Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(74)

Jess looked around and found a printed page in a corner; it was smeared and poorly aligned but legible. He handed it to the captain and watched the stages of realization hit in turn. Confusion first. Then dawning wonder. Then unease, as she realized the implications. He could tell that this captain wasn’t someone who tended to think of the immense possibilities . . . only the dangers. But then, that was why she’d risen to her current post . . . and likely no further.

“It prints duplicates,” Jess said. “Ink on paper. No Obscurist required.”

“It’s a machine that makes Burner lies look true.” The captain crumpled the paper up and threw it with force against the wall. It bounced and rolled, and she stomped it flat. “And they can blanket the street with them. It’s obscene.”

“It’s a tool,” Jess said. “And it can do a great deal of good, in the right use.”

“Good? If anyone can decide what is right and wrong, then we are lost, Brightwell! No unity, no sanity. It’s an abomination.”

Jess imagined that was what the first Archivist to destroy one of these machines had said. It had been the excuse for cutting the throat of the Scholar who invented it, too. “Perhaps,” he said. “But just think for a moment what the Library could do with it.”

“If even one of these things exists, there is no Library, don’t you understand that?” The captain turned and walked back to the steps. “Gold Squad! Get down here. I want this thing destroyed. Not one scrap of it should remain when you’re done—do you understand? Make a list of all the materials that go into it. We will want to track purchases.”

A swarm of High Garda came down into the basement and began dismantling the press with hands, hammers, iron bars—anything they could find. They’d make short work of it, Jess thought.

But it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be the only one in Alexandria. If the Burners had discovered how useful it was, and they obviously had, then Anit would have built several of them; this one, she’d sold to the Burners, but there would be bigger ones. Better ones. Red Ibrahim had access to money and talent that the Burners couldn’t dream of, and he would see the astonishing possibilities where the High Garda captain would only see the threat.

Not that he was wrong, of course. There was no more dire, direct threat to the Great Library’s power than the machine the soldiers were so busily dismantling. But the jinn was long out of the bottle by now; print machines were being thrown together in all corners of the world. The revolution was disorganized, but it was inevitable. The Archivist was riding a blind horse toward a cliff, and someone had to stop the inevitable disaster.

That wouldn’t be done by destroying this machine, or any of them, or all of them. It would be done by remembering what the Library was, at its heart: a defiant outpost of courage, built by those who made knowledge something to be cherished, not destroyed.

People like this captain—who saw only danger from progress, while paying lip service to a tradition they didn’t understand—were the largest obstacle to that goal. For generations, they’d placed all their worth and trust in the Library being the only source of knowledge. And they’d cling to that with everything they had.

But being the only source had never been the Library’s founding purpose. Only preservation and protection.

Jess didn’t argue; the captain wouldn’t listen and saw him as hardly better than a Burner, anyway. Jess sat deep in thought on a barrel of ink, paging through the records of what the Burners had already printed and distributed—a shockingly high number of leaflets—when the captain snatched the notebook from his hand and stuffed it into her own pocket next to a personal journal. I miss my journal, Jess thought, and was strangely surprised to feel a little pang of grief. He’d not written down a thing that had happened in his life for such a long time; he’d broken the habit and custom without a glance backward the instant he knew the Library might be reading the contents. But he was surprised to realize that he missed it. Maybe, once this was over, he could write about what had happened. That might help this strange, gray mood that had taken him over.

You can take it apart, but you can’t destroy the idea, he wanted to tell the captain, but he’d be wasting his time.

“Well?” the captain snapped. “Are you staying here to wait for the Burners to come back and tear you apart, or are you going with us? Either way is fine with me.”

He couldn’t help but ask, “You mean, you’d let me stay?”

The woman shrugged. “Stay if you like. But it’ll be the end of you if you do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was told to withdraw. You should do the same, if you want to live.”

“Captain?”

The woman walked away, and Jess trailed her up, through the house, to the street.

“Last time,” the captain said. “Are you coming or staying?”

“Staying,” Jess said. Since he’d been given the choice, which was baffling. The captain stepped into the carrier and it sped away, leaving a cloud of white steam behind it. The next two carriers followed close behind.

And then they were gone.

They’d left him behind. Free. That hardly seemed right, and he was trying to decide what the hell was happening when he heard the alarm sound from the Lighthouse.