He tilted his head. “Oh, they could always get rid of the paper.”
“Get rid of the paper?” She laughed. “Kai, this is the Library. We never get rid of anything here. Ever.”
He shrugged, clearly giving up on the enquiry. “Okay. If you don’t want to be serious about it, I won’t push it. Shall we get going?”
“Certainly,” Irene said, rising to her feet. “Please follow me. We can talk on the way.”
It was half an hour before he began speaking again, apart from casual grunts of acknowledgement or disagreement. She was leading the way down a spiral staircase of dark oak and black iron; it was too narrow for the two of them to walk side by side, and he was a few paces behind her. Narrow slit windows in the thick walls looked out over a sea of roofs. The occasional television aerial stood out among classic brickwork edifices and faux-oriental domes. Finally Kai said, “Can I ask some questions?”
“Of course.” She reached the bottom of the staircase and stepped aside so he could catch up. The wide corridor ahead was crammed with doors on either side, some better polished and dusted than others. The lantern-light glinted on their brass plates.
“Ah, if we’re going by foot to the exit point, isn’t this going to take a while?”
“Fair point,” Irene said. “It’s in B-395, you remember?”
“Of course,” he said, and looked down his nose at her. He was several inches taller than her, so that allowed for a fair amount of condescension.
“Right.” She started off down the corridor. “Now, I had a look at the map before you came in, and the closest access to B Wing is down this way and then up two floors. We can check a terminal when we get there and find the fastest way from there to 395. Hopefully it won’t be more than a day or so from where we are.”
“A day or so . . . Can’t we just take a rapid shift to get there?”
“No, afraid not. I don’t have the authority to requisition one.” She couldn’t help thinking how much easier it would have made things. “You need to be at Coppelia’s level to order one of those.”
“Oh.” He walked in silence for a few steps. “Okay. So what do you know about B-395?”
“Well, obviously it’s a magic-dominant alternate.”
“Because it’s a B, or beta-type world, right?”
“Yes. Which sort were you from, by the way?”
“Oh, one of the gammas. So there was both tech and magic. High-tech, medium magic. They had problems getting them to work together, though—anyone who was too cyborged couldn’t get magic to work.”
“Mm,” Irene said neutrally. “I’m assuming you don’t have any machine augmentation yourself.”
“No. Good thing too. They told me it wouldn’t work here.”
“Not exactly,” Irene said punctiliously. “It’s more that no powered device can cross into or out of the Library while still functioning. Devices would work perfectly well if you could turn them off while you were traversing and then on again once you were in here . . .”
Kai shook his head. “Not my gig. What’s the use of it if I’d have to keep turning it on and off? I wasn’t really into the magic, either. I was more heavy on real-world stuff, like physical combat, martial arts, things like that.”
“How did you get picked up for the Library, then?” she asked.
Kai shrugged. “Well, everyone did research using online tools where I was. But from time to time I used to get jobs hunting down old books for this researcher. Some of them were, you know, not legal—and real big-time not legal too . . . So I started looking into his background, thought I might find something interesting. And I think I sort of looked a bit too hard. Because next thing I was getting a visit from some real hardline people, and they told me I needed to come and work for them.”
“Or?”
Kai glanced at her icily. “The ‘or’ would have been bad news for me.”
Irene was silent for the time it took to walk past several doors. Eventually she said, “So here you are, then. Are you unhappy?”
“Not so much,” he said, surprising her. “You play the game, you take the risks. It was a better offer than some people would have given me, right? One of the people teaching me here, Master Grimaldi, he said that if I’d had a family they’d never have made the offer. They’d just have warned me off some other way. So I can’t complain about that.”
“Then what can you complain about?”
“Five years.” They turned a corner. “It’s been five fricking years I’ve been here studying. I know about the time-continuity thing. It’ll have been five years since I dropped out of my own world. All the guys I used to run with, they’ll have moved on or be dead. It was that sort of place. There was this girl. She’ll have moved on to someone else. There’ll be new fashions. New styles. New tech and magic. Maybe some countries will have gone and blown themselves up. And I won’t have been there for any of it. How can I call it my own world if I keep on missing parts of it?”
“You can’t,” Irene answered.
“How do you cope?”
Irene gestured at the corridor. “This is my world.”
“Seriously?”
Irene’s hand tightened on the copy of Midnight Requiems. “Remember I told you that my parents were both Librarians? I wasn’t born in the Library, but I might as well have been. They brought me in here when I was still a baby. They used to take me on jobs. Mother said I was the best prop she’d ever had.” She smiled faintly at the memory. “Father used to tell me a bedtime story about how they smuggled a manuscript in my nappy bag.”
“No.” Kai came to a stop. “Seriously.”
Irene blinked. “I am serious.
