Audrey glared. “That was useless. Idiots!” She kicked the threshold and turned her glower on the rest of us. “Well, come on. They still don’t know how we got in the first time.” She began trudging in the direction of the side entrance. I prayed they hadn’t thought to guard that as well. My face was growing numb, and I felt as if my thoughts were doing the same.
Snow drifted high against the library’s east side. We scraped it away with gloved hands and pulled the door open enough to slip in. No guards awaited us. The service passage was still cold, but shelter from the wind came as an intense relief.
“Why does anyone live in New England during the winter, if it feels like this to them all the time?” I demanded as I stomped snow from my shoes.
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” said Charlie.
“You get used to it,” said Audrey. She pulled off her gloves and rubbed her cheeks. “Worse today, though. It’s easier when you can stay inside.”
My connection with Sally was a compass, not a map. But I suspected they’d ensconced themselves in the restricted section. We followed our old route upward.
After a few minutes Trumbull said, unprompted, “I’d appreciate it if you called her something else. Whenever you say, ‘Professor Trumbull did such and such,’ it’s very distracting. And unpleasant: I didn’t do any of those things.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to remember. We can call her ‘the Yith.’ But she never gave us any name other than yours.”
“It’s—” She stopped abruptly in the middle of a narrow corridor, held her hands out claw-like. “I know it. I know it, but I can’t pronounce it.”
Audrey looked at her sympathetically. “Amnesia really isn’t as useful as some entities seem to think.”
“Have you ever heard of Atlantis?” asked Caleb.
“You’ve mentioned it before. Please tell me some mystical nonsense is actually nonsense?” said Spector plaintively.
“Some is,” said Caleb, “and there was never a place named Atlantis. But there really was an island city-state built on anachronistic knowledge from a poorly executed Yithian memory wipe, and they really did destroy themselves with ill-considered use of that same knowledge.”
Spector shook his head. “I don’t think knowledge needs an esoteric origin to be dangerous.”
The restricted section was well-lit and well-insulated: a bright if not warm spot at the library’s heart. On the second level of the stacks, a door stood open. We found Barlow’s people there, in one of the rooms set aside for studies that wanted no witness.
Barlow came swiftly to his feet as we entered, hand moving toward the gun under his jacket. “Ron, I can’t believe you’d bring these people here now, of all times.”
Spector gave him an exasperated look. “I’m here to help.” The familiarity made me wonder what background they shared beyond their political disagreements. Surely the agency’s few experts in supernatural matters must sometimes be required to work together more directly.
“You’ve made it clear you won’t even admit to yourself that you’re harboring saboteurs. And you,” he added to Trumbull. “I’ll have your head for playing with the guards’ minds again. There’s no other way they’d have let you by.”
“We came in the back door,” I told him. “And we came now, of all times, to help. As Mr. Spector said.”
Barlow nodded at Peters. Before I could decide how to react, Peters rushed forward and grabbed me. He twisted my wrists tight behind my back and pressed his other arm against my neck, forcing my chin up so I could feel my pulse thudding against his skin.
I went still, every muscle tensed against the instinct to fight. I could break his hold, but not without hurting him. Not without the consequences that would bring. I sought Caleb’s eyes and willed him to stay where he was. He, too, had frozen, but I could see joints flex, gaze dart in search of a moment’s opportunity. I shook my head a fraction, felt Peters tighten his grip in response. I swallowed, hard: a soldier had grabbed me and our father had leapt to stop him—and died with another soldier’s bullet in the back of his head.
Spector held up his hands. “Don’t make this mistake again, George. You’re searching at random; we can make a difference. My people aren’t responsible for your problems, and you have two women hurt.”
“Two?” Barlow surveyed his team. There were only the two women on it.
“I’m fine,” said Sally, glaring at Audrey. She didn’t look fine: her skin was wan, her muscles locked painfully against the shivers that threatened to overwhelm her. But if Barlow noticed, he didn’t acknowledge.
Mary rose from her chair and approached Spector. She looked him up and down, secretarial camouflage abandoned. “What do you know about what happened?”
I swallowed against the pressure on my windpipe. “I know that it doesn’t take sabotage for an experimental ritual to go very, very wrong.”
Peters’s grip loosened a fraction, and Barlow nodded. “Let her talk. I want to hear everything she has to say.” He eyed Trumbull, and I knew that with more agents here, he’d have happily grabbed us all. I glanced at her as well: where her guest would have glared back and made some cutting remark, she’d masked her expression entirely, save that her pupils had gone wide.
I was tempted to forgo Trumbull’s deception. This wasn’t Atlantis, and I wanted to say something that would shake them out of their paranoid arrogance. Shouldn’t they know how close they’d come to destruction? Shouldn’t they know how we’d discovered their disastrous summoning, and that the disaster was their fault and no other’s?
But Barlow didn’t believe he was doing something safe. He simply believed it necessary. And if he knew about the Yith, he was precisely the sort to seek out their other representatives around the world, and drag dangerous knowledge from them by whatever means he could muster. And, if he were truly foolish, try to keep them from sharing it with others.
I closed my eyes, breathed as deeply as I could, and tried to think beyond my father’s blood and Peters’s grip on my wrists. I needed to focus on what we were doing now: Audrey and Sally’s lives and sanity, and perhaps my own, depended on it. But I knew how to be honest, and how to be silent, and neither seemed wise. If Audrey weren’t so distracted, what would she say?
“We picked up on what you were doing last night,” I said. “We came to find out who was running an unshielded summoning, but when we got close enough it grabbed us as well. We found you in the basement of the admin building. Something else came through. You don’t remember any of this?”
“No, of course not,” said Barlow, but his eyes grew distant and worried.
“Is this your explanation for why letters look like gibberish to me this morning?” asked Mary.