"Then we make sure it matters," I said. "We make sure what we save is enough."
We worked. Twenty hours on, four hours off. I translated until the words blurred into a single stream of characters, until my hand moved without my brain's conscious direction, until the Asura script and the Deva script merged in my mind into a single language that belonged to both civilisations and neither.
On day nine, with the Deva expedition two days away, we had one hundred and sixty-seven translated texts, each reproduced in fifty copies. Eight thousand three hundred and fifty documents. Enough to fill a wagon. Enough, maybe, to change a world.
We sealed the library. Kritya did it herself — stood at the fissure entrance and activated something in the wall, a mechanism I couldn't see, that caused the entrance to collapse inward. Stone and earth filled the gap. The blue light disappeared. The library — seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and thirty-three remaining codices, the accumulated knowledge of a civilisation, three centuries of preserved truth — was buried again.
This time, by its own people. To protect it from being destroyed.
"We'll come back," Kritya said, more to herself than to anyone else. "When it's safe. We'll come back."
Nobody believed her. But nobody argued.
We loaded the wagons. One hundred and sixty-seven texts. Eight thousand three hundred and fifty copies. The distilled truth of a destroyed people, packed in crates and covered with canvas, pulled by oxen through a forest at night, away from an army that was coming to erase what we'd saved.
The Heist was over. The harder part was about to begin.
Getting the truth to listen.
