Our 2nd is at a crossroads.
The light turns green and pedestrians flood the intersection, weaving around me, shoving me with their elbows as they rush past. I turn toward the huge gray building between First and 2nd Street. The Library of Congress.
Read between the lines. It’s all possible.
I dart between oncoming cars toward it. Racing up the front stairs of the library, I throw open the door to the vestibule and jerk to a stop.
A line forms in front of a row of metal detectors. I watch as tourists and visitors empty their pockets and put their purses and backpacks on a table to be searched by security guards. Jack’s scent is faint, but stronger the closer I get to the checkpoint. He’s here. Unarmed.
I back out of the building, reach under my sweatshirt for my pocketknife, and dump it into the nearest trash can before getting back in line.
“Seriously, Jack?” I mutter to myself once I’m cleared through. “You had to pick the biggest library in the world?”
Static crackles in my ear. “I’m having a hard time hearing you, Fleur. There’s a terrible echo.”
“Never mind,” I say loudly, drawing a glare from a lady behind a reference desk. I keep moving. The place is enormous. I stand in the center of a cavernous room, surrounded by archways and balconies. If I were Jack—if someone were hunting me—where would I go? Where would I hide?
I follow signs to the elevators and check the directory. Ten years ago, I managed to shake Julio in a hotel in Atlantic City by taking the elevator to every floor. This building only has five levels and a basement.
The Basement: Geography and Maps Room.
It’s harder for Poppy to pick up his signal below gound. He’s burrowing. He’s done it before.
I reach for my knife before I remember it’s not there.
“I don’t like this,” Poppy says. “Not one bit. He’s trying to get you alone. You can wait outside and nab him when he surfaces. Do not get in the—”
I step into the elevator alone.
When the elevator doors open, Jack’s scent is everywhere and I fight back the urge to be sick.
I pause at a set of double doors. They drip with condensation. They’re still cold where he touched them.
“Tunnel to Cannon House Office Building (Staff Only),” a sign reads.
A tunnel... That explains why Poppy lost his signal.
I kick the wall. “Where is he, Poppy?”
But all I get through my transmitter is static.
I follow Jack’s trail backward to an empty table in the far corner of the Map Room. It’s littered with open books and marked-up documents. A chair is pulled out, left at an angle, the wood still chilled where he sat.
I sift through the abandoned atlases Jack’s left open. Meteorological maps of the Atlantic. Physical and climate maps of the United States. Highway maps with multiple routes highlighted from one coast to the other. And in the middle of them all, a volume of poems, opened to “The Good-Morrow.”
My eyes skim the words I already know by heart.
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one...
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
None can die.
Beside the mountain of books, four rechargeable batteries pin down the curled corners of a DC subway map. A diagram’s scribbled on the back, the closed looping circuit of a secondary cell.
