Some way down the corridor on the far side, once out of earshot, she said, “I apologize for that.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Kai replied. He twitched a shoulder in casual dismissal, seemingly fascinated by the beech panelling and decorated plaster ceiling. His voice was arctic in tone. “You’re quite right; I shouldn’t have made a noise and disturbed other students at work. I apologize for offending against the Library rules—”
“Look,” Irene said before he could get any more sarcastic, “don’t get me wrong. I’m not apologizing for being rule orientated.”
“Oh?”
“No. I’m apologizing for snapping at you to shut you up, because I couldn’t discuss classified information with someone else in the room.”
Kai took a few more paces. “Oh,” he said. “Right.”
Irene decided that was the closest to an apology she was going to get for the moment. “Our destination is quarantined,” she said briskly. “It’s listed as having a high chaos infestation.” Which meant its risk factor went way beyond simply dangerous, she thought furiously. What was Coppelia thinking, sending them there? If a magically active world was quarantined, that meant it had been corrupted by chaotic forces. Its magic had tipped just too far the wrong way in the balance between order and disorder. As Kai would have been told, chaos corrupting ordered worlds was an age-old and potentially lethal hazard for Library operatives. And it went against everything that the Library represented, as an institution upholding order. A high level of chaos would mean that they could expect to meet the Fae, creatures of chaos and magic, who were able to take form and cause disorder on such a corrupted world. And that was never good news.
“And there’s no balancing element that’s trying to bring the world from chaos back to order?”
“No. Either the dragons don’t know about that alternate, or they’re just staying well out of it.” What she didn’t say, as she was struggling to calm her own fears, was that without a balancing element, a corrupted world could tip all the way over into primal chaos. Nobody could be sure where the dividing line between chaos infestation and total absorption might lie. And she certainly didn’t want to find out.
Kai frowned. “I thought—that is, we got told in basic orientation that the dragons always interfere if there’s a high chaos level. That they could bring a world back into line. That the worse it got, the more likely they were to interfere.”
“Well, according to the records, there’s no sign of them there.” It might be true that the dragons disliked chaos, being creatures of law and structure. Irene had received the same basic briefing as Kai. But that didn’t necessarily mean they were going to interfere wherever it was found. From her own personal experience with alternate worlds, Irene had come to the conclusion that dragons preferred to choose their battles carefully. “Perhaps the world’s Librarian will know a bit more. His name’s Dominic Aubrey. He’s got a cover job on the British Library staff. Head of the Classical Manuscripts section.” She tilted her head to look at Kai. “Is something the matter?”
Kai shoved his hands farther into his pockets. “Look, I know they tell us students the worst possible scenarios in orientation so that we won’t try anything stupid. And they probably make them seem even worse than they actually are, but a world with a high chaos infestation with no dragons to even start balancing it . . . sounds kind of risky for a first assignment for me and for . . .”
“For a junior grade like me?”
“You said it,” Kai muttered. “I didn’t.”
Irene sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’m not happy, either.”
“So how bad is it?”
She considered running her hands through her hair, having a hysterical fit, and sitting down and not doing anything for the next few hours while she tried to figure out a way to avoid the job. “They have steam-level technology, though there was a side-note that recent ‘innovative advances’ had been made. The chaos infestation is taking the form of folklore-related supernatural manifestations, with occasional scientific aberrancy.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can expect to find vampires. Werewolves. Fictional creations that go bump in the night. You might also find their technology working in unexpected ways.”
“Oh well,” Kai said with jaunty enthusiasm. “No problem there.”
“What?”
“I’m from a gamma, remember? I’m used to figuring out magic. Even if I didn’t do it myself, we had to know how to work the system if we wanted to stay out of trouble. Magic always seems to involve taboos and prohibitions too. So all we have to do is work out what these are and then avoid them while we pick up the document or book. No problemo.”
Irene nodded. “So, high chaos infestation.” The thought clearly worried her far more than it did Kai. Possibly because she’d had experience with a chaos infestation before and hadn’t enjoyed it at all.
Chaos made worlds act unreasonably. Things outside the natural order infested those worlds as a direct result. Vampires, werewolves, faerie, mutations, superheroes, impossible devices . . . She could cope with some spirits and magic, where both operated by a set of rules and were natural phenomena within their worlds. The alternate she’d just come from had very organized magic, and while she hadn’t actually practised it, it had at least made sense. She hoped that she could cope with dragons too. Again, they were natural to the order of all the linked worlds, a part of their structure rather than actively working to break down order.
She had no idea where to start coping with chaos. No one knew exactly how or why chaos broke through into an alternate—or maybe that knowledge was above her pay grade. But it was never natural to that world and seemed drawn to order so it could break it down, warping what it touched. It created things that worked by irrational laws. It infected worlds and it broke down natural principles. It wasn’t good for any world it entered,
