sake. It wasn’t that he wanted Gertrude to feel the summer air on her skin one more time. It was that he wanted a wife. He wanted company.”

“True.”

“I love Heather. Loved. I loved Heather. But not more than I love myself. If we survive this, I’m going to wind up alone, now. At least for a while. That’s just the way it is. You’ll leave, and maybe Isola will stay, but I have a feeling we’ll both be alone for a while, a long while, even with the other around.”

He laughed, all of a sudden. “That’s the best-case scenario.”

“How do we get to that scenario?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know one thing, though. We’ve got to kill Sebastian. There’s no coming back from what he’s done.”

“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as ‘beyond redemption’ in my book,” I said. “I try not to believe in vengeance, only solving problems. If that means we’ve got to kill him, I won’t cry. But there’s always coming back from what we’ve done. The path back into the light is always there, even if most people won’t take it and sometimes you need to kill them if they won’t, in order to keep yourself or your community or even strangers safe.”

Vasilis shook his head. “Any other situation, I’d probably agree with you.”

I didn’t want to argue nitpicky shit about creating societies with radically transformed ideas of crime and punishment. I also didn’t want to get up off the couch to get away from him. Surprisingly, I didn’t want him to get up either. Talking doesn’t always help with panic, but it was helping just then.

“What’s with the spade?” I asked, nodding toward his tattoo, to change the subject.

“I was a different man, when I was younger. Gambling man. Lost a bet. I’ll tell you one thing that a drunken face tattoo is good for—it’s good for teaching you not to regret.”

“You ever think about getting it removed?” I asked.

“Hell no. I love this thing. How many librarians do you know with face tattoos who run a library that they technically stole from the state?”

“You’re the only one,” I said.

“Damn straight.”

“There’s nothing in here,” Doomsday said, standing up at last, setting the book atop Heather’s body like she was a table. “Nothing that’s gonna help us.”

“What we need is a distraction,” Gertrude said. She was handling the whole thing rather well. I suppose she had nothing left to fear.

“Like what?” I asked. I peered out the narrow crack between the wooden shutter and the window. Most of the crowd was still there, leaning on cars, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. Sebastian Miller stood sentinel in the middle of the street, staring intently at the front door. It had been what? Eight hours? Our magic feds were nowhere in sight, which was not reassuring.

“I bet they’ll let me go. Me and Isola. We’re not with you. We know those people. I bet they’ll let us go, and we’ll figure out something.”

“You’re the two that Sebastian was trying to kill,” I said.

“He won’t, not with everyone else watching. Sebastian always cared a lot about what people think of him.”

It was a dangerous plan, but it wasn’t “get to the roof and start shooting” dangerous, and it was better than anything else we’d come up with.

I followed her downstairs to the front door. Isola was easy to convince.

Gertrude opened the door a crack. “Don’t shoot!” she yelled. “It’s me! Ms. Miller! I’m coming out!”

She slipped out, Isola close behind, and I slammed the bar back in place behind them. I was trapped inside again.

Fuck, I wish I’d been able to join them.

* * *

“I wonder what they’ll do.”

I was back upstairs, back on the panic couch. It didn’t hit me so bad this time, maybe because whether or not it was me doing something, I knew that someone was doing something. I knew that the current situation would not continue indefinitely. Even without physically moving, every passing minute got me closer to not-in-the-library as surely as if I was walking toward the exit.

“Fuck off and leave us here,” Vasilis said. “That’s my guess.”

Thursday and Doomsday sat on the love seat, quietly whispering. Vulture was asleep in Isola’s bed. Brynn paced, her boots a rhythmic clomph clomph on the floor. Every time her circuit took her past the window, she peered out for a second.

“Hey,” she said, on one of her rounds. She motioned us over. “Check this out.”

In the distance, from the west edge of town, a thin trickle of smoke turned into a billowing cloud erupting up toward heaven.

Isola’s house was on fire.

EIGHT

“They’re leaving,” Brynn said.

“All of them?” Thursday asked.

“Yeah. Wait. No. Almost everyone. Mr. Miller’s still there, plus some other guy.”

Vasilis went to the window and looked out. “Arthur Dawson,” he said. “Runs Dawson’s. Probably Miller’s best friend in town.”

“He armed?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Take to the roof?” Thursday suggested.

“Wait, what the fuck is that?” Brynn asked. The rest of us stacked up by the window to peer through the crack to see what she was talking about.

Sebastian stood on the street, his face shaded by a baseball cap. In front of him, a tall, thin man in blue jeans held a pistol in his hand and had another holstered at his hip. Sebastian’s rifle, though, was leaning against a parked car, and Sebastian had some stubby black device in his hand.

Sebastian stepped up to his friend and jabbed him in the side while simultaneously muffling him with an elbow around the face. Arthur went down, thrashing.

“What the fuck is he doing?” Brynn asked.

“Taser,” Vulture said.

“Whatever it is,” I said, heading for the stairs, “we’re going to stop him.”

Informal decision making is great: when there’s time, you bicker about what to do; when there isn’t, you just go for it. My friends were right behind me.

The ground floor of the library was empty, had been empty for days. It already looked abandoned—rats gathered on the checkout counter. Sunlight cut thin

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