CHAPTER 28
January saw itself out with rain; February, with sleet and hail. On the first day the sun tremulously returned, Emma went straight to the Library. As she had hoped, it was deserted. Most mortals were out basking in the lukewarm weather. So Emma tucked herself into her favorite reading nook and folded Saskia’s note into her pocket. An important discovery, or so the scribbled message said. Saskia would tell Emma all when they met, in the Librarian’s office.
But Emma had come to the Library hours early, while daylight still glowed through the warped windows. It was useful to have time alone to hunt through the stacks. But for all her work, she’d found no clues to crossing between worlds, and nothing of worth to the messenger either. Logically, she knew that the key to the Turnbulls’ downfall would not be out where anyone could find it. She would have to get closer to them. To go where they were. But it was easy to find excuses. It would have been pointless to look in December: The University had emptied for the holidays. And she ought to master fox form first, so if they spotted her, she’d be able to hide.
The truth was, she was afraid. That if she went looking, they would find her, and they would hurt her. So for now, Emma busied herself with her notebook. She had outlined three clear paths of inquiry. Firstly, what had the Turnbulls bargained for? If she knew what they wanted, their vulnerable spots might become clear. Next, how had she been brought into their bargain? On the night of the ritual, had it been something she drank, or touched—or none of those things? The Judge had said she had been “marked” with something “affixed” to her soul, but not how or when. And thirdly, had there been other victims? The Judge had said that the Turnbull contract was of long standing, after all. In finding the other sacrifices, she might be able to piece together more of what had happened to her.
Emma’s pen froze at the hiss of approaching whispers. One word caught her:Boars.She ducked beneath the desk and crouched, quieting her breath. In the gap beneath the bookcase, she saw two pairs of feet: one booted in leather, the other with talons like an eagle.
The taloned feet edged closer to the boots. Like someone with a secret. “There, s’quieter in here. It’s all over the market. Raids on four traders, all innocent folk, like.”
The other made a noise of disgust. “You never saw so many Boar patrols, before the flood.”
Emma frowned. She hadn’t thought about the flood happening in the Night City. Silly of her, really. The nightfolk did share the same patch of land with the mortals. If the mortals had been under water, it stood to reason the City would have been, too.
Emma watched the talons scrape into the floorboards. “Thatflood.It’s all been amiss since then, and none as is brave enough to talk about it. And you know the City started it in the first place?”
The boots backed up a step. “Hush yourself. That’s bad talk.”
“Go on, try’n tell me you didn’t recognize the magic behind that water. City, through and through. We all know it.”
Magic in the water. Hunched beneath the desk, Emma sorted through flashes of memory. The river swallowing the colleges in a single night. Unnaturally fast, surely. And when it receded, that odd, intoxicating scent it had left behind. Rot and sweetness. The sense that something was strange, somehow. Animals breeding out of season. The knot of frogs on the pavement, writhing and devouring.
Magic. The flood had been swirling with magic. And now it seemed obvious. A flood that rose a whole day before any rain started? Hardly natural. How had she not noticed, not suspected? No wonder nightfolk said mortals were blind.
The boot voice scoffed, though with an edge of unease. “Night’s sake, it was enough water to drown the Guilder Wood. Come, why would the City raise all that magic?”
“Maybe something happened. Something the Court’s scared to talk about. Like an attack.”
“You want us both dead? Night’s breath, you can’tsaythings like that.”
“I wouldn’t, near our kind. I’m no keener to see the inside of a cell than you. But it’s only cloth-eared mortals here.” The voice veered between belligerence and fear. Emma blessed the instinct that had sent her scurrying beneath the desk.
The pair’s argument drifted to guild matters. Emma’s legs had time to grow stiff in their cramped curl against her chest by the time they moved on. Finally, their voices faded.
Emma crawled from under the desk, muscles complaining. So much time lost working on her notes. The flood was interestingenough, to be sure, but she’d learned nothing she actually needed to know. With a sigh, Emma flipped her notebook shut. She would catch up another time. The afternoon was getting on, and she had a far more important reason for being at the Library during mortal hours: The English Department’s last lecture ended at three p.m.
Emma knew this because at three fifteen sharp, a familiar lanky figure would push open the entrance doors and emerge from the stacks. Nat wore his hair short these days. He had a favorite seat near the window.
The punishment for drawing mortal attention inside the Library was fierce, Saskia had said. And Nat would have recognized her the moment he looked up. So Emma watched from behind her bookcase. If she unshelved a few books, she had a gap large enough to see him clearly.
She was never bored, watching him. The way he mouthed parts of the essay as he wrote it, as if performing for an invisible audience. How he crammed a book against his nose when he read a point that excited him, or tossed it onto the desk in disgust when he thought the author was an idiot.
She had been gone more than a year, so it was Nat’s final stretch at the University. And Julia’s, and Venetia’s. Her mother had probably moved to a new posting by now. She always got itchy feet around the eighteen-month mark. Emma was surprised to find herself smiling, as though it were something she loved about her mother, rather than their biggest difference. But if Emma had been mortal, she would have been preparing for a move too. Her head full of final exams, but spinning with the world opening up beyond. This time, she would have been able to choose those places for herself, to stay as long as she wanted.
Emma let her fingers curl, imagined the hunt song of a fox flowing through them, and watched with satisfaction as her nails lengthened and curved themselves into claws. Dark as night; sharp as flints. She dug them into the bookcase, glorying at the yielding scrape of the wood. She was practicing fox form, in her off moments. Shaping her nails into claws came most easily. Knowing she could rend and slash quieted something inside her, a voice that murmured of hunters and danger and boots slamming after her in the night. She didn’t have to make a conscious effort. Sometimes, she would just look down and the claws were there.
But if she concentrated harder, she could switch her ears for a fox’s keen hearing, or her eyes for a predator’s night vision. A full transformation was still an effort. She found fox shape uneasy and hard to hold. It was too animal, too savage: too far from the idea of herself she clung to. The slightest distraction sent her rocketing back up into human form. The claws seemed to be the only thing she could hang on to.
Emma forced her nails back into human shape—although it always felt like a loss—and brushed the sawdust from the ruined shelf. It was the moment she waited for every day. Nat was gathering his belongings. Then he would take his usual path to the readers’ café and eat a bacon sandwich at a table outside.
Outside the Library, that is, where the laws of the regular world applied. Where, at four thirty on a bright March afternoon, a creature of the Night City was all but invisible to mortals. Where there was no punishment for being close.
And so, as she had every afternoon she watched him, Emma slid into the café seat next to Nat. He was hunched against the chill, his hands cozied in gloves. He looked up vaguely at the scrape of thechair, but returned to his sandwich and his book. He still hadn’t mastered the art of chewing his food before swallowing.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
He looked straight into her face with the beginnings of a smile she had seen a thousand times. When he had spotted her in a crowd, or waved her to the lunch table he’d saved. But it faded, and she knew he had not seen her.
