Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(9)
“Mup,” he mumbled, and rolled sideways off his bunk. He desperately wanted to flop down again and die; his body felt nine kinds of sore from the trauma of the exercise the day before and the night’s adventures. He hadn’t had nearly enough sleep. The book, he thought, and grabbed for it and the sheaf of translated pages. He stuffed it into the smuggling harness, which was getting a good deal too crowded for safety, then threw on a robe to answer the summons.
Glain stood there, crisply uniformed, and she said, “Unplanned exercise. Get ready. It’s our last one. Thirty minutes.”
“Glain—” But she was already moving on to knock at another door. He’d hoped to find a moment to talk. But this wasn’t the right one. Maybe that was better saved for after, when all this was done, and he could guide her more gently through the levels of shock, grief, and anger that he’d already experienced.
Dressed and fortified with a cup of sweet Egyptian coffee, he jogged with his squad to the training grounds and their assigned place to form up on the field. Other squads were coming, too, but none, Jess saw, had beaten them there.
Glain hadn’t made the run with them.
She isn’t here.
He realized that only as they formed their rank and stood at attention. It wasn’t just unusual for Glain to be missing, it had never happened, and he exchanged a sidelong glance with the young man to his right—Tariq, who’d shot him the day before—without moving another muscle. Tariq seemed calm, but he was already sweating. The loud morning tone sounded from the top of the High Garda watchtower, and . . . Glain still didn’t appear. Other squads were inspected and dismissed. Jess’s group stood silent in the hot sun, at attention. If the others worried as much as he did, they were too well trained to speak.
Finally, Jess saw one of the Garda’s armored carriers speeding across the ground; his eyes tracked it as it approached them. Glain Wathen jumped out almost before the hissing steam-powered vehicle came to a halt. She was followed by someone Jess recognized only slightly: High Garda Captain Feng, who was smiling this morning, though his eyes were like chips of cold black ice. Feng had never appeared on the parade ground before. Never interacted with their squad at all. He had quite a reputation as a hard man to please.
From the rank behind him, Jess heard someone take in a startled breath, but he concentrated on staying as still as he could. Feng’s gaze—cold and impersonal—swept over each of them as he walked the rank. He gave Jess exactly the same assessment as the others, no longer or shorter, and said nothing until he reached the end of his inspection and returned, with Glain, to stand before them. He and the young squad leader were silhouetted by the merciless glow of the rising sun. It effectively hid their expressions.
“Scores,” Feng said to Glain. She briskly unhooked the small waterproof box on her belt and snapped it open. Inside lay a Blank, a book connected to the Great Library’s vast archives, though this was one whose cover shimmered with the Library’s gold seal and the feather of Ma’at—her recording journal, which copied itself daily into a mirroring Blank on the shelves somewhere in the distant bowels of the High Commander’s offices. Military issue.
Glain presented it to Feng with both hands, and he took it the same way—a sign of respect for the book itself, not for her. He paged through, reading her reports and notes, and then handed it back with the same care. “Well done, Sergeant Wathen,” he said. “Well done, squad. Take ease.”
That was a relief, and Jess heard a quiet sigh as they all spread their feet and relaxed their spines a bit. That was a mistake, as Feng continued, “You lead the roster in points, and, as such, we have decided to issue you a special test today, one that will challenge you to the level we wish you to achieve. Are you ready to excel, recruits?”
“Yes, sir!” they all responded at once and as one. Nobody had to feed them that response. Every member of Glain Wathen’s squad was driven to excel, and their gods preserve them if they weren’t. Glain added her own voice. She stood even taller, even straighter. She was in her element here.
Jess envied that. Right now, he desperately missed the quiet comfort of his books. This, he thought, is going to be hard. Feng hadn’t set up a special challenge for them for the fun of it, and Jess had no doubt at all that it was going to be a brutal affair.
“Squad!” Glain called, and they all gave back a deep-chested “Sir,” in response. Even Jess. “We lead by two points in the rankings. This is not enough. We will bring in this exercise with a comfortable five-point lead, and we will finish with the top score! Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!” Jess barked, in unison with the rest. He wanted to finish this bloody training in first position as much as Glain did, but having attracted the attention of Captain Feng was a mixed blessing at best.
Feng walked slowly up and down the row, but he looked into the blank middle distance as he said, “Your assignment today is a confiscation. Your job will be to enter and search a home for contraband books, and, if found, tag and recover them for the Library. You may meet resistance. Be ready.”
That sounded deceptively easy. Glain and Jess had been on real book-confiscation missions as postulants competing for their current positions; every person in the squad had qualified on situations much harder than this. In fact, it sounded so remedial that it was utterly out of place, given where they were in their training.