Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(36)

Not every foolish thing in Alexandria is my fault.


Please tell me you got something out of it.


Nothing I want to tell you this way, even if you’re erasing these messages. Too dangerous.


Try not to let him talk you into any more of this.


Careful. I might begin to think you care.


I always have.


Morgan, tell me what I need to do to make it right between us. Please.


There’s nothing you can do. I’ll do what I can for you.


I want to help you!


. . .


Morgan?


-X-





CHAPTER SIX





It was the heavy middle of the next night when Jess’s Codex chimed, bringing him groggily awake. He turned on a glow and paged open the book to see a new message writing itself out in round, professionally inked letters. Recruit Jess Brightwell to report to the Office of the High Commander in fifteen minutes.

Now? He felt a lurch of unease. People disappeared conveniently in these barren hours. He remembered finding the disarranged state of Thomas’s room back at Ptolemy House at a similar time of night, a smear of blood on the floor. Easy to be just . . . gone. But avoiding the summons would be inadvisable at best, impossible at worst, and he couldn’t let them see fear. What if they know? What if we’ve been identified from the park?

It felt like dressing for his own funeral, but Jess donned a clean uniform and stepped into the hall . . . to find Wu, Bransom, and Glain already there, as well as the remaining members of their squad. Helva was still in the infirmary, and Tariq—his absence echoed loudly between them just now.

“High Commander’s office?” Wu asked. Jess nodded. His eyes met Glain’s for a moment, and he knew she was just as unsettled as he was. She’d taken the news of his near death with calm, but had also known, just as he did, that it might have been a temporary escape.

“Form up,” Glain said. “If this is our last time together, then we do it right.” She meant it both for them as a squad and as a personal message to him. Jess appreciated the sentiment.

The squad fell into stride through the long, clean hallways, past the turn that led to their quarters and off into wider, more lush spaces, and then into the courtyard where the Spartan turned his head sharply to focus on Jess as he passed. Jess refused to look at the thing. Instead he kept his concentration on keeping stride with Wu and Bransom and trying not to think why the squad—the whole squad—had been so summarily summoned.

The High Commander’s office was in a tightly guarded central building, one that required presentation of their official Library bracelets to a seated sphinx automaton twice Jess’s height—an eerie thing that stared at Jess from the lifeless simulation of a human face with utterly alien eyes as it examined his credentials. A growl of discontent rumbled somewhere deep inside the thing as it stared at him, a vague and terrifying dislike that might, at any moment, break into a full-throated shriek and baring of those needle teeth. Did it know? Could it? Do the sphinxes communicate somehow?

Evidently they did not, because the sphinx turned its attention to Bransom, the next in line. It took a real effort of will for Jess to turn his back on the thing and walk. Glain, having her own bracelet examined last, caught up to him in several long strides and whispered, “Near thing.”

“But still a miss. I’m beginning to believe that they just like me.”

“Automata don’t like or dislike anyone. They’re machines!”

“Not completely,” he said. “Thomas once told me that they . . . think. It’s not just gears and steam in there. It’s something else.” He itched to open one up now that he’d read that coded volume, full of tantalizing hints about how the thing worked inside. Thomas would have had exactly the same impulse; the German boy was an expert at mechanical things, constantly breaking down and building up their inner workings. He’d been fascinated with automata. Still is fascinated, Jess corrected himself. He isn’t dead.

The group marched together at a brisk pace down clean stone hallways, inset with alcoves filled with warrior deities from around the world—African, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Roman, Japanese, Russian. Finally, at the end of the hallway, in pride of place, outsized golden statues of Horus and Menhit, the local Egyptian war gods. The floor beneath their boots, shining and clean, was a mosaic design of sphinxes, and at the end, in the rounded vestibule of the High Commander’s office, the Great Library’s seal shone gold, inset in the marble. The place smelled of metal and oil, with a faint, acrid smell of chemicals and gunpowder floating above like fog. The smell of war. Jess still preferred the crisp, dry scent of paper and leather.

This is the end, he thought, and wondered if the others were thinking the same thing. This is the end of my time at the Library. We’ve been held hanging, and now the sword is about to fall and cut us loose.

My father will never take me back.

Glain stepped forward to knock on the huge ebony doors, but she didn’t need to do so; they swung open without a sound, and after a bare instant of hesitation, she squared her shoulders and led the way in.

It was a long march through a very large room. Displays of arms and armor and vast shelves of Blanks lined the walls. At the far end of the space, in front of a wall inscribed with rows of hieroglyphs that looked millennia old, sat a desk with crouched lions for legs.