“That,” Jess said, “is probably all the sentimentality you’ll ever see from my family. Cherish it.”
Morgan refreshed her quill and frowned at the level of ink left. She wrote, Message back when you have everything arranged. We won’t have much time.
Done, his father wrote, and Jess could almost hear the clap of the book closing. His father would be on his feet now, tugging down his expensive silk waistcoat, pacing the thick Turkish carpet of his office. Brendan would be slouched in a chair nearby, listening to every word. He felt curiously reassured by that vision, and by knowing that though he wouldn’t trust his family to save his life, he could trust them to see the profit in what he was bringing them. His life was just part of the deal.
Morgan capped the ink. “I’ll need more before we go,” she said. “It’s the one thing I can’t make any other place.” She wiped the quill clean on a scrap of cloth and tucked it in the holder on the side of the Codex.
“You’re taking the Codex? Won’t they miss it?”
“Hardly anyone here bothers to request new books. We get almost everything mirrored to our Serapeum downstairs as it is.” She hesitated, stroking the cover of the Codex, and asked, “Are you sure we can trust him? Your father?”
He wished he could say yes. More than anything, he wanted to believe he could. But what he said was, “You can trust he’ll see the profit in rescuing us and the books. Once he realizes the opportunities of building the press, I doubt he’ll have a second of hesitation in throwing the full weight of the black markets behind this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That sounds like a harsh kind of love.”
It was a perfect description for his childhood. He’d not known anything else until he’d come here to Alexandria, and now he could look back on it and see how dry and arid it was.
But useful nevertheless. I might be just as bad, he thought. I can’t see my brother and father as anything but tools to be used. I should be better than that. He’d not even spared a moment to think about his mother—not that he wasn’t fond of her in the abstract, but she’d never been present for him. Would she have cried over his death? Probably. But he had the awful feeling that it would have just been for herself and not for him.
“Don’t,” Morgan said. She turned toward him and put her hand on his chin to turn his face toward her. “Don’t go into your head and leave me. I’m just as frightened as you are, you know.”
“You? The girl who defies the Iron Tower and wins? I doubt you understand what fear means to the rest of us.” He removed her hand from his chin, but only to raise it to his lips. He kissed the soft skin while looking into her eyes and saw her shiver. Felt her skin rise in chill bumps under his touch. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
He pointed to the Codex. “For reminding me there’s more to life than what I grew up knowing.”
Wolfe, Khalila, and Thomas were still arguing. Morgan sighed and tilted her head in their direction. “I suppose—”
“That we should help? Yes. We’ll be out of time soon.”
Morgan proved to be a calming influence, and Jess interrupted arguments when it became clear both sides had points, and within another hour, they’d scraped together a good deal more than a hundred volumes. Too many to carry. Jess and Santi took charge of weighing the bags and removing what couldn’t be taken, though every one they abandoned put a cut on Jess’s heart. It’s all right, he thought. Maybe we can come back later for more. She’ll help us. She’d said she couldn’t, but Jess was seeing quite a bit of Wolfe in his mother’s character, including the steel-hard stubbornness.
Keria Morning hadn’t survived all these years as an enemy of the Archivist by giving up, giving in.
The Codex that Morgan carried must have changed, because she quickly drew it out and opened it. Then she frowned.
“Is it from my father?” Jess asked.
“No,” she said, and went to the Obscurist. She showed her the entry. “It’s from Gregory, to you.”
The Obscurist read the message, closed the book, and nodded. “We’re out of time,” she told him. “The Archivist’s guards have entered the Tower. Gregory let them in, and I’m being ordered to surrender you all immediately. You must Translate to London. Now.”
“My father’s not sent back a reply yet,” Jess said. “Until we know it’s safe—”
“It won’t be safe here,” she interrupted him. “They’re coming. Now.”
Silence settled in with grim weight, and Santi said, “Then we go.” It sounded like a death sentence. Jess swallowed hard.