The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I shuffle through them, frowning. She’s printed out, like, four different articles, all about some kind of explosion and fire on a barge. One reports that it’s happened, and then there are a couple follow-up articles about them trying to figure out why.

“Wow,” I say, impressed. “This is awesome. Thank you.”

“No problem,” she says. “Lucky for you, it’s slow in here today.”

I move away from her desk, hunting through the still printer-warm pages for any mention of Annie.

“Dude.” Tyler plucks at my shirt. “Come on.”

“Wait, wait!” I exclaim. I want to read the articles. I have to find out what happened.

“Wes. It already happened, right? They’re not going anywhere. Come on. I’m starving, and I want to tell you about what’s going on with Gavin Brown.”

“Tyler! Will you just wait one goddam minute? I need to read this.” It comes out louder than I intended it to. I can tell, because Tyler’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Sure. Jeez. Have a stroke about it, why don’t you.” Tyler wanders over to the table and flops back into a chair to fiddle more with my camera while I scuttle to a corner by a bookshelf to read the articles away from prying eyes.

Unfortunately, they don’t tell me all that much. They’re written in this weird, overblown old-fashioned style. Basically, there was a huge party, and they spend about a million years listing all the civic groups who were there. Finally, they get to the good part. The governor poured a bunch of water from different rivers all over the world into the harbor, and all these fireworks went off, and while that was happening, one of the barges went up in flames.

There was screaming. They could hear it all across the harbor, under the sound of the flames. At first no one did anything, because they thought it was part of the fireworks show. But then people onshore noticed the silhouettes of people on the barge, running back and forth, jumping into the water with their clothes on fire.

I swallow. Hard.

The Canal Corporation won’t comment—that must be Annie’s dad’s company—and the harbormaster thinks some bunting caught fire by accident. It was a great tragedy, the only mar on an otherwise triumphant day.

“God,” I whisper, haunted by the soot crawling up Annie’s arms and face when she reached her hand into the sunlight by that tiny, awful park that’s not really a park.

I can’t think about it. I can’t.

One of the articles has a strange coda. It says that the United Brotherhood of Luddites has claimed responsibility for the fire on the barge.

Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

“United Brotherhood of . . . Huh.” I pause, thinking. Where have I heard that before? Luddites . . . Ludditz . . . the graffiti in Maddie’s squat. But something else . . .

I rush back over to the librarian’s desk. She smiles pleasantly up at me.

“Find something good?” she asks.

“Maybe,” I say. “Listen, I know you’re busy and everything, but could I use your computer for, like, two seconds?”

“Why don’t you go downstairs? Plenty of terminals there,” she points out.

“No, I know. But my friend’s waiting for me, and I just . . . I promise, it’ll only take a second.”

“You said two seconds. Which is it?” She arches an eyebrow at me.

“All right,” I confess. “Two. But not a second more.”

She gestures with her head for me to come around behind her desk. When I get there I open up her browser.

“Google? God, you’re killing me,” she says.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

I search “United Brotherhood of Luddites.”

In the pages and pages of random stuff, most of it irrelevant, I spot one thing that chills me so deeply my fingers practically go numb.

It’s a nineteenth-century engraving. A trademark, maybe, or like something you’d see on a letterhead.

The engraving is of a spindle.

Just like the one on the sealing wax.

“That’s it!” I exclaim, looking excitedly at the librarian.

“What’s it?” she asks me, clearly amused at my excitement.

“They’re going to blow up her parents! On the barge!” I almost shout. “I have to tell her! Tyler!” I holler across the reading room at my friend, who glances up from my camera.