a mostly complete scroll. She unwound it, struggling to be careful as a dread rose in her. The text on the scroll ran top to bottom, possibly an ancient form of pinyin, but that was Claire’s wildly uneducated guess. In her wing, books translated themselves.
The scroll dropped out of her suddenly nerveless fingers. She lowered the gem from her eye, dropping the curtain of shadows around the room again. It hurt to breathe.
“Claire?” Rami’s voice was soft at her side. “Do you have a guess where we are?”
“We don’t have to guess.” Claire’s voice was unsteady. “Though I’m not surprised now that you didn’t recognize it. No one comes here; no one should be here, least of all Hero. Rami, this is the Dust Wing.”
The understanding registered as a startle of breath in Rami’s otherwise solid-as-stone presence. He shifted, and Claire supposed he was uneasily scanning the half dark, trying to catch any movement. “Hero is here?”
He sounded uncertain, as if he suddenly wanted to doubt his own tracker skills. That would surely be a more comfortable thought than the idea of Hero here, injured or dying or lost in a mausoleum of forgotten books.
Claire didn’t allow herself any such comforts. Concern was raw in her throat. “Of course he is. Your abilities led us here, so here is where we will find him. We will find him.” She repeated it, mostly to herself, despite the way it undercut her certainty.
Water soaked through the toe of her sneakers. Claire straightened, squinted against the dark until she could be certain she wasn’t about to walk off a cliff, and strode off in a random direction. “Get your little feather out, angel. We are going to find him.”
* * *
* * *
THEY MADE THEIR WAY in the dark, stumbling over gullies of shredded parchment, swamps of rotted paste, led by the slender waft of the feather in Rami’s palm. Rami said nothing, but Claire’s head was filled with an unending scream.
“The trail leads this way,” Rami said, starting up a precarious-looking slope. Claire took a step to follow but halted as a shiver came over the air. A thunder of falling books rang out behind them, accompanied by an unholy screech. Abruptly, the ground beneath them shifted. It didn’t move, not in the physical sense, but the books beneath them shivered, throwing the accumulated dust up into the air and painting the dim world in an incomprehensible fog.
Perhaps it was a matter of familiarity; perhaps it was an instinct honed after three decades in the Library; perhaps it was a sympathetic echo between unwritten writer and unremembered books, but Claire knew in an instant that there’d been a loss. A book of the Dust Wing had been further disgraced, dismantled, destroyed. She pivoted, wheezing and straining to see through the dust, but nothing else moved.
Until the scream. It was wordless, cut off, but it was also, undeniably, Brevity’s voice.
Claire spun to Rami, wide-eyed with alarm. “That was Brev.”
Rami didn’t question it, didn’t ask how she could possibly be certain. And for all that, for his stoic, buoyant belief that held her up like a life raft, Claire loved him a little more. He nodded and measured the drift of the feather in his cupped palm.
“Go. Find Brevity. Do your duty.”
Claire’s heart jumped, and she felt torn in two. “But Hero—”
“I’ll find our wayward man,” Rami said with a gentleness that seemed to expand his care for the entirety of the Library. “He can’t be far. Go. You need to do this. I’ll find Hero and we’ll find you.”
If the soft gravel of Rami’s voice had been an ounce less certain and made of stone, Claire couldn’t have done it. If his eyes had been a smidge harder and not full of love—for her, for Hero, for what horrible mistakes had brought them here in the darkness—Claire couldn’t have trusted it. But he touched her face in the light-limned dust and she impulsively went to her toes, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and flung herself down the bleak, slippery incline.
29
BREVITY
A reader doesn’t mark his life by days but by memories. A book doesn’t mark its life by pages but by readers. We are made up of those whom we touch.
Librarian Claire Juniper Hadley, 2017 CE
THE WIND AND WEFT of light left them suddenly, and Probity’s grip on Brevity’s hand twitched her forward a moment before Probity’s magic swept closed at their backs. Goose bumps immediately pricked at Brevity’s bare shoulders.
It