Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
The day’s weak sunlight has long since departed, leaving a penetrating gloom that spills out of the bookshop and down its steps.
Cassandra has a brief flicker of unease at the thought of crossing the threshold, and then shakes herself.
Normally, Byron would have left the lamps on, so Cassandra would come home to a warm honey-glazed glow drizzling through the windows, painting the very picture of the bookshop at its most idyllic.
A picture that, until very recently, had only existed at the edges of her dreams—the ghost of a memory.
Cassandra looks through the darkness again and steels herself. The light switch is on the other side of the room, behind the desk. She’ll just have to remember to turn it on herself from now on.
She’s already survived the unsurvivable, she tells herself.
She’ll deal with this, too, and survive it, as she always has.
You just keep bouncing back, Roth had told her once, on a rare occasion where he’d been full of genuine admiration.
Fuck Edmund Sharpe. She doesn’t need his help, or anyone else’s, for that matter.
There’ll be another bookseller—perhaps not one as smart, as funny, as wickedly inventive as Byron—just as there’ll be other customers, other contacts. Other—
Ms. Fairfax.
Something spears through her heart.
She trips over an uneven floorboard and stumbles into the dark bookshop, closing the door behind her.
It’s no different to any of the other times she’s walked into it, or indeed, that time not so long ago when she’d first contemplated what it meant to stand on the other side of the door.
It’s just a room. It’s just a shop. But silence dominates, and even the whisper of rustling from the shelves can’t dispel it.
Is this what it’ll feel like from now on? Is this what Chiron felt, in those last living hours?
It would be different, a voice inside her head whispers, if you took a paradox book.
A paradox book would wipe her past clean. A paradox book would give her the chance to start over. She’ll never have to hear the name Cass Holt again, or the mistakes that have so irreversibly damned her future.
When midnight strikes, Cassandra is waiting by the archway. She glances back just one more time. But no one comes through the door. She’s on her own.
The Keeper is at her desk, as always, when Cassandra approaches. The river overhead is a stormy grey, and the travellers are unusually quiet, their footsteps barely a whisper. They gather around her, their shadows pooling on the floor. Above, thunder rumbles.
“What would you have from us?” the Keeper says, her dark gaze cool and distant.
As if she can already sense the betrayal. That Cassandra would rather have no river and a past swept free of sins save this one, than the river and the life she’s so spectacularly shattered.
Cassandra wets her lips. The river is dying anyway: Chiron failed; the society have failed; Roth has failed. A thief only takes—and that’s all Cassandra has ever been. So what does it matter if she takes again? Her hands grip the edge of the desk, wood cutting into her palm.
The Keeper’s expression turns steely. “What do you want, Cassandra Fairfax?”
“I…”
A clean slate. A boat. A chance to undo the last decade of her life.
“Cassandra,” the Keeper demands.
Then she hears the quiet sound of an anxious meow. Errata pads towards her, soaking wet from the river. Cassandra’s always wondered how he managed to traverse between bookshops. Magic—because that’s what the river is. Magic and that unfathomable first language and the touch of the world. Of home.
Her hands start to shake. She sinks to her knees, and rests her head against the desk, too exhausted to even cry.
“I can’t do it,” she whispers.
She has lost everything—and she’ll lose more, if the future has its way. But she can’t relinquish her hold on the river, on the bookshop. She’ll have it for whatever time is left, and then it’ll be gone, with all that its death implies. But it won’t be at her hands.
She can’t—and she won’t.
“I’ve wasted your time,” Cassandra says, getting to her feet.
As soon as she steps out of the archway, it closes up behind her, the last of its light vanishing. The bookshop is the pitch-black of early hours, a stranger to her.
A small, gentle voice in the back of her head that sounds a lot like Byron—that will always sound like Byron, without the paradox book to undo the link between them—suggests that she go to bed. But what point is sleeping when tomorrow will leave her in the same position?
She’s still done what she’s done. She’s still—
Something creaks, heavy. A footstep.
Cassandra has just enough time to suck in a breath to scream—but not enough to do it.
There is a short, desperate struggle. Too many bodies all at once, shoving to claim her.
An elbow catches her in the ribs; she kicks out and connects with someone’s meaty thigh.
A hand, stronger than hers, tries to press something doused in chemical scent to her mouth, and she bites down on fingers, as hard as she can. A man’s yelp. A curse.
“Fuck this,” someone says.
A blow to the back of the head, and the bookshop falls away.