Ceramic smooth under my fingers; I started a little, unaware that I had even reached out towards them. Still warm from the heat of the day, they were slick, spotless, absolutely regular… no. Not absolutely. I slowly ran my hands over the spirals of black and white and green and blue, feeling something arise from it, shutting my eyes, trying to let my fingertips read it. Straight lines, curves. Letters? Words?
“…John?”
Even after I had explained it to her, she said she couldn’t feel anything in the tiles, and I had to do it again and again, and finally write down what I had felt on a scrap piece of paper. It still made no sense: six horizontal lines, one straight one piercing them like a spine, and two random rectangles that I was sure I had drawn incorrectly.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, holding the drawing in one hand and absently trying to stuff the wad of notes back into my bag with the other. I took it myself and zipped the bag shut. “It’s… I think it’s the missing part of the floor plan. The Room of Protection for unholy documents. The whole wall’s got natural wards on it. How in the hell did you find it?”
“I don’t know. It kind of… you know, like those Magic Eye things?”
She stared at me appraisingly. “I can’t see it.”
“Yeah, Brent and Cookie can’t see them either. Just me and Chris.” But their names felt like poison in my mouth, and for a moment I almost felt crushed with grief—that I had left them, that they couldn’t see this, that I couldn’t protect them. As if everything were normal until I spoke the words. I looked away, wishing I could have had even one more moment of feeling proud about finding the secret room before it had turned to bitterness.
We followed the map through the door, down the hallway, and to a tile wall that Johnny confidently walked up to and threw her full weight against; it moved perhaps a half-inch. I gestured her aside and leaned on it till it opened its full width. She shut it behind us as we entered, waving her tiny penlight ahead of us in the perfect darkness, counting under her breath as the saucer of white light played over more bright tiles and then thresholds of perfect darkness, doorways that did not lead to where we needed. At six, she turned right and pushed open a set of wooden doors.
I knew it was the right place; a breeze blew from it like a breath, cold and heavy with the odour of old paper and mould. It smelled like the ghost of a library. The darkness was near-absolute here, only the thinnest bars of grey light filtering through gaps in the roof onto shelf after shelf of books and scrolls. They rose in the darkness, intricate shadows, the only brightness from masking-tape labels attached to some of the scaffolding, most labelled with dates—indicating, I supposed, when they had to be moved to continue the restoration project.
“They’re still working in here,” I said. “They’ll have guards.”
“Not sure I care. They’ll have lights too.”
“You have a real authority problem,” I whispered as we tiptoed into the darkness. “Only Child Syndrome.”
“Oh come on, that’s been debunked a hundred times. Where did you learn that, high school?”
“At least I have a high school diploma! What have you got?”
“And you’ve got a problem with authority, too.”
“That’s because you’re a bad influence.”
SHE HAD BEEN working for two hours, with a caged fluorescent worklight dragged from the hallway to her study carrel, when we started hearing the noises. I snapped out of my uncomfortable doze (the indigo water, the dust, silvery dust on all the cities of the world, raining down, some dust, some ashes, some spores, some cells) and looked around. Outside the blinding circle of the worklight, it was pitch black, not even moonlight visible. We had both lost whatever remnants of our night vision remained, whatever handful of rods or cones, I couldn’t remember which, and couldn’t get it back while we crisscrossed from floor to floor, room to room, trying to find the books Johnny wanted in the complicated shelving.
“Hit the light,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t help. “Someone’s coming, we’ll get in trouble.”
“I need it,” she said, pointing at her laptop and the growing pile of notes beside it. “I know when the alignment is and we are going to leave an