This is her nodding before she closes her eyes, pale and silent and so fragile-looking that he wants to protect her from the world, even the part of it that he represents.
This is the sound of gunfire going silent outside. Not tapering off; just stopping, like the world has been muted.
This is the world going white.
This is the end.
We got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we
Avery wasn’t sure he could go any further.
He was tired. He thought he had never really known what tired was before today: he had heard of being tired, but he’d never really felt it. Tired went all the way down to his bones, wrapping around them like ribbons, until his legs were lead and his arms were sacks of sand suspended from his shoulders. Tired sapped the color out of the world, turning everything gray and dull. Tired hung weights from his eyelashes. Whenever he blinked, he thought his eyes might refuse to open again.
But Zib—stupid Zib, who thought she knew everything—was supposed to be somewhere around here. That’s what the Page of Frozen Waters had said, before pushing him over the waterfall. He needed to find Zib. He needed to tell her he was sorry.
There was a bundle of rags on the riverbank, covered in glittering silver dust, like fish scales or moonlight. Avery paused. Rags didn’t normally have tangled, uncombed hair.
Avery found that he could run after all.
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book V
Aftershocks
Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it.
—L. Frank Baum
You are an alchemist; make gold of that.
—William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
WE ARE
Timeline: 14:02 PDT, June 15, 2016 (seven and a half years later).
Something in the stacks falls with a clatter. Roger freezes in the act of replacing a book on the shelf, cocking his head to the side and considering the noise. Nothing audibly smashed; it wasn’t students sneaking beer into the rare books aisle again. It hadn’t been a meaty sound, either, so no one is passing out back there or otherwise getting up to mischief. The number of people who think library sex is a good idea never fails to astound him. Sure, he’d tried it a few times back in his undergrad days, but it had only taken one paper cut in an unfortunate place to make him realize that going back to his room was a much better solution.
“Kids,” he says finally, shaking his head and smiling. Somewhere along the way, people who were his peers when he arrived on campus have become “kids,” needing supervision, unworthy of being trusted with the rarer books in the school collection. He’s found himself incapable of finding undergrads attractive recently, his mind calculating how long it’s been since they graduated high school and dismissing them as too young for anything but getting himself into trouble. That’s probably a good thing—he knows a lot of junior faculty who’ve had issues with dating students—but it still feels like one more step toward an adulthood he’s not quite sure how to handle. Growing up was something that was supposed to happen to other people. Not to him. Never to him.
Roger sets the rest of his books down on the cart and walks, hands in his pockets, toward the sound. He’s one of the younger professors in the UC Berkeley Linguistics department, and many of the students find him more relatable than his peers. If someone is in dishabille back there, they may feel more comfortable with him being the one to point out that the library isn’t the place for such activities. And if it’s another damn squirrel, he can always open a window.
The floor doesn’t creak beneath his feet; the walls don’t breathe as they settle. The main library at UC Berkeley is only five years old, bright and clean and new, without that smell of dust and time that eventually ensnares every good library. Parents look at the school’s facilities and smile, picturing their precious children being taught in beautiful spaces, learning beautiful things, without needing to worry about black mold or falling masonry. Students like he was look at those same spaces and frown, thinking of ivy-shrouded walls, mysterious reading nooks, and the power of time. He wishes he had a way of telling them that they can be part of transforming this new place into an old one, that sometimes being the one who etches the lines in