Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Chapter 20: The One Who Studies Dead Languages

I could drive to campus in forty-five minutes flat or less if I used the limo in the HOV lane.

Instead, I left my jacket, tie, phone, and smartwatch in Café Null's Faraday lockers and stood at the curb, asking strangers which bus would get me there. Two hours on public transit, if lucky. Maybe ninety minutes if traffic cooperated.

From the bus window, the city revealed itself in a way my usual commute never allowed. We lumbered through the graffitied streets surrounding Café Null, lingering by the diner where Mateo and I shared lunch, then snarled through downtown's neglected corridors. But once we hit the commercial sprawl, we sailed through green light after green light, as if the city were rushing me toward campus with its terracotta rooftops and oak-lined walkways.

At the campus edge, I paused to study a map as students walked around me in constant motion. Laughter and heated debates floated through the air in a babel of languages. Instinctively, I listened for Mateo's voice, but of course he wouldn't be here. He wouldn't materialize just because I wished it.

I peeled back layers of event announcements plastered over the map until my destination emerged beneath. After a short walk, I entered a concrete building that looked like it had been designed during the Brutalist architecture fashion. Its air reeked faintly of old wood and coffee gone cold, a smell I associated, distantly, with a private school I'd attended for two years before my father decided the curriculum wasn't rigorous enough. No signage welcomed me, just a directory displaying a maze of corridors taped askew to a pockmarked wall.

The name had first caught my eye in the acknowledgments of Oskar Enevoldsen's documents as one of two peer reviewers, one based in Geneva, one here on campus. Her faculty page revealed her expertise: documenting human rights violations, with a focus on resource extraction conflicts and indigenous territorial disputes throughout South America. The titles of her recent publications confirmed what I needed to know: she had conducted fieldwork in the Chaco two years ago.

The hallway narrowed as I approached her office, walls cluttered with administrative notices and course syllabi. Her door had a large map showing disputed borders across four nations, each conflict zone marked by a precise thick red line. Found the Chaco. Found the Pilcomayo corridor, though no one had labeled it for me. I recognized it from the files, from coordinates I'd read enough times to memorize without meaning to. I lingered before it, studying the patterns of contestation. How much of the world was defined by what had been taken, and from whom?

I knocked.

"Come in."

Okonkwo was younger than I'd assumed from her publication record. Late thirties, perhaps, with close-cropped hair and suntanned skin. When her gaze met mine, steady but guarded, I recognized that look. Her face was a battlefield mask of academic neutrality. Mateo wore the same expression.

"Arthur Penn," I said. "I emailed yesterday. I'm not sure if---"

"I know who you are," she said. "Sit down."

I sat. I opened my laptop and slid it across the desk toward her. Grace, treacherous Grace, had taught me you only offered explanations when you doubted your own work. And I didn't doubt the information was real, not really. My certainty was almost complete and painful. Okonkwo didn't move. "What do you want from this conversation?" she asked.

"I want to find out if what I'm looking at is real," I said. "I've had two people tell me it is. I need a third."

She considered this, then pulled my laptop towards her. Reading through the documents, she moved with practiced efficiency. Eyes scanned dates, footnotes, and fine print in a seemingly random sequence. With nothing pretty nor interesting in her office for me to pretend to be interested in, I watched her read my files. I noted the change in her stoic expression: a subtle widening of her eyes, a slight pinch of her lips.

She stopped and said, "Lots of prioritization models, tiered infrastructure. Resource allocation under strain: who gets power, who doesn't and who gets response time measured in seconds, and who gets it measured in hours."

"That's standard in disaster modeling," I said automatically.

"Yes," she said. "It is. But here it shows the sourcing of materials for those systems through supply chains that correlate almost perfectly with regions reporting elevated rates of environmental degradation and death."

Okonkwo watched me absorb that. "Where did you get these?" she asked.

"Someone sent them to me," I said, seeing no reason to lie. "Someone who said they had retrieved them from Camelot's internal system."

"You had no prior knowledge of what is here? Even though this is your company?"

"Not mine yet. And some, but not all of it."

She was quiet for a moment, absorbing this, then returned her gaze to the documents. Now and then her finger would tap the trackpad, returning to an earlier section for comparison.

Finally, she leaned back with a long sigh that sounded almost like a laugh. "All right," she said. "Come to this side of the desk."

My heart rose, beating in my throat as I obeyed.

She tapped on the screen. I recognized the data Grace and Lance had sent me.

"Look at this," she said. "These are vendor chains three layers deep before you hit anything public-facing. That's not how people record activities. That's how they hide them."

She scrolled. "And this modeling language is not for a presentation. It's not even for clarity. It's for speed. Internal use," she added. "Which is exactly what you'd expect if this came from inside your company."

I didn't correct her: I'm the heir, not the owner. VP figurehead only. "So, it's a cover-up?"

She tilted her head, considering me. "It's authentic enough," she said. "People placating themselves while they build something too large to explain."

"And the raw data? The documents? Articles?" I asked. "Were they truly distorted? Could it be a fake?

"Not faked," she said. "They're consistent with every primary source I've worked with in that region over five years."

She pushed the laptop back toward me. I looked at the screen

"For example, this vendor documentation in section three, listing the labor intermediary for the Pilcomayo corridor," she continued. "I've seen this entity before. Not in Camelot filings. In a database tracking defender deaths."

My hands, which had been resting open on my thighs, closed into fists. "The men who organized against them are in there," I said. "In the files. Three names."

"I was acquainted with two of them," she stated. "Lucio Duarte and Roberto Ixpac." She looked at me with something like sadness. "Their deaths were ruled accidental. But they were murdered."

I nodded once. Behind her, almost hidden between the bookshelf and the window, hung a second map, smaller than the one on her door, hand-annotated, showing a single corridor. The Pilcomayo. Six red pushpins marked points along it, each one precise and deliberate, the way you mark something you intend to return to.

"Thank you," I said. "That's what I needed."

As I got up and reached for the laptop, she asked: "What are you going to do with this information?"

I thought about Grace saying strategic context. I thought about Lance's hand dropping before it reached the small of her back. I thought about my father's face on a monitor telling me to protect Camelot's interests at any cost. I thought about Mateo's grey-blue eyes as he told me to be good.

"I don't know," I said.

I was almost at the door when my hand found my jacket pocket on its own, the way it always reached for my phone. Instead, my fingers closed around a folded square of paper. I pulled out the yellow note and handed it to her. "Wan yok simi koonata esdudia run."

Something shifted in her expression, not dramatically, but there. "Quechua," she said. "Southern dialect. Your phonetic rendering is rough but interpretable. Wañuq simikunata estudiaq runa."

"What does it mean?"

She laughed a little. "My Quechua isn't that good. I believe the phrase describes a person grammatically. Someone who learns from languages that were killed."

I looked at the note. “Can you name a person occupied with the study of dead languages?

She took her glasses off. "There are a few people working in that space," she said. "The best known is Mateo Ixpac. His thesis is on the mechanisms of colonial linguistic suppression." When I looked confused, she added, "It is how the Spanish crown and later the Portuguese and British systematically destroyed native language infrastructure. Not just banning words but dismantling the systems that transmitted them. Oral tradition, naming practices, and ceremonial language." She paused. "His argument is that language death and land death are the same process.

The empire silences the tongue and takes the territory simultaneously, because a people who can't name what they've lost can't organize to reclaim it."

I looked at the six pushpins in the Pilcomayo corridor. I thought of Camelot's brochures: a shared tongue, unified infrastructure, one city at a time. My father had said it like poetry.

"Thank you," I said. My voice came out trembling.

"Of course." She watched me pick up the sticky note. "He's a remarkable researcher," she said. "We've been to the region together. He knows it better than I do."

I turned toward the office door. My hand found the frame before I reached it, steadying myself against something I couldn't name. Then something in the room flickered. Just a pulse, gone before I could name it.

I turned back to her, but Okonkwo didn't react. "Did you feel that?"

"The electricity here has been inconsistent," she said. "That's all."

For the first time, I wasn't wondering where Mateo was. I was wondering who else already knew I was looking for him.