Chapter 20
Do you have a plan?” the Gallerist asked.
Full Librarian access meant I could message the other branches.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of half the contact list (what exactly was the Banned Books Directive?
the Cloud Codex? the Wordsmithing Forge?) but I’d managed to shoot emails off to the Gallerist and the Programmer, and they’d both come at once at my message flagged Urgent.
They arrived not by the main door but through the stacks, and I wondered aloud if they’d hitched a ride in on that Arnold Bocklin ferry boat from the Isle of the Dead painting.
I swallowed, feeling with a spasm of panic that people like this should not be looking at me for the plan.
I was not the person with the plan. I was the person looking for someone else—an adult, or at least a more responsible, more experienced, adultier adult than me—to provide the plan.
But right now, that option was off the table.
“I do have a plan,” I gulped, and outlined it.
They didn’t laugh in my face, which was nice of them.
Neither looked exactly enthusiastic either, but not much about the situation we found ourselves in called for pompoms and confetti.
“I’ll take Shahrzad, then,” the Programmer said, touching the Librarian’s hand with its emerald ring, and I wondered if he’d given it to her—wondered how many decades he’d had to know the Librarian to even learn her name, much less be invited to use it.
“I’ll tuck her away with the healing acolytes at the Temple of Kynareth in Whiterun.
If anyone wants to get at her there, they’ll have to fight their way through every side-quest in Skyrim first.”
I nodded. I didn’t want the Librarian anywhere near Elizabeth or her Board members when it came time to let them in.
Which I was going to do: I’d already emailed Elizabeth through the tablet that I’d returned to the Library but would admit the Board as promised when they arrived tomorrow morning (well, morning for them; a few changeless hours for me).
I was trying not to find Elizabeth’s lack of response ominous.
“I’ll make calls to the people you mentioned.” The Gallerist checked off a list in their little leather-bound notebook. “I can’t make guarantees that anyone—”
“I know.”
“You’re sure you don’t want us here?” the Programmer wanted to know. “Backing you up at the Board meeting?”
I did. Desperately. Having the Gallerist’s elegant unflappable presence at my back, the Programmer’s faint Cockney drawl and broad arms, would be distinctly comforting.
But— “If I have written statements from the two of you, that should do. According to the bylaws, anyway.” I’d been crash-coursing myself through everything the tablet could teach me about the Library Board and the annual meeting rules of operation.
There were a lot of them. (Aren’t there always, when it comes to bylaws?) “I wish I could have you both here, but you should be looking to your own domains. If the Board wants to take control of this place, they might want the Astral Gallery and the—” Oh, hell, I couldn’t remember what the Programmer’s domain was called.
“AGNIS,” he said. “Astral Gaming Network Interspace System.”
“Right. Well, go back and start raising your defenses, both of you, because I have a feeling this”—waving one of the annual meeting notices—“is only the beginning.”
“What are they planning to do to this place?” the Gallerist asked, looking around at the anxious books.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I really don’t.
Elizabeth kept lapsing into all this bureaucrat-speak.
‘Essential modernization’ and ‘updated business model’ and ‘monetized programming.’” And I felt a moment’s blunted anger at the Librarian for isolating herself here with her Patrons and her live books, rather than taking this on before it became the juggernaut now bearing down on me.
“‘Monetized programming?’” The Programmer blinked. “What are they trying to turn us into, alternative arts?”
“Maybe a bit of modernization wouldn’t be so bad.” The Gallerist sounded like they were trying to convince themselves as much as me.
“Elizabeth thinks the ideal library is only one-quarter books,” I stated, and we all traded dark looks.
Dennis the ghost jostled a decanter of brandy on the nearest table with a clatter of crystal as if suggesting we all have a good stiff drink, but there wasn’t time.
The Gallerist sighed and headed out in a flutter of Hermès silk and the Programmer soon followed, bringing the Librarian behind him on a raft of anxious, floating books that carried her like an airborne gurney.
And I was alone, but I wasn’t really alone.
Can a bookworm ever really call herself alone when she’s surrounded by books?
“For the last time,” I asked the green tablet, “can I really not just morph into dragon form? Because I could take Elizabeth and the whole Board out in a few good chomps if—”
But the tablet rolled out a big unblinking NO, just as it had the first, second, and third times I asked.
There were some things apparently even full Librarian status could not grant access to right away—the Librarian had said it had taken a hundred years or so for her dragon to come in.
Which frankly was a real shame. If I could access myself some wings, fangs, and claws, I’d munch Elizabeth down with a bottle of hot sauce and sleep like a goddamn baby afterward.
Because now that the shock had worn off and the bleak reality of the fight I’d chosen was dawning, something else was rising in me and that was rage.
At Elizabeth, for the casual just-doing-my-job way she’d exploited my precarious little life and its various buried traumas so she could get her foot in the door of a world that didn’t want her; at the Library Board, who had blithely voted to maim the Librarian all because she’d declined to cooperate with the people who had voted to steal everything I owned or was. Rage at all of them.
But rage wasn’t going to give me dragon scales and dragon teeth, so I bid that particular fantasy goodbye with a pang of regret, and pulled a chair up to the big oak counter. “All right,” I told the green tablet, swiping over to the drop-down menu for Library history, “we’ll do this the hard way.”
I’d never actually peeled the backing off my mom’s old curling bumper sticker—every home I’d ever been to, I just stuck it up with a thumbtack because I knew I’d probably be moving on soon. But I peeled the backing off now and smacked that sticker front and center across the long oak counter:
They Got the Library at Alexandria—They Aren’t Getting Mine.
And I pulled up Library History on the tablet and sank into the bylaws to prepare the Library’s defense.
Because if you want to beat a lot of bureaucrats at their own game, be prepared to beat them with words .
. . And maybe I was a loser who’d never gone to college, a foster kid who’d largely educated herself with a library card, but I was a pissed-off sesquipedalian bitch crammed to the gills with words.
I had a dozen pages of notes and was halfway down the silver pot of perpetually hot coffee the Library had thoughtfully parked at my elbow when I heard a knock.
“Is that the Gallerist sending their written statement over, Dennis?” I called to the ghost, who had put down War and Peace so he could hover at my elbow all evening like a spectral secretary, periodically bringing me texts on Astral Library history and refilling the plate of lemon-lavender shortbread and Girl Scout Thin Mints at my other elbow.
“If it is, thank them for me and take their statement along with the Programmer’s. If any more come in—”
“Who’s Dennis?” a familiar voice called, floating through the Library door panels, and my head snapped up so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.
I stared a moment, then I pushed back from my chair and stumbled around the long oak counter, almost tripping over my pins-and-needles feet as I ran up the staircase and flung the door open to reveal—
Beau Sato-Jones.
Not Beau as I’d ever seen him before, I realized in a split-second head-to-toe glance.
He’d always been dressed in some exquisite hand-tailored ensemble, a walking advertisement for his shop in a Regency frock coat and Hessian boots, or a Japanese yukata with stenciled willow trees, or a reproduction of the gold brocade kaftan worn by Czar Nicholas II to a Winter Palace costume ball—but here he was on the Library’s doorstep in a heather-gray T-shirt and old jeans, looking rumpled and hollow-eyed, not so much as a single flick of eyeliner at his lashes.
This was Beau stripped down to brass tacks, exhausted and rumpled and struggling to hoist an enormous box under one arm, saying quietly, “Can I come in, czarina?”
I yanked him in fast, before Library Security could appear.
Though he hadn’t entered through the BPL—behind him I saw a sliver of dingy metal book stacks belonging to some underfunded branch library, visible in the barest glimpse before I slammed the door shut.
“Where did you walk in from?” I asked, and then directed my second question at the Library itself, demanding, “I thought we were in security lockdown, and here people are waltzing in and out like Kenmore station at rush hour?”
The tablet blatted at me crossly from the counter as Beau answered my first question. “I came in at the shitty little branch library near the fabric store where I stock up on thread and beads for the shop.”
“Why?” I made myself ask, throat suddenly thick. Because he’d stamped out of here pretty heatedly, without a backward glance.