"Six in the morning," he says. "Don't be late."
He walks back down the aisle. His footsteps are quiet on the library floor, quieter going than coming, and I hear him descend the stairs without looking back.
I sit with my back against the shelf and my knees pulled up and my hands still not entirely steady, and I press the back of my wrist against the cheek he almost touched and stare at the ceiling until the shaking finally stops.
Down in the Council Chamber gallery, two sets of eyes had watched Ryder defend me in front of seven Councilors who looked at me like a problem to be contained. Thane, jaw tight, arms crossed, performing indifference badly. Caspian, turning that ring in slow circles, watching everything and cataloguing it the way he catalogues everything, with the patient attention of someone who already knows what it means and is deciding what to do with that knowledge.
I don't know what they make of today. I don't know what I make of today.
A man told me not to trust him and then defended me to a Council that wanted me gone. That same man followed me to the library, or was already there, and crouched down to look at my face and reached out and stopped himself, and I don't knowwhich part of that is more alarming: that he stopped, or that I held still for it.
I get up off the floor. I dust off my trousers. I put my face back in order.
The library is empty around me, all those old books on their shelves, all those recorded facts about magic and history and the classified natures of things. Somewhere in this building, Sage is getting an explanation from Malik about a protection assignment that started at orientation and was never meant to be disclosed. Somewhere, Seraphina Vale is calculating what went wrong with a plan that should have worked.
I walk to the end of the aisle and down the stairs and out into the corridor, where the afternoon light falls through the high windows in long, dusty angles and the academy moves around me the way it always does, loud and political and pretending.
Tomorrow. Six in the morning. Private sessions with a man who almost touched my face and then remembered he wasn't supposed to.
I keep walking.
Chapter 9
The Forbidden Section doesn't have a sign that says Forbidden Section. It has a ward that tastes like copper when you press your hand against the air in front of it, and a lock that's been oiled recently enough that someone is maintaining it. Someone is going in and out. The lock is for people they want to stop, not people they want to allow.
I'm through it in four minutes. Probably a personal record.
The section itself is smaller than I expected. Two rows of shelves tucked behind the main stacks, the kind of narrow that means you have to turn sideways between them, the kind of dark that means the single wall sconce was installed as an afterthought. The books here don't have spines with titles. They have classification seals, pressed into the leather covers in dark wax, and half of them look older than the academy itself.
I start with the historical texts. There are three shelves of them, organized by century, and I pull the ones that predate the academy's founding and work backwards. What I'm looking for won't be filed under anything helpful. It'll be buried in afootnote, or a margin annotation, or catalogued under a heading that doesn't flag until you're already reading.
The word null appears in the first text I open, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
I find it again in the second. And the third.
It's in all of them. Every historical record I pull in the next twenty minutes has a version of the same section, always titled dry and administrative: Catalogue of Purge Subjects or Classification of Aberrant Manifestations or, in one particularly cheerful volume, On the Necessary Elimination of Null-Born Individuals During the Great Cleansing.
All of them. They killed all of them.
I sit on the floor between the shelves with a text across my knees and read the account in full. The Purge ran for six years. It wasn't quick. It wasn't surgical. It was systematic and documented and signed off on by council members whose names are still on plaques in the main building's entry hall. Nulls were identified through a standardized assessment process, formally classified, and eliminated. The language is bureaucratic and clean and it describes the deaths of hundreds of people with the same affect as a crop rotation report.
There's a footnote at the bottom of the third page. I almost miss it because the text is small and the ink has faded to brown, but it's there: See also: Conduit Prophecy, Appendix C, restricted per Council Order 7.
I find Appendix C forty minutes later, in a separate volume that was shelved wrong, or shelved deliberately wrong, tucked between two texts on wraith containment that nobody would pull unless they were looking for a specific thing. The appendix is three pages. The handwriting is different from the main text, older, and someone has underlined sections in two different inks. At least two people have read this carefully before me.
I read the first underlined section. Then I read it again.
"You're going to ruin your eyes reading in this light."
I don't scream. I almost do. I close the book on my finger to hold the page and look up, and Caspian Thorne is standing at the entrance to the row, one shoulder against the shelf, arms crossed, watching me with the patient attention of someone who has been there long enough to get comfortable.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"Long enough to know you found the appendix." His green eyes drop to the book in my lap. "You're faster than I expected."
"I'm going to need you to back up."
"Why?"
