Emma’s fox instincts screamed a warning. She managed to pull Nat and Julia back from the door in time. “No, can I hear them there,” she gasped. “They’re in the north corridor too.”
“At both of the ways out. So we’re trapped,” Venetia said acidly.
Richard croaked something.
“What?” Emma waved at Hugo to loosen his grip on Richard’s collar.
Richard rubbed his throat and coughed. “The military history room. I have—the key. Round my neck.”
“A room that locks…” Emma hated to consider anything he said. But he had dropped his knife by the fountain, whereas the Boars were closing in with pikes and swords intact. “We’d be safe there from the Boars, at least.”
“Stellar thinking,” said Venetia. “Let’s trust the deranged kidnapper.”
“This can’t be a good idea,” Nat muttered.
Emma looked round at them all. “Our best plan is to hide until the Boars pass, then make a run for the exit. I hate to say it, but the military history room is the only place we’d have a chance of barricading ourselves in that long. Nowhere else locks.”
“How would we get there?”
“We’d have to cut through the Greater Reading Room.” Emma had spent enough time in the Library to know its layout. So she crept ahead with Venetia to scout out the way.
Close to the door of the Greater Reading Room, Emma tripped over something curly and shivering. It whimpered and tried toshrink back under the book trolley it had chosen for a hiding place, golden curls askew.
“Don’t hurt me, please. My family—they’re important, rich—my father can pay you, anything you want.”
“Dear God, how pathetic.” Venetia’s voice dripped disdain. “Come out, Balfour. It’s us.”
“Venetia? Emma?” he scrambled out. “Are the monsters gone?”
A year and a half of hatred was hard to shake. Emma found she had to force the words through her teeth. “No, but we’ve found somewhere to hide. Through the Greater Reading Room.”
Jasper paled. “But they’re there too, the monsters.”
Hugo, Julia, and Nat arrived in a clatter of footsteps, Richard in tow.
“We have to move,” Nat said. “Now. They’re right behind us.”
Emma calculated quickly. They were out in the open here. But in the Greater Reading Room, they could use bookcases as cover. There, they had at least a chance of creeping past the Boars.
Emma steeled herself to be brave, to shake off the last of her shock and fear from Richard’s attack. He, at least, was no longer a threat. He slumped behind Hugo, a broken man. But she still had to be strong. To keep her mortals alive. Even if the darkness of the Library pressed around her, feeling thicker than ever.
“Stay off the central walkway,” she warned the group. “Stick to the shadows between bookcases.”
“We’re with you.” Nat took Jasper in a firm but kind grip, like the owner of a cowardly puppy, and tugged him from under the trolley.
“N-no,” panted Jasper. “Stop pulling me—the monsters—”
They slid through the doors.
The Greater Reading Room was a cathedral to books. The one room could have fitted whole libraries. Emma squinted in the dim light. She just made out a cluster of shadows moving at the far end, gathered around something. Smoke spiraled up to the magnificent vaulted ceiling.
But their end of the room was deserted. There was only one guard ahead, ambling along the central aisle. Emma signaled to the mortals to creep forward. They slipped around the bookcases in ones and twos. The darkness seemed thicker than ever. Emma began to hold out hope they would make it through unseen. They had already covered a quarter of the reading room without drawing the Boars’ attention.
And now Emma made out the origin of the smoke. The Boars had built a bonfire of broken desks and bookcases. Now they were piling ancient tomes in stacks by the fireside. So close to the flames. An invisible hand closed around Emma’s throat. The Boars had to have gone mad, or rabid. They were going to destroy the Night City’s own hoard of books: its most precious treasure, the knowledge it had taken centuries to build. Beloved, irreplaceable. That they dared such a thing filled her with dread.
And anger. It surprised Emma to find how much it mattered. They weren’t her books. But the Library stood for everything the University was. Or what it ought to have been. Because the place she studied shouldn’t have been about the Turnbulls, or money, or tradition. Or inner circle after inner circle that only a few people got invited into. This building, and these books, were what it ought to have meant. Knowledge, free for anyone who came in.
But it would all burn so easily. All that polished wood; the paper kept carefully bone-dry. The whole Library could go up inan instant. There would be nothing left to save. Someone ought to stop them.
