Lenora was a girl of action. She had learned to venture forth boldly and rely on her wits and valor. But somehow, she could not move. Her feet felt bolted to the floor. Sweat broke out all over her and she began to shake. In the most dangerous moments, Lenora had always kept her head. But now she was simply terrified. She felt, rising within her, a scream.
The woman came close and leaned over, studying Lenora’s eyes. “Who are you?” she asked in a voice that sent more waves of terror through Lenora. Run! her mind begged. But she could not.
“I—I’m a librarian,” Lenora squeaked, humiliated at the sound of her own voice.
“How nice,” the woman said. Something wriggled beneath her coat. “But I have not seen you before. Perhaps you do not know that librarians are not so welcome here these days. You may choose to quit, be fired, or cooperate. If you do none of those things, we will, of course, eat you. Choose. Now.”
Lenora had heard such a threat before. I say we eat her now and get it over with, a monster like this woman had once said about Lenora. She closed her eyes, remembering that moment, and what Malachi had told her afterward: Knowledge Is a Light, Lenora. Everything Malachi had said at the time was forever etched in Lenora’s mind, as though chiseled in stone: Throughout history, that light has at times burned very dimly, and nearly even gone out, while in other times it has blazed up gloriously.
As she remembered those words, she was surprised to hear a sudden hiss. She opened her eyes, and was shocked to see the woman flinching back, away from Lenora. For the briefest moment, she looked down at her hands. Was she glowing, as she had glowed once before? There seemed to be something, barely visible under the harsh light … but there was no time to think about it. All her fear had vanished, and she could move again. But already the woman in the raincoat was recovering.
Lenora wasted no time in breaking into a full run. In her career the Forces had made any number of attempts to squish or eat or attack her with swords, and she wasn’t about to wait around to find out what this one, who was more terrifying than all the rest put together, would do.
Suddenly, she found herself at an intersection of eight hallways going in all directions, all of them seemingly endless and identical to the one Lenora had come down. She whirled to see if the woman in the red raincoat was chasing her, but no one was there.
Then a door burst open a few yards down another corridor, and a man rushed out, his arms full of books. He looked in both directions, then ran toward the intersection. He seemed quite out of breath, with a flushed face and drips of sweat running down his temples. And he had a badge that Lenora could make out as he came closer:
PAOLO
ASSISTANT TO THE ASSISTANT ANSWERER
Lenora knew that this was a real librarian. She could tell with a glance, though she still didn’t know how. Perhaps it came with her promotion. At any rate, she quickly surmised that if Paolo was the Assistant to the Assistant Answerer, then he could tell her where the Assistant Answerer was, and that person could tell her where the Chief Answerer, Malachi, was. And so even though Paolo was about to run right past her, she put out a hand and cried “Wait!”
Paolo stopped instantly, nearly dropping all his books, which were really too many for one person to try to carry at a run.
Lenora could tell he was in a hurry (who couldn’t?), so she spoke quickly. “Where is the Assistant Answerer?”
The man’s eyes widened in alarm. He looked up at the ceiling, then in all eight directions, before looking back at Lenora and, awkwardly, putting one finger to his lips. Lenora caught two of his books as they fell.
Paolo pointed down one of the hallways, then reached for the books. Lenora handed them back silently. She wanted to offer to help him with whatever was wrong, but he had indicated silence, and so she said nothing. Once he had the books, he took off running in another direction.
Lenora went down the hallway she’d been pointed toward. She walked past one door after another, until she reached one with a placard that read ASSISTANT ANSWERER. The door was closed. She raised one hand to knock, but before she could, a voice spoke from behind the door.
“Come in, Lenora.”
The voice was Malachi’s.
CHAPTER THREE
Lenora Listens
Lenora threw open the door. “Malachi!” she cried to the dark-skinned woman, before pausing to take in the scene.
She had never seen the Chief Answerer’s office before (and wasn’t sure that Malachi had ever had or needed one in the past), but this did not seem at all like a place Malachi would choose to work. It was little different from the other small offices she’d seen, except that there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering the walls, all groaning under the weight of hundreds of books. Lenora sighed with relief at the sight of the first proper bookshelves she’d seen since entering the Library.
The desk was just the same as the desks she’d seen elsewhere, and so naturally it was far too small for the ten-foot-tall Chief Answerer. Her head, with its perfect bun held in place with two ever-so-sharp pencils, almost brushed the ceiling even though she was sitting in her little chair, her knees poking up higher than Lenora’s head. Down the length of her sharp nose she peered at Lenora, and if Lenora didn’t know better she’d think there might be a twitch of a smile at one end of her lips.
“It is good to see you, Lenora,” she said primly. “And I see you’ve grown.”
That was true. Lenora, always the shortest in her class, had undergone something of a growth spurt lately, and was now perhaps only the fifth- or sixth-shortest. But Malachi often said things that had more than one meaning, and Lenora suspected this was one of them.
Then she saw it, and gasped. Malachi’s badge. It read, against all sense:
MALACHI
ASSISTANT ANSWERER
“Assistant Answerer!” cried Lenora. “But—” And then she was instantly silenced by Malachi’s long finger going to her lips.
The Chief—Assistant?—Answerer pointed slowly to all four corners of the ceiling, then pointed to her ears, then back. Lenora understood immediately what she’d begun to guess from Paolo.
Someone was listening. And so Lenora must be very careful what she said.
Malachi spoke in a rather flat tone unlike her usual speech. “It’s quite simple, Lenora. There is new leadership on the Board.”
The Board! Lenora had heard that term right before she left the Library the first time. But she still had no idea what it was.
“The Board determined that the Library needed to modernize,” Malachi continued. “Needed outside-the-box thinking and innovation. Synergy. Paradigms.”
Again, Lenora had no idea what Malachi was talking about. But she suspected, strongly, that Malachi was simply speaking for whoever was listening and didn’t believe a word of it herself.
“And they brought in a new Director to run the Library. He had, as we were told, a vision. A very great vision.”
Malachi leaned into the word great with such force that Lenora almost took a step back.
“And so there has been a reorganization. My duties have been … changed … in keeping with the vision. Many librarians, who were no longer a good”—and here Malachi paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath—“fit, were offered the opportunity to seek new jobs elsewhere. Away from the Library.”