Chapter 10 #2
There were a lot of Ivan Volkovs. It felt silly, in retrospect, to assume there wouldn’t be.
There was a poet, a biochemist, a literary critic.
Lucy was nearly six pages into the results before she’d moved past the texts authored by Ivan Volkovs and into the texts about Ivan Volkovs.
She ran each results page through a Google Translate filter, hoping the long list of Russian and Bulgarian article names would yield some clue.
Instead, she got things like Victory of the Kolkhoz Construction Workers in the Belarusian SSR. Hammurabi, King of Babylonia.
Mass Development of Old and Abandoned Lands.
She had just begun to feel very, very naive for having any hope when her eyes skimmed the translated title at the bottom of the page:
The Mountain Villa Massacre: The Strange Case of the Volkov Family.
Lucy’s cursor paused. The result was probably just pulled in by the matching last name—at least, that was what she thought at first. But the small gray text at the bottom of the search entry read contains: ‘ivan volkov.’
She clicked. And despite the library’s ancient Wi-Fi, the next page loaded as quickly as a slap in the face. You’ve taken a wrong turn! read the cheery Comic Sans text. Redirecting…
With a short, frustrated sound, Lucy tried the link again. She could have sworn she was redirected back even quicker the next time.
Dead end confirmed.
She leaned back in her chair, and all the largely useless text on-screen blurred.
Maybe this Mountain Villa Massacre was just as useless.
If there was anything she’d learned from the last several pages, it was that there were a lot of Ivan Volkovs in the world.
But she had an hour and a half left to kill.
“Mila,” she whispered, leaning around the computer. “Do you mind if I—”
She clipped her question off halfway. Sometime in the past ten minutes, Mila had pushed her laptop back in order to pillow her head in her arms. Her back was rising and falling in a steady pace, and the fringe of her bangs partially, but didn’t quite, conceal a closed eye.
When Lucy carefully pushed her chair back and stood, Mila didn’t even flinch.
Lucy laughed softly. She figured that Mila’s two to three hours of sleep that morning hadn’t been sufficient, no matter how many times Mila tried to convince the both of them that it was.
But still. It was a little surprising to see exhaustion get the better of her.
Not many things seemed to get the better of Mila Rostova.
Her hand hovered above Mila’s shoulder. It would be sensible to wake her up and tell her where she was going. But she doubted that either of them would have a quiet night ahead. It couldn’t be a bad thing to let her rest a little while longer.
Carefully withdrawing a notebook and pen from her bag, she started to write on a fresh page. DON’T PANIC! she wrote first, in all caps. Going downstairs to reference librarian. If I’m not here when you wake up, the desk is on floor B2. Sleep well.
She backed away carefully, as if slipping around a sleeping lion. Hopefully Mila would see that before she armed herself in the middle of a crowded library. The black bow was safely in its bag at her feet. Ideally it would stay that way.
Lucy made her way out of the study room and back across the main floor.
She had a faint memory of where the reference librarian’s desk was from the library tour, but Natalie hadn’t taken them all the way there.
He’s cranky, she’d said, which was fine with Lucy.
With any luck, he could help her find the article quickly, and she’d be in and out.
She crossed out of the sunlight as she moved into the stairwell.
She still wasn’t used to the instant relief, like laying a cold washcloth on a headache.
Of course, she hoped she wouldn’t have a chance to get used to it at all.
She’d envisioned so many sunny walks across campus during her orientation tour.
So many hikes to nearby caves and waterfalls.
Now it felt as if she belonged down here, in the dark, with the worms.
Her grandmother used to tell her nothing was permanent: no circumstance, no feeling, no bad day.
It was something Lucy had repeated to herself over and over since she was young.
But that was far more comforting when the worst that could happen to her was living out a long, cramped life in Jacksonville, Florida.
There was a whole different kind of powerlessness in her potential future now.
She rubbed at her temples with a wince. The relief of the shade hadn’t lasted long.
There was a different pressure taking its place now.
Not the feeling of eyes on her, like she’d felt in Goldwell.
Not the intrusive creep of sounds and sensations, like she’d felt in the classroom.
This pressure didn’t quite have direction.
It was a wall over her head, steadily pressing downward.
Like the pressure shift of a summer storm.
Lucy realized then that her hand was quivering over the banister.
She was shaking. She was shaking like a Chihuahua, actually—she could feel it in her whole body.
Was there actually a storm brewing outside?
Her childhood cat used to crouch low to the ground when she felt them coming.
Maybe her own heightened senses could feel some of it, too?
She rounded the stairwell, past the B1 sign, and pressed on to B2. And the wall, steadily and gradually, pressed harder.
“What the hell,” she whispered. She could feel sweat springing up across the back of her neck.
Her scalp prickled, tickling the crown of her head.
This wasn’t fear. This wasn’t a feeling so much as an instinct.
Lucy had enough trouble reading her own human instincts, sometimes.
To read the instincts of the infection felt like a world beyond.
She took a breath and got a grip. There were no steam tunnels in the library. She wouldn’t be here unless Mila was completely sure of that. Which meant she was almost certainly alone in that stairwell, psyching herself out.
She wasn’t alone for long, though. There were a few bare signs of life as she stepped into floor B2.
There was definitely a small crowd in the first reading room she passed: No one was talking, but she could hear the faint scratches of their heartbeats through the door.
There was a set of stacks ahead in the main room, and at the very back, a horseshoe-shaped desk.
Lucy could make out a blond figure behind it, leaning over a book.
She’d made it. It should have been a relief. But as she approached, her legs gradually shook harder. Until it was almost too difficult to move.
He heard her coming. And he lifted his head.
His eyes, a pale and indifferent blue, met hers. And like lightning passing over her head, every nerve in her body rippled with electricity. The feeling of his attention was beyond weight. It was its own force of gravity. Even as she reeled under the force of it, she couldn’t help but come closer.
Vanya, she thought, at first. But even without knowing what Vanya looked like, the person at the desk could never be mistaken for the hazy impression of him in her mind.
He was tall and long-limbed, his hair more yellow-gold than sandy, handsome but etched with lines around his mouth and forehead.
When he looked at her, it wasn’t appraising.
It radiated sourness. It was like the atmosphere itself curling a lip in disgust.
And unlike Vanya, he was not young. Young was not a word Lucy had associated with Vanya until this moment. But as this man looked at her, Lucy felt sure that she’d never met anything older. Not even the mountains around them.
He closed his book. And a single lifeless blue vein jumped against his delicate jaw.
“Oh, no,” said the ancient creature at the Johnson Library reference desk. “Absolutely not.”