looking at the designs, which shifted as I watched them, like gears. A solid circle in the centre of each winked suddenly at me, and I flinched.
“Protection against whatever might come when I touch the book the first time,” she said. “More warding. Different kind. Don’t look.”
“Can I have one?” I said, pointing.
“I can’t power it for both of us, sorry,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Nicky. Just call for me and I’ll come.”
I hadn’t really wanted one of the ugly, alien things, and barely knew why I had asked. Helpless to contradict anything she’d said, I moved off into the stacks.
Dust motes swirled in a golden darkness; I smelled mould and felt a bolt of terror. Leaving home had heightened my senses for... not danger, precisely, but reminders of my eventual fate. Not the vague one that awaits all of us in some way, but the specific one that awaited us right now. I knew the likely day of our deaths, the time, even who would be responsible. Only the manner was unknown, and I didn’t want to think about it.
After the heat of the day, the cold, silent breeze should have been refreshing, but it wasn’t. If it had been just cold and still, that would have been one thing—we were underground, after all—but it felt like water continuously trickling on my face. I began to shiver as I moved carefully around the teetering stacks, eyes beginning to tear up from the dust.
Everything in me wanted to start turning them around so I could read the titles on the spines, but both Johnny and Akhmetov had said not to touch the books. I was less inclined to believe the grouchy Akhmetov, who would have said it just to be a pain in the ass, but if Johnny said not to touch them, I’d be damned if I would. It was slow going though, especially as the paths narrowed deeper into the stacks, so that I had to suck in my gut and contort my shoulders not to touch the crumbling paper.
“We’ll know,” I muttered. The increasingly slender main path branched off into dozens of even smaller ones, some delineating stacks just a couple of books wide, others big enough that the path slipped out of sight. It occurred to me that this place was like Johnny’s house—carved out underground and far bigger than the house on top, like an iceberg.
I shivered and walked, walked and shivered. If I could just touch the books, I could see if they were in Latin at least. Maybe similar languages would be grouped together. Arabic with Arabic, Latin with Latin. Whatever pointy stick language Johnny had been learning in the other libraries before we left. Akkadian? Sumerian? What had she called it—coneform? Comic-book stuff, time of legends, Conan the Barbarian, King of Cimmeria. A time of beasts and monsters and wizards and magic, but also the time, it seemed, that people learned the words to speak of Them, write of Them. Maybe the time humanity had invented writing specifically to banish Them and record what They’d done.
I thought: If the plan works, no one will ever know. They’ll just know that Joanna Chambers, child prodigy and scientific entrepreneur, had run off with a boy for a week, or been kidnapped by a boy for a week, and beat up some people in an airport, and then meekly came home. My name won’t even be remembered. We’ll never be in the history books for this. If it works. If the plan works. It will be our secret, another one to keep. Like the bullet that still invisibly joined us. Like falling through the ice. Like the wasps, at the Creek, and looking at each other through the clear water. Like the kite I’d broken at her house, a gift from the Emperor of Japan that I never should have touched.
Like thirteen years of friendship with the glass wall of her secret between us, like the barrier separating animals and humans at the zoo.
And yet here we were, nine thousand kilometers from home, together. A girl and her dog.
I took random turns, left here, right there, waiting for a book to... what, jump out at me? Be so amazingly gorgeous I couldn’t miss it? Speak to me? Light up? The mouldy smell was intensifying too. I pre-emptively told my stomach not to be a dick, held my hand cautiously over my nose, and kept going. With everything looking the same, it was hard to