The library was in the downtown of Four Points, one block farther east than the General Store. Four Points Middle School was on the west side of the downtown. As they walked, Alma watched as the dark tower of the Fifth Point grew larger and larger. Inside, her dark thoughts grew larger and larger too.
She almost told Hugo and Shirin that she had changed her mind. She almost told them that she had made a mistake, that she did not, in fact, want to go. She didn’t want to go anywhere at all ever.
Instead she thought about the Starling.
“Hugo,” she asked, fighting to keep the tremor from her voice. “How far away is the nearest star?”
“You mean the sun?” Hugo asked.
“Oh, right,” Alma said. The sun was still shining down on them now. It was a safe bet that it had not fallen from the sky and into her backyard. “No, not that one. The next one.”
“The next closest star,” Hugo said, “is Proxima Centauri. It’s about twenty-five trillion miles from Earth.”
Twenty-five trillion miles. Alma couldn’t even fathom a distance that far. The Starling had fallen at least twenty-five trillion miles through space. She had fallen and fallen and fallen. What would it be like to fall so far? Alma didn’t know. But she knew that the Starling had to be afraid. She had to be lonely. No one could be farther from home than the Starling was.
And the book said the Starling had lost quintessence in the fall. From what Alma had seen through the quintescope, she was losing more and more every day. The Starling was in mortal peril, while she, Alma, was feeling brighter than ever.
She had gone to new places now, and she hadn’t had episodes. She was with her friends. She was on a quest. So surely she could go to the library. She had to. It was up to her to save the Starling.
Shakily, tentatively, Alma followed her friends through the library doors.
Behind the library’s front desk, there was a librarian. Well, Alma assumed she was a librarian because of where she was sitting. She didn’t exactly look very librarian-y.
She was wearing a dress that started high on her neck with sleeves that trailed to the ends of her fingers, which were covered in white gloves. The dress appeared to be made of scarves, dozens of scarves sewn together in a hodgepodge sort of pattern. She had huge, round sunglasses that obscured most of her face, and she wore her hair in twists tipped in rainbow colors—scarlet, gold, teal, fuchsia. Her name tag read SUSIE.
Even before they approached her desk, Susie leaped to her feet.
“Welcome!” she cried in a very unsuitable-for-the-library voice. “How can I help you today, my dear souls?”
Alma’s nervousness was coursing through her, energizing her in a high-wire, live-wire, barbed-wire way. “We need—we need books,” she blurted to the rainbow-garbed librarian.
Susie beamed at her, showing shiny teeth. “You’re in the right place, aren’t you? What kind of books do you need?”
Alma looked to Hugo to respond, but Hugo seemed momentarily overwhelmed by the librarian. Alma didn’t blame him. Susie didn’t seem very acclimated to Four Points. She seemed as out of place as a tropical parrot in a gray concrete city.
“Books about building wind funnels,” Shirin said. In her own colorfully striped dress and sequined backpack, her voice loud and clear, Shirin didn’t even seem to notice how odd the librarian was. “And wind turbines, if you have anything like that.”
The librarian nodded emphatically, her twists nodding along. “Wind funnels and turbines!” she practically sang. “How marvelous! Marvelous! What else?”
“Geology.” Hugo spoke up now, a little uncertainly. “And mining, alchemy, and natural spontaneous combustion.”
“Also a local bus schedule, please,” Shirin added.
“That’s quite a varied list,” Susie said, still grinning at them. “Is this for a school project, my dears?”
“Yes,” Alma replied. “Sort of. It’s for a—a club.”
“Just the three of you are in it?” Susie asked. “No one else?” Then, before they could answer, she shook her head and laughed, a bell-like sound that rang around the room. “Never mind, never mind! There’s a schedule posted at the bus stop outside of the library. As for the other topics, let’s see what we see!”
The librarian came out from behind the desk. She was, Alma noticed, extremely short, and as she led the way to the stacks, her feet were hidden by her dress, so that she seemed to glide.
Hugo and Shirin hurried to follow. Alma took a deep breath and then went after them.
They searched through the sections together, gathering up book after book until each of them had a tower. Alma tried to focus on the task. She tried to listen as Susie chattered on and on about this book and that book, about engineering and wind direction, about cave systems and lightning, about the alchemist Paracelsus, who had written about the elements during the early Renaissance—and about the phone call that Hugo had received about his fines, which Susie admitted must have been an error on her part.
Alma tried to pay attention to Susie, and she tried not to pay attention to her mind.
Which was telling her over and over and over to run.
“I think,” Susie said after placing a final book on the already head-high pile in Hugo’s arms, “that should be enough to get you started.” She nodded happily at Hugo, then at Shirin. Then she looked at Alma and her smile slipped from her face. “Oh my stars! You look a bit flickery. What’s the matter, dear soul?”
“Nothing,” Alma said. “I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. I’m not flickery at all.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. Because in spite of the librarian’s concern and in spite of the books in her hands, books that would no doubt lead them to wind and possibly the other elements, and in spite of the light that had been growing in her and the new friends by her side, Alma’s stomach had begun to knot. Alma’s throat had begun to tighten. Alma’s breath was coming faster and the edges of the world had begun to blur.
The library suddenly seemed so cramped, so small. There were people here, on the other side of the bookshelves, at the computers, surrounding her, everywhere. She was going to shatter and everyone was going to see it. She wasn’t only going to flicker, she was going to go out, she was going to go dark. She should never have come here.
It was happening again.
Alma dropped her books, and she ran from the library.
She ran all the way home.