He studied me a second longer, and then a slow grin softened the lines of his face. He closed the book and set it in his lap.
“What were you doing at Mr. Addad’s house?”
“Who’s Mr.—” Then it hit me. The man in the house. The man who had taken Mom. “How did you know I was there? Were you following me?”
Freeman said nothing. I shrugged and picked at a stray bit of carpet. “I thought I knew the woman there.”
“Sara?”
The word hit me with a jolt. So that was her name now. Sara. I nodded.
“She’s been good for him.”
I made myself look up. “What do you mean?”
“Sara found Fred wandering in the woods two weeks after the outbreak. He was alone. Nearly starving. She got him to the Guard. It turned out his mother had died a week before the outbreak and he was in town for her funeral. That’s her house they’re staying in. He and Sara have been together ever since.”
“So he didn’t . . .”
“What?”
I swallowed back an ache in my throat. “He didn’t . . . take her?”
An even greater intensity flooded Freeman’s eyes. “So that’s why you came,” he said. “You wanted to rescue her.”
Freeman assured me that Fred wasn’t that kind of man. That he was gentle and seemed to love Mom. Every bit of the exhaustion and pain I’d felt over the last few days came surging back at once. Maybe I should have been happy to know that Mom wasn’t with some monster, but all I could think about was how she had gone to the Guard to get some stranger his name back, and had left her own behind.
When Freeman was done, I forced myself up and started toward the front door.
“Did you know her?”
I turned back. Freeman was still sitting on the floor, surrounded by his books.
“Sara,” he said. “Did you know her?”
From where I was standing I could see down a line of shelves to the front desk and the windows behind it. While we’d been talking, the sun had begun to rise, filling the library with a blueish early-morning light. Near the desk was a small round table surrounded by four plastic chairs. I saw the four of us sitting there that first week in Black River when we came with Mom and Dad to get our library cards.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know her. Thanks for the help, Freeman.”
My legs shook as I made my way through the stacks. But I didn’t go straight to the front door. I veered off into the dimmer sections of the library, wandering aimlessly until I decided to stop lying to myself. I knew where I was going.
I found all four volumes of Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings on a shelf toward the back. Their scarlet spines seemed to glow in the low light, standing out against all the others. I ran my finger down the length of them. A bell tolled in my chest as I read each title:
VOLUME 1.?THE RADIANT CITY AND THE EMERALD HORDE
VOLUME 2.?SALLY SPARROW DANCES AMONG THE STARS
VOLUME 3.?BEHOLD, ABADDON
VOLUME 4.?EXILE IN THE GARDENS OF NULL
I picked up the first volume and became lost in it immediately. The pain of my injuries faded as I breezed through the Brotherhood’s battles with Madame Night, Slim John, and Professor Hurricane. I was right there when Blue Jay learned what being a leader meant on the day the Brotherhood was trapped in the Gray Waste. When Black Eagle and Rex Raven survived the three trials of the King of the Molemen. When Sally Sparrow danced among the stars.
Before I knew it, I was at the end of the second volume and staring at that page, you know the one, the panel everybody said won Dad his Hugo. The one that made him famous.
The Rose Prison.
I’d seen it a thousand times, but it still stopped me cold. It was so simple. Cardinal and Sally Sparrow imprisoned at the heart of an immense rose of coral-colored steel. I’d looked at the panel a thousand times and still couldn’t understand how Dad had managed to make something that was so beautiful and so horrifying at the same time.
The sun was fully up by then and the room was bright and warm. The green curve of Lucy’s Promise showed in one of the south-facing windows, but I knew I couldn’t go back there, not yet. There was somewhere I needed to go first.
I took the Brotherhood comics off the shelf and tucked them under my arm as I walked out of the library.
Sun-bleached trash blew across the parking lot of the Seeger Museum. Trees that had once been trimmed into lollipop rounds like something out of Willy Wonka were overgrown and leaning.