Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(43)

The powers that be? There’s no way the Guard would have done something like this, which left only one possibility. “Martinson Vine did this? Why?”

He selected a handful of volumes and took them to an empty shelf.

“Since the beginning of time, rulers have held on to power by making the masses believe the order they impose is permanent and inevitable. That resisting it would be like resisting gravity.” He nestled a book into place. “What could be a greater threat to that than the contemplation of alternate realities?”

Freeman stepped back and brushed his fingertips along the spines of the books he’d just arranged. He seemed so different from the last time I saw him. He stood straighter. His eyes were sharper. He was calm. Was it because he was here in the library? Or was it something else?

There was the sound of a distant siren and then a flash of red lights as a Guard vehicle passed by and continued on down the street. I was thrown back to earlier that night—my back in the mud, Tommasulo leaning over me, and then someone’s hands on my shoulders, dragging me away.

“You were the one who called the Guard,” I said. “The one who pulled me out when those men were—”

Freeman nodded.

“Why?”

He returned to his pile of books and held one up so I could see the cover. To Kill a Mockingbird.

“I don’t understand.”

Freeman set the book down again and went back to his work, moving between the shelves and the stacks on the floor. “I came here the night of the sixteenth,” he said. “By then I understood what was about to happen to me, so I wrote down everything I knew about myself. Things I’d done. Things I’d seen and thought and believed. I decided that once the virus had finished its work, all I’d have to do was read what I’d written and I’d be able to recreate the man I was.”

Freeman finished the shelf he was working on, but instead of returning for more books, he took one of the candles and sat on the carpet across from me, careful to keep a gulf of distance between us. Yellow light flickered over the creases of his face.

“But the next day, when I read what I’d written, it became clear to me that I had no desire to be the man I once was.”

Freeman looked out across the mountain range of books scattered across the room.

“That’s when I realized what this place actually is,” he said. “It’s not a repository of paper and ink. It’s the memory of the world, the memory of a thousand worlds, from the Big Bang to the darkness that lies in wait at the end of time. For weeks, I didn’t sleep. I barely ate. I did nothing but read, constructing Freeman Wayne sentence by sentence from this place’s memory instead of my own. One book became my heart. One my mind. One my soul.”

He took the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in both hands, as if he was afraid it might crumble to dust and blow away. He opened it, and for a while the library hush was filled with the dry sweep of pages turning. When he looked up at me again over that book’s spine, there was a clarity in his eyes I’d never seen before.

“Tell me,” he said. “What raw materials did you use to build Cardinal Cassidy?”

“I’m not—”

“I know you’re not infected.”

Freeman waited, his sea blue eyes never wavering.

“I thought you said that you could just look at someone and see their past and their future.”

He studied me a second longer, and then a slow grin softened the lines of his face. He closed the book and set it in his lap.

“What were you doing at Mr. Addad’s house?”

“Who’s Mr.—” Then it hit me. The man in the house. The man who had taken Mom. “How did you know I was there? Were you following me?”

Freeman said nothing. I shrugged and picked at a stray bit of carpet. “I thought I knew the woman there.”

“Sara?”

The word hit me with a jolt. So that was her name now. Sara. I nodded.

“She’s been good for him.”

I made myself look up. “What do you mean?”

“Sara found Fred wandering in the woods two weeks after the outbreak. He was alone. Nearly starving. She got him to the Guard. It turned out his mother had died a week before the outbreak and he was in town for her funeral. That’s her house they’re staying in. He and Sara have been together ever since.”

“So he didn’t . . .”

“What?”

I swallowed back an ache in my throat. “He didn’t . . . take her?”

An even greater intensity flooded Freeman’s eyes. “So that’s why you came,” he said. “You wanted to rescue her.”

Freeman assured me that Fred wasn’t that kind of man. That he was gentle and seemed to love Mom. Every bit of the exhaustion and pain I’d felt over the last few days came surging back at once. Maybe I should have been happy to know that Mom wasn’t with some monster, but all I could think about was how she had gone to the Guard to get some stranger his name back, and had left her own behind.

When Freeman was done, I forced myself up and started toward the front door.

“Did you know her?”

I turned back. Freeman was still sitting on the floor, surrounded by his books.

“Sara,” he said. “Did you know her?”