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I gave him a narrow stare that had no effect whatsoever, then limped to the nearest shelves and started poking away. Permission to look around his bookshop felt implicit in the fact that it was a shop, and a very poor reward for my labor. Even so, I had wanted to investigate further.

“So, what was up with that earthquake?” I asked.

“I have no idea.” Xavier put his book down and sipped his coffee contemplatively. “I guess this is what alien abductees have to go through—I don’t mean the probing, but an extraordinary thing happened, and we have no proof of it. Moreover, it makes so little sense that nobody would take any report of it seriously, and they would be right not to.

“I’m tempted to put in those security cameras Olivia is always going on about. But only to provide a visual record if it were to happen again.”

“Not to catch thieves?” I asked.

“Selecting a book should be a private business. Nobody wants a camera staring at the back of their head while they pick and choose. Anyone who steals a book takes their own punishment with them. A stain on their soul. And I think it’s too rare an occurrence for the cameras to earn their keep.”

I nodded absently and continued to browse. By degrees, I let myself be drawn back to the part of Xavier’s book maze where the quake had happened. He was right. Nobody would believe it. How could the place have shaken violently enough to eject the books without so much as cracking the ceiling? Olivia’s poltergeist sounded a more likely explanation. But if I really believed that, I wouldn’t have been back there on my own. Supernatural shit creeps me out, but it hadn’t felt like that.

I scanned the shelves, thinking of the girl’s face on the cover of The Wind in the Willows. I needed it not to be a hallucination. I didn’t want to be keeping Mum company in an Apriori Group psychiatric hospital. Or—far more likely—keeping the one-eyed homeless man company under a bridge somewhere.

Maybe one of the books that had hit me on the head had done so with sufficient force for a character to be jolted out of its pages and into my imagination. I snorted and ran my fingers over book spines…playing my own literary lottery until chance or instinct made me pull one out for closer inspection.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I supposed I should get to Dickens one day. I’d read that he was one of the most famous people on the planet while he was writing. Not today though. I moved to put the book back where it came from, but something on the cover caught my eye. The artwork seemed more Gothic horror than Dickensian, a woman sitting in the decaying grandeur of a great house, so shrouded in her wedding dress that nothing could be seen of her. I thought I’d seen a baby in her lap, and something about it, perhaps just new life amid all that collapse, had put a hook in me. But it had just been a trick of the light, manufactured out of the folds of her dress. I put it back and continued my search.

A faint tingle in my fingertips was all it took for me to select my next book. It lay a few dozen places past the Dickens, and I tugged it from the close embrace of its neighbors. The Wizard of Oz. Yesterday’s earthquake had been a definite “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. I stood, holding the book but not really seeing it, remembering instead how it had been to lie there covered in fallen volumes. And to be discovered by Olivia.

I wondered what I would ask the wizard for if I’d got hooked up in Dorothy’s expedition. I could certainly use more brains and courage. Perhaps I’d be better off with less heart though. It’s very tiring feeling things too deeply. Maybe that’s what I’d ask for. A thicker skin. A turtle shell to hide in.

“Shit…” Dorothy stood beside the Tin Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road. She looked remarkably like the girl I’d seen—thought I’d seen—on the Wind in the Willows cover the day before. My overactive imagination was forever conjuring faces from swirls in the bark of trees or random patterns on bathroom tiles. Now it was plastering this face over book covers. And at what point did an overactive imagination shade into hallucination and madness? There wasn’t a line you crossed, a step down into insanity. It was a gradient that you hardly noticed until the moment you slipped and kept on slipping.

I put the book back. “I should probably…go.”

I was glad Xavier was too cheap for cameras. He made me feel silly anyway, even without watching my stupid moments on a TV screen.

As I turned to leave, I trailed my fingers across another foot or so of shelf. I’ve not been Tasered before, and what stung me might not have been quite that level, but it was a lot stronger than any shock I’d ever got after slip-sliding over ten yards of nylon carpet.

“Owww!” I yelped belatedly. And then, because I’m stupid, but also because I was daring the shelf to do the same thing again—because stuff like that just shouldn’t happen—I repeated the action, slowly, wincing with each new contact, ready to whip my hand away the instant anything bit me.

And that’s how I ended up tumbling down a well that was deep enough for me to work out that I was tumbling down a well.

Chapter 12

The Library

The Great Smith stands in a dark jungle, every tree black with soot, creepers hanging like cables escaping the roof space. Moths flutter in this gloom, each faintly glowing, and in their number and in their presence and absence they reveal a hidden order. The trees here grow in rows, and between each, a pool, black as tar.

“You were wrong, Dalion,” the Great Smith says. It hadn’t been the biggest of his hammers that broke time, but the smallest.

But Dalion isn’t here. The Great Smith went alone through the fracture he created. He emerged from one of these many pools, heaving himself from its depths and standing at its edge, panting, his third hammer—larger than a sledgehammer—still clutched in one hand.

“You should not be here.” The speaker has approached from behind. Sneaky, the Great Smith calls that.

“I go where I please.” The Smith turns to find an assistant standing beside a neighboring pool.

The assistant is like the others that the Smith has seen, smaller than him, but not small, a faceless automaton of some sort, not dissimilar to those shop dummies whose features are smoothed almost to nothing so that a customer might more easily imagine their own face there. And like the others, the ones that the Smith has seen within the Library, the assistant is porcelain white, gleaming, a single piece with no joint or seam to be seen.

“I have broken time.” The Smith looks at his limbs. The blackness of the pool has left no stain on him.

“In a sense.” The assistant inclines his head, and the Smith is reminded for a moment of Dalion. “You are in the Exchange. It is a timeless place.”

“But what I want to break is the Library itself, and that still stands beyond my means,” the Smith growls. “Why is that?”

“I do not know why you wish to break the Library,” the assistant says. “Or rather, I know, but I do not understand. You have access. More books than even you could ever read are there, waiting for you to take them.”