Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (41 page)

J
ess opened his eyes on a dark, windowless room that stank of mold and the river.

River.
Not the ocean. He knew this smell. It was even stronger than the vile stench of burned books that still clung to his skin and clothes.

It smelled like . . . home.

The next second brought memory and a sharp stab of fear.
Was
he alone? Had the others been lost somewhere in that terrible, screaming silence? But no, he heard a scrape of movement and a moan and rattling, phlegmy coughing, all from different spots around him in the dark.

He heard Morgan whisper, “Jess?” and flung his hand out toward her. He missed and slapped wet stone, then tried again. His fingers brushed cloth with hard edges beneath. A pack. A pack full of books. He rolled over, every muscle seizing in pain, and managed to crawl another foot closer. This time, he touched Morgan’s skin. Her arm. “Jess?”

“I’m here,” he croaked. His mouth tasted like sewage, and he desperately needed water to wash it clean. “All right?”

She burst into frantic tears and threw herself into his arms, and he held on. He didn’t know which of them trembled harder. It didn’t matter. They’d seen something so terrible, neither of them would ever forget.

All that knowledge, lost. Wolfe’s mother. So much gone.

Someone was upright, stumbling in the dark, and fell over something in the way.

“Scheisse!”
Thomas. Thomas was alive. “Jess? Jess!” He sounded desperate. Of course he would be. Alone in the dark again.

“Here,” Jess gasped. He let go of Morgan, though he kept tight hold of her hand. “Thomas?”

“Here,” the other boy said faintly. “I fell on something.”

Jess reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out a glow; he shook it and held it out, and there was Thomas, sitting spread-legged on a damp concrete floor. What he’d tripped over was the mound of bags—packs, canvas duffel sacks.

The books. The Black Archive books.

The last ones. The survivors.

“Easy,” Morgan said, and knelt beside Thomas with her hand on his back. “We’re here. We’re all right.” She looked up at Jess with a panicked question in her wide eyes. “Aren’t we?”

He didn’t answer. “Khalila? Glain?”

“Here,” Glain groaned, and Khalila responded a few seconds later.

“I’m here, too,” Dario said, very quietly. Jess swung the light around and saw the Spaniard against the wall, shivering. The light reflected weirdly in his eyes.

Tears.

“Jess.
Jess, stop,
” Morgan said, and Jess realized he’d been moving toward Dario with a deadly serious intent. “Leave him! He helped us!”

“Leave a traitor to put a knife in our backs again?” Jess still had the gun he’d been firing in the Iron Tower, and the deadly weight of it felt good in his hands as he stared at Dario. “Khalila?”

“Leave him for now,” she said. “We’ll watch him closely. Where are we?”

“Smells like London,” Jess said.

“London smells very bad.” Thomas’s voice was choked but a little steadier now. “This isn’t a Serapeum.”

“No. It’s—” Jess raised the glow and looked around. “Where are Wolfe and Santi?”

“Here,” Wolfe said. “Nic?”

“It’s not a Translation Chamber.” Santi, Jess realized, was already on his feet and shaking another glow to life. The sickly yellowish light revealed an empty hall with a high, arching ceiling like a church, but no windows to let in the light.
Underground,
Jess thought.
Somewhere near the river.

A symbol up high in chalk caught his eye, and Jess held his glow closer. “Smuggling route,” he said. “Belongs to the Riverrun Boys.”

“Yours?”

“Competitors,” Jess said. “My father’s not the only smuggler in town. The Riverrun Boys specialize in things other than books. Drugs, mostly. Nasty bunch.”

“Charming,” Wolfe said. His voice was as low and raspy as Jess’s. He’d breathed in a lot of smoke. “Why would she send us here?”

“There wouldn’t have been any chance for us at the Serapeum,” Jess said. “Dario’s betrayal would have seen to that. She must have known about this place. Maybe she’s even been here.”

“Unlikely,” Wolfe said. “My mother— Did you see—”

“Yes,” Jess said. “I did. I’m sorry.”

Wolfe said nothing. His eyes looked flat, lightless, utterly unreadable. The silence stretched a moment, and then he said, “We should find a way out.”

Jess broke out a glow of his own, and Glain had one, and they separated into teams to explore the room. It was wide and bare, and the exit that the Riverrun Boys must have once used had been blocked up with stones. Solid ones. London Garda had found this place.
If she brought us all this way only for us to die in a trap . . .

“Over here,” Glain called. She was leaning half her weight on Thomas, but she had a look of elation on her face. “I think these are steam tunnels.”

Jess felt a wave of disquiet. “Did you find a way out?”

“There’s a staircase leading up. It’s barred with a grate,” Thomas
said. “Welded shut, with the symbol of the English lion on it. London Garda?”

“Find something to force it,” Jess said, and began looking himself. “We may not have much time.”

“Why not? What is it?” That was Dario, who’d finally gotten up from his spot against the wall. Jess picked up a piece of rotten wood and tossed it aside without answering. “Jess, wait. I can explain—”

“I’m not listening,” Jess interrupted. “Look for something to break those welds. Hurry.”

“Why?” Santi asked.

“Because if Glain’s right, these tunnels vent scalding steam off of the city boilers. We need to break out of here. Quickly.”

“How often does it vent?” Wolfe asked.

“I don’t bloody well know! Every day? Every hour? The point is, we need to move. Now!”

That ended the questioning.

It was Khalila who came up with the solution, when a search failed to turn up anything else. She made an impatient sound, grabbed Jess’s weapon, and said, “Make it safe. Quickly.”

He did, sliding the safety switches and removing the cartridge, and she jammed it into the grate. “Now, Thomas. You’ve got the best leverage, I think.”

“I’ll try.” He sounded doubtful. His best effort popped half the weld loose, but then he stepped away, panting, flexing his arms. “I’m sorry. I’m still too weak.”

Santi stepped up and took a try and almost got it. One last try with both of them shattered the last of the welding, and the grate swung open with a rusty, stubborn shriek of hinges.

“Stairs,” Glain said gloomily. “Better let me go last. I’ll just hold you up.”

Khalila shook her head. “You come with me,” she said, and put her shoulder under Glain’s. “We’re not leaving you behind, so don’t start.”

They climbed up. When Dario moved toward the stairs, Jess shoved him back. Hard. “Not yet,” he said. “Why did you do it?”

Dario coughed, spat out black ashes, and wiped his mouth. “Do what? I went to the embassy. I thought I’d get help for us from my father. Instead the embassy called the Artifex.”

“And you sold us out. Just that easy. Coward.”

“No.” Dario wiped angrily at his eyes. “I would have given my life. But he had Khalila’s
family
, Jess. I couldn’t let him . . . I told him where you would have gone, to London, but you didn’t show up there. He asked me where else you would go. I said you would try to find the Black Archives. Jess, I didn’t know they were
in the Iron Tower.
”

Jess was silent. He’d effortlessly believed that Dario had turned on them. Why was that? What had Dario done to deserve that, really? Would he have done any differently with Khalila’s family at stake?

Dario gulped in an uneven breath. “I led him to you, is that what you want to hear? It’s true! I didn’t mean to do it or want to, but I did.” He was weeping, sobs hitting him like blows. “Go ahead. Hit me.
Hit me!
”

Jess might have, if only to stop the other young man’s self-pity, but he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and lifted the glow to check.

The opening in the ceiling had a thin curl of white mist coming out of it, like a lazy whisper. Something hissed far in the distance.

Something rattled. The hiss grew louder.

“I’ll hit you later!” Jess said, and shoved Dario up the steps ahead of him. He felt a wave of sudden heat wash over him, damp as clammy skin. He scrambled up and nearly slipped on the foggy stairs; the steam boiling up from beneath came faster now, a hot white cloud that seared his lungs when he gasped.

Dario grabbed him and towed him up the last few steps into the open air, and as Jess fell to his knees, a geyser of solid white steam shot up into the air behind him and climbed into the sky in a towering explosion.

Then it blew away in a hiss of hot droplets on the wind, and all that was left was a spray of water on the street where it had fallen.

Jess looked up at Dario, and for just a moment, he wasn’t angry anymore. Maybe that would come again later. Didn’t matter.

He nodded. Dario returned it and walked away.

Santi crouched next to Jess. “Can you breathe?”

“Yes,” Jess said. It hurt a little, but he didn’t think it was as bad as he’d feared. His skin was tender from the steam, but no worse than an Alexandrian sunburn. “I’m all right, sir.”

“Good.” Santi leaned back on his heels and looked around. “Where are we?” The day was cloudy, a typical enough London day, and the gray pall made everything look dim and ancient. Jess had no trouble placing the outlines of buildings and the expanse of the bridge, but it seemed darker than it should. Smoky.

“London. Close to the bank of the River Thames,” Jess said. “Near Blackfriars Bridge.”

“How far to the Serapeum?”

“Walking? Not close enough.” He looked around. The bridge was some distance, but he saw it was full of people streaming across. Odd, that. There normally wasn’t such congestion in the middle of the day to cross the river. He heard the distant honking of steam-carriage horns.

Morgan took out the Codex she’d put in the pocket of her dress. The quill had survived, and she unwrapped the padded bottle of ink and quickly dipped the pen into it to scribble on the open page. “I’m telling your father where we are,” she said. “And to call off his men at the Serapeum. There’s no sense in risking them there if we aren’t coming.”

Somewhere in the distance, Jess heard the sonorous noon strikes of Big Ben. “What does he say?”

“Nothing.” Morgan chewed anxiously on her lip, and he saw the moment writing began to appear in the sudden relaxation of her posture. “Ah, there—he says go to the warehouse. You know where that is?”

“Yes.” That didn’t lessen Jess’s sense of unease, not in the least. His father kept the warehouse utterly secure, and the eight of them were walking targets. Why would he send the Library’s most wanted fugitives to his most sacred hiding spot?

He wouldn’t. Not with any good intent.

“Ask him where Liam is,” he said.

“What? Who’s Liam?”

“Just ask.”

After a pause, she read off the reply. “He says he’s at the warehouse,” she said. “Why?”

“Liam’s my older brother,” Jess said. “He’s dead. That means you’re not talking to my father anymore. And we’re not going to the warehouse.”

J
ess sat in the shadows outside his family’s town house, eating a hot pie and watching the doorway. He’d been there for two hours, slouched in stinking rags with a nearly empty bottle of gin between his feet. It was cold and misty, and he now understood what the crush of traffic on Blackfriars Bridge had been about; it was all over the street corners, with urchins crying the news. The flexible sheet they sold him had constantly updating stories, war stories, written out quickly by scribes somewhere in a London office. There was a cleverly drawn illustration of soldiers in what looked to be Camden Town, judging by the street signs and shopwindows. They were carrying the Welsh dragon flag and setting fire to buildings as Londoners ran in fear. A few uniformed London Garda were being overrun near the edges of the picture. It was stylized but effective. Chaos, it seemed, had moved on from Oxford and was spreading fast. London was a vast city, but in some ways it was also curiously small, and Jess felt the prickles of unease on seeing those familiar street names and shops burning.