CHAPTER ONE

Every day, Jess Brightwell passed the Spartan warrior statue on his way to and from his quarters. It was a beautifully made automaton, fluid and deadly, with a skin of burnished copper. It stood in a dynamic pose on its pedestal, with a spear ready to thrust, and was both a decoration and a protection against intruders.

It wasn’t supposed to be a threat to those who belonged here.

Now, as he passed it, the shadowed eyes under the helmet flickered and flared red, and the Spartan’s head turned to track his passage. Jess felt the burn of those eyes, but he didn’t return the stare. It would take only an instant for that form to move and that spear to drive right through him. He could feel the very spot the point would enter like a red, tingling target on his back.

Not now! Jess sweated, terribly aware of the leather smuggling harness strapped to his chest, and the slender original book hidden inside. Calm. Be calm. It was incredibly difficult, not only because of the threat of the automaton but because of the anger that burned inside him. As he walked away, the tingle in his back rose to a hot burn, and he waited for the rush of movement and the horrible invasion of the spear stabbing through his body . . . But then he was a step past, two steps, and the attack didn’t come.

When he looked back, the statue had gone back to resting mode, staring straight ahead blindly. It seemed safe. It wasn’t. Jess Brightwell lived on sufferance and luck at the Great Library of Alexandria. If he’d been half as clever as his friend Thomas Schreiber, he would have figured out how to disable these things by now . . .

Don’t think about Thomas. Thomas is dead. You have to keep that thought firm in your head or you’ll never make it through this.

Jess paused in the dark, cool tunnel that led from the Spartan’s entrance into the wider precincts of the complex where he was quartered. There was no one here to watch him, no fellow travelers at either end of the tunnel. The automaton couldn’t see him. Here, for this one sheltered moment, he could allow himself to feel.

Anger sparked red and violent inside, heated his skin and tensed his muscles, and the tears that stung his eyes were driven by rage as much as grief. You lied, Artifex, he thought. You lying, cruel, evil bastard. The book in the harness on his chest was proof of everything he’d hoped for the past six months. But hope was a malicious, jagged thing, all spikes and razors that churned and cut deep in his guts. Hope was a great deal like fear.

Jess bounced his head against the stones behind him, again, again, again, until he could get control of the anger. He forced it back into a black box, buried deep, and secured it with chains of will, then wiped his face clear. It was morning, still so early that dawn blushed the horizon, and he was tired out of his skin. He’d been chasing the book he smuggled now for weeks, giving up meals, giving up rest, and finally he’d found it. It had cost him an entire night’s sleep. He’d not eaten, except for a quick gyro from a Greek street vendor nearly eight hours past. He’d spent the rest of the time hiding in an abandoned building and reading the book three times, cover to cover, until he had every single detail etched hot into his memory.

Jess felt gritty with exhaustion and trembled with hunger, but he knew what he had to do.

He had to tell Glain the truth.

He didn’t look forward to that at all, and the idea made him bounce his skull off the stones one more time, this time more gently. He pushed off, checked his pulse to be sure it was steady again, and then walked out of the tunnel to the inner courtyard—no automata stationed here, though sphinxes roamed the grounds on a regular basis. He was grateful not to see one this time and headed to his left, toward his barracks.

After a brief stop to wolf down bread and drink an entire jug of water, he moved on and avoided any of the early risers in the halls who might want to be social. He craved a shower and mindless sleep more than any conversation.

He got neither. As he unlocked his door and stepped inside, he found Glain Wathen—friend, fellow survivor, classmate, superior officer—sitting bold as brass in the chair by his small desk. Tall girl, made sleek with muscle. He’d never call her pretty, but she had a comfortable, easy assurance—hard won these past months—that made her almost beautiful in certain lights. Force of personality if nothing else.

The Welsh girl was calmly reading, though she closed the Blank and returned it to his shelf when he shut the door behind him.

“People will talk, Glain,” he said. He had no temper for this right now. He needed, burned, to tell her what he’d learned, but at the same time he was on the precarious edge of emotion, and he didn’t want her of all people to see him lose control. He wanted to rest and face her fresh. That way, he wouldn’t break into rage, or just . . . break.

“One thing you learn early growing up a girl—people always talk, whatever you do,” Glain said. “What bliss it must be to be male.” Her tone was sour, and it matched her expression. “Where have you been? I had half a mind to call a search party.”

“You damn well know better than to do that,” he said, and if she was going to stay, fine. He had no qualms about stripping off his uniform jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. They’d seen each other in all states as postulants struggling to survive Wolfe’s class, and the High Garda wasn’t a place that invited modesty, either.

He really must have been too tired to think, because his fingers were halfway down the buttons on his shirt when he realized she’d see the smuggling harness, which was a secret he didn’t feel prepared to share just yet. “A little privacy?” he said, and she raised her dark eyebrows but got up and turned her back. He didn’t take his eyes off her as he stripped off the shirt and reached for the buckles of the leather harness that held the book against his chest. “I need sleep, not conversation.”

“Too bad. You won’t get any of the former,” she told him. “We’re due for an exercise in half an hour. Which is why I was looking for you. The orders came after you’d gone sneaking into the night. Where exactly did you go, Jess?”

Jess. So they weren’t on military footing now, not that he’d really thought they were. He sighed, left the harness on, and replaced the old shirt with a fresh one. “You can turn,” he said, as he finished the buttons. She did, hands clasped behind her back, and stared at him with far too much perception.

“If that bit of false-modesty theater was meant to distract me from the fact you’re wearing some kind of smuggling equipment under that shirt, it failed,” she said. “Have you gone back into the family business?”

The Brightwells had a stranglehold on the London book trade, and had fingers in every black market across the world, one way or another; he had never told her that, but somehow, he also wasn’t surprised she knew. Glain liked to learn everything she could about those close to her. It was a smart strategy. He’d done the same with her, the only daughter of a moderately successful merchant who’d nearly bankrupted himself to earn her a place at the Library. She’d been raised with six brothers. None of them, despite sharing her strong build and height, had been inclined at all to military life. Glain was exactly what she seemed: a strong, capably violent young woman who cared about her abilities, not her looks.

“If you’re a Brightwell, you’re never really out of the family business,” he said, and sat down on his bed. The mattress yielded, and he wanted to stretch out and let it cradle him, but if he did, he knew he’d be asleep in seconds. “You didn’t just barge in here to make sure I was still alive, did you?”

“No.” She sounded amused and completely at ease again. “I needed to ask you a question.”

“Well? As you said, we’ve got only half an hour—”

“Somewhat less now,” she said. “Since we’re having this conversation. What do you know about the Black Archives?”

That stopped him cold. He’d expected her to ask something else, something more . . . military. But instead, it took his tired brain a moment to scramble to the new topic. He finally said, “That they’re a myth.”

“Really.” Scorn dripped from that word, and she leaned back against the wall behind her. “What if I told you that I heard from someone I trust that they’re not?”

“You must have slept through your childhood lessons.” He switched to a childish singsong. “‘The Great Library has an Archive, where all the books they save—’”

“‘Not fire or sword, not flood or war, will be the Archive’s grave,’” Glain finished. “I memorized the same childhood rhymes you did. But I’m talking about the other Archives. The forbidden ones.”

“The Black Archives are a story to frighten children—that’s all. Full of dangerous books, as if books could be dangerous.”

“Some might be,” she said. “And Dario doesn’t think it’s a myth.”

“Dario?” Jess said. “Since when do you believe anything Dario Santiago says? And why is he talking to you at all?”

She gave him a long unreadable smile. “Maybe he just wants to keep track of what you get up to,” she said. “But back to the subject. If it’s where they keep dangerous information, then I say that’s a place that we need to look for any hints about what happened to send Thomas to his death. And who to go after for it. Don’t you?”

Thomas. Hearing his best friend’s name said aloud conjured up his image behind Jess’s eyes: a cheerfully optimistic genius in the body of a German farm boy. He missed Thomas, who’d had all the warmth and understanding of others that Jess lacked. I can’t think about him. For a wild instant, he thought he’d either shout at her or cry, but somehow he managed to keep his voice even as he said, “If such a place as the Black Archives even exists, how would we go about getting into it? I hope Dario has an idea. I don’t.”

“You know Dario—he’s always got an idea,” Glain said. “Something to think on, anyway. Something we can do. I know you want to find out how and why Thomas died as much as I do.”

“The Archivist told us why,” he said. “Thomas was convicted of heresy against the Library.” Tell her what you know, for God’s sake. The thought beat hard against his brain, like a prisoner battering at a door, but he just wasn’t ready. He couldn’t tell what saying the words out loud, making them real, might do to him.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Glain said softly. Her dark eyes had gone distant and the look in them sad. “Thomas would never have done anything, said anything to deserve that. He was the best of us.”

Just tell her. She deserves to know!

He finally scraped together just enough courage and drew in a deep, slow breath as he looked up to meet her eyes. “Glain, about Thomas—”

He was cut off by a sudden hard rapping on the door. It sounded urgent, and Jess bolted up off the bed and crossed to answer. He felt half relieved for the interruption . . . until he swung it open, and his squad mate Tariq Oduya shouldered past Jess and into the room. He held two steaming mugs, and thrust one at Jess as he said, “And here I thought you’d be still lagging in bed . . .” His voice trailed off as he caught sight of Glain standing against the wall. She had her arms crossed, and looked as casual as could be, but Tariq still grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Or maybe you just got up!”

“Stuff it,” Glain said, and there was no sign of humor in her expression or voice. She moved forward to take the second cup from Tariq and sipped it, never mind that it was probably his own. “Thanks. Now be about your business, soldier.”

“Happy to oblige, Squad Leader,” he said, and mock saluted. Technically, they were off duty, but he was walking a tightrope, and Jess watched Glain’s face to see if she intended to slice through it and send him falling into the abyss for the lack of respect.

She just sipped the hot drink and watched Tariq without blinking until he moved to the door.

“Recruit Oduya,” she said as he stepped over the threshold. “You do understand that if I hear a whisper of you implying anything about this situation, I’ll knock you senseless, and then I’ll see you off the squad and out of the High Garda.”

He turned and gave her a proper salute. His handsome face was set in a calm mask. “Yes, Squad Leader. Understood.”

He closed the door behind him. Jess took a gulp of the coffee and closed his eyes in relief as the caffeine began its work. “He’s a good sort. He won’t spread rumors.”

Glain gave him a look of utter incredulity. “You really don’t know him at all, do you?”

In truth, Jess didn’t. The squad had bonded tightly, but he’d held himself apart from that quite deliberately; he’d formed deep friendships in his postulant class and seen some of those friends dismissed, injured, and dead. He wasn’t about to open himself up to the same pain again.

Still, he considered Tariq the closest he had to a friend, except for Glain. Glain he trusted.

His uniform jacket was still clean, and he put it on as he finished the coffee. Glain watched in silence for a moment before she said, “You were about to tell me something.”

“Later,” he said. “After the exercise. It’s going to be a longer conversation.”

“All right.” As he stopped to check his uniform in front of the mirror, she rolled her eyes. “You’re pretty enough for both of us, Brightwell.”

“Charmed you think so, Squad Leader. You’re quite handsome yourself today.” Handsome was a good description. Glain had chopped her dark hair closer for convenience; it suited her, he decided, and fit well with the solid curves of a body made for endurance and strength. There was no attraction between them, but there was respect—more now than before, he thought. Some, like Oduya, might mistake it for something else. She might be right to be concerned. Jess met her eyes in the mirror. “That compliment stops at the doorway, of course.”

She nodded. It seemed brisk, but there was a look in her eyes that he thought might be some form of gratitude. “Stop preening and let’s go.”

They left his room together, but, thankfully, no one was in the hall to see it. The squad had gathered toward the end, talking casually, but all that stopped as Glain approached. Jess silently took position with the rest of the squad, and Glain led them out at a fast walk for the parade ground. Despite his sweaty weariness, he looked forward to this; it was a chance to let a little of his anger out of that locked, chained box. There wouldn’t be any real surprises. It was just an exercise, after all.

He was dead wrong about that, and it cost him.

They were in the tenth long hour on the exercise ground when Jess saw a flash of movement from the corner of his eye and tried to turn toward it, but he was hampered by thick layers of cloth and the flexible armor, and just simply too slow, too tired, and too late.

A shot hit him squarely in the back.

Then he was on the ground, looking up at a merciless Alexandrian sky scratched white by the heat, and he couldn’t breathe. The pain crushed all the air out of his chest, and for a split second he wondered if something had gone badly wrong, if all the safety measures had failed, if he was going to die . . . And then his frozen solar plexus unlocked and he gulped in a raw, whooping mouthful of air.

A shadow blocked out the burning sun, and he knew her by the short-cropped halo of hair that bristled up. After blinking a few times, he saw that Glain was holding out a hand to him. He bit down on his pride and took it, and she hauled him to unsteady feet.

“What the hell did you do wrong, Brightwell?” she asked him. There was no sympathy in her voice. He shook his head, still intent on getting breath back in his lungs. “I told you all to watch your backs. You didn’t listen. If these weapons had been loaded with real ammunition, you’d be a mess to clean up right now.”

He felt halfway dead, anyway. The training weapons that the High Garda of the Great Library used were not toys; they delivered real jolts and very real bruises. “Sorry,” he muttered, and then, a second too late, “sir.”

Now that she wasn’t just a silhouette against the sun, he could see the warning flash in her eyes. We’re not equals here. Forgetting that was a stupid, personal issue he needed to overcome, and quickly; she couldn’t afford to let it slip for long without seeming to encourage a lack of discipline in the ranks of their squad.

Hard habit to break, friendship.

The rest of the squad gathered together now from around the corners of the mock buildings that served as their training ground. It was mercilessly hot, as it always was, and each of his fellow Garda soldiers now looked as exhausted and sweat streaked as he did. Glain wiped her face with an impatient swipe of her sleeve and barked, loud enough for the rest of the squad to hear, “Report what you did wrong, soldier!”

“Squad Leader, sir, I failed to watch my back,” Jess said. His voice sounded strained, and he knew from the still-burning ache in his back that he was going to have a spectacular sunset of a bruise. “But—”

Her face set like concrete. “Are you about to excuse your failure, Brightwell?”

“No, sir!” He cut a look at Tariq, who was openly grinning. “It was friendly fire, sir!”

“Oh, be fair. I’m not that friendly,” Tariq said. “And I did it on orders.”

“Orders?” Jess looked at Glain, whose face was as unreadable as the wall behind her. “You ordered him to shoot me in the back?”

Glain’s expression never flickered. “In the real world, you’d better watch your friends as much as your enemies. Allies can turn on you when you least expect it. I hope the bruises remind you.”

He hardly needed the tip and she knew it. He wasn’t a fool; he’d grown up never trusting people. Trust, for him, was a recently acquired skill that had developed in the company of his friends and fellow postulants. Like Glain. Who was trying to remind him not to rely on it.

Jess swallowed a bitter mouthful of anger and said, “No excuses, sir. Tariq always struck me as shifty, anyway.”

“Then why’d you let your guard down, you bright spark?” Tariq said. “I admit, I like playing the heinous villain, sir.”

“Playing?” someone else in the squad muttered, and Tariq mimed a finger shot in her direction as he swigged from his canteen. Jess would have laughed if it didn’t hurt so much, but Glain’s lesson had been pointed . . . and on point. I can’t afford to relax, he thought. I knew as much from the beginning. Glain’s just trying to remind me. With, unfortunately, Glain’s typical subtlety.

“Settle,” Glain said flatly, and the squad did. Instantly. Nobody questioned her—not for long. Jess certainly didn’t. “We’re nearly at the end of training,” she told them, and paced back and forth in front of them with a lithe, restless energy that never seemed to go away, no matter how long the day. “We will finish in the lead. Screw that up, any of you, and I’ll slap you out of service hard enough to brand my palm print on your grandmother’s face. Clear?”

“Clear, sir!” they all responded, instantly and in perfect chorus. They’d learned how to move and speak in concert long, painful months ago. That was Glain’s doing. She’d end up High Garda commander one day . . . or dead. But she’d never settle for less than perfection.

“I’m tempted to make you run it again,” Glain was saying, and there was a barely perceptible moan that ran through the group she didn’t acknowledge, “but you’ve bled enough for one day. You weren’t terrible, and next time had better be an improvement. Shower, drink, eat, rest. Dismissed.”

That, Jess thought, is why she’s good at this. She’d pushed them all very hard, to the point of breaking, but she knew when to give just a touch of encouragement. And, most of all, she knew when to stop. None of them, not even him, were being carried to the Medica tents, which couldn’t be said for a lot of other squads who weren’t as highly ranked as Glain’s.

Around them, this section of the High Garda training ground was almost deserted; it was reserved for trainee testing. Everyone else had called it a day long ago, since the mess bells had pealed half an hour back, and now that Jess had the chance to think about it, his stomach growled fiercely. He’d burned off the light breakfast hours ago.

He fell into step with Shi Zheng and Tariq, but stopped when Glain said, “Brightwell. A word.”

Others gave him sympathetic looks but didn’t pause; they walked around him as he halted and turned back. Glain was still pacing, and doing it in full sun; she never minded the scorching Alexandrian heat. The sun loved her just as much, and her skin had darkened to a warm, woody brown over the months of exposure. Jess, who’d been in the climate precisely the same amount of time, had managed to achieve only a light coating of translucent tan over layers of memorable burns. “Sir?”

She fixed a stare somewhere over his shoulder, toward the horizon. “Message came in earlier to me from Captain Santi. He says to tell you . . . no.” She suddenly shifted to fix her gaze right on his. “No to what, Jess?”

“Glain—”

“That’s Squad Leader Wathen to you, and no to what?”

“I asked to talk to Wolfe. Sir.”

“Why?”

It was the coward’s way out, but he gave her the second reason he wanted a meeting with their old Scholar Christopher Wolfe, who’d pushed them through a memorable period of hell as postulants. “I wanted to know if he knew anything of the Black Archives.”

She blinked, and her look shifted—still suspicious and dark, but a good deal more concerned. “You told me you thought they were a myth just this morning. You must have asked days ago.”

“I did. For the same reasons you gave. Seemed to me that if the Black Archives existed—and I never said I thought they did—then it might be a place to look into Thomas’s death.” He looked down. “I got a letter from his father, thanking me for being his friend. He asked if I knew exactly how his son died.”

Glain said nothing to that, but after a moment, she nodded. “You didn’t want me looking into the subject because you already were.”

“And they watch us, Glain,” he said. “All of us.” It was burning his tongue to tell her the truth, but he knew, knew how she’d take it. And he was too tired. He wanted to tell her in better circumstances, when the clock wasn’t ticking down. If there was an exercise, she needed her focus more than he did . . . or, at least, that was what he told himself.

“Which brings us to the point: stay away from Wolfe. You know it’s not safe, for him or you.”

“I won’t ask again.”

“Dismissed, then, Brightwell. We’ll talk later.”

He nodded and jogged away to put space between them. Curious that Captain Niccolo Santi had passed the message, and Wolfe hadn’t sent it himself. But, then, their teacher had been a barbed puzzle since the start.

Wolfe was not a kind man or a natural teacher, but he’d tried his best to save his students. That didn’t make him a friend, exactly, but Wolfe would want to know the truth about Thomas, too. Once he did . . . No wonder Captain Santi wants to keep me away from him, Jess thought. Wolfe wouldn’t let it go. No more than Jess could. Or Glain, once he told her. Good that he had a little more time to think. He needed a plan before he set that particular cat among the pigeons, didn’t he?

His back ached, and his head pounded from the heat and exertion. Dinner was as fast as breakfast, fuel he ate without really noting it, and afterward Jess fell into bed for a few short hours—far less than he needed—before dragging himself up. He still had things to do that couldn’t be done in the open.

He showered, changed into civilian clothing, shoveled down food in the common dining hall, and slipped away from the High Garda compound into the embrace of a rich, sea-cooled Alexandrian evening, beneath a blue-black sky scattered with hard stars.

This was work better done in the dark.