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“Isa?” I called out as I leafed through my returned books. Half of them didn’t even have catalogue cards. They weren’t our books. And all of them felt…dead. They were books with pages and covers, but as I flipped pages, I found faded ink, blank sheets, garbled chapters like an unfinished image in some neural network an AI told to imagine what a good novel looked like.

No Isa.

No response.

“Zeke?” Again, I called out and no response.

With a soft grunt, I rose to my feet and huffed through the aching joints and complaining ligaments.

It was then that I caught the scent. Smoke.

It wasn’t uncommon to catch a whiff of bonfire or the odd scent of burning from someone’s story, a book putting off all it knew how, to communicate their presence.

This wasn’t it, though.

I scanned the library and reached for my phone, pulling it out for a text message to Mesmer. “Something’s wrong here. It’s too quiet and I just got in some odd books.”

I clutched for the key at my neck and focused, making sure I hadn’t accidentally dived into a book showing me the strangeness. But who would write a book about our library?

As I made it a few steps, every light in the library went out with a flickering pulse, isolating me amid the stacks in almost-total darkness, gray morning light filtering in through the odd skylight.

I turned on the flashlight of my phone and shone it around, narrowing my gaze as the scent of smoke grew thicker and thicker.

“Alright, guys, are the romance novels fucking again?” They tended to get steamy, and I took a step in that direction as a rumble shook the entire library and a cloud of smoke and ashes billowed toward me.

The wards should have kicked in. Something should have stopped the fire. Isa had tried explaining it to me: books that would unleash snow or ice—a vacuum in space…

Nothing triggered as a glow lit the other side of the library.

“Zeke!” I called out again and ran toward his office. “Isa?”

The fire was close, throwing high flames against a wall thirty feet from his office door. The choking scent stole my breath as I wheeled around and stared at the bookshelves around me. Fantasy.

I stepped back, rotating on my heel as I turned down another aisle and another until I came upon the six-hundreds for technology and applied science.

I tore books from a rack, old textbooks clattering to the floor amid engineering and otherwise, until I found a chemistry text about a dry ice factory.

Fire chased me like it had a mind of its own, and I forced myself into a blind dive within the book, stumbling to life amid a busy factory floor of workers feeding pressurized pipes and hoses, checking gauges.

Dry ice was formed by compressing carbon dioxide until it turned into a liquid—something I barely remembered from high-school chemistry. Once pressurized, a rapid release of pressure caused the temperature to drop rapidly, which froze it solid.

A worker stumbled away from me, eyes wild, and I must have shocked him to his core as I grabbed his coverall-clad chest and shouted, “Where’s the release valve?”

A plan twisted in my mind as I studied the factory until I came to a scrubbing tower leading into a cooling and condensing unit. Releasing the pressure at the end of the line would make dry ice rapidly, blowing pressurized pellets under a force almost half as strong as the average bullet.

I bolted as fast as I could, dodging employees as I gripped a release valve and tore my connection to the book away at the same time, forcing the entrance to the real world to open at the yawning mouth of the liquid carbon dioxide tank.

As I came into the world aflame around me, the mouth of the valve yawning out of the book in a strange twist of reality as I choked on the air and angled the book away from me. I tilted it against a wall, got as much distance from it as I could, fingertips barely on the lever as I jerked it hard and threw myself back.

Pelletized chunks of dry ice exploded from the book with a bang that made my ears ring.

Shelves collapsed, fire hissed, beams creaked. “Zeke!”

The ringing in my ears blotted out my own voice, so I kept screaming.

I staggered away from the book as my breath grew labored.

Too much carbon dioxide. Too much carbon monoxide from the fire. But fire needed oxygen and the carbon dioxide would flood the place, strangling the fire.