She hadn’t seen the old man. She hadn’t seen the slasher. She’d only heard that terrible wail, that sound. That lost, broken sound.
“It’s different here,” Max was saying. “It’s not like the city. Do you know that the whole place, all of it, is one big school? They saved the books, Nell, saved all that knowledge when the Genius tried to burn them! They want people to know things! Not like the Genius! They hid away and protected all the things that are important. Would people like that turn someone into an animal? How could they? Why would they?”
It was rare that Nell couldn’t think of something to say, but the urgency in Max’s voice, the mix of concern and certainty, pressed on her. And then there was the old man himself. She’d seen him in the sunlit room. She knew. . . .
“You don’t know, Nell,” Max was saying. “Really, you don’t know what you saw. We have a chance to learn here. To find out things we couldn’t ever dream of on our own. You do want to get home, don’t you?”
Blankly, she nodded.
Max heaved a sigh and stopped talking at last. In the silence, Nell looked at Jean and Kate, who were regarding all of them with round eyes. She looked at Susan, who stared back at her, something desperate in her face. And finally at Max, who was breathing heavily, eyes fixed on her.
“Just don’t break their rules,” he said in a low voice. “Just for now. They’re so strict about it. It would ruin everything.”
She had thought they were afraid the way she was afraid — of something real. But they were only afraid she would cause trouble, mess things up, step over silly lines that someone had drawn and pretended meant something.
The familiar urge to say no, she’d break whatever rules she wanted, rose up in her, and she almost shook her head. But the old man wasn’t the Genius. And this wasn’t the city. She really didn’t know. Slowly, she nodded.
“Good,” Max breathed. “Good.”
Nell sincerely hoped it was.
Ahush enveloped the sanctuary the rest of that day, and long after Max had returned to his own room, the silence gathered in the hallways, oppressing Nell. She was not used to questioning her own memory, to doubting the evidence of her senses. And yet maybe here, in Ganbihar, where buildings wavered and faces changed, what you saw, what you heard, was less solid than it was at home. Hadn’t she herself said real was different here? Maybe in a place like this, you could be fooled into seeing things that weren’t true.
She drove herself nearly mad with doubt after that. At last, when Susan and the younger girls had fallen asleep out of sheer boredom, she crept across the hall to the oak doors that led into the great library.
She looked down into the canyon of books and at the volumes that ran behind her on this level, the third. Max had said this place had saved knowledge, that here they wanted people to know things. She remembered the Guide’s warm voice, his saying that all who came here brought with them a question. Mistress Meva had said these were the books gathered from all of Ganbihar, from ancient times before the Genius, before the change. Books were solid. Books would help her.
She walked among the stacks, wondering in which of the thick, weathered volumes she would find an answer. She pulled out one and then another, but their titles confounded her: Seeding in Early Spring: A Planner, The Art and Mystery of the Tapestry, Foot Rot and Other Contagious Diseases in Goats. Not one of them seemed to promise anything but hours of tedium.
“Looking for something in particular?”
She turned to find a thin silver-haired woman with close-set, kindly eyes, brown except for a fleck of yellow in one of them. Everything about her was thin — nose, eyebrows, lips, jaw. And yet she gave an impression of contented fullness when she smiled. She wore a loose rose-colored top that flowed over a long, narrow black skirt. It made her fair skin seem pink, too, and the flowing, bright fabric stood out against the brown and gray and black of faded books and polished wood, a vivid surprise.
“I’ve been watching you wander the shelves awhile now. Maybe I can help you. I’m Mistress Bianna. I tend the books.”
Tender of books seemed a good name for her. She held one now, one long hand resting flat on its cover, like a person gentling a horse. Nell wished she’d given better thought to what she wanted. “I — I’m new here, and I wanted to understand . . .” She trailed off, not sure how to put it.
But the woman nodded brightly. “Ah. I see. You’re newer than you look. I wondered who would be out of rooms on such a day. But don’t worry.” She winked. “I never tell on those who love to read.”
Nell waited as the woman thought, her fingers running absently over the cover of her book. “So what to give you? Hmm.” Nell watched her eyes sweep the wall. She turned to lean against the wooden railing, surveying the acres of books below.
“I think I know,” she said after a moment. “It won’t be in this section, with the technical books. These are mostly tips on gardening.” She looked over her shoulder to grin at Nell and said, “The boring section, I call it.”
Nell smiled back.
“What you want is a little bit of a walk from here. Come, I’ll show you.”
Nell followed her across one of the bridges. She looked overhead as they crossed, to the distant skylights, white in the afternoon sun, and then down over the railings, to the tiles illuminated in squares that mimicked the pattern above. Mistress Bianna reached the twisted staircase and jogged down it, nimble as a child. She must
