choice all the same.”
“I make my own choices. I’m a librarian, aren’t I?”
“If that’s what gives you purpose, my dear.” Lucille hummed gently. “It is all right, is all I’m saying. We all understand you do as you must.”
A sharp poke at his thumb interrupted Hero’s thoughts. He hadn’t put down the pen, and the tines of the tip prodded into the flesh of his thumb with a smear of black. A moment, just a flash really, of another time came over him. Claire being swallowed by black. And then, before that, a damsel bleeding and turning to ash. Tasting ink on his tongue and dark at the edge of his vision.
Hero shook it clear, but instead of feeling better it made him feel precisely too aware. Aware of the walls, suddenly too close; the air, a little too warm. “I could . . . I could run.”
“Only as far as they let you, sweetling.” Lucille sighed, and her earnest pity was worse than her scorn. “So you’ve convinced yourself you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.” The ink wicked along the fingerprint of the broad side of his thumb. He rubbed it, only succeeding in smearing it larger as it began to dry, leaving his skin feeling tight. No matter. It would wash away as if it’d never been there. “I chose to stay. To help.”
As soon as he’d said them, the words took on a familiar echo from Chinvat bridge. The wind had dragged its nails through his coat and across his skin. He’d balanced on his toes, terror in his throat, and told himself he would not play their game. He’d spite the gods; he wouldn’t play their game, and he’d choose to fall.
As if anyone chooses gravity.
“You are a help,” Lucille said while precisely not saying a thousand other pitying things. “But when someone stays with you because they don’t have any other choice, that’s not a kindness. The damsel suite is always open to you, when you need a home.”
It was strangling; it was falling; it was enough ripping sensations to tear Hero apart. His ink-smeared fingers clenched under the desk, but just then the logbook chimed a reprieve. “I’ll make my own way, thank you,” Hero said with every bit of acid stored up in his throat. He bent over the desk and studied the inventory with far more scrutiny than the single line—all books accounted for—required. It gave him the moment of privacy he needed to stop the twisting fear building in his chest.
“Nothing missing?” Lucille said after the silence turned awkward.
“None. Does that satisfy you?” Hero drew himself up to his full height. It was so much easier looking at people from the narrow parapet of his nose. “Rami!” he called, without turning to look.
After a few moments, he could hear the familiar heavy trod of angelic work boots. Hero tried to not let the relief play on his face.
“I couldn’t find the tea cart,” Rami apologized as he left the long shadows of the stacks.
“You’re a sweetheart for looking. Never you mind.” Lucille rose slowly with dignity, playing up her age in a way that made Hero strain to not roll his eyes. “There will be a kettle on in the suite.”
“Oh . . .” The heavy brows on Rami’s olive face did a complicated twitch as he stepped aside for Lucille to leave and glanced at Hero. He was canny enough to step carefully over the frost in the air. “But the inventory?”
“Satisfactory.” Lucille patted the angel’s arm as she passed. “The rest of it is no business of mine, of course. You boys tell the librarian I’d appreciate a visit when she gets back.”
Hero’s lip was curled. It took an effort to straighten out his expression as Lucille left and Rami turned a questioning gaze back to him. He took a tentative step on his injured foot and was pleased that only the rotation of his ankle twinged in protest. He could work with that. “Rami, I do hate to be a bother, but—”
“What can I do to help?” Rami asked, as Hero knew he would.
Hero rewarded him with a warm smile that was shockingly earnest. Some of the doubts Lucille had left in his chest began to recede. Choices, and the power to make them—Rami lived his life so effortlessly that way. It would be impossible for Hero to keep up, at least as he was. His smile brightened. “Could you do me a favor and mind the