The words faded, and there was no immediate reply. He hated that she didn’t tell him what was happening to her inside the Tower. Still, she had to be safe enough: Obscurists were rare. Valuable. Necessary to the continued operation of the Great Library and the entire system of the Codex, and Serapeum. They’d have no reason to hurt her. And surely she wasn’t yet old enough for them to be demanding a child from her, to continue the Obscurist line. That would be in her future, but not yet. Surely not yet.
At long last, as he watched, a pen moved over paper somewhere in a room far away. Does that matter?
As simple as that was, it ripped a piece of his soul away. She hadn’t forgiven him.
Of course it matters. Are you?
Is anyone? she replied. As long as the Library rules us?
She was right, of course, but he wished, futile as it was, that the Library could be what he’d always believed it to be as a child: the light of knowledge, the protector of science, arts, history—a force for great and eternal good.
The terrible truth was that the Library still was all those things. It was a force for good. It did protect what would otherwise have been lost in wars and chaos and disasters. It did encourage scholarship and knowledge across the world, across religious and national lines. It did set knowledge and learning in a place of honor above all other considerations.
It was just how it went about it that turned his stomach and made it all wrong.
The Library will change, Morgan wrote, and he could hear the whisper of her voice saying it, too. It has to change. We must make it change. Is that still our bargain?
As if they had the power to do that. Jess’s optimism had guttered out months ago, and whatever embers remained were fast losing their heat. He took up his pen and hesitated. He knew what he needed to write to her; it was the same information he needed to give to Glain, and to Wolfe, about Thomas. But, as with Glain, he couldn’t think of the words.
Morgan’s pen moved one last time, to write, I will have more information soon. Look after Wolfe.
He wrote, Don’t take unnecessary chances.
She didn’t reply to that last, only marked down a final X to let him know she was finished, and then the words vanished from the page as the Codex scrubbed any trace that she’d ever written to him at all.
He didn’t understand how she could do this—cover her traces so thoroughly from other Obscurists who should have been watching them both. Morgan was clever and resourceful; she’d concealed her abilities as an Obscurist for most of her life without being detected. Still . . . he knew it was a risk every time she sent him a message, and yet he still craved any contact from her like a drug. One day, she’d let something slip, some sign she was letting go of her anger and bitterness.
One day in the distant future, she might even forgive him.
He returned his Codex to the case on his belt and saw Glain looking at him from across the way. She might have suspected Morgan was still in contact with him, though he’d not been completely forthright about it. Glain knew too many of his secrets as it was.
Jess was just about to shut his eyes again when Santi strode into the room, swept all of them with a look, and pointed to Glain, then to Jess. “You two,” he said. “With me.”
He executed a crisp turn and left, leaving Jess and Glain to scramble up and after with as much decorum as their battle-sore bodies could manage, while the rest of their squad stared holes in their backs. Santi didn’t pause as the door shut behind them. He continued a quick march down the long, plain corridor, then up a flight of stairs decorated with Anubis statues in alcoves, and to an office door with an armed guard beside it. Santi accepted the soldier’s salute with one of his own.
“Dismissed,” he told the guard, and watched the man leave. Then he opened the door and led the way inside.
Christopher Wolfe sat on one side of a large solid table. He was shackled at the wrists.
“Sit down,” Santi said to Glain and Jess as he shut the door, and gestured to a wooden bench at the side of the room. He was still wearing that cool military expression, and it gave Jess a creeping sense of unease. Wolfe in chains, Santi acting utterly unlike himself . . . And the four of them in a locked room.
Glain slowly eased herself down on the bench and glared at Jess until he sat next to her. Santi dragged a wooden chair, a noisy slide over the stone floor, and thumped it in place across from Wolfe at the table.
Wolfe finally looked up. He seemed drawn and exhausted and—so wrong to Jess—vulnerable. He lifted his bound wrists silently, and, when Santi shook his head, dropped them back with a heavy clank of metal to the table.
Though he’d brought the chair over, Santi didn’t sit. “You’re still under arrest, Scholar Wolfe,” he said in a quiet, calm voice that raised the hackles on the back of Jess’s neck. “You’re going to stay that way. You know why.”