Book 1: Chapter 9

She struggled out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, and crept downstairs to the library. The computer sat in solitary splendour at Grandmother’s desk, but the power button didn’t respond. After a minute or two, she realised it needed to be switched on at the plug.

It booted up, and then requested a password. Linua checked underneath the keyboard, but there were no passwords taped there. She bit her lip and looked around, but she didn’t see anything under the pen holder or the pot plant either. There were some drawers to the right, and the top one had a little leather-covered black book. Inside, on the first page, she saw her Grandmother’s big, loopy writing: “Must have at least 6 letters + capital + number!” The “6,” the word “capitals”, and the word “number” were all underlined.

She turned the page. There, Grandmother had written instructions for plugging in the computer, pressing the power button—“Press FIRMLY and HOLD for 1 second”—followed by the name of Linua’s mother and her date of birth. That must be the password.

Alone in the dark, Linua was overtaken by an unexpected wave of grief and loss that felt like it nearly drowned her. Tears picked at her eyes and it was all she could do just to sit there and not cry. She held onto the little leather-bound book as tightly as she could, and it was only after she was able to release her grip on it that she saw it had left a square indentation in the meat of her palm where she had been holding it too tightly.

The reason she didn’t want to be an astronomer was because astronomy had taken her parents away from her.

She took several breaths in and out, and then typed the password into the computer.

The screen loaded slowly with little icons. There was an email one, and one to access the internet and several others. Linua clicked on the second, which loaded the Observatory’s website as the default home page.

Linua laboriously typed in the address of a search engine, and then paused, not sure what to search for. She tried variations of “ancient” + “string” + “net” and got the following:

· An article from the Shinboa History Museum about an ancient counting method using knots in a piece of rope or string.

· A study on the development of fishing nets from Ancient Kāru following the colonisation, through the Post-Deluge period, and into the Kingdom of Kāru. It was surprisingly fascinating and well written considering how mundane the subject was, and Linua abandoned it reluctantly.

· An excerpt from a book on the history of weaving, which included one tantalising reference to a circle of women who had swapped secret coded messages during the Warring Cities period in Barako Kassanos approximately a thousand years previously. The part of the book which Linua had access to, however, didn’t include any pictures or examples of said textiles. She saved the link anyway.

· A gold net headdress of Queen Holuratu of the Late Kingdom period. While stunning, it was nothing like the muddy, irregular pile of string from the photos, which looked more like something that had been vomited up by a cat.

· An encyclopaedia entry on ancient stringed instruments—again, fascinating, but not remotely relevant.

An hour and a half later, she logged into the bulletin board and entered the link to the history of weaving. None of the others, she saw, had had better luck. She was struggling to keep her eyes open by this point, so she was about to log out when she saw a message from Anith from earlier that evening: Meet at the central museum at 6.30pm!

A wave of disappointment swept over her. If the Astronomy Club was meeting at the museum in the centre of town, the one with the big columns and the gargantua skeleton in the foyer, Linua would miss out. She would be stuck all by herself at the Observatory, which was halfway up the mountain. There was no easy way to get from the Observatory to Herkow city centre at that time of night.

She typed in response: Sorry I won’t be able to go, I have to go to the Observatory in the evenings.

Maybe she could use the bulletin board to find out about the group’s progress in the museum. It wasn’t much consolation. She signed off the computer, unplugged it, and crept back into bed, setting her alarm half an hour early so she could see if there had been any replies.

Linua was used to dragging herself out of bed having not had enough sleep, but today was a particularly bad one. She felt stiff and headachy. She crept downstairs again. She needed to be quiet as Helged would be arriving in the kitchen in fifteen minutes, and Grandmother might wake up if Linua made too much noise.

Once again, she logged into the computer and checked the bulletin board. There was a reply from Pickle less than an hour after her own message. Had he stayed up all night?

It said: can’t you skip the obs for 1 day ?

Linua typed back: How?

The reply came back within seconds: just skive off ! get the bus to the museum instead

I get to the Observatory using a car service. Also, don’t you sleep at all?

car service ?? r u rich or someth ? tell the driver to take u to museum instead . sleep is for wimps

Linua couldn’t call the car service to arrange a different destination. They would hear immediately from her voice that she was a teenager, not a venerable old woman of seventy odd. She typed a laborious explanation to Pickle.

Pickle: email the car service then . i email stuff all the time and pretend to be grown up

Linua thought of the dodgy video of the man explaining how to get into the storage without tripping any location software put there by the government. Pickle was obviously getting up to a lot of stuff in his spare time that his parents probably didn’t know about.

Linua wished it was easier for her to do the same. She clicked the email icon, and checked her grandmother’s book for the email password.

wots the name of the car service ? Pickle asked.

She provided it, and the email address of the car service popped up on the bulletin board less than a minute later. She opened a new email and typed a message:

To whom it may concern: this afternoon I would like my granddaughter to be taken from my house to the Herkow Museum in the city centre, instead of to the Observatory, and picked up from the museum at the same time as normal. Thank you for your assistance. Regards, Lady Catarin Leylan.

Would Grandmother put all her academic suffixes on too? Yes, Linua thought, she probably would. She added them in.

To Pickle, she said: It’s sent. But what if they reply and my Grandmother sees it?

Pickle obligingly talked her through setting up a rule that would automatically forward any email from the car service to Linua’s own email, which Eret had apparently set up for her last night, along with her bulletin board access. The rule would also delete the original email in her Grandmother’s inbox.

She heard the stairs creak as Helged came down to start breakfast and typed: got to go. She logged out of the computer, nipped quietly up the stairs, and came down more slowly, making sure her footsteps were audible.