled up to the chimney to get a good look at the top right brick in the oddly colored formation. Sure enough, when she tugged at it a bit, it gave. When she positioned her thumb more firmly against it, it came completely free in her hand. There was a large imperfection in the brick, and inside of that, was a small mass of parchment – more than one page. It was covered in some sort of wax. Already nervous that she would be caught at so sensitive a moment, Vekaya’s ears pricked up as she carefully freed the sticky paper from its hiding place. Her fingers pushed into the wax, trying to straighten the paper. Unsure of how long she had fumbled with the message in the darkness, Vekaya started to realize the absurdity of her goal. Even if she could flatten it out to, there was no reading in this darkness. The sound of footsteps echoing out of the main hallway caused her to give up on the message for the time being. If they entered the kitchen now, if they heard her, whoever it was could close off her escape. She reset the brick, put the pages in her pocket and darted off to the entrance of the kitchen.