the forest, and manning the gates of the town. But when we were all gathered in the meeting room, I saw how his top lip crept up in distaste when I opened the chest.
“I don’t even want to touch this stuff,” he said, holding back slightly as the rest of us drew closer to the trunk.
“Elsa’s husband didn’t die from touching these papers,” I said. “He died because your Council had him tortured to death. If you don’t want to know what’s in here, then stay out of our way.”
Piper lifted out the top sheet, and read it out loud. He had to pause over some of the strange words, and at sections when the paper had succumbed to mold, or simply crumbled away.
Yr. 1, Nov. 24. MEMORANDUM (14b) FOR ARK INTERIM GOVERNMENT: SECURITY PROTOCOLS
. . . and preserving the security of the Ark remains our first priority. However, the condition of survivors on the surface (particularly the percentage of survivors whose retinal damage has left them effectively blind [65 percent—see report from Expedition 2]), allows us to conclude that the current security measures are adequate . . .
“It can’t be real,” the Ringmaster said. We’d told him about Sally’s Ark paper, but I understood his incredulity. Our whole world was built on the ashes of the Before. It seemed inconceivable that any part of the Before could have survived the blast, even if only for a while, was hard to come to terms with.
“How the hell did Joe get hold of all this?” Zoe said, crouching by the trunk and lifting out more of the papers. “He wasn’t any kind of explorer, by the sounds of it. Not exactly the type to discover this Ark himself.”
“He never went farther than the market towns within a few days’ travel of here,” Elsa said. “Not in the twenty years I knew him.”
Piper shrugged. “Someone got those papers out of the Ark. Whoever stumbled upon the Ark first—perhaps even before the Council found it. Somewhere along the way these papers got lost, or stolen. They probably changed hands—who knows how many times, or whether the people who had the papers could even read them. Until finally they ended up with a low-level chancer like Joe. My guess is he had no idea what he’d stumbled onto.”
“He must’ve shown some of the papers to someone,” I said, “when he was trying to fence the stuff. Someone who realized their importance —and they told the Council.”
“It doesn’t matter how he found it, or how he was discovered,” the Ringmaster said. He had stepped farther from the chest. “What good can come of it? What good ever came out of the Before? The one thing that we know for certain about these people is that they, and their machines, destroyed the world. They brought about all of this.” His sweeping arm might have been intended to indicate the broken world beyond the walls. The rubble fields, the wreckage of taboo towns. The deadlands to the east. But we all knew what he really meant, when he spoke about the blighted world: us.
He went on: “I freed this town because I wanted to uphold the taboo and stop the machines from being resurrected. What can this Ark offer us apart from more machines?”
“You’re scared,” said Piper. “Too afraid of the machines to think of what it could mean to us, if we find the Ark.”
“I am scared,” the Ringmaster said. He looked around at us all, one by one. “If you knew what I knew, you’d be scared, too. You should be grateful for the taboo. We all should. If your twin didn’t have some idea of how much people feared the machines, he’d have done more than build the tanks. Even when I first met him, when he’d just come to Wyndham and hadn’t even called himself the Reformer yet, he was already talking about some of the things they used to have, in the Before—machines and weapons that you can’t even begin to imagine. He’s always been curious about the Before. Think what you’re doing, when you want to start poking around among this taboo stuff. If it weren’t for the taboo, the Reformer’s soldiers would’ve come after you in vehicles without horses, and a hundred times faster. They’d have overrun us at New Hobart with weapons that can kill a squadron of men half a mile away. You think he hasn’t done his best to find these things out, and re-create them? Most