CHAPTER TEN

He arrived back just as his fellow soldiers were starting to wake, and except for the fact that he was already wearing his uniform, no one gave him a second look. He sat on his bunk and ate a pressed fruit from his pack, and wondered how to tell the others what he’d found. Too many ears. They needed privacy.

Glain could see he had news. She was clever enough not to ask, but he saw the level stare and the tilt of her head. What is she seeing? He had no idea. He was usually better at hiding in plain sight than that. Maybe it was the flush of triumph he couldn’t quite shake. He just hoped that turning off the sentry lion hadn’t triggered some alarms that would make exiting that way harder.

“You look happy,” she said to him, and took half his ration bar.

“Help yourself,” he said mildly. “It’s going to be a long day.”

She gave him a narrow look, which he answered with a grin, and then it was too late to play question games, as their squad leader called them to order. Jess fell into line beside Glain. Squad Leader Rollison walked down the line and fixed them each with a direct yet impersonal stare.

“Good work yesterday,” he said. “So said the Artifex himself. We don’t get to earn that praise again today, because today, the Artifex leaves the basilica and visits the Roman Senate, and we’re staying here. The rest of our century arrived overnight and will be guarding the route and the Senate. Our job today is to keep the basilica safe, and, to that end, we’ll be conducting roving patrols. Those of you who don’t like sunshine, Burners, or those damned Roman lions, here’s some happy news for you: we’ll be staying inside. Those who were hoping for more glory today—and I mean you, Brightwell—you’ll have to live with disappointment.”

“Yes, sir,” Jess said. “I’ll try to contain myself, sir.”

Lucky. Too lucky. He sensed some hand behind yet another windfall of good fortune, but he didn’t know where to look. Could be the Artifex, setting him—setting all of them—up for a disaster. Or, rather more unlikely, it could be a better angel looking out for them.

“Routes,” Troll said, and all of them got out their Codices. He scribbled down a map and labeled their names on hallways, and it appeared in rapid, neat strokes on the page in Jess’s Codex assigned for orders. Jess had been paired with Glain, which seemed natural enough; Troll would have recognized they worked well together.

The hall they’d been given to patrol ran the length of the first floor on the Forum side of the building. Jess remembered the maps he sketched out last night and the one that he’d drawn from Wolfe’s Mesmer session, and stacked them one atop another in his mind to see the differences.

Wolfe’s secret hall, the one that led from a concealed inner portal to the door that led down to the prisons, was on the other side of the wall from where they’d been assigned. Convenient, that. Too damned convenient. His feeling that they’d just so happened to be assigned here today and that they’d just so happened to be given a patrol so near to the secret prison entrance . . . it raised an itch on the back of his neck.

Better angels, or conniving demons. Something nipped at his heels.

He silently kitted up with the armored Library coat and his weapons, and found Glain—of course—ready before him. Rollison was checking off his squad as they left the room, and held out a hand to keep Glain and Jess back. They were the last out of the room.

Troll turned to Glain and Jess, closed his Codex, and said, “Follow me.”

“Sir?” Glain said, but complied. He didn’t explain, just set off at a quick pace. They fell in behind him as he led the way through a maze of doors that finally ended in a blind storage area lined with shelves.

“What is this?” Glain asked, and added only as an afterthought, “Sir.”

“It’s where you wait,” he said. “Captain Santi and the others are coming. Don’t worry, I’m— I can’t say I’m one of you, but I’ve known Captain Santi a long time. He and my father were friends back in training. After my father died, he and Wolfe made sure I had a place to live, enough to eat. I owe him this much.”

He turned to go. Glain grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” she said. “Do you know what—”

Troll brushed her hand away with a move so smooth it almost seemed effortless. “No. I don’t want to know. It’s a favor for a friend, and that’s where it ends. When you’re done here, make your patrols.”

He left without a backward glance and shut the door. Glain frowned after him and said, “Do you trust him?”

“Do we have a choice?” Jess leaned against the wall. “I found the tunnel Dario talked about. It’s clear all the way down. I could hear footsteps above, and they weren’t from the basilica. They had to be from inside the prison.”

“No guards?”

“There was an automaton lion,” he said. “I took care of it.” He tried to sound offhand about it.

“You what?”

“Off switch,” he said. “I told you, I did it to a sphinx the night everything went wrong with Dario.”

She thought about it and shuddered. “That was a sphinx. I’ve seen the size of these lions. Not sure I’d have tried facing one down there in the dark. And you should have let me know what you were doing! If you hadn’t come back . . .”

She was right, of course. He should have left word. It had been a stupid risk; that fact had finally registered with the rising of the sun, and he could have disappeared without a trace into the dark, crushed and rotting beneath the prison. Worse than that, he could have destroyed any chance they had of finding Thomas. “Sorry.”

“Do it again and I’ll kill what the automaton doesn’t eat.” She meant it—or thought she did. Her Welsh lilt came out strong when she said it. He didn’t have time to reply—if he’d thought of anything to say to that—because there was a noise beyond the door, and as they both turned that direction, it swung open.

Santi. Khalila. Dario. Santi wore his uniform and carried a full pack and weapons. Khalila had opted for a dark gray dress with her robe thrown over the top and a head scarf, and carried a pack of her own. Dario was in plain, sturdy clothes and his Scholar’s robe. They all looked tense.

“Someone tried to kill Captain Santi,” Khalila blurted.

Glain, who’d been about to speak, was stunned into silence, so Jess jumped in.

“What? How?”

“Poison in the fruit in my room,” he said. “No way to know who put it there, but I think we can guess.”

“The Artifex.”

“He’s done toying with us, and I think he’ll close his trap now . . . He deliberately left us all behind while he went off to the Senate. We’re out of time.”

“But we didn’t bring all our things,” Khalila said. “Can we go back for them?”

“No. You can’t. If you turn back, you stay behind. Are you staying?”

“Don’t rush us,” Dario snapped. “It’s a big decision, you know, to turn our backs on our futures. Our families. Everything we’ve ever believed.”

“No, it isn’t,” Khalila said, and took in a deep breath. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, Dario. I thought we’d already decided where our loyalty had to lie. Mine is with them. Is yours?”

“Sweet flower . . .”

“Don’t. If you want to go, just go. This isn’t the time for your charm.”

Dario studied her and then slowly nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right. Yes. We go.”

Santi looked grim, and never more in command. “We go. Now.”

The timing is terrible, Jess thought; he had everything he would carry for a duty patrol, but no extras. The rest of his kit was still back stowed beneath his bunk. It will have to stay there. He’d abandoned more things than he’d kept in his life, anyway.

“The hallway Wolfe talked about is on the other side of the far wall, the one with the statues,” Jess said. “Probably some access. I’d guess behind the statues, through one of the alcoves.”

“According to Wolfe, there will be guards and an Obscurist on duty in the Translation Chamber on the other side of the wall; Glain and I will take care of that. At the end of the hall, there’s an automaton and a door. I have Greek fire for the automaton . . .”

“No,” Jess said. “I can get us past it.” Santi looked at him and frowned. Jess met his gaze and held it. “I can, sir. We both know using Greek fire in a confined space is risky at best.”

“All right.” Santi didn’t sound convinced. “Jess will get us past the automaton. After that, the locked door.” Jess nodded at that, too. “And then we go down into the tunnel. There will be more automata. Three of them, according to Christopher. Two sphinxes and a Spartan. Can you disarm those as well?”

“I can get the sphinxes,” Jess said. “I don’t know about the Spartan, sir.”

“That’ll have to do. There are four High Garda on duty in the prison. If I know any of them, I’m going to try to save them, but if not . . . If not, we may have to fight. If it comes to that, let me, Glain, and Jess take the lead.” He turned to Jess. “You scouted the tunnel exit that Khalila and Dario discovered,” Santi said. “Is it clear?”

“How did you know I—”

“I know you. Is it clear?”

“Yes.”

Santi took in a breath. “Then we go.”

As simply as that, they were abandoning all they’d planned for their lives, all they’d worked toward. For Santi, it meant throwing away an entire career spent gathering honor and trust within the Library. For Glain, the destruction of a dream she’d held since childhood. For Khalila, a future so bright, Jess couldn’t bear to think of snuffing it out. Even Dario was giving up something priceless.

I’m the only one who has nothing much to lose, he thought. He’d already lost all the illusions that had brought him to this moment. What he had left now was just a hope that whatever came after this would prove to be better.

One by one, they nodded.

And they headed for the hallway that Jess and Glain had been assigned to patrol.

“What about Wolfe?” Jess asked. “He’s alone in Alexandria. Anything could happen to him there, especially once they know what we’ve done. He’ll be executed.”

“No,” Santi said. “It’s taken care of. Now spread out and find the entrance.” He stepped up to the nearest statue—the one of Minerva—and felt around behind her in the alcove. Jess held back, letting his gaze move over the gods in succession . . . and settling on one in particular. Pluto. Roman god of the underworld.

He stepped up and felt behind, along the smooth plaster of the alcove. Nothing. But as he did, he braced himself on Pluto’s marble arm, and it moved beneath the black toga the statue wore.

The alcove clicked open.

“Here,” Jess said. “Come on.”

“Dario, bring up the rear. Keep watch,” Santi said. He had his weapon ready, and, Jess realized, so did Glain. Jess quickly followed their lead and waited at the opening. “Jess, go right and see to the automaton. Glain and I go left. Dario, Khalila, stay here until we signal.”

Jess ducked through and immediately turned right. The hallway was just as Wolfe had described it in his Mesmeric trance—a long, straight run with windows that overlooked the Forum. Not glass, certainly, because that would make them easy targets for vandals or Burners. These would be made of something harder and unbreakable. No use giving a desperate captive the chance to throw himself out and escape, either.

Jess heard the lion’s rumbling growl before he’d taken three running steps in its direction and slowed to a fast walk. The lion wasn’t waiting for him; it was pacing toward him, the cabled length of its tail twitching side to side and slamming into walls and windows. It left gouges where it hit. The creature was a big thing, the same size as the one he’d faced down in the tunnels. Seeing it coming at him in harsh daylight was chilling indeed.

You know this. You can do this. The problem was that this lion was in motion, and very probably about to break into a run; it didn’t have the same confusion the one in the tunnel had shown, and it was not undecided about the situation. It had been built to respond to intruders, no matter what uniforms they wore.

Jess broke into a run again, closing the distance fast, and ten steps from it, he threw himself into a slide on the slick marble floor. The lion, confused, tried to slow, but momentum wouldn’t allow it to check so quickly. Jess slid right underneath its open jaws, which hit the floor with a heavy clang just as his head cleared the space, and grabbed one of the thick metal legs to stop his slide. At the same time, he reached up for the depression beneath the lion’s jaw, found it, and pressed as hard as he could.

He heard the roar that had been building inside the thing skew to a strange whining noise and die. The lion took another step forward and froze.

Jess pushed himself out from behind it and cut his arm on the tail when he grabbed hold to stand up; the barbed end of it, he realized, was razor sharp. Even standing still, the thing was capable of harm.

The door lay just beyond—locked, as Wolfe had said. Jess never left without his handy set of picklocks—the lesson of a devious childhood—and pulled them out of the pack and set to work as quickly as he could. He heard the sounds of fighting behind him. Wolfe and Glain must have met with resistance.

He’d just pushed the last tumbler in the lock when Khalila dropped down beside him and said, “How can I help?”

“You can get out of the light,” he said. “Are they coming?”

“Yes. Dario went to help them.” She stood up and looked back over the lion’s shoulder. “How did you know to do this?”

“What, lock picking? Comes naturally. I’m a criminal, remember?”

“I meant the lion, Jess.” She was waving now, giving urgent hurry signals. “Get the door open—they’re coming!”

They were. He heard the footsteps. Glain, ever the athlete, chose to throw herself under the lion, as Jess had, and slid neatly through, then rolled back to her feet and leaned on the still metallic body to aim her weapon back down the hallway. She fired, and Jess recognized the sound: stunning rounds, not lethal. She didn’t intend to kill her fellow High Garda soldiers, no matter what their orders might be.

Dario came next, and behind him . . . behind him came Santi, and . . . Scholar Wolfe. Wolfe, like Dario, wore Scholar’s robes, and his shoulder-length hair had been tied back in a tight knot. “Wolfe?” Jess spared a precious, astonished second to stare at him. Khalila jabbed him in the shoulder to remind him to keep working. “How did he get here?”

“Translation,” she said. “Santi wouldn’t leave him alone in Alexandria. That would have been a death sentence. Jess, are you sure you can—”

“Got it,” Jess said, as the last tumbler clicked and fell away. “Is he all right to be here, do you think? Wolfe?” He couldn’t shake the memory of Wolfe’s swallowed screams as the Mesmer tried to calm him. Whatever was buried under that calm, Elsinore Quest had been right: it was poisonous and powerful. Must have been hard to keep it locked away.

“I don’t know,” Khalila admitted, as Jess rose and pulled on the door’s handle. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to . . . go down there. But it’s Wolfe. We can’t leave him behind for the Archivist, can we?”

She was right. They were all in it together and would rise or fall together. And Santi was staying close to Wolfe, only a step or two away, as if well aware of the risks.

Jess slammed the metal door back against the wall and took the lead, heading down a ramp into the dark. As his eyes adjusted, he realized there were lights, just low ones that blazed brighter as he approached—sensing his presence somehow. There’ll be three more automata, he remembered. The Alexandrian sphinxes would be smaller than the lions, though no less dangerous. The Spartan . . .

He didn’t know what to do about the Spartan.

The tunnel twisted to the left, and he looked back before he took the turn. Khalila and Glain were behind him, then Dario and Wolfe with Santi. As Jess turned the curving corner, he saw steps going down. The smooth plaster of the walls gave way to old Roman stone. The lights continued to brighten around them, and Jess moved as fast as he could.

A High Garda soldier stepped out into his path, and Jess prepared to shoot, but Santi put a hand on his shoulder. “No,” he said. “Sergeant Reynolds?”

The soldier lowered his weapon—not completely, just enough to ease Jess’s mind a little. “Captain Santi? Sir, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Let me pass.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

Glain shot him. It was a quick, economical movement, and the stun round dropped the man to his knees. A second put him completely down. Santi checked the man’s pulse and nodded. He wasn’t happy, but Glain had done the right thing. Talking would get them killed.

The second soldier who came rushing in fired. Glain shot back, but he was wearing armor, and the stunning shot had no effect.

Jess had his weapon set to full strength and fired. He put two rounds into the armor, which was enough to knock the man down and unconscious, but—he hoped—not enough to kill.

A chorus of high-pitched shrieks split the air. There was another blind corner ahead, and beyond it would be the cells . . . and the sphinxes were between them and Thomas. Two of them. How do I stop two of them at once? It seemed impossible now that he was here, listening to the screams coming closer.

“Khalila,” he said. “When the sphinx comes, there’s a depression underneath the jaw, behind the pharaoh’s beard. You need to press it. They should hesitate, seeing you in a Scholar’s robe and a gold band. I’ll get the other one.”

She stared at him with wide, incredulous eyes for an instant, then nodded. No discussion, no questions. She stood beside him, ready, as the two sphinxes rounded the corner together, loping out of rhythm with each other but with the same deadly grace. The one making for Jess screamed again and bared needle teeth, but the one on Khalila’s side of the hallway seemed confused. She held her hand up to show her gold band. It slowed, cocking its inhuman head.

Jess feinted to his left, and when the sphinx on his side lunged, he jammed his gun crosswise into the fearsome jaws. One of the paws swiped for him, and he heard Glain shout a warning even as he twisted to avoid it. He didn’t dare risk a glance at Khalila. This sphinx wasn’t going to hesitate to kill him, and he didn’t dare take even a second of attention away. It moved like a snake, like something unnaturally fluid, and his sweaty fingers slipped as he tried for the switch beneath the jaw. He missed, ducked a swipe, and heard metal crunching as the sphinx bit down on the gun. He tried for the switch again and got knocked off balance by a metallic head butt hard enough to send him flying backward. A massive paw armed with razor claws raked a path through the floor where he’d been. He hit, rolled off the wall, and came back low and fast.

This time, he flung himself around with one arm over the lion’s head and swung onto the beast’s back. The heat coming from it at this angle felt intense even through the layers of his uniform, but he ignored that, ignored the blood dripping from fingers that had grazed sharp claws on the way up, and wrapped both arms around the thing’s neck as it reared to try to throw him off. When it crashed down to four paws again, the mangled gun fell from the sharp-toothed mouth, and the sphinx’s head whipped around at an impossible angle to bite.

He got to the switch, somehow, just before it sank those teeth into his neck.

As he slid down, leaving the sphinx frozen in that unnatural, twisted position, he realized that Khalila’s sphinx was equally still . . . in a crouch, at her feet, like a particularly dangerous pet.

“Maybe I should let you do this from now on,” he said with a grin that felt half-mad, and she let out a laugh at least as uncontrolled. “We’ve still got one soldier and a Spartan to deal with. Reinforcements will come.”

“Then we should hurry.”

That was a new voice coming from behind them, and as Jess turned, he saw Glain and Santi had beaten him to it with impressive speed. They leveled weapons at the newcomer making her way down the steps, and Santi lowered his weapon first.

Morgan.

Glain said, “It can’t be. How in Hades did you . . .”

Morgan smiled, but it wasn’t for Glain at all. She was looking through the rest of them, straight to Jess, and the smile was for him.

“I brought what I could,” she said. “But we have to go quickly. I disabled the Translation Chamber to keep reinforcements from coming through from Alexandria, but Captain Santi’s troops will respond soon, and we don’t want to have to kill anyone.”

“Morgan?” Khalila said, and then repeated it with more force. “Morgan!” She rushed to her and clasped her in an embrace—one that the English girl returned full force. “I didn’t think you could leave the Iron Tower!”

“That’s a story for later,” Morgan said. Jess couldn’t take his eyes from her. How is she here? The Translation Chamber, obviously, but . . . It hit him then that the collar around her neck was gone.

She was free. Free. Just as she’d said she’d be.

He couldn’t quite believe his eyes, until she pushed past the others and wrapped her arms around him, and then he had to believe it—her familiar, remembered warmth, the scent of her hair, her skin. It felt right, having her in his embrace again.

Dario, of course, was the one to say, “Not that I’m not delighted to see you, too, Morgan, but can the welcomes wait? We’re on a schedule.”

He was right, of course, and Jess stepped away. Not without regret.

Glain wasn’t smiling. She was watching Morgan with cool, assessing eyes, and now she said, “This is strangely opportune timing. I thought it was impossible to escape the Iron Tower.”

“That’s what they want us to believe,” Morgan said. “There are several ways, actually, but getting the collar off was half the battle. I’ve spent months searching for a way to get out and stay out. When I found it, I waited until Scholar Wolfe made his move to join you. So the timing is exact. Not opportune.”

“You can understand her doubts,” Dario said, which was weaselly of him, sympathizing while still not agreeing. “We haven’t seen you since you were driven off by the Obscurist Magnus, apparently never to be seen again. One thing we know about the Library: it’s fully capable of turning us against each other.”

“You think you can’t trust me?” Morgan’s face set hard and she returned Glain’s stare, not Dario’s. “While you were being pampered and groomed, free to do as you liked, I was locked away. You have no idea where I’ve been.” She touched the skin at her throat: too pale, from long months of being circled by the collar. But the collar was gone. “I left my chains back in the Tower. And I’m not going back. If you don’t think you can trust me, fine—I’ll go my own way. But I’m not leaving until I see all of you safely out of here.”

Jess silently moved to her side, because suddenly there were sides, and at the very worst time. It lasted only a second, a terrible second, because Santi snapped, “No time for this. We trust her because we have to trust her. Now go.”

He moved past them, and Glain went with him. Dario and Khalila were next, with Wolfe, who was also—to Jess’s slight surprise—armed. The gun blended in with his black robes.

He seemed to falter a little, as if the memories had overwhelmed him. Morgan held out her hand to him. Wolfe looked at it as if he’d never seen such a thing and walked on.

“Well,” she said, “he’s not changed at all.”

“Come on,” Jess said. “Dario’s right. There’s still Thomas to find.”

“I was so worried you’d move faster than I could and I’d be too late,” she said, and her grip on his hand grew stronger. Almost painful. “I knew you’d left Alexandria. I was afraid—afraid something terrible would happen to you.”

“To me?” He forced a smile he didn’t quite feel. “Nothing ever happens to me.”

“Oh, I remember you collapsing with a wound that almost killed you after Oxford. You don’t fool me.”

“Shh.” He’d heard a scrape, and his instincts had spiked hard enough to hurt. There was a blind corner just ahead, and Wolfe was already passing the turn.

The noise had come from behind them.

Jess pushed Morgan ahead of him, toward Wolfe, and—though he’d sworn seconds ago he never would—let go of her hand. His shove sent her stumbling into the wall at the corner, and she turned back with a surprised expression that turned to horror, and Jess knew.

He did the only thing he could: he threw himself hard to the side, into the old stone wall, and a sharp-tipped bronze spear stabbed hard down into the floor where he’d been standing.

The Spartan automaton pulled the spear back with economical grace, turned its head, and the red eyes blazed at Jess from a distance of only an arm’s length away. This was no sphinx, no lion; it was in the form of a man, muscled and lean. Upright.

It slammed its left forearm toward him, and Jess ducked. He didn’t quite move fast enough, and the blow that grazed the top of his head made the world go soft and strange. Not pain, exactly, but he knew it was there somewhere, floating like a cloud that hadn’t quite rained yet.

“Jess!” Morgan’s scream pierced the fog like the Lighthouse’s focused beam, and he scrambled out of the way as the Spartan thrust down again. The spear tore through the leg of his uniform trousers and grazed his flesh; he felt skin part, but again, no pain. The spear’s tip was too sharp to hurt, like a Medica’s scalpel. He was seconds from dying and he knew it. All he could do was scramble and try to estimate where an engineer, a good engineer like Thomas, would have placed the safety switch for this particular design. He didn’t know. It looked like a man, taller and broader and faster than a man. The face under the Spartan helmet was unmoving, as uncaring as any beast. It won’t bite, at least, he thought. The mouth was half-hidden under the helmet . . .

The helmet? No, too high up. He’d never reach it. If he tried any approach from the front, he’d be killed before he could even try a switch, if one even existed in a spot he could find.

He was going to die. Maybe he’d known that from the first moment he’d seen the Spartan automaton on the High Garda grounds. He remembered feeling a shiver of premonition about it.

His brain was racing like a river in full flood, uncontrollable in its search for some way to survive. It directed his body without conscious thought, rolling, diving, scrambling on all fours like a crab, and when the Spartan lifted one sandaled foot to crush him, he remembered something.

Something from a favorite book he’d read a dozen times as a child. Talos, the bronze titan who fought Jason and his men aboard the Argo. A metal man who could not be hurt, could not be defeated.

Talos had been stopped by the removal of a plug at his heel, which had drained away the vital fluid that moved him. So the story went.

The engineers who’d designed the Spartan had read the same stories, dreamed the same dreams.

Jess hit the ground behind the Spartan and reached out blindly for the backs of the statue’s legs with both hands, sliding fingers down the unnaturally warm bronze. It twisted around, shifting position to spear him like a fish. He saw the head tilting down toward him. The spear lifting.

His hand found a slight depression in the metal of the automaton’s heel on the left side, and he pressed in with his thumb and rolled aside, gasping for breath, hoping he’d not just killed himself.

It was just as well he moved, because the Spartan retained enough power to bring the spear down one last time, hard enough to pierce the stone where Jess had been lying. It would have pierced his skull just as easily. He heard the whine of the gears inside grinding to a stop, the springs unwinding, and felt a surge of weakness that nearly put him down flat again. Then he felt giddy. He’d just become the world’s foremost criminal expert in stopping Library automata. That was worth something on the open market, surely.

“You’re bleeding,” Morgan said, and reached down a hand. He checked the floor around him, and, yes, he was, but not badly. A rain, not a flood. He grabbed hold and let her haul him to his feet, and then hung on to her for steadiness as the hallway rocked and spun around them. “Can you walk, Jess?”

“I can walk.” He wasn’t sure, but it was something to aspire to. “I’m all right.” He wasn’t. Definitely wasn’t. “Let go.”

“No,” she said, and there was no arguing with the way she said it. “Why is it that you’re always hurt when I find you? Is that my fault?”

He wanted to laugh, but the fog was clearing, and in its place pain had taken up a steady, red throb. Laughter would split his skull in two. “We need to find Thomas.”

“I know,” Morgan said, and her strong arm around his waist helped him find his balance again. “Come on.”

The third High Garda soldier they’d expected was down by the time Jess and Morgan arrived. Santi glanced at them, but then his gaze locked on Jess and the blood. “Are you all right?” It was only half concern. The other half of the question had to do with the viability of their escape if he wasn’t.

“I’m fine,” Jess said, though he knew he wasn’t. “I won’t hold you back.”

“Stop chattering,” Wolfe said, his tone as cold and bitter as winter. “Jess. Locks.”

For a blank second, Jess didn’t understand his order, and then he fumbled for his picklocks and moved past the men to the door of the cell.

“Jess,” said a quiet voice from beyond the bars. It sounded rough and strange, somehow familiar, and when he finally looked straight into the cell, he saw his best friend, Thomas Schreiber, sitting on the floor of the stone room. He was shackled to a metal ring in the wall. The big, young man had lost weight, which somehow made him seem larger without that comfortable layer of padding. He no longer looked as young and innocent as Jess remembered. He’d grown a beard, and his hair was a matted mess down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a plain oatmeal-colored shirt and trousers that were much worse for wear.

Jess wrapped his hands around the bars, partly to keep himself from falling as dizziness hit him, and said, “Got yourself in a mess, haven’t you, Thomas?”

“Jess,” Thomas whispered. Even with the beard, the hair, the changes in him, his smile remained gentle and kind. His eyes had an odd shine to them, and it took Jess a moment to realize it was tears. “They took our machine. They destroyed it.”

“Never mind. You can build another,” Jess said. His throat felt tight and his eyes burned until he blinked his own tears away. No time for that nonsense now. “Let’s get you out of there.”

He bent to the lock, but his fingers felt clumsy and his reasoning felt suspiciously slow. I have to do this, he thought. I have to get him out.

And then Khalila tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a ring of keys. “From the last guard,” she said.

Maybe I do have a cracked skull, he thought, and almost laughed. Three tries before he slid the key into the lock, and then the catch clicked open with a crisp sound that seemed to echo around the stones. Jess heard his friends letting out held breaths, and grinned despite the ache in his head and shoulder. He swung the door open and rushed in to kneel next to Thomas.

He had to pause, because Thomas was looking down at him, holding out his shackled hand. “It’s good to see you, Jess,” Thomas said, and his voice faltered. It sounded different now. Tears blurred his eyes. “Mein Gott, I thought—I never thought you’d really come. I didn’t think any of you knew. They told me . . .”

His voice faded away. Jess ignored the hand and grabbed him into a hard, fast hug. Best Thomas couldn’t see his face. Then he went back to the work of freeing him from the chains.

Scholar Wolfe was still outside the bars, and Jess realized he probably couldn’t bear the idea of stepping inside ever again. Wolfe said, “They told you we were all dead, didn’t they?”

Jess felt Thomas nod wearily, and blotted moisture from his eyes with the back of his sleeve as he worked the stubborn lock. Until this moment, he’d thought of Thomas in the abstract, just as he’d last seen him. Unchanged. Seeing what they’d made of him brought things home in ways imagination couldn’t.

“They described it,” Thomas said. “For every one of you. How you died. I tried not to believe it, but . . . but it’s hard not to here. This becomes all you know.”

“They lie.” Wolfe’s voice sounded low and silky, dark as midnight. “It’s their favorite tactic—I know it well—to break your mind and your spirit. I’m sorry it took so long to get to you.”

“If we’d tried to come earlier, the lies might well have become true,” Santi said, just as Jess clicked the last shackle open. He winced when he saw how raw Thomas’s ankle was beneath.

“Can you walk?” Jess asked. Thomas, for answer, stood up. And even though Jess knew how tall his friend was, it surprised him to see him towering over them again.

“Of course,” Thomas said, and then tried to take a step and had to grab Jess for balance. “Slowly.”

Santi’s expression didn’t change, but it was clear slowly wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear in strategic terms. Their time was running out fast. “Then let’s go,” he said. “As fast as we can.”

“Wait!” Thomas turned to look at the walls of his room, and for the first time, Jess realized they were densely covered with small, scratched drawings in Thomas’s precise hand. Machines. Automata. He’d drawn what looked like one of the Roman lions, then drawn it as if it had exploded into pieces, each one shown in context with the skeletal frame. “I need to remember these! I have to remember. I didn’t have anything else to work with—they wouldn’t give me any paper . . .”

“No time, Thomas. We need to move,” Glain said. “They’re coming.” There was a note of tension in her voice that convinced Jess instantly, and he pulled Thomas toward the door. There would be no moving the young man if he really wanted to resist, but Thomas went, although reluctantly, still turned to memorize his drawings. Once out of the cell, though, Thomas turned to the front, put his back against the bars, and sucked down a deep, trembling breath, as though for the first time it was dawning on him that they were here, it was not a dream, and he was actually free.

All of Jess’s pulling wouldn’t move him.

“Thomas?” He kept his voice quiet, firm, and calm. “We can’t stop here. The Garda are coming, and they will put us all in those cells. We have to go.”

“I know,” Thomas said. He closed his eyes and then opened them, and they’d taken on a blind, hard shine. “It isn’t an illusion, is it? You’re here. This is real.”

“Yes. It’s real.”

Thomas was silently weeping, and Jess wanted to hurt someone responsible for that. Badly.

“Keep going,” Jess called to Santi, who was taking the lead with Glain. “There’s a round metal plate in the floor that used to be a drain. Find it and burn through. That puts us in the sewer underneath. I’ve marked the way for once we’re down there. Oh, and there’s a lion. I hope it’s still stopped. I took care of it last night.” Strange that it seemed the least of their worries at the moment.

“Another one?” Khalila turned, eyes wide. “How long have you known how to do that?”

“Since the night Dario almost got me killed at Alexander’s tomb,” he said. “Ask him.”

She whipped around to do just that, but Dario held up his hand to stop her. “Later, desert flower, for mercy’s sake,” Dario said before she could begin the interrogation. “I know your curiosity is stronger than your sense of self-preservation, but I still don’t know how he did it, by the way. I ran for my life like any sensible person.”

“Jess didn’t run!”

“And that proves my point.”

Wolfe turned on them in a storm of black robes and bitter, angry eyes. He was, Jess thought, all but shattering down here, in this place where he couldn’t shut out the memories of his time behind these bars. “Do you think this is a game?”

Even Dario fell silent at the vicious tone and, more than that, the way Wolfe’s voice broke in the middle. He was trembling. Sweat shone hot on his face, though it was cave-cool down here. Santi—still on alert—reached back and put a hand on his arm, and Wolfe dragged in a tortured breath and nodded.

“Are there others?” Jess asked Thomas. “More prisoners here?”

“Yes,” Thomas said quietly. He was watching Wolfe as if he understood him perfectly. As if he was watching himself. “A few. Most don’t stay long. They—they’re taken away.”

“Released?” Morgan asked.

Thomas shook his head. Jess didn’t want to ask any more.

They were hurrying along now and keeping their voices low. Jess heard nothing behind them yet, but he was sure pursuit would be coming fast. The prison was larger than he’d thought and stretched in a long, straight hallway of cells, some occupied, and he couldn’t look inside, couldn’t, for fear he’d see the face of someone he knew staring out. Khalila had, just ahead of him. She’d stopped, grabbed the bars of a cell, and was looking inside. When she turned to Jess, her eyes were blind with tears. “We have to let them out,” she said. “Please. Help—”

He took out the keys, but his hands were trembling. Nearly useless. Focus, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure he could. It was all too much, too fast. Dario silently took the keys and tried them, one after another. The desperate person behind the bars didn’t seem to care. It was impossible for Jess to tell the gender or age; it was just a dark shape huddled in a corner against the wall, chained as Thomas had been.

The keys didn’t work.

“Maybe they’re on one of the other guards. I’ll get them,” Dario said, and went back the way they’d come. He didn’t get far before he reversed course and came back fast. “No time,” he said. “They’re coming. Go. Go!”

“But—” Khalila looked absolutely tormented. Dario took her by the arms and pulled her away from the cell. “No, we can’t—”

“We must.” He held on when she tried to yank away. “Khalila. Querida. Look at me. We can’t help them if we’re all dead!”

He was right. It hurt, and he was right, and Jess finally dared to look into the cell, into the face of the one they were leaving behind.

He didn’t know the man. That was a terrible relief, and then a terrible guilt, too. “I’m sorry,” he said, and helped Thomas as they followed Dario and Khalila down the hall.

He didn’t look in any of the other cells. Wasn’t sure he could stand it.

The left turn ahead dumped them into a large, circular room with age-scrubbed frescoes on the walls. It was lined with . . . What were these things? Mechanical devices. Jess tried not to think what they were intended to do, but the spikes, straps, wheels, gears made it all too evident once he focused on the evil things.

It was a torture chamber.

There were no exits.

Jess froze for a moment, thinking, What did I just do? But then he pushed past the others into the center of the room. This was the right place; he knew it was. This chamber was a perfect round replica of the one below their feet, off the sewers. But there was no sign of any metal plate in the floor.

It has to be here, he thought, and pushed aside the thudding headache to concentrate. His eyes fixed on a device in the middle of the room.

“Here! Move this!” he said, and pushed at a particularly large construction that looked like a bed, but with gears and ropes and straps stained with old blood. The stench of it—of the whole room—made his throat close up, but he gritted his teeth and shoved, and Santi and Dario joined him. The machine moved with a long, agonizing screech of metal on metal—because it had been partially blocking the round metal plate set in the center of the floor. The plate was stamped with the screaming face of a monster with snakes for hair—a Gorgon. Ancient work. It had been sealed for a very long time.

Santi removed the Codex from his belt and—to Jess’s surprise—dropped it on the ground before he took a sealed, padded bottle from his pack and said, “Leave your Codices here. Stand back.”

Jess hadn’t thought of it, but Santi was right, of course; the Codex that was so familiar a tool to him could be used against them. It could be tracked, couldn’t it? The Archivist would have Obscurists on it in moments. Morgan had already dropped hers, and so had Wolfe. Jess put his down on the floor, obscurely careful about it, and watched as Glain did the same. It took Khalila and Dario far longer to decide to let go of this last tangible symbol of the Library; Khalila put hers down reverently, as if it might break, and whispered something that sounded to him like a prayer as she pressed her fingertips to the cover.

Then Santi opened the bottle and poured the thick greenish contents over the stack of books. They flared up into a brilliant pyre, and Jess pulled Thomas and Morgan back from the billowing toxic smoke. We’re Burners, Jess thought, stricken. Now we’re Burners.

Through the hanging pall of smoke, as he started to cough, he saw Santi take out two more bottles and pour them over the Gorgon face of the metal plate. This time it didn’t burn; it bubbled as it distorted the Gorgon’s snarl into a slack-mouthed scream, and then hissed and melted it away altogether. The plate was thick, but the chemicals would do the job . . . if they had time.

Jess heard sounds from the hallway. He moved toward the opening, and what started as distant running footsteps rapidly came closer. They were still in the other corridor, fast approaching the sharp corner. He exchanged a look with Glain, and without a word spoken, they moved to take up positions. He was, by common consent, the better shot, and before anyone appeared at the intersection, let loose a short burst of lethal projectile fire that chewed head-high holes in the old stonework. An explicit warning to the troops around the corner. In the next second, before the echoes died, he switched the weapon back to a stun setting—enough to put someone down, he hoped, if he scored a good shot. From his angle, he’d get the first pick of targets, and Glain would clean up.

The first man to the corner was Blue Squad leader Rollison. Troll threw himself into the opening with fearless disregard for his own safety, maybe hoping that Jess would hesitate to fire, but Jess didn’t: he planted his shot precisely on target, into the armor just above Troll’s stomach. It would, he vividly remembered, knock the wind right out of a man.

Troll dropped like a suit of empty clothes, mouth open as he gagged for air. Glain got the next soldier to appear, Jess the third. The rest hesitated and dragged their injured comrades back to cover.

“We’re through,” Santi said from behind them. “Glain, get down to the next level. Go. Now.”

“I’d rather hold this position, sir.”

“I need you to be sure our escape route’s secure. Take Wolfe with you and don’t let him resist.”

Before either of them could protest, Santi walked right past them into the opening. Into the hallway. Glain hesitated, then—as she would, being Glain—followed orders, grabbing Wolfe and pushing him toward the open dark hole in the floor.

Jess took in a deep breath and focused on Santi, who was putting his own life on the line to buy time. He raised his weapon to provide what cover he could, though if anyone on the other end decided to rain fire, Santi wouldn’t survive.

Captain Santi strode halfway down the hall and called out, “Zara?”

There was a short silence, and then Santi’s lieutenant—the green-eyed woman—stepped around to face him, with her gun pointed squarely at his chest. “Sir,” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You know what I’m doing. You saw the cells. Don’t tell me you agree with what they do here. What we do here. The Library is us. We allow this to happen, Zara.”

“Whether I agree with it or not, I can’t let you take prisoners out of custody! There are ways we can make protests. Channels for—”

“Do you really think that the people who made this place care about protests or channels or laws? Come here and look, Zara. Look at what they do.”

The woman didn’t answer. She stared at Santi for a long moment, and Jess couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Not at all.

Then she said, “Nic, please. Don’t make me do this. We can make a story that you were forced into helping them. I don’t know, but we’ll make something work. You can’t throw away your career. Your life! I know this is—it looks bad. But it can be fixed. It will be fixed!”

“It won’t,” he told her. “I’m sorry. They’d never believe I didn’t know what I was doing. And I did know. I went into this knowing full well how it would go.” Santi’s voice was gentle but firm. “Zara, I’m not asking you to join me. I’m just asking you to come with me and look. If you don’t agree once you’ve seen what is in this room, then shoot.”

She blinked slowly, looking at him, then at the troops surely queued up behind her, just around the corner. “I’m going with him,” she said. “Give me one minute. If I don’t return, shoot to kill. Is that understood? They may be wearing Scholar’s robes, but they are traitors to the Library. No mercy.”

“Sir.” The echoing voices sounded dark and sure. Wolfe and Glain were already gone, as was Morgan. Dario and Khalila were helping Thomas through the opening and struggling with his weight. He dropped out of sight. Dario quickly gestured at Khalila to follow, and she let him take her hands and lower her down. With one last glance at Jess—Almost an apology, Jess thought—Dario jumped through and disappeared.

Santi walked his lieutenant down the hall toward Jess. “I don’t want to fight my own people,” he said. “No more than you want to fight me.”

“Why are you doing this? Just tell me that.”

“Just look.”

Santi walked her into the round room filled with machines—machines built to cut, to tear, to pull, to cause suffering and anguish. There was no other use for them. The stained walls and floor told the story without any words. The smell of pain and blood and despair was louder than screams.

Zara stopped in her tracks. She stared at the room, the gruesome equipment, the floor . . . and then back at Santi. She started to speak, then shook her head.

“Christopher was here,” Santi said. “He was here. Do you understand now? This is what they don’t tell us. This is who we serve. Who those people have made us.”

“No. It’s not—” She took in a trembling breath. “Someone has to keep order,” she said. “Our hands aren’t clean, either.”

“The High Garda fights wars; we don’t torture the innocent or the guilty. This is what they made us into. I’m asking you to say you arrived too late to stop us, Zara. That’s all I’m asking.”

The woman stood very still, looking at the room, hearing the silent screams trapped here, and Jess saw tears glitter in her eyes.

Then she lifted her gun and trained it directly on Captain Santi. From where Jess stood, he couldn’t tell if she had set it for lethal force or stun, but the look in her eyes said she meant to kill. “Surrender now, and maybe the Archivist will show you mercy.”

“Mercy?” Santi’s voice was as dark as the dried blood on the walls. “Look around. Does it appear to you the Library has an abundance of that? Shoot me. You’ll have to, to stop me.”

She would, Jess realized. She wasn’t like Santi. Like Jess.

She couldn’t admit her world was a lie and everything she’d done had been in the service of something dark.

Jess fired, but he was too late. She fired at exactly the same moment his bullet hit her armor.

Zara and Santi fell at the same time.