Chapter Thirty-Four #2
Today, the water pressing on the atrium ceiling is a stormy grey, impenetrable.
The travellers, as she’s come to call them, drift back and forth, completely uninterested in her.
Even though her mind still can’t hold on to their true images, she’s started to identify some of them by feeling.
There’s one she calls the Nun, for the way their silhouette drapes like a habit.
With another, it’s not so much an image as a scent: the tangy, spicy smell of fresh-pressed olives.
None of them remind her of Chiron.
“Good evening, Keeper,” Cassandra says, with a certain amount of caution.
The Keeper glances up from her desk, and in that instant, Cassandra is struck by that dizzying sense of shapeshifting again, before the Keeper’s face regains its familiarity.
Tonight, her desk is piled high with ledgers, the writing snarled on the page and impossible to read, no matter how many times Cassandra tries.
Suddenly, Errata jumps up onto the desk, knocking over two bottles of ink. Cassandra flinches, but the Keeper gives Errata a couple of scratches behind his ears. His eyes close, as he kneads the ledger underneath him.
“I have no idea how he followed me,” Cassandra says apologetically.
The Keeper gives one of her rare, enigmatic smiles. “The river knows its own. But he is always welcome here.”
It doesn’t escape Cassandra’s notice that the pooling ink has vanished, the bottles once more upright as though they’d never been knocked over in the first place. And it’s quite possible that in the bookshop below, they haven’t.
Gently, she places the damaged books on the desk.
Each one is falling apart, with only the thinnest of frayed threads keeping the pages together.
But beyond that, the magic within is behaving erratically—too dangerous to hand over to a customer, and too distressing to the other books to remain above.
The Keeper stands up, sweeping the books in her arms. “Come with me, please.”
Warily, Cassandra follows her as she moves further into the bookshop below, past the tight rows of shelves behind the desk.
The architecture shifts uncomfortably around them, either accommodating Cassandra or hiding portions of itself away deemed too secret for mortal eyes.
The travellers thin out in number, but their motions are much more deliberate here, as though their proximity to the river is lending them solidity.
The Keeper brings her to an eddy of the river, tucked between two bays.
A window hangs in the wall between the bays, and dark velvet curtains block the view, while shadows dip and pool underneath.
Cassandra considers flinging them open to see what lies beyond, and then decides that she has quite enough troubled dreams as it is.
Carefully, the Keeper kneels down and places the books in the shallow water of the river. Instead of sinking to the bottom, they sit suspended beneath the surface, the waves around them trailing phosphorescent light where they break. Cassandra watches the current move back and forth, hypnotic.
So much power in the river. So much potential. And yet how little it must expend per book, given how many of them have made their way to the outside world. From down here, it’s beyond impossible to imagine that it could ever vanish.
Cassandra glances up to find the Keeper watching her, black gaze probing.
“What else have you come for, Cassandra Fairfax?”
Cassandra thinks, I need to ask about Chiron.
But her mouth shapes another phrase, the one that’s been hiding inside her head ever since she first heard about the paradox books. A little knowledge won’t hurt, she tells herself. Just to know, if she ever needs it, that it’ll be there.
“I—I heard I can take a book. Any book.”
A paradox book. What a dizzying amount of power. Perhaps this is why Chiron hadn’t told her—because he’d believed that kind of power wasn’t for someone like her.
The Keeper studies her. “And what would you do with this book?”
“I…”
The blue horizon. The boat. It doesn’t even need to be a boat, she thinks.
A ticket to a faraway place. And it would be more than a future for herself because with a paradox book, it would be the past, too: severing one timeline with a clean, quick snip, leaving behind the bloody mess she’s made of her life, to escape to another.
Then maybe that inexplicable urge to run, squeezing her chest, would cease.
She recalls Edmund’s warning. It would need a vast amount of power.
Power the river can no longer sustain. Maybe, she reasons with herself, a future to redirect the river would take that kind of unimaginable power.
But Cassandra isn’t the river; she’s just one person.
And the price for a paradox book—she would pay the price—would surely be worth it.
But then she thinks about the perpetual warmth of the bookshop, the cohabitation she has worked so hard for.
The satisfaction in the very simplest of things, like sweeping the floors clean, or listening to Byron sing along to her radio in the back.
Waking up without that fist of fear around her heart because even if she’s an imperfect owner—even if she’s a failure by Chiron’s standards—the bookshop is home.
“Was there anything else?” the Keeper asks.
Ask about Chiron. Ask about Maud.
Ask for the book that would change your life.
“Nothing,” Cassandra says.
She emerges upstairs, feeling unusually vexed with herself.
What kind of a thief is she, if she isn’t willing to take a little risk for the sake of a book?
A book that could ensure a future for herself, one where she doesn’t have to worry about people like Roth and Edmund Sharpe.
Where the past can’t touch her because it no longer remembers her.
Then she lets her eye roam over the bookshop again.
The gleaming brass fittings, polished weekly; the books, quiet and companionable on their shelves; the comforting lull of the river.
Her past is everywhere here, like fingerprints she can never scrub off.
But so is the present. Byron. Lowell. And the bookshop itself, that she’s already poured so much of herself into, like a glass that will never be full.
What makes you think that you can give it up now, if a decade couldn’t do it?
The voice that sounds like Chiron laughs quietly.