Thomas came through, and was promptly and violently sick—no surprise, since he’d been struggling with so much, for so long. Gregory calmly went for a mop and bucket to clean up after him, and Jess and Khalila moved the boy to the bench, poured him tea, and helped him lie flat when it seemed he needed that more than the restorative. By the time they’d gotten Thomas settled, Wolfe arrived, then Santi immediately after.
Jess stared hard at the couch, so hard he could feel a vein pulsing in his temple. Come on, he begged her. Come on, don’t dally around. Don’t let them take you!
When Morgan’s form coalesced in a red cloud of blood, bone, and muscle, he was instantly on his feet and moving toward her. By the time she was gasping her first breath, he was at her side. Holding her hand.
She jackknifed up into his embrace with a horrible, choking cry and locked her arms around him like she expected to be dragged away. “No,” she whispered into the fabric of his shirt. “No.”
He smoothed her hair and pressed his lips to the salty skin of her temple. “Morgan. I’m here. You’re not alone.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, and her whole body shook with the force of her gasp for breath. “I can’t do it again. There’s no other way out. They’ll lock me here for good, and I can’t, I can’t . . .”
“Nobody’s locking you in,” he told her, and he meant it. “But we need to find out what the Obscurist wants from us. Trust me? I won’t let you down, Morgan. Not this time.”
She shuddered and relaxed, just a little—enough that he was able to loosen her panicked grip on him. Jess helped her to the bench, the tea, and then turned to Santi and Wolfe, who were standing and talking to Gregory. Glain’s leg had been efficiently bandaged and she was being carried off to a surgery for repair of the torn muscle and blood vessels; on the way out, Jess reached out to brush her fingers, and she gave him a brisk, almost normal nod.
“You’re in charge until I get back,” she told him. It was half a joke, and half not.
He nodded back. “Not sure what I’m in charge of,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can. Glain. Don’t die on me.”
“Well,” she said, and managed a weak, strange smile. “As long as it’s an order, sir.”
As they carried Glain away, the Obscurist Magnus appeared from a staircase, trailing an entourage of more than a dozen others who all wore the golden collars of service to the Iron Tower.
Wolfe’s mother. She wore her age well and was beautiful in her own striking way. She also wore power like a crackling cloak, and Jess could feel the snap of it halfway across the room. Every head bowed as she passed, and even Niccolo Santi took a step back and nodded in tribute as she approached.
Not her son, though. Wolfe stared at her as if she were a stranger, and said, “What is this? Are you planning to bargain with the Archivist? Use us as your chips?”
It was a sharp observation. After all, the Iron Tower now had something the Archivist wanted very badly, and all neatly tied with a gift ribbon: Wolfe, Santi, the young rebel Scholars, and an escaped Library prisoner. Quite a lever, if she chose to use it to move the man who ruled the Library. And the Obscurist surely hadn’t gained, or held, her position by being politically inept all these years.
The Obscurist put a hand against his cheek. It was a contact that lasted less than a second, because he quickly stepped back. “Do you really think I would do that, Christopher? Do you think so little of me?”
“No,” he said. “I think so much of your sense of responsibility to the people in this tower. I’m a secondary concern at best. As ever.”
He couldn’t have hurt her worse if he’d stabbed her, but it was visible for only a moment. Her expression stayed the same, except for a slight chill in her eyes. “Everyone in this tower is my family,” she said. “You, of all people, know that. They’re your family. You were born here. Raised here. And, yes, it hurt to send you away, but you know why it had to be done. I’ve never stopped watching over you. I never will.”
Jess tried to imagine those words coming from his own parents and failed. He knew other families loved on that level; he’d seen it, like glimpses into a warm room from a cold street. But it was an alien thing to him, caring so much. He’d never experienced it until he’d—all unwillingly—begun to care about these people here in Alexandria.
His . . . family.
“You won’t hide us from the Archivist,” Wolfe told his mother, and then, after a brief pause, asked, “Will you?”
“That would be impossible. I can delay him for a bit,” she said. “Enough time to plan for what you will do next. I’m not the Archivist’s creature. I know that everything you’ve done has been for the good of the Library’s mission. For its soul. No matter how you feel about me as a mother, I love you as my son.”