While they waited, the two of them were rarely out of each other’s company. To fill the time, they researched the Library’s secret prisons and met with Dario and Khalila to discuss their findings.
The problem was, proof was thin on the ground. Thomas might be in one of three different places where secret prisons were strongly rumored to be hidden: Rome, Paris, Moscow. If Jess had to place a bet, he’d have put his money on Paris—the country of France was, after all, a Library territory, fully owned after the rebellion against the Library that failed in the late 1700s. What few of the French people were allowed to live in Paris were required by law to perform in the historical reenactments—the rebellion, the Library’s conquest, the executions. It was a perfect place, in Jess’s opinion, to hide prisoners. Who’d dare to even go look?
Trouble was, every new location led to impassioned speculation but no definitive answers to tip the scales toward one of the choices.
“Well,” Glain said over strong coffee in their usual café, “we can’t go looking for him blind. We need more information than we have. Much more. Somehow we have to find it.”
“I agree,” Jess said, and to his surprise, Dario was saying the same thing at the same time. They exchanged looks, and Jess let Dario continue.
“We need someone with more access than we can have. What about Morgan?”
“What about her?” Jess shot back, suddenly on his guard.
“She can access hidden information, can’t she? It’s the whole reason they’re called Obscurists.”
“I can’t contact Morgan. I have to wait for her to write to me.”
“And she hasn’t? Maybe your charm’s finally wearing off,” Dario observed. “Maybe she’s found some lucky man to fill her days inside the Iron Tower.”
Jess’s hand tightened on his fork, and for a brief, bloody moment he imagined that—or worse, that she hadn’t found someone else, that someone else had been found for her. He didn’t want to talk about that. At all. “Morgan can’t help us,” he snapped. “Move on, Dario.”
“I have, actually. I think we should involve someone else who can—”
“No,” Khalila said. Her tone sounded flat and a little angry. “Dario. We discussed this. You can’t involve anyone else inside the Library!”
“And anyone outside it is of no use—Jess has proved that. All his fancy criminal connections can’t get us what we need, and every day, every day we wait, Thomas suffers.” Dario glared at Khalila, a thing Jess had never seen him do, and Khalila held the stare firmly. She might be a quiet girl, but shy? No. She didn’t back away from a fight. “It’s three cities—we’ve narrowed it to that. We just need confirmation. If it’s someone we can trust—”
Sickly, Jess thought of his brother and Neksa. He could ask Brendan to use Neksa to verify the information. If she really did work for the Archivist, she might not have to do anything but look in a book and say yes or no. Easy. But that would make him complicit in ruining the girl, and that . . . that was a bridge he couldn’t cross.
He didn’t have to, because Dario said, “I didn’t wait to get your approval. I told Scholar Prakesh everything we know about Thomas. I asked for her help.”
There was a breathless silence, and Khalila’s eyes widened. She tried to speak, failed, and finally managed to say, “You what?”
“Without asking us?” Glain jumped in.
“I’m tired of waiting for someone to drop an answer into our laps,” Dario said. His cheeks had an angry red tinge now, and he met Jess’s eyes. “Well? Aren’t you going to join the outrage?”
“No,” Jess said. “You know Scholar Prakesh; I don’t. I know she’s highly placed and very well respected. She’ll be hard for the Archivist to dismiss and harder to make disappear. It might well be the best choice we have.”
Glain kicked him under the table for breaking ranks, but the fact was, Dario was right. Except for that one guilty thought about Neksa, which Jess knew he had to hold as a last resort, he’d pulled every lever available to him.
“I don’t like this,” Khalila said. “What if she’s discovered? She’s a Scholar, not a spy!”
“She’s been close friends with the Archivist since he was a postulant, and she was once the Artifex’s lover,” Dario said, and refilled his coffee cup from the small pot on the table. At Jess’s gesture, he filled his cup, too. “She knows the Library in and out. Even better, she knows the people we need to investigate. Who better to find out what we need to know?”
“She’s an old woman, and you put her at risk,” Khalila insisted. “What if something happens to her? Our duty is to—”
“Our duty is to our friend,” Jess said. “If you don’t believe that, Khalila—”
“I never said that! Of course I want to save him!”