Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2) - Rachel Caine Page 0,75
behavior of the automata. Today would have been a fine one, in the chaos of the Burners, and Jess knew if he’d made the wrong move, he’d be another stain to clean up on the steps tonight.
Rome is a trap. It was too neat, too convenient, that suddenly they’d been dispatched here just after finding the information about the secret prison. The Artifex must have known their plans, or at least strongly suspected them. Khalila and Dario had gone missing. Maybe already locked away.
Disposing of Glain, Jess, and Santi would just be a sensible precaution. Get rid of the fighters; keep the Scholars out of the group who—in the Artifex’s counting, maybe—could be controlled and used. It made a sickening kind of sense.
Below, Medica attendants came to claim the bodies, and a squad of firefighters put out the Greek fire blaze. People began to filter back into the Forum in ones and twos, and then suddenly it was full again, as if nothing had happened at all. Only the blackened chemical stains on the stones behind Jupiter and the bloodstains on those near Mercury showed anything at all had interrupted a normal day.
Troll stopped next to him and scanned the people below with distant, cold eyes. “Seems useless, doesn’t it?” he asked. “They put us out here, and the Burners take their shot at us, and they die.”
“It’s a waste on both sides,” Jess said. “But we can’t let them win. They want to destroy the Library.”
He knew that wasn’t strictly true; he’d been among the Burners once, had spoken to a local leader. They wanted the Library to change, just as Jess did . . . but their tactics were unacceptably violent.
Troll shifted his weight just a little. “Any idea why the lions hate you so much?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Troll surely didn’t believe it for a moment. “You know I have to report it. Even if I didn’t, there’s another squad leader who will. They might pull you out and try to find out what about you alerts them.”
Troll seemed to be fishing for something, and Jess didn’t like it. He turned and looked at the young man directly to say, “I’m not a Burner, if you’re thinking it.” But I knew some. That was a secret the Artifex held in reserve, too. Guillaume, his classmate, had come from a Burner family; his bereaved father had taken Jess prisoner in France. If the Artifex wanted to make it seem Jess had become an agent, it would be child’s play to make that appear reasonable. “No offense, sir, but why do you care? I’m a one-day-in recruit. You should shed me and get someone else, according to any kind of logic.”
“Not that simple,” Troll said. “Believe me, I wish it were.”
He moved off, stopping to check each of his squad members like any good commander. Jess didn’t know what to make of him. Or any of this.
He was still considering the ramifications of it when he realized sometime in the chaos of the Burner attack, his Codex had received a new message.
It was gibberish. He frowned at the text, and then a second later realized he knew this code. It was his own family’s highly secure emergency code, used only for the most urgent information. He’d memorized the keys to it when he’d been just a boy.
It read, Your friend lives in the city of seven hills. There was no signature, but one hieroglyphic bird sketched at the end of the code string. Not part of his family’s code at all, and it reminded him of the engraving on the ring that Anit, Red Ibrahim’s daughter, wore on a chain around her neck—the ring of one of her brothers.
The message was from her. His free gift of the information about the automata had done some good after all, because this was confirmation, at long last, that Thomas was alive.
And here, beneath Jess’s feet, in Rome.
EPHEMERA
From a speech by a masked Burner leader, given in the territory of America, 1789. Held strictly in the Black Archives.
You hesitate now to lift your hands and weapons against your oppressors? We have the eyes of nations upon us, all eager to see us break these chains and rise, stand firm, be free of this dire and smothering control that has, year by year, been laid upon us.
We have been told that paper in a binding, ink on a page, is worth more than the life of any man, woman, or child. We have been pressed into