Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(73)

“Well,” she said, “he’s not changed at all.”

“Come on,” Jess said. “Dario’s right. There’s still Thomas to find.”

“I was so worried you’d move faster than I could and I’d be too late,” she said, and her grip on his hand grew stronger. Almost painful. “I knew you’d left Alexandria. I was afraid—afraid something terrible would happen to you.”

“To me?” He forced a smile he didn’t quite feel. “Nothing ever happens to me.”

“Oh, I remember you collapsing with a wound that almost killed you after Oxford. You don’t fool me.”

“Shh.” He’d heard a scrape, and his instincts had spiked hard enough to hurt. There was a blind corner just ahead, and Wolfe was already passing the turn.

The noise had come from behind them.

Jess pushed Morgan ahead of him, toward Wolfe, and—though he’d sworn seconds ago he never would—let go of her hand. His shove sent her stumbling into the wall at the corner, and she turned back with a surprised expression that turned to horror, and Jess knew.

He did the only thing he could: he threw himself hard to the side, into the old stone wall, and a sharp-tipped bronze spear stabbed hard down into the floor where he’d been standing.

The Spartan automaton pulled the spear back with economical grace, turned its head, and the red eyes blazed at Jess from a distance of only an arm’s length away. This was no sphinx, no lion; it was in the form of a man, muscled and lean. Upright.

It slammed its left forearm toward him, and Jess ducked. He didn’t quite move fast enough, and the blow that grazed the top of his head made the world go soft and strange. Not pain, exactly, but he knew it was there somewhere, floating like a cloud that hadn’t quite rained yet.

“Jess!” Morgan’s scream pierced the fog like the Lighthouse’s focused beam, and he scrambled out of the way as the Spartan thrust down again. The spear tore through the leg of his uniform trousers and grazed his flesh; he felt skin part, but again, no pain. The spear’s tip was too sharp to hurt, like a Medica’s scalpel. He was seconds from dying and he knew it. All he could do was scramble and try to estimate where an engineer, a good engineer like Thomas, would have placed the safety switch for this particular design. He didn’t know. It looked like a man, taller and broader and faster than a man. The face under the Spartan helmet was unmoving, as uncaring as any beast. It won’t bite, at least, he thought. The mouth was half-hidden under the helmet . . .

The helmet? No, too high up. He’d never reach it. If he tried any approach from the front, he’d be killed before he could even try a switch, if one even existed in a spot he could find.

He was going to die. Maybe he’d known that from the first moment he’d seen the Spartan automaton on the High Garda grounds. He remembered feeling a shiver of premonition about it.

His brain was racing like a river in full flood, uncontrollable in its search for some way to survive. It directed his body without conscious thought, rolling, diving, scrambling on all fours like a crab, and when the Spartan lifted one sandaled foot to crush him, he remembered something.

Something from a favorite book he’d read a dozen times as a child. Talos, the bronze titan who fought Jason and his men aboard the Argo. A metal man who could not be hurt, could not be defeated.

Talos had been stopped by the removal of a plug at his heel, which had drained away the vital fluid that moved him. So the story went.

The engineers who’d designed the Spartan had read the same stories, dreamed the same dreams.

Jess hit the ground behind the Spartan and reached out blindly for the backs of the statue’s legs with both hands, sliding fingers down the unnaturally warm bronze. It twisted around, shifting position to spear him like a fish. He saw the head tilting down toward him. The spear lifting.

His hand found a slight depression in the metal of the automaton’s heel on the left side, and he pressed in with his thumb and rolled aside, gasping for breath, hoping he’d not just killed himself.

It was just as well he moved, because the Spartan retained enough power to bring the spear down one last time, hard enough to pierce the stone where Jess had been lying. It would have pierced his skull just as easily. He heard the whine of the gears inside grinding to a stop, the springs unwinding, and felt a surge of weakness that nearly put him down flat again. Then he felt giddy. He’d just become the world’s foremost criminal expert in stopping Library automata. That was worth something on the open market, surely.

“You’re bleeding,” Morgan said, and reached down a hand. He checked the floor around him, and, yes, he was, but not badly. A rain, not a flood. He grabbed hold and let her haul him to his feet, and then hung on to her for steadiness as the hallway rocked and spun around them. “Can you walk, Jess?”

“I can walk.” He wasn’t sure, but it was something to aspire to. “I’m all right.” He wasn’t. Definitely wasn’t. “Let go.”

“No,” she said, and there was no arguing with the way she said it. “Why is it that you’re always hurt when I find you? Is that my fault?”

He wanted to laugh, but the fog was clearing, and in its place pain had taken up a steady, red throb. Laughter would split his skull in two. “We need to find Thomas.”

“I know,” Morgan said, and her strong arm around his waist helped him find his balance again. “Come on.”