“Halloween?” Clearly, he’d never heard of it. I wasn’t surprised. I’d only seen the word once myself in an old history book my parents had. Some parts of that book were tattered beyond recognition, with pages missing or mostly destroyed. Still, I was always fascinated by the mention of a holiday we knew nothing about.
“Not so certain now, Your Royal Smartness?” I teased.
He made a face at me though it was clear he was only playing at being annoyed. He checked his watch and sucked in a breath.
“Come with me. We have to hurry,” he said, grabbing my hand and launching himself into a run.
I stumbled a bit in my little heels, but I kept up pretty well as he led me back to the palace with a huge grin on his face. I loved when Maxon’s carefree side came through; too often he was so serious.
“Gentlemen,” he said as we raced past the guards by the door.
I made it halfway down the hall before my shoes got the better of me. “Maxon, stop!” I gasped.
“I can’t keep up!”
“Come on, come on, you’re going to love this,” he complained, tugging my arm as I slowed. He finally eased back to my pace but was obviously itching to move faster.
We headed toward the north corridor, near the area where the
“Where are we going exactly?”
He turned and faced me, immediately serious. “You have to swear never to reveal this little chamber. Only a few members of the family and a handful of the guards even know it exists.”
I was beyond intrigued. “Absolutely.”
We reached the top of the stairs, and Maxon held open the door for me. He took my hand again and pulled me down the hallway, finally stopping in front of a wall that was mostly covered by a magnificent painting. Maxon looked behind us to make sure no one was there, then reached behind the frame on the far side. I heard a faint click, and the painting swung toward us.
I gasped. Maxon grinned.
Behind the painting was a door that didn’t go all the way to the ground and had a small keypad on it, like the kind on a telephone. Maxon punched in a few numbers and then a tiny beep sounded. He turned the handle as he looked back to me.
“Let me help you. It’s quite a high step.” He gave me his hand and gestured for me to walk in first.
I was shocked.
The windowless room was covered with shelves full of what appeared to be ancient books.
Two of the shelves contained books that had curious red slashes on the bindings, and I saw a massive atlas against one wall, opened to a page that held the shape of some country I couldn’t name. In the middle was a table with a handful of books on it, looking as if they’d been handled recently and left out for quick recovery. And finally, embedded in one wall was a wide screen that looked like a TV.
“What do the red slashes mean?” I asked in wonder.
“Those are banned books. As far as we know, they may be the only copies that still exist in all of Illea.”
I turned to him, asking with my eyes what I didn’t dare say out loud.
“Yes, you can look at them,” he said in a manner that implied I was putting him out but with an expression that said he had been hoping I’d ask.
I lifted one of the books carefully, terrified that I might accidentally destroy a one-of-a-kind treasure. I flipped through the pages but ended up setting it back down almost immediately. I was simply too awestruck.
I turned around to find Maxon typing on something that looked like a flat typewriter attached to the TV screen.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A computer. Have you never seen one?” I shook my head, and Maxon didn’t seem too surprised. “Not many people have them anymore. This one is specifically for the information held in this room. If anything about your Halloween exists, this will tell us where it is.”
I wasn’t fully sure of what he was saying, but I didn’t ask him to clarify. In a few seconds his hunt produced a three-bullet list on the screen.
“Oh, excellent!” he exclaimed. “Wait right there.”
I stood by the table as Maxon found the three books that would reveal what Halloween was. I hoped it wasn’t something stupid and that I hadn’t made him go through all this effort for nothing.
The first book defined Halloween as a Celtic festival that marked the end of summer. Not wanting to slow us, I didn’t bother mentioning I had no idea what a Celtic was. It said they believed that spirits passed in and out of the world on Halloween, and people would put on masks to ward off the evil ones. Later, it evolved into a secular holiday, mainly for children. They dressed up in costumes and went around their towns singing songs and were rewarded with candy, creating the saying “trick or treat,” as they did a trick to get a treat.
The second book defined it as something similar, only it mentioned pumpkins and Christianity.
“This will be the interesting one,” Maxon claimed, flipping through a book that was much thinner than the others and handwritten.
“How so?” I asked, coming around to get a better look.
“This, Lady America, is one of the volumes of Gregory Illea’s personal diaries.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “Can I touch it?”
“Let me find the page we’re searching for first. Look, it even has a picture!”
And there, like an apparition, an image from an unknown past showed Gregory Illea with a tight expression on his face, his suit crisp and his stance tall. It was bizarre how much of the king and Maxon I could see in the way he stood. Beside him, a woman was giving the camera a halfhearted smile. There was something to her face that hinted she was once very lovely, but the luster had gone out of her eyes. She seemed tired.
Surrounding the couple were three figures. The first was a teenage girl, beautiful and vibrant, grinning widely and wearing a crown and a frilly gown. How funny! She was dressed as a princess.
And then there were two boys, one slightly taller than the other and both dressed as characters I didn’t recognize. They looked like they were on the verge of mischief. Below the image was an entry, amazingly enough, in Gregory Illea’s own hand.
“Do you think that’s why we don’t celebrate anymore? Because it’s wasteful?” I asked.
“Could be. If the date’s any indication, this was right after the American State of China started fighting back, just before the Fourth World War. At that point, most people had nothing—picture an entire nation of Sevens with a handful of Twos.”
“Wow.” I tried to imagine the landscape of our country like that, blown apart by war, then fighting to pull itself back together. It was amazing.
“How many of these diaries are there?” I asked.
Maxon pointed to a shelf with a row of journals similar to the one we held. “About a dozen or so.”
I couldn’t believe it! All this history right in one room.
“Thank you,” I said. “This is something I would never even have dreamed of seeing. I can’t believe all this exists.”
He was beaming. “Would you like to read the rest of it?” He motioned to the diary.
“Yes, of course!” I practically shouted before my duties came back to me. “But I can’t stay; I have to finish studying that terrible report. And you have to get back to work.”
“True. Well, how about this? You can take the book and keep it for a few days.”
“Am I allowed to do that?” I asked in awe.
“No.” He smiled.
I hesitated, afraid of what I held. What if I lost it? What if I ruined it? Surely he had to be thinking the same thing. But I would never have an opportunity like this again. I could be careful enough for the sake of this gift.
“Okay. Just a night or two and then I’ll give it straight back.”
