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The Tinoppa palace library was nothing like the libraries she’d known. Her mother had maintained the palace library back in Sibu, but its smell had been worn and musty, and comforting, too—like a soft blanket slipped around your shoulders. Sunlight would filter in, slanting slowly across the room.
This library was cold, dim, and without windows. As they moved through the enormous towers of books, goose bumps formed on Rhee’s arms and shoulders. The room must have been climate-controlled to preserve the paper, but her body was reacting to something apart from the temperature. Half the books were wrapped in plastic, sheathed like dead bodies, or tucked behind glass. Their footsteps barely made a sound on the carpet.
“Where is he?” Rhee whispered. The library appeared to be deserted.
Tai Reyanna just frowned and shook her head. Rhee heard light footsteps and turned just in time to see the shadow of a man pass quickly between shelves. Electricity danced on her skin. A trap. It had to be a trap.
She looked at Tai Reyanna. “You lied to me.” Her governess was short, like her; they stood face-to-face, and Tai Reyanna looked terrified. “Where is he?”
Tai Reyanna shook her head. “Seotra?” she croaked, and then cleared her throat. “Seotra?”
“No!” Seotra’s voice came from somewhere in the stacks. “It’s a trap. Get her out of here!”
Just then a high-pitched whine sounded throughout the room, a noise that reminded Rhee of charge, of current, of electricity humming to life. Before she could wonder what it was, they were thrown backward by the force of a blinding white explosion.
Debris was flung everywhere, and charred paper and ash fell among them like snow. Rhee could barely hear anything; it was like the world had been muted and replaced by a low hum. She pushed herself up on her elbows and saw Tai Reyanna, a few feet away but unmoving. Rhee tried to call to her but could barely hear her own voice. She crawled through pieces of splintered bookshelf, through fluttering paper, feeling as if her body, too, had been blown apart, as if it were taking forever for her brain to send commands to her arms and legs.
Tai Reyanna opened her eyes when Rhee shook her. But immediately the hazy look fell away, her eyes wide, as she pulled Rhee close and said something in urgent tones. Rhee couldn’t make out her words over the hum in her ears.
“I can’t hear you,” she said, then tried to repeat louder. “Stay here!” Tai Reyanna’s eyes were wide. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. Rhee had never seen her cry.
Fear filled up every atom of Rhee’s body. She felt like it would overflow out of her eyes, but she pushed herself forward. She slipped between two bookcases that had miraculously remained upright. She squeezed the hilt of the knife so tightly her knuckles went white.
She sidestepped down the row, still trying to clear the buzzing from her ears. She used to hide in her mother’s library, too, back on Kalu. Those floors were covered with tasseled rugs, woven through with red and orange hues, so thick it felt like a forest floor. She’d crawl along those very rugs, through a maze of table legs and chairs in a game of hide-and-seek—and she remembered now how Josselyn had surprised her once, poking her head out upside down from the table above, her thick braid swinging like a pendulum as she said: “BOO!”
Another explosion. This time Rhee dropped and clamped her hands to her ears, and when the dust and paper mist cleared, she found she hadn’t lost full use of her hearing: From somewhere nearby, she could hear Seotra moaning.
Someone else was after Seotra too.
Maybe someone who didn’t want her to have answers?
There was no more time to think. She spun around the bookshelf and had a quick view of a bloodied Seotra on the ground, and a tall figure in a hooded cape standing above him.
When the man began to turn, she spun her leg out in a low roundhouse. As he collapsed, she jumped, driving him to the ground and then mounting his back. She stuck her knee in a pressure point at the base of his spine and sunk the point of her knife in his neck so that it barely broke skin. It happened so quickly that only when she was positioned did she see his neck was covered in tattoos, and that he had dirty blond hair and wore a black ring on his right hand.
“Dahlen?” She moved off of him and stumbled backward, horrified. “What—what are you doing?”