Sol

Aro shared his office with someone he’d never met.

In the ever-churning, ever-changing labyrinth of the Caretaker Bureau, he walked in a door that led into the office at dawn, and the same door at dusk, but this time it let out into the cloister. Between those times, he sat in the office with its two three plaster walls and one brick wall and saw nobody. His work came to him through pneumatic tubes that extended into the ceiling and disappeared, on their way to some unknown terminus. He removed the scrolls from their little capsules and sent the capsules back through the return chute. He transcribed whatever was on the paper. He set the transcription in a pile for his coworker. Every few days, he dusted the shelves or swept the tile floor before getting back to work. The gears behind the brick wall clicked and groaned.

He did not see anything he transcribed—it was a talent he’d perfected long ago. Thirty years ago, to be exact. A Scribe needed to copy what was on the scrolls, word for word, perfectly, and remember none of it. He had not been made aware of why, and that too was expected. Oh, he had vague childhood memories of people whispering—secret magics, or war correspondences—but Aro had learned to unremember as well as to unsee.

Like all Scribes throughout the city’s history, Aro had been selected as a child for his face-blindness. The Bureau required such discretion that the individuals who worked there had to be involuntarily circumspect as well as intentionally so, as a failsafe. As children they were given over to the Bureau by governmental decree and raised alone, by one mentor. They saw no other human being after age seven.

But he did wonder sometimes, about the coworker who occupied this office during the night shift. There were only so many Scribes. Were their cells beside each other at the Enclave as children?

Even as he unremembered and unsaw, Aro thought about hiding a note. He’d tried it once when he was eight—an apprentice trying to seek out another apprentice. The note had wound up on his pillow that night, inexplicably. A warning from his mentor.

He hadn’t tried again since.

And yet, often he noticed that the seat, when he walked into the office at dawn, was still faintly warm as if someone had vacated it only moments ago. Sometimes there was a droplet of vaguely-floral tea spilled unnoticed from a thermos onto the worn, furrowed wood of the table. And sometimes, very infrequently, his coworker would change perfume. He could tell because it lingered ever so slightly on the worn woolen blanket that draped over the back of the clunky chair for the cold days. They shared it because only certain items were allowed to move in and out of the office every day.

This was all Aro knew about her—he’d always imagined his coworker to be a her, though he had no real evidence that this was so. He knew she worked right up to the last minute of her shift. She drank floral tea—that was how he knew it had been the same person all these thirty years; it was always the same brew. When there was no droplet for a while he grew nervous, until there it was again days or weeks or months later and he knew his lifelong un-companion had not been replaced. He knew she grew bored of routine once in a while, at least in some small harmless way that would not be against doctrine. And he knew she existed. That was all, and he had never known anyone so well. He wondered what she knew about him.

Today, he learned another detail.

The office had no window, unless you counted the wood-framed opening in the brick that allowed maintenance to be performed on the ancient gears and cogs and cables that churned behind the wall with uncertain purpose. The result was the same—natural light did not reach this room at its unspecified, inconstant location somewhere in the Bureau. A kerosene lamp on the desk, a candlestick on the bookcase, and a small curlique-ing electric chandelier hanging from the ceiling—those provided illumination while the Scribes wrote.

But Aro’s coworker had left him a miniature sun hovering in the corner of the office when he stepped in at dawn.

Gasping in surprise, he closed the creaking door behind him. He slung his work bag over his shoulder and onto the back of the chair. He stood before the head-sized glowing orb floating just above his eye level, eyes aching and transfixed. When he looked away at last, the greenish-red ghost of a circle was burned into the center of his vision.

Scribes were not forbidden to use conjuration as long as it was just little things like summoning balls of light or reheating tea or calling a dropped pen up to you when you couldn’t be bothered to bend down to pick it up. But they were required to remove all evidence of their presence before the shifts changed.

There was so much evidence here.

She’s tired, thought Aro. She forgot to banish it. Or, more tantalizingly: she wanted me to see it.

It was apt that she’d want a warm sun to light up the room. Working the night shift probably meant she rarely saw the real one, like Aro rarely saw the moon.

He smiled at it. “Good morning,” he said in a voice hoarse from disuse (Aro never talked to himself, not like his mentor had), and waved his hand to turn it into a tiny replica of the moon he remembered from the few times he’d seen it. The glow shifted from golden yellow to celestial blue. Then he sat at the desk and got to work.

He unsaw the writing on the scrolls and he unsaw his own writing as he reproduced it. He ignored whatever motions his ink and quill scratched onto the paper. For twelve hours he let the letters flow into his eyes and out through his hands, not allowing any of them to stick in his mind. He unremembered all of the information, once in a while smiling to himself when he took a break to stretch his writing hand or eat his lunch—whenever he looked up at the little piece of evidence that another human shared this space.

When the end of his shift came, he would pack his personal items back into his bag, step out the door, and unremember the moon, too.