Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2) - Rachel Caine Page 0,93

from the chains.

Scholar Wolfe was still outside the bars, and Jess realized he probably couldn’t bear the idea of stepping inside ever again. Wolfe said, “They told you we were all dead, didn’t they?”

Jess felt Thomas nod wearily, and blotted moisture from his eyes with the back of his sleeve as he worked the stubborn lock. Until this moment, he’d thought of Thomas in the abstract, just as he’d last seen him. Unchanged. Seeing what they’d made of him brought things home in ways imagination couldn’t.

“They described it,” Thomas said. “For every one of you. How you died. I tried not to believe it, but . . . but it’s hard not to here. This becomes all you know.”

“They lie.” Wolfe’s voice sounded low and silky, dark as midnight. “It’s their favorite tactic—I know it well—to break your mind and your spirit. I’m sorry it took so long to get to you.”

“If we’d tried to come earlier, the lies might well have become true,” Santi said, just as Jess clicked the last shackle open. He winced when he saw how raw Thomas’s ankle was beneath.

“Can you walk?” Jess asked. Thomas, for answer, stood up. And even though Jess knew how tall his friend was, it surprised him to see him towering over them again.

“Of course,” Thomas said, and then tried to take a step and had to grab Jess for balance. “Slowly.”

Santi’s expression didn’t change, but it was clear slowly wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear in strategic terms. Their time was running out fast. “Then let’s go,” he said. “As fast as we can.”

“Wait!” Thomas turned to look at the walls of his room, and for the first time, Jess realized they were densely covered with small, scratched drawings in Thomas’s precise hand. Machines. Automata. He’d drawn what looked like one of the Roman lions, then drawn it as if it had exploded into pieces, each one shown in context with the skeletal frame. “I need to remember these! I have to remember. I didn’t have anything else to work with—they wouldn’t give me any paper . . .”

“No time, Thomas. We need to move,” Glain said. “They’re coming.” There was a note of tension in her voice that convinced Jess instantly, and he pulled Thomas toward the door. There would be no moving the young man if he really wanted to resist, but Thomas went, although reluctantly, still turned to memorize his drawings. Once out of the cell, though, Thomas turned to the front, put his back against the bars, and sucked down a deep, trembling breath, as though for the first time it was dawning on him that they were here, it was not a dream, and he was actually free.

All of Jess’s pulling wouldn’t move him.

“Thomas?” He kept his voice quiet, firm, and calm. “We can’t stop here. The Garda are coming, and they will put us all in those cells. We have to go.”

“I know,” Thomas said. He closed his eyes and then opened them, and they’d taken on a blind, hard shine. “It isn’t an illusion, is it? You’re here. This is real.”

“Yes. It’s real.”

Thomas was silently weeping, and Jess wanted to hurt someone responsible for that. Badly.

“Keep going,” Jess called to Santi, who was taking the lead with Glain. “There’s a round metal plate in the floor that used to be a drain. Find it and burn through. That puts us in the sewer underneath. I’ve marked the way for once we’re down there. Oh, and there’s a lion. I hope it’s still stopped. I took care of it last night.” Strange that it seemed the least of their worries at the moment.

“Another one?” Khalila turned, eyes wide. “How long have you known how to do that?”

“Since the night Dario almost got me killed at Alexander’s tomb,” he said. “Ask him.”

She whipped around to do just that, but Dario held up his hand to stop her. “Later, desert flower, for mercy’s sake,” Dario said before she could begin the interrogation. “I know your curiosity is stronger than your sense of self-preservation, but I still don’t know how he did it, by the way. I ran for my life like any sensible person.”

“Jess didn’t run!”

“And that proves my point.”

Wolfe turned on them in a storm of black robes and bitter, angry eyes. He was, Jess thought, all but shattering down here, in this place where he couldn’t shut out the memories of his time behind these bars. “Do you think this is a