The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,20

a heady drug. We can’t repair it; we can’t use it. Just its existence is a risk to the whole Library.”

“The whole Library? Or just you?” Hero snipped.

“Uncalled for. Watch your tone,” Rami growled under his breath.

Hero smiled. “Make me.”

“It’s too great a risk,” Claire repeated. “If we learned nothing else from Andras, we should have learned that.”

Brevity shook her head. “It’s a book—”

“It’s not,” Claire snapped. “It’s just ink. It’s a thing.”

“Fond of dismissing anything you find threatening as a nonhuman thing, aren’t you, warden?” Hero said with a sudden chill.

“Don’t,” Claire gritted through her teeth. “Don’t. Start.”

Hero’s shoulders stiffened. A wild protectiveness rose in Brevity. Hero was her assistant, just as Brevity had been Claire’s. What’s more, he was a character, a book of the Library, and he was hers. He was hers and the Library was hers and the books—the books were hers. “Claire. Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not!” Claire threw up her hands. “This is just . . . parts! Pieces! Bone and blood! Ink doesn’t make a story any more than paper does! This thing—”

Ink, ink and blood and the flare of a fire that destroyed everything she cherished. Andras’s laughter, and the dry slide of wyrm scales against crushed pages as the acrid smoke seized her lungs. Blocks of soot black as the Library burned. Heat washed up Brevity’s face, and the memory choked her. Probity was staring at her, suddenly full of concern. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the anger slipped out from her lips. “You don’t get it. You never got it. You don’t even see them!”

Them, the colors. The color of a story, the light that slips through the cracks of all stories. The cracks where the lights slipped out and the reader slipped in. She saw the colors in the books and the colors in the ink. Bile crept up her tongue. What they’d let happen to the books, what Claire wanted to do—to shut them away like they never existed—

A rumble shivered through her feet. The air splintered and groaned. Brevity’s eyes snapped open in time to see the faerie lights detach from the stacks and whizz in a frenzy overhead, stabbing light and shadow down on them. One whipped near enough to Claire’s face to graze a cut across her cheek. In a distant row, something toppled off a high shelf and the impact echoed. The pause frothed with the sound of ruffled pages, disquiet books.

Brevity. Brevity had done that. She’d gotten upset and the Library had responded. She gasped. “I’m sorry—”

“No.” Claire held perfectly still, a stricken look in her eyes. She waited until the air quieted again to speak, voice thin and controlled as a scalpel. “We can speak more of this when—when you’re less . . . emotional. We should go.”

Claire glanced at Rami with a brief nod that was stiff enough to shatter, then turned and strode purposefully toward the doors. Ramiel’s colorless silver gaze skipped over Probity to trace Brevity and Hero with a mournful look, but, ever the soldier, he followed at Claire’s back. The doors of the Unwritten Wing closed behind them, quiet as snowfall.

It felt as if the air deflated out of the room with them. Brevity fell into her chair and looked to see Hero sagging against the desk with a lost look. They both sat heavily in the silence, clinging to the desk as perhaps everything else felt unmoored. “What . . . what just happened?”

6

RAMI

Characters. Boss says “they’re just characters” when I press her about the damsel suite. As if characters are a “just”-ish thing to be. They’re people! Essential, intense, emotional lives, scrubbed down and stripped away and honed to a cutting edge. That’s how you fascinate a reader. Characters are more real than real. That’s what fiction is. Why else do stories make them suffer or make them change? They’re mirrors and foils. Every muse is taught that. We fall a little in love with every character we meet. Maybe the story of humanity is learning to be brave enough to be the character in their own story.

Apprentice Librarian Brevity, 2016 CE

RAMIEL HAD TAKEN TIME over the last half a year to become familiar with the confounding mortal who had upended his chance at eternal rest, and the only thing he’d ascertained for sure was that Claire had precisely two forms of walking. One was purposeful, when she had a destination in mind—and she nearly always did. Back straight, chin forward, heels clicking, long,