Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(39)
“Then why—”
“I don’t know,” Glain said, cutting Bransom off, with the definite subtext of and I don’t care. “You heard the High Commander. The squad passed. We’ll receive individual commissions by Codex. This may be my last opportunity to say it to all of you, but I’m proud of you. Very proud.” Her gaze touched each of them in turn, and last of all, Jess. He nodded.
“Thank you, sir,” Wu said, and Jess echoed it. “Oh hells, Bransom, stop cringing like a child. You’re a soldier now!”
“I wasn’t cringing!” she said, and glared at Jess, as if it were somehow his fault. “What about Helva?”
“Helva will be on Medica duty until she’s well enough, but I imagine she’ll pass, too. They say she’ll make a full recovery eventually.”
Jess drifted slowly away and let the group talk, as their good fortune slowly began to sink in. He continued to stare back down the hall, where the eight-foot goddess Menhit relentlessly swished her golden flail, her leonine jaws baring in a grin that showed sharp, cutting teeth.
Jess went back to his room and tried to go back to sleep, but his heart was pounding, his hands clammy, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that the jaws of a trap were slowly, slowly closing around him. He couldn’t lie still. Finally, he rose, dressed in common clothes, and paced his room restlessly as he tried to still the anxiety inside. He didn’t want to wake up Glain, and Dario and Khalila didn’t deserve to be rattled awake at this terrible hour, either, but he felt more alone than he ever had.
He sat down and picked up his Codex and turned to the page where Morgan’s messages appeared. He knew it was useless, but he took up his pen and wrote, I need to talk to you. Please. I need you.
He watched the page, waiting for her familiar handwriting to appear, but it didn’t come. Of course it wouldn’t. She could reach out to him, but he couldn’t do the same to her. He didn’t even know if she was reading it. So he kept writing, almost against his will. I feel very alone tonight. And I miss you. It’s stupid, I know, but I miss the touch of your skin, the smell of your hair. The weight of you in my arms. Horus help me, I sound like a lovesick poet. I should thank the God of Scribes you’ll never read this, because I don’t deserve to write it. You still hate me. You might not ever want to see me again, and, even if you do, you might never feel the same as you did before. I know that. I just . . . I miss you, Morgan.
Then he reversed the stylus and brushed it all out, erased as if it had never been, and felt more alone than before.
He needed the comfort of someone familiar. I want to go home, he thought, which was strange; he had few happy memories of London, really. And it had hardly ever been safe. Still, in this moment, he desperately wanted to walk in the door of his family’s town house, to see the wan smile of his mother and see his father busy at his massive desk.
A bit of home.
After a moment of debate, and knowing it was bound to backfire on him, Jess gave in to temptation and went in search of his twin brother, Brendan.
The sentries posted at the gate asked where he was going, and he told the truth: visiting relatives. I’m not a child running for comfort, he told himself. Father’s been pestering me to find out what Brendan’s up to, anyway. Because Brendan should have left Alexandria long ago, headed back to London, but Jess had learned his brother had taken up residence in the city instead.
Maybe his brother had broken with the family business. Maybe they were both outcasts now.
Leaving the compound this time felt like shedding a giant load from his shoulders; he wasn’t on a mission, wasn’t under pressure to dodge, avoid, not be found out. He had been allowed off the grounds without argument, and now he walked into the cool, misty night of Alexandria with his hands in his pockets.
It felt, for the first time in a long time, like freedom, even with the weight of the copper bracelet of the Library still clasped around his wrist.
Alexandria at this hour was a relatively quiet place, except near the docks, where lights and noise and activity continued as ships loaded and unloaded and sailors found leisure. He avoided that; pubs here in Egypt were far different from the friendly, cozy places he’d grown up with at home. Add sailors to the mix, and they were almost always dangerous places, especially at this dark hour.
He knew the way to his brother’s rented home; he’d walked past it a few times, studying it. But it occurred to him that along the way, he needed to make a stop at the shadow markets.
Growing up in the book-market trade, he’d been dragged along to these sorts of places since he was old enough to understand what went on there and the risks. He remembered, at ten years old, carrying a satchel of rare books for his father as they followed warrenlike alleys into a particularly wretched little shop near Cricklewood. It had not, of course, sold books; it sold pens, journals, Codices—all the products of the Library. The old man who ran it had opened up a trapdoor to a tunnel that ran below the shop, and well beneath the city, they’d found London’s Graymarket, a moving, ever-changing feast of illegal books and those who craved them. There were always two or three clumps of nervous newcomers who’d found caches of books in dead relatives’ homes and looked to sell them off for a quick profit; those, his father always targeted first. He bought cheap, and relieved those otherwise upright citizens to scamper home with their guilty money.