I slowly got to my feet. The pain made my head swim, but I managed to hobble out of the room and into a narrow hallway. At the end, there was a soft, amber-colored light. I made my way to it, one hand against the wall to hold myself up. When I came to the end of the hall, I turned a corner and found a large open space. Candles sat on every available surface, their warm glow illuminating a maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves. I was in the library.
I wound through the stacks, surprised to find entire rows of shelves sitting empty. It looked like nearly half of the library’s books were gone. Most of what remained lay in messy heaps in the aisles. I stepped over a mountain of Stephen King paperbacks and a crumbling pyramid of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. Some had pages torn out of them; some had been ripped in two.
I found Freeman not far from the circulation desk, taking books from the floor and methodically re-shelving them. His coat was draped over a chair, leaving him in his dingy black pants and a sweat-stained shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He glanced up when I came in, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded toward one of the empty shelves. Sitting on it was a bottle of water and a bottle of aspirin. I shook four into my palm and chased them with a gulp of water.
“Thanks.”
Freeman slid another book onto the shelf. I figured I should start heading back to Lucy’s Promise, but I was too tired, too sore. The bruises along my chest and sides screamed as I lowered myself onto the floor beside the collected works of Charles Dickens. The spine of Great Expectations was broken. The cover of A Tale of Two Cities had been torn off and tossed aside.
“What happened?”
Freeman knelt by another pile of books and started turning each one over in his hands, lovingly checking it for damage.
“The latest skirmish in an old war,” he said.
“What war?”
“The library versus the powers that be.”
The powers that be? There’s no way the Guard would have done something like this, which left only one possibility. “Martinson Vine did this? Why?”
He selected a handful of volumes and took them to an empty shelf.
“Since the beginning of time, rulers have held on to power by making the masses believe the order they impose is permanent and inevitable. That resisting it would be like resisting gravity.” He nestled a book into place. “What could be a greater threat to that than the contemplation of alternate realities?”
Freeman stepped back and brushed his fingertips along the spines of the books he’d just arranged. He seemed so different from the last time I saw him. He stood straighter. His eyes were sharper. He was calm. Was it because he was here in the library? Or was it something else?
There was the sound of a distant siren and then a flash of red lights as a Guard vehicle passed by and continued on down the street. I was thrown back to earlier that night—my back in the mud, Tommasulo leaning over me, and then someone’s hands on my shoulders, dragging me away.
“You were the one who called the Guard,” I said. “The one who pulled me out when those men were—”
Freeman nodded.
“Why?”
He returned to his pile of books and held one up so I could see the cover. To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I don’t understand.”
Freeman set the book down again and went back to his work, moving between the shelves and the stacks on the floor. “I came here the night of the sixteenth,” he said. “By then I understood what was about to happen to me, so I wrote down everything I knew about myself. Things I’d done. Things I’d seen and thought and believed. I decided that once the virus had finished its work, all I’d have to do was read what I’d written and I’d be able to recreate the man I was.”
Freeman finished the shelf he was working on, but instead of returning for more books, he took one of the candles and sat on the carpet across from me, careful to keep a gulf of distance between us. Yellow light flickered over the creases of his face.
“But the next day, when I read what I’d written, it became clear to me that I had no desire to be the man I once was.”
Freeman looked out across the mountain range of books scattered across the room.
“That’s when I realized what this place actually is,” he said. “It’s not a repository of paper and ink. It’s the memory of the world, the memory of a thousand worlds, from the Big Bang to the darkness that lies in wait at the end of time. For weeks, I didn’t sleep. I barely ate. I did nothing but read, constructing Freeman Wayne sentence by sentence from this place’s memory instead of my own. One book became my heart. One my mind. One my soul.”
He took the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in both hands, as if he was afraid it might crumble to dust and blow away. He opened it, and for a while the library hush was filled with the dry sweep of pages turning. When he looked up at me again over that book’s spine, there was a clarity in his eyes I’d never seen before.
“Tell me,” he said. “What raw materials did you use to build Cardinal Cassidy?”
“I’m not—”
“I know you’re not infected.”
Freeman waited, his sea blue eyes never wavering.
“I thought you said that you could just look at someone and see their past and their future.”