Our eyes met and she smiled. A real one this time. It sent a wave of heat through my chest. Her hand was swinging beside her as she walked. It took everything in me not to reach out and take it.
Greer shouted from behind us. “Yo! Guys! Heads up!”
A truck was rolling into the intersection down the street. It was one of the big Marvin ones like we’d seen earlier, but with a dark canvas top covering the back. We ducked off the road and around the side of a nearby house as the vehicle slowed to a stop on the other side of the intersection. I heard voices beneath the engine’s rumble, and then a flap opened in the back. A bundle the size of a large trash bag spilled out onto the roadway, and then the truck belched a cloud of exhaust and was gone.
Greer just shook his head. “Here one day, and they’re already littering. No respect.”
“It’s not trash,” the girl said.
“What?”
The bundle shifted and began to unfold. It was a man—gray-haired, wearing a long, dark coat. He moaned as he sat up, clutching the shoulder they’d dropped him on.
“Is that Freeman?”
Greer was right. Freeman Wayne—the town librarian. The same man I’d seen taken away by the Marvins at the ration drop.
“Come on,” I said. “We better keep mov—”
Before I could finish, Greer darted out from behind the house and into the street.
“Looks like you got yourself into a bit of trouble there,” he said to Freeman. “What’d you do? Refuse to renew somebody’s copy of Encyclopedia Brown?”
The girl looked back at me, and then she joined Greer. The two of them helped Freeman onto the curb, and Greer handed him a bottle of water from his pack. The spire of St. Stephen’s rose just beyond the houses across from us. We were five minutes from the sculpture garden, maybe less. Damn it. I looked both ways for more Marvins, then crossed the road.
Freeman Wayne was well over six feet tall and scrawny, with a beaklike nose and a rat’s nest of white hair. Gray stubble ran from his jawline to the edge of his cheekbones. Despite the heat, he wore a dingy white button-down shirt and black pants, the knees shiny from wear, under the coat. I’d have bet anything that if Black River had any homeless people before the outbreak, Freeman was one of them.
He finished the bottle of water Greer had given him, then wiped his lips with his sleeve.
“Kept talking to me about papers,” he said. “I told them this was America and I wouldn’t show them my papers even if I had them. Then they asked my name. I told them it was Freeman Wayne, but they kept asking, so I said it was Josef K.”
He made a spasmodic kind of gulp that I guessed was a laugh, then reached inside his coat and started hunting around for something. He exhausted nearly every pocket before he pulled out a piece of construction paper cut to the size of a business card. “Black River Municipal Library” was scrawled at the top of it. Freeman held it out to Greer.
“Letter of transit,” he said. “Whatever you need, you come see me. I have the entire universe and all of time trapped within four walls.”
“I already have a library card. Remember? Greer Larson?”
Freeman squinted up at him and then bowed with a flourish as he turned to the girl.
“For you then, Penthesilea.”
She blushed a little and took the card. “Uh . . . thanks.”
Greer clapped his hands together. “Well then! This has been great, but if you’re feeling better, we’ll just get—”
“You’re the man in the iron mask.”
Freeman was staring right at me. He had these intense eyes, small and ocean blue, beneath snowy eyebrows.
“You look after the children on the mountain,” he said. “You and that other one. Layton. Belson.”
“Larson,” Greer said, raising his hand. “I’m right here, Free.”
“My name’s Cardinal.”
Freeman’s eyes narrowed to slits, looking at me, through me. “You must be very careful.”
“I’m sorry?”
“To not have become one of us. All this time. Surrounded by the children of Lethe. You must be very careful.”
“I keep my distance.”
He looked at my mask and my gloves; then his eyes slipped down to my waist, where my hand gripped the knife. I snatched it away. He smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you must.”
Greer stepped down off the curb. “So! Like I was saying, we have to—”
“Do any of you know how new planets are discovered?”
Freeman waited for an answer. Greer looked from me to the girl. We both shrugged.
“We, uh, don’t know. Some kind of telescope maybe?”
The librarian let out a grunt of disgust, then he reached into his coat again and whipped out a nub of chalk.
“Planets that are too distant to be viewed directly are sometimes detected by looking at the way light bends around them.”
He leaned over the asphalt and drew a stick figure with a slash of a line growing out of its chest.