“It isn’t so much a question as something I need to tell you. All of you, I suppose, though I hadn’t thought it would go quite this way.” He swallowed, because he’d drawn Santi’s attention now, too. The weight of their stares felt heavy as an elephant on his chest. And speaking of his chest, the harness beneath his shirt seemed to pull even tighter on his bruised skin.
He silently unbuttoned his uniform jacket and shirt beneath. Both were sodden with sweat, and the kiss of cooler air on damp skin made him shiver. No one said a word as he pulled aside the fabric to reveal the smuggling harness, and then unsnapped the pocket to pull out one of the two books inside.
“Your life is on a thin edge right now,” Santi told him softly. “I’m still an oath-sworn member of the Library High Garda. That contraband had better be worth your risk, Brightwell.”
Jess’s hand felt cold and sweaty as he gripped the battered, flexible leather of the cover, and for a long moment he said nothing. Couldn’t think how to begin to tell them. Then he said, “This is the last confession of one of the Archivist’s personal guards. The man killed himself a couple of months ago. In it, the man gives detailed records about who he arrested, who was tortured, who was released. Who was executed and how.” He swallowed. “Your name is in here, Scholar Wolfe.”
No one moved. Jess raised his gaze from the book to meet each of theirs in turn.
“There’s another name in here. Thomas Schreiber’s.”
Glain took in a breath, then slowly let it out, and bowed her head. “Does it say how he died?” she asked. “What they did to him?”
“It has a record of Thomas’s arrest,” Jess said. “And they did . . . they did hurt him.” He didn’t want to think about that. He’d read the entries, forced himself to do it, and he’d hurt for days after, like his mind and body had been cut and torn by it. “But Thomas wasn’t executed.”
None of them seemed to quite grasp what he’d said at first. Not even Wolfe, who was usually so quick off the mark. The silence stretched, and Glain finally said, in a hushed and muffled voice, “Then how did Thomas die?”
“He hasn’t died at all,” Jess said. “He’s still alive. Our friend is still alive. And that means . . . That means we still have a chance to save him.”
He should have predicted that Glain would be angry, but, for some reason, he underestimated the speed of it, and when her fist hit him square on the left side of his jaw, he didn’t have time to duck. It was a solid punch, with considerable muscle behind it, and when the red haze faded, he was lying on the floor on his back, and Santi was holding Glain from behind by the elbows. From the absolute fury on her face, she was ready to haul Jess off the floor and give it another go.
“Thomas is dead!” Glain shouted, and it sounded raw and full of anguish. Tears glittered hard in her eyes. “They took him from our house, they tortured him, and they killed him! They told you to your face!” She launched into a blistering stream of Welsh that he was sure called everything from his manhood to his parentage into question, and didn’t stop until Santi whipped her around and shook her.
“Calm down, Squad Leader! That’s an order!” Maybe it was his stern presence or her awareness that she couldn’t hit a superior officer, but Glain stopped cursing and went still. She breathed fast and hard, but after a moment of silence, she nodded sharply. Santi let her go. Glain sank back down on the bench and balled her hands into hard fists that Jess watched warily as he got up.
Santi turned on him, and there was violence in him, too. Just better controlled. “Jess. How do you know this book isn’t a fake?”
“Because absolutely no one wanted me to have it,” he said. “I stumbled over the existence of it only because I was working my way through”—he caught himself in time; regardless of how much he trusted these three, his family’s business matters weren’t to be shared—“through an errand for my father. I overheard a reference to this book, and when I tried to follow up, I was blocked at every turn. It took me months just to verify the news of the guard’s suicide, and even longer to make contact with his family to finally pay for the book. They’ve got no love for the Archivist, believe me.”
“Or that could all be the signs of a very well-baited trap,” Santi said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. No help from him, Jess saw. He concentrated on Wolfe.
“Sir, it’s authentic. I’ve investigated.” He swallowed and held Wolfe’s stare, somehow. “I have sources you can check.”
“And I will.” Wolfe’s voice was as soft and dry as the desert sands. “I’ll expect a full accounting of them before I believe a word of this.” But he glanced at Captain Santi, and there was something in it that made Jess play a guess.
“You already knew this, didn’t you?” That got both Wolfe and Santi’s attention, and though Wolfe was hard to read, Santi, in that moment, wasn’t. “God. You did know Thomas was alive.”
“No,” Santi said. “We didn’t. Not for certain.”
Wolfe removed all doubts when he said, “I believed that he was. And no, before you scream at me, I had no real proof, not like this book of yours. The pattern follows what they did to me: arrest, torture, prison, erasing me as if I never existed. The Archivist doesn’t like to waste talent. Thomas Schreiber is gifted, and he knows that. He’ll want to . . . use him, if he can. The greater good of the Library and all that.”
There was a bleak sound to that, and Jess felt chilled as he remembered the entries in the journal, the shock he’d felt on seeing the name Scholar Christopher Wolfe written there, early on in the book. The guard had seen Wolfe arrested and taken for questioning, but had never seen him executed.
Wolfe had simply disappeared from the records.
Just like Thomas had disappeared, taken from the safety of their student housing. Gone in a whisper.
Dead, they’d been told.
“Is Thomas being kept here in Alexandria?” Glain’s voice had gone hard and cold. She leaned forward to put her weight on elbows braced on knees. “Where did they hold you, Scholar? What happened to you when they—”
“Stop,” Santi said. It was just one word, but the force behind it—not a shout, just pure menace—made her look at him in surprise. “He doesn’t need to relive any of this.”
“He does if it’s the same place Thomas might be held.” Jess stood up, and Wolfe’s gaze followed him. It seemed black and remote, but there was something behind it Jess couldn’t understand. “Where are they keeping him? Here?”
“No. They wouldn’t keep him in Alexandria, knowing he has friends such as us.” Wolfe leaned forward, and his shackles dragged across the wood. “Let me see it.”