Don’t risk it, Jess thought. You don’t have the time.
But it was impossible to resist the impulse. He veered close to the body and reached down just enough to snag his fingers in the bag’s strings. He lost a half second and could feel the sphinxes gaining on him. I won’t make it, he thought, and had a vision of himself crushed on the ground like that nameless sailor.
The bag he’d grabbed was unexpectedly heavy and it would slow him down. The knowledge—if there was any to be had from whatever was inside it—wouldn’t help him if the sphinxes caught him, but it might give him an advantage if he used it right.
Jess turned and threw the bag as far as he could the way he’d come, into the park. The twist of his body gave him a heart-stopping view of the sphinxes loping just a body’s length behind him, and then he was facing forward again and running with real desperation, breath pumping faster and faster as he spotted the park exit ahead.
One of the sphinxes peeled off and chased the thrown bag; he saw the flash out of the corner of his eye.
But one stayed on him.
There was nothing to do but pray that once he’d passed the boundary of the tomb’s precincts, the sphinx would let him go. They were made to be territorial, after all. Not even the Library wanted the monsters tearing through crowded streets in pursuit.
He could feel the sphinx gaining behind him and realized, with a sudden horror, that all his best speed, his finest running, wouldn’t put him through the exit before it reached him.
He was going to be caught.
So Jess did the only thing he could. He threw himself flat and hoped momentum would force the thing to miss him.
He was lucky rather than good—the sphinx had just leaped as he flung himself down, and as he curled into a protective ball, the back feet crashed down on gravel just a handbreadth away from his head. He could see cables flexing under the metallic flank of the thing and scrambled up, hoping to be away before it could adjust and turn.
He slipped. The loose gravel betrayed him, and before he could recover he was on his knees and the sphinx had turned to him. It padded toward him. Unhurried. Remorseless. The human face held no expression at all. The sinuous copper skin seemed to stretch and mold to the simulated muscles beneath as it moved, and Jess thought, Do something, but there was nothing he could do.
He held still, hardly daring to breathe. The human-faced head of it was on a level with his eyes, and utterly, unsettlingly alien, and he was reminded of the cobra, swaying in the darkness as it considered biting.
The sphinx parted thin metal lips and revealed razor-sharp teeth behind—the teeth of a lion in a man’s face. Deadly sharp.
Don’t. Move.
He felt a whisper of air as it drew in a bellows of breath, and he realized he was doubly dead now—he was wearing the smuggling harness with not one but two illegal books inside. The harness’s coatings should have masked the smell of bindings and papers, but if the Archivist wanted him dead, this creature needed no further excuse.
The switch, he remembered from the book. He also knew that those razor-sharp teeth, and the massive lion paws with equally pointed claws, ensured that one wrong guess would absolutely be his last. Anit’s brothers had both faced this moment.
They’d both died.
Jess didn’t allow himself the luxury of doubt, because he knew that he was seconds away from death if he did nothing; the automaton’s mouth was already opening wider and the eyes burning hotter, and this chance was his only chance.
He reached under the chin of the human face and felt a small depression. As the sphinx’s head whipped sideways to bite his arm, he pressed down hard.
The head slowed its turn, but the teeth still closed around his arm.
Pressed down.
He felt the slicing sting of metal and knew it was too late—he’d lose his arm at the very least. God, no . . .
But then the sphinx just . . . stopped, with a sound of gears grinding to a halt. The jaws still pressed down, but the bite was shallow, just a little blood and pain that he made worse by having to pull himself free. Jess was panting now, shaking, pouring sweat, and as he watched the sphinx’s face, he saw the eyes flicker red, then black, and then go a dead, leaden gray.
It stood still as the statue it resembled. Frozen on the spot.
Jess heard the shriek of the other sphinx returning, and launched himself around the frozen automaton. Hedges snapped and flailed at him until he achieved gravel again, and then was running, running, with the gardens falling behind him, and the lonely, angry shriek of a sphinx chasing to the borders of the tomb’s park.
The scream followed him like a vengeful ghost as he lost himself in the streets of Alexandria.