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“Sorry,” Cassandra says, fingertips white where they dig into the book she’s holding. “Are we just not going to talk about this?”
“Talk about what?” Eve asks, slightly wary. She’s got good reason to be, considering she’s been yelled at about ten times by four different people in the last hour, but clearly they have been talking about that.
Cassie looks pointedly at Alexandria, who’s tucked up under Eve’s arm where they’re both sitting on the stairs. She flinches back slightly and looks away, pretending to be enraptured by the small magnifying glass stand on the nearest shelf. Eve’s hold tightens a little like she’s afraid she’s going to disappear at any moment.
“About how we all just watched—” Her voice wavers and she holds the book tighter. She’s much more quiet when she tries again. “About how we all just watched Al—Dr. Carsen try to kill herself.”
Most libraries are quiet places by nature. This one is not and hasn’t been for several years now. The silence that rings through it now is thick and almost oppressive. Jake and Ezekiel look up from the corner where their heads are together. Jenkins freezes mid-step, nearly dropping one piece of the Beagalltach. Alexandria shrinks a little more, trying to disappear into her coat.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Alexandria says quietly.
“I doubt that very much,” Jenkins huffs to himself, which is the complete wrong thing to say because Cassandra immediately whirls on him.
“And you knew!” She yells, taking all of them aback. Cassie doesn’t normally yell out of anger. She seethes and retreats. This is different. This is fury. She’s in front of him in two seconds, jabbing her finger into his chest. Now he really does drop half the Beagalltach in surprise. “You knew for months what she was going to do and you didn’t do anything to stop it!”
“It was the only way to defeat—” Alexandria tries, and Cassandra whips her head around while still keeping Jenkins cornered.
“Clearly it wasn’t!” She snaps. Only Jenkins is close enough to her to realize she’s shaking. “Because we did it and you didn’t die. If you’d told any of us sooner we could have figured that out and none of us would have had to worry about it. We could have had a plan, a real plan, and you wouldn’t have nearly died. And I think you both knew that! I think you found this solution and didn’t want to keep looking for better one because—because—”
“I looked for other ways—” Alexandria starts.
Cassie cuts her off again. “I think it’s because you actually want to die.”
Ezekiel’s mouth closes with an audible click from across the room. Jake looks back and forth between Cassie and Alexandria like he’s watching a tennis match. Eve’s face is pale—although not quite as pale as Alexandria’s—with her lips a thin white line.
“Of course I want to die!” Alexandria says hotly, which makes Eve’s eyes widen. Alexandria looks around for backup and finds none, then scrambles to explain her reasoning. “I want to die for the Library, for the world, the way I’m supposed to! That’s part of the job! My job!”
“Well, maybe it shouldn’t be!” Cassie clenches her fists like that will stop her voice from breaking as tears start dripping down her chin and onto the floor. “Maybe it’s wrong! Maybe it’s bad that no Librarian other than you lasted ten years. Maybe it’s—maybe something needs to change!”
The lights above their head flicker, a frantic staccato burst that all but one of them immediately recognize as Morse code. Alexandria leaves her coat under Eve’s arm and jumps up, waving her hands in the air as she glares up at the ceiling. The lights flash again, fast enough this time that her and Cassandra are the only two who can read it.
“Don’t take her side!” She shouts. “I was dying for you, for all of you! I was doing what Librarians are supposed to do!”
“And Cassie’s saying that’s bad,” Jake says. His voice is low, but he inclines his head to Cassandra when she catches his eye. I’ve got your back. “And I think she’s right. You’ve lasted the longest out of anyone in the Library’s history and this is, what, your thirteenth year on the job?”
“That’s a long time,” Alexandria argues, crossing her arms and lifting her chin.
“No,” Eve says quietly. She rubs her forehead. “It’s really not.”
There had been something Alexandria wanted to tell her in Alaska, right before they’d gotten the call about Cassie. She should have pushed for what it was after they’d made sure she was okay. And, god—I should feel scared right now, but I don’t. Her telling Apep that she was tired. That she just wanted to end this. This, the fight against evil, the lying to everyone else, her life. The sheer relief when she reassured Eve it was almost over.
Jenkins had called what was needed to defeat Apep a “human sacrifice.” Eve immediately pictured magic, the Eye burning both Alexandria and Apep up. Which had been painful to imagine already. But then Cassie had whispered “Alex is gonna kill herself?” and—shit. Shit.
Alexandria had been the Librarian for ten years before she met her. The man in the mirror, Judson, had said that like it was something to be proud of. Maybe under ordinary circumstances, if they’d just meant that everyone else had gone on to other things, it would be. But keeping someone alive for ten years wasn’t much of an accomplishment, even when that person was as reckless as Alexandria.
Fuck. That recklessness. The traps Eve has seen her set off, the way she tried to chase Prospero through his portals without a thought for what was on the other side, how she got everyone out but herself on the plane, the constant going off to do things on her own. The way her solution to every problem was to jump into it. Eve’s called it a disregard for her own safety on several occasions, more out of exasperation and concern for Alexandria’s physical wellbeing rather than her mental one. But she’s seen all of it before, on people who kept pushing it until they didn’t make it out alive.
“Yes it is,” Alexandria retorts. “It’s too long. Like I told you, I’ve been on borrowed time for years.”
The crumpled up piece of tissue that Cassie throws at Alexandria hits dead-on in the center of her forehead. She points at her, trembling. Jenkins takes the opportunity to take a step back.
“Do not,” Cassie says icily, “talk to me about borrowed time.”
Eve stands up and gently pulls Alexandria back. “Cassandra, she didn’t mean—”
“I’m still mad at you,” Cassie says stiffly, and shoves her book at Jenkins before storming out of the annex.
“We’ll go after her,” Jake says, pulling Ezekiel to his feet. “You three talk about all the secrets you keep keeping from us.”
“You know where she’s going?” Alexandria asks because Eve can’t cover her mouth in time.
They don’t dignify that with a response.
Ezekiel catches up first, jogging until he’s parallel to Cassie. “You wanna go set off illegal fireworks under the DOSA van that’s still parked outside?”
“Loud noises,” she says as a way of turning him down, hand fluttering next to her head while Jake comes up on Ezekiel’s other side.
He shrugs. “Well, I’m here if you want to do it later.”
“I just—I can’t—how could they—” Cassandra closes her eyes, wiping her face with her sleeve. “How could they? I know Dr. Carsen keeps secrets from us, I expect her to, but Eve? Jenkins?”
“That’s why you can’t trust Feds,” Ezekiel mutters. Jake hits his arm.
“How could they?” She repeats. She sits down on the floor next to one of the suits of armor, beneath a section on Russian literature that Alexandria keeps talking about needing to reshelve. It’s one of her favorite out of the way spots to take time to herself in. She hugs her knees to her chest. “Even before Dr. Carsen and Eve made their plan, Jenkins knew what she was going to try to do, and he just let her. Why don’t they realize how bad it is? If he’d said something, maybe we could have stopped her sooner, or…”
Jake sits down heavily beside her, letting her press her head into his shoulder. “I dunno that Jenkins remembers what it’s like to not be immortal.”
“So he shouldn’t have told us Dr. Carsen was going to c-commit suicide?” Cassie says, muffled.
“That’s not what I’m sayin’,” he says. Ezekiel settles on his other side, kicking his leg up so it crosses over Jake’s. “I’m just… I don’t know. I think there’s something that this place does to people, to make them think that sacrificing themselves is okay. I know Baird’s got that kind of thing, too, and I won’t pretend I wouldn’t if it was the rest of you on the line. But I don’t think it should be like that.”
“They don’t get what it’s like,” Cassie says, sniffling as she moves her head off Jake’s shirt and tries to scrub the tears off her face. Both of them know exactly what she means.
All six of them had a long conversation in the hospital room after the surgery. About the difference between treatable and curable. It had mostly been Cassandra and Alexandria explaining, with a lot of Cassie’s words being stepped on. For once, she hadn’t minded, too preoccupied with the data floating around everyone else’s heads that seemed impossible to turn off. It was a conversation she’d had far too many times before, anyway. A break from it was kind of nice.
“You heard what Jenkins said to Colonel Baird,” Ezekiel says. He looks at the other two. “About her not getting our trust back. I don’t know if he’s going to have it either.”
“‘Least Alexandria never did,” Jake huffs. He takes both of their hands. “Can I… I gotta ask…”
“No,” Cassandra says immediately.
“What?” Ezekiel asks, leaning in on Jake’s other side.
Jake exhales slowly. “Cassie knows what I was going to say. Are we walking away over this?”
“Hell no,” Ezekiel says, bristling. “They don’t get to try to push us out of this and then win. We’re still Librarians. We still protect the Library. We’re just also not gonna let this slide. Any of it.”
Jake nods. It’s the answer he was pretty sure he was going to get. It’s the answer he was going to give. No matter how they were lied to, they can’t just leave. This is their job. This is who they are now. This place needs them. They were chosen to protect it. They tried it, going back to normal lives and doing this on the side, and it didn’t work. It’s not like they don’t have some regular hobbies on the side. They’d all go crazy otherwise. Hell, that’s probably a big part of why Alexandria’s… how she is. But this is their life.
Besides, who knows how long DOSA is actually going to back off for? The Library needs defending even if “pure evil” is gone. The more of them, the better. They’re all a whole lot less likely to die if they’ve got each other. And Eve and Jenkins, as mad as they may be at them right now.
Cassie swallows. She squeezes their hands tightly. “I think… I think… I think Dr. Carsen—Alexandria needs help. And I know it’s not our responsibility and she doesn’t know how to be our friend but someone has to help her.”
She can’t even tell who she’s the most angry with. Eve lied about one thing. Jenkins lied about another. Alexandria lied about both. They could have all worked together and instead they tried to split them apart even though they should know better by now. But it’s hard to be angry at Jenkins when he’s just as mad at Eve as they are, and it’s hard to be mad at Eve for the exact same reason.
It’s not like Jenkins has ever told them everything about himself. He hides so much. But this is—
Cassie’s breathing stutters. Is it different than what Jake and Ezekiel know about her? They haven’t told anyone. No, it has to be different. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t have it planned because she’s depressed or looking to escape her life and she wants out. Everything has been out of her control since she went to the doctor about a sudden influx of seizures despite not having epilepsy, and she’d rather go how she wants than in a hospital room.
Besides, she can push it back now. Treatable, not curable, but treatment buys so much more time. She touches the mark on her head where the stitches were. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to be alive while she still can, and in control for as long as possible. That’s why she gave herself a timeline.
“Yeah.” Jake says. “Okay. We’ll see what we can do.”
Ezekiel brushes his thumb along the back of Cassie’s knuckles, which is the same as an agreement.
Eve takes a deep breath. She knows she’s looming, a little, but there’s not much else she can do to get an actual straight answer to this question. “How long?”
Alexandria blinks at her. She’s huddled on the stairs again, fidgeting with her sleeves. “What?”
“How long have you been actively planning to kill yourself?” Eve asks bluntly.
“I was planning to use myself to defeat Apep since the Bermuda Triangle,” Alexandria answers, which confirms what Eve assumed.
So Cassie was right about it being months. And here Eve was assuming that progress had been made. Alex wasn’t running away at the first opportunity, she was sticking around to help them, she was making an effort to be cordial with Cassie, Jake, and Ezekiel… She was asking them questions about themselves like she wanted to know the answers, she was more open to their ideas, she was cheerful. She seemed happy. She offered to lend her favorite field guides to Cassandra, she gave Ezekiel her punchcard for the frozen yogurt place across town, she’d asked if Eve wanted Cal to stay with her permanently at her apartment…
Was that because she didn’t feel like she would need them for much longer? Hadn’t Eve heard once that that was supposed to be a sign that someone knew they were going to take their own life soon?
“I should feel scared right now, but I don’t. I feel grateful. To you, and to the Library, for bringing me so much joy. Goodbye, Eve.”
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t tell me,” Eve says. When Alexandria looks away, she shakes her head. “I can believe you wouldn’t. But you—” She glares at Jenkins. “Lecturing me about breaking their trust while hiding this from us?”
“I think I was perfectly within my rights to tell you that you had failed as a Guardian and as a human being given what I knew about the situation,” Jenkins says. “In fact, I would say that not cluing us in on your plan with Dr. Carsen still ranks very highly as a bad decision.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Eve snaps. “Don’t get sanctimonious with me about a plan with ‘Dr. Carsen.’”
“You shouldn’t be mad at Jenkins,” Alexandria says quietly. Eve looks back down at her as she wraps and unwraps the chain that used to hold the Eye from around her fingertips. There’s still a smudge of soot on her forehead, like she’s the first Jewish person to participate in Ash Wednesday. “The Caretaker’s responsibility is to the Library and to the Librarian. I asked him not to tell you.”
“Oh, really? Jenkins, you once told me the Library goes through Librarians like tissue paper. Now you’ve got four. Would losing one really make that much of a difference?” Eve hisses.
Jenkins actually flinches. “Ms. Carsen is not an ordinary Librarian,” he says after a long moment, voice thick and briefly flustered enough to drop the proper honorific. “She’s my friend.”
“That—” She feels like Cassandra did. She wants to go over there and poke him. “That makes it worse.” Great, now they’re both crying. “You know that makes it worse, don’t you?”
“I’m right here,” Alexandria says to herself. She keeps playing with the gold chain, cutting off circulation to her fingers and then restoring it again. She switches to Bird and adds under her breath, “It was for the greater good.”
“All the Librarians that died over the years,” Eve says, fighting with every ounce of strength she has to keep her voice even. “How many of them—how many of them killed themselves?”
“That’s not fair,” Alexandria objects, in English this time. “Plenty of Librarians have sacrificed themselves in the name of keeping the world safe from magic. Like I keep saying, it’s part of the job. Everyone knows that!”
“Twelve,” Jenkins says, and to his credit he doesn’t break eye contact with Eve when he does.
Alexandria frowns, head tilting like a curious parrot. “That’s not as many as I was expecting, considering all the catastrophes that—”
“No, Dr. Carsen. I’m… In the interest of fairness, I’m excluding the ones who gave their lives for others the way you attempted to,” Jenkins says delicately. “Twelve Librarians have died of… self-inflicted wounds.”
Eve closes her eyes. It’s not that she doesn’t think there’s a difference between someone honestly giving their life in the moment to save someone else or a plan that only works if someone goes down with the ship and someone outright committing suicide. With all the hits she’s taken for these people, it’d be hypocritical of her not to. In the line of duty, she would do exactly what Alex had done. There’s no doubt in her mind that she would lay down her life for everyone in this Library.
But months. For months, Alexandria has been lying to her and planning to die. When Eve had gone to her about General Rockwell trying to turn her into a double agent, she’d been upset about the idea that Eve would have to pretend to betray them, right before lying directly to her face about Jenkins being able to create a failsafe to protect the Library while knowing she was going to use it as an opportunity to kill herself and Apep both.
“That’s twelve too many,” she says.
“That, we can agree on,” Jenkins says, dipping his head. He sighs deeply and takes a few steps toward her, putting his hand on his heart. “Colonel Baird, I won’t pretend I’ve shed tears for every Librarian who’s passed through these doors and not returned. But I can assure you, if I believed there was any way we could have sealed evil away without Dr. Carsen having to die, I would have done my best to take it.”
“I’m still right here,” Alexandria grouses. She’s not sure why there are some tears in her eyes. “You’re talking about my life, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Eve sits back down next to her on the stairs and wraps her arm around her again, pulling her close until she can press her forehead into Alexandria’s temple. “I’m worried about you, Alex.”
“You don’t have to be,” Alexandria says earnestly. “We did it. We saved the world. Of course there will be the next emergency, but I wouldn’t…” She takes a deep breath. “It was necessary. I was protecting you, and them, and Jenkins, and the Library, and everything else good in the world. I don’t want to die for nothing.”
“I don’t want you to want to die for anything,” Eve says.
Jenkins coughs into his fist but doesn’t actually speak. Eve knows he’s thinking about how she defeated Dorian Gray. About her complete lack of hesitation when she flung herself off the roof and onto concrete without any confirmation that the plan would work. About all the other times she’s put herself between her Librarians and the line of fire. But that was… different. That wasn’t premeditated. There had been no other way.
It was different. It was.
“It’s not wanting,” Alexandria says. She considers and holds up her fingers, measuring a tiny amount. “Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit wanting. But it’s not the same thing. I’m not going to go home and hang myself or anything.”
She says it like a joke, but there’s not nearly enough humor in it. Especially because it’s what Eve has been imagining ever since Alexandria said “Of course I want to die!” That had sounded like more than just a little bit of passive suicidal ideation.
All three of them look up when Cassandra marches back into the annex with Jake and Ezekiel in tow.
She crosses the floor until she’s in front of Alexandria and Eve. Eve winces a little at the hurt in her eyes when she makes eye contact with her. She looks away before Cassie does.
Cassie straightens her shoulders and lifts her chin. “I’ve known what day I was going to die since I was fifteen years old.”
Once more, the whole Library goes quiet. Alexandria freezes with her brow furrowed and her mouth open. Eve can’t help but notice that Jake and Ezekiel don’t look the least bit surprised. How long have they known?
“I didn’t have it set because I wanted to die,” she says. “I had it because I knew I wanted to go on my terms, not anyone or anything else’s. I want to live until I can’t anymore, and if I’m dying, it’s not going to be because of a bunch of rogue oligodendrocytes.”
She takes a deep, shaky breath. Alexandria tries to stand but Eve doesn’t let her. “Cass—”
“Let her finish,” Jake and Ezekiel say in unison, then look at each other in surprise.
“You saved me,” Cassie says. “You—I could have cured myself, but I brought you back because you saved me. You gave me the greatest gift I’ll ever have and I don’t want you to die.”
“It’s not like that,” Alexandria insists when Cassie stops and doesn’t start again. She reaches out like she wants to take her hand and then falters, cradling her wrist to her chest as though it’s injured. She flicks her fingers, twitches her head the way she does when she’s flustered. “I was saving the world. I was saving you.”
“You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” Cassie says. Alexandria can’t stop herself from preening a little. “I know you know that if you had told us, we would have found a way to help you defeat Apep without dying. I don’t think it was just about saving the world.”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you would all try to stop me,” Alexandria says. “Which you did.”
She sounds ever-so-slightly accusatory. She immediately realizes her mistake when they all start talking over each other.
“And it worked, and we didn’t lose you! Alex, you can’t seriously still think that was a good idea!”
“You told Jenkins and he didn’t stop you!”
“See, this is what she’s talking about, that’s not a normal thing to say!”
“Dr. Carsen, I think the only thing we can do now is admit our mistakes.”
It’s Cassandra’s voice that cuts through the rest. “I think you need to stop being the Librarian for a while.”
If Alexandria was pale before, now she’s as white as a sheet. “No,” she says. Snarls, really. “No.”
“That seems a bit drastic,” Jenkins says.
Cassie shakes her head. “Not permanently,” she says. “You don’t have to quit. But—”
“The answer is no,” Alexandria cuts her off, anger flaring. She stands and throws the chain in her hands down on the floor. “I’m the Librarian. I decide when I’m done.”
Now it’s her turn to leave the annex in a huff, and despite their anger everyone else turns to Eve.
Normally she would shrug. Alexandria likes alone time. She’s not good at being around other people, especially when under emotional duress. Whether it’s an autism thing or just an Alexandria thing, Eve’s not sure. But she just tried killing herself. There’s no way she’s letting her disappear into the Library now. Eve doesn’t even want to let her out of her line of sight. Not now that she’s this upset.
A thought springs into her mind unbidden. Is Cal still upstairs where we put it to hide it from Rockwell? She doesn’t want to have to worry about that. It makes her feel sick.
“We’re going after her. See if you can find her in the shelves,” Eve instructs. She hesitates for a second before dividing them up, trying to figure out the best way for them to be split that won’t end in Cassie strangling Jenkins to death. “Cassandra, you’re with me. Stone, you search the east side. Jones, Jenkins, you take the west.”
“Are we sure this is a good—” Jenkins falters when four pairs of eyes glare at him. “Duly noted. I will go with Mr. Jones.”
It’s not exactly a fool’s errand. There’s a good chance one of the others will find her. But Eve knows where she’s most likely to be, and it’s not in any of the usual places she likes to go to hide. All the cozy corners where she’s found her curled up with books, or the spot under the portrait that Alexandria once told her didn’t always look how it does now, or the room with all the (in Eve’s opinion creepy) extinct animal taxidermy, or the unicorn stable… She’s probably hoping they’ll look there first.
Eve’s got a feeling she has a different destination in mind this time.
Jenkins had shown her the Chamber of Memories entirely by accident. He’d been looking for something else and she had passed by just as he inadvertently rediscovered it. He hadn’t fully explained to her what it was. It mostly just looked like a fire hazard. But it had been so upsetting for Alexandria after Charlene died that she had sent Eve back there in her place to see if she was really gone.
If there’s anywhere in this damn Library she’s hiding that isn’t one of her favorite spots, it’s going to be there.
“What room is this?” Cassandra asks quietly, looking around at all the candles. She has a mental map of everywhere in the Library she knows about, not that it’s very useful as a navigational tool considering how they move around, but she has to add to it all the time.
“I barely understand it,” Eve admits. She peers through the doorway and spots a huddle at the back of the room. “But she’s here.”
Alexandria’s head jerks up when they approach. Her skin looks waxy and jaundiced in the flickering light of the candles, her eyes darkened from brown to black by the shadows. She stays frozen, hunched over in front of a candle that’s burned nearly all the way down. There’s actual wax residue piled up on every inch of the floor, although Alexandria is making an effort to scratch her own name into the milky-looking patch next to where she’s sitting.
“Go away,” she says.
“I can’t do that,” Eve says. “I’m—we’re all worried about you.”
“Because you think I’m crazy,” Alexandria snaps, and Eve can’t blame her for clearly still being in deeply defensive territory. She stops approaching, but Cassandra doesn’t, although she doesn’t actually cross the room; she seems as preoccupied with looking at all the candles as Eve is with distracting Alex. “You all think I’m crazy. You want to—to get me out of the Library, is that it? You’re all in cahoots together to—I don’t know! Lock me up?”
“No, Alex,” Eve says firmly. Once more something flashes across her brain. When they’d decided that an intervention was the best way to get through to Alexandria. Ezekiel had asked if they were sure there wasn’t just a medication she was supposed to be taking. Cassie had pinched him for it. “We’re your friends. It’s me. We want to help you.”
She looks panicked, like an animal in a trap. Eve’s seen it before. Both on Alexandria’s face and on that of the version of her she’d met who wasn’t any of this. She hated it then and she hates it now.
“Cassandra, why don’t you go find the boys?” Eve suggests. Less people here might be… better.
“No,” Cassie says quietly. “You should go. I’ll stay.”
Protectiveness rises in Eve’s chest. She’s used to playing translator, bringing Alexandria back down to earth. She doesn’t want to go. This is her—her partner they’re talking about here. Her Alex, who’s scared and struggling and nearly died in her arms less than ten hours ago.
Less people would be better, but shouldn’t she be the one to stay?
“Trust me,” Cassandra says. When Eve doesn’t move, she adds, “You do trust me, don’t you?”
Eve takes a deep breath. Trust. Right. This is Cassie they’re talking about. She wouldn’t hurt someone… Well, yes, she would, with very little hesitation, but not someone she cares about. They may not be friends, but she knows she still cares about Alex. “What we kept from you had nothing to do with trust,” she says softly, and takes a step back. “Call me if you need me.”
Cassandra waits for her to leave before sitting down on the floor. She peers at Alexandria, who’s looking at the doorway nervously like she’s hoping Eve will just turn around and come back through it.
“What’s your favorite bird?” She asks.
It works. All the anxious tension trickles out of Alexandria in an instant. She blinks at Cassie, trying to figure out the trick and finding none. Cautiously, she answers, “Diomedea antipodensis. Antipodean albatross. For, uh, personal reasons.” She pauses. “You?”
Cassie looks around at all the candles. She noticed the weird feeling in the room from the second she walked in. It’s like everything in here hums on some strange frequency she can’t quite attune herself to. It makes her head squeeze a little bit. On the ceiling, some of the shadows change direction and chase each other. The Library saying hello.
“Ivory-billed woodpecker,” she says. The shadows wink again like they’re promising they have her back.
“Oh. We have two around here somewhere,” Alexandria offers. She changes position so she’s not on her knees, leaning back against a table precariously stacked with lit candles. Cassie half expects her hair to go up in flames. “I can show you where. They’re by Nessie’s hibernation pool.”
“Maybe tomorrow?” Cassie suggests.
“Are you going to have me kicked out of the Library by tomorrow?” Alexandria sounds more tired than angry now.
“I don’t want you to stop being a Librarian forever,” Cassie says. Which is true. She looks at the candle Alexandria is next to. The one burned almost all the way down to the stone pedestal it’s on. “You’re good at it. But we’re good at it too, now. You don’t have to do everything, because all of us are here.”
“Déjà vu,” Alexandria mutters. “Gonna tie me up in a chair this time, too? Make us all go around in a big circle, explain all the reasons why we want to—” She cuts herself off, pursing her lips.
“Die?” Cassandra hugs her shoulders. “I don’t think any of the rest of us want to die.”
“Come on.” Alexandria starts ticking off her fingers. “Jenkins is immortal. If you think immortals don’t want to die, you’re kidding yourself. Stone—I don’t know, probably. You’re right, though, Jones definitely doesn’t. Eve—” She falters. “I hope not. You need her. And you just said you have it planned.”
There’s so much to unpack there that for a moment Cassandra just blinks at her. She scrambles to compartmentalize. Can’t deal with that right now, or that, or that, just the last thing. “I don’t have it—I don’t have dying planned because I want to die.”
Alexandria looks at the little candle’s remains. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I have it so I know I can live.” Cassandra looks at the huge branching candle next to her. It’s so bright it almost single-handedly illuminates this side of the room. Her brain spirals in the tiny lines of smoke. “On my timeline, not my body’s. I don’t have to worry about when cancer is going to kill me, because it doesn’t matter. I decide.”
“And if the day you pick lets you go out saving the world?” Alexandria challenges.
“Maybe it will.” Cassandra shrugs. “But I don’t want a world-ending catastrophe to decide when I get to die, either. It’s my life, even if things keep trying to invade it. That’s why I’m going to live more now that this surgery is done. I don’t… I don’t want to die. I don’t want anyone to want to die.” She taps her foot. “You said we needed Baird.”
“Because you do,” Alexandria says.
“Of course we do. She’s our Guardian,” Cassie says. “But she needs you, too.”
Alexandria laughs, quick and short. “You don’t have to lie to me, Cassandra.”
She stops. The idea of Eve not needing Alexandria is… almost laughable. It’s the same as needing the rest of them. Of course she does. She knows sometimes Jake and Ezekiel think that the Library could manage fine without them, but Cassie knows better than that. “You think she doesn’t?”
“Eve needs me like I need—” Alexandria starts, only to laugh as harshly as before. It reminds Cassandra a lot of how she’d sounded before they got on the plane. “Can’t say that, can I? You’ll think I really want to shoot myself.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Cassandra spins the ring on her left hand.
Whatever Alexandria mutters to herself is too quiet to make out, and even though Cassie’s pretty good at lip reading these days it doesn’t help if it’s not said in something she can actually speak. She doesn’t have a hope of reconstructing a sentence in a language entirely spoken by extant Ornithurae and one Librarian. But… Cassie studies her face. People are like puzzles. Not easy puzzles, not usually, but puzzles nonetheless. And there’s something she picked up on a long time ago, in a tunnel under the Vatican when she and Jake weren’t supposed to be eavesdropping on the conversion Alexandria was having with Eve. Something that came up again two months ago.
“You don’t talk about your Guardian before Eve,” she says, and she knows she’s hit on something because Alexandria flinches like she’s been struck. She swallows, thinking about Eve bleeding out on the floor from a wound that appeared from nowhere. It takes her a second to make her mouth move. “How many?”
Alexandria presses her lips together. “One,” she croaks. “Officially. Two more unofficially, if you count Charlene.”
“Charlene,” Cassandra echoes, because Alexandria has been planning this for months, longer than Charlene has been dead, but she watched her—not her Guardian, not quite, but something like her mother and certainly her friend give her own life for the Library less than a week ago. Her stomach feels hollow.
She can hear Charlene’s voice in her head. They’d all politely pretended not to listen when she’d been talking to Alexandria (well, Ezekiel hadn’t bothered pretending), even though they’d been hanging onto every word. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices, as hard as that is for those around us. But more than anyone, you understand the sacrifice I make. Don’t you?”
It’s just like what Jake said. About this place doing something to people, making them want to burn out bright. She doesn’t even think the Library does it on purpose; it took her side earlier, about not wanting Alexandria to kill herself. Maybe it’s something in the tap water and they should be investigating Bull Run. Maybe it’s just the isolation. The second option is scarier.
“I miss her,” Alexandria says, choked. “I always missed her. But I miss her now more.” Her breathing turns into shallow gasps. “Everyone’s gone. Everyone. It’s only the people here. Now. That’s all I have. Charlene and Judson are gone. I killed—I—I—and Simone is gone. My mom’s been gone longer than Judson and Charlene have.”
“I don’t even think about you as having parents,” Cassie says, half to calm her down and half because it’s true. “I just imagine you appearing in the middle of the Library like Athena coming out of Zeus’ head.”
Alexandria twitches her head. She doesn’t know Cassandra nearly enough to tell her about her family. She avoids talking about it with Eve and Eve already knows some of it from the one time she had an anxiety attack and spilled the details that her mother loved her but she loved the son she thought Alexandria took away more. “I almost named myself Athena.”
“I like Alex better,” Cassie says.
Alexandria looks at the candle. “I didn’t know when I picked it—well, I knew about the library, obviously. I picked it because of the library, because I’m the Librarian. But I thought it was an ordinary one. Charlene told me a few years after that it was the original location of our Library. And I—I liked the name. Defender of mankind.”
Cassandra looks at that candle, too. Then from there to the big one next to her, then to the one hanging from the ceiling, then to all the extinguished ones scattered through with what might look to someone else like a completely random array but clearly follows a pattern, spiraling in sequences across nearly every square inch of space. The candle by Alexandria she’s so focused on is the next in line. If she squints, she can just barely see the smoke making a pattern. Not a code, a spectrogram. She can piece together what it would sound like, but it’s just a high-pitched bird song.
Oh. She understands what this place is now, maybe. Definitely. She refuses to look at the candles behind Alexandria because she knows what they must be.
“It’s almost gone,” she observes.
“That’s how I know my time is almost up,” Alexandria says with clear relief. “You can’t beat prophecy, just like you can’t beat time travel.”
“Eve did,” Cassandra says.
Alexandria shakes her head. “Eve’s special.”
“She couldn’t have done it alone.” Cassie stands up and finally crosses the room. “That’s one of the only ways you can outsmart it. Someone outside the prophecy has to intervene.”
“Maybe I don’t want all of you to keep intervening,” Alexandria says. “Maybe I’m tired, Cassandra. Maybe I’m too tired of all of this to keep going.”
Cassandra holds out her hand to help her to her feet. “Just stop. For two weeks, just stop. Go do something with Eve. No Library stuff. See how you feel afterward.”
“I can’t leave the Library,” Alexandria insists. “It’s my home.”
“But if you did,” Cassie says, “I think I know a place you could go. Just think about it like a vacation. Hasn’t Eve been asking you to take her on one?”
For five minutes, they’re both there. Cassie with her arm outstretched and Alexandria on the floor. Then Alex sighs, takes Cassandra’s hand, and lets herself be pulled upright.
“Hi, you,” Eve says when Alexandria hurls herself at her, bending so she can push her face into Eve’s neck. She wraps her arms around her, pulling her closer. “What did you two talk about?”
“Cassandra’s favorite bird is the ivory-billed woodpecker,” Alexandria says, voice tickling Eve’s skin.
“Oh, really?” Eve says mildly. She does her best to chase away the anxiety in her head that Alexandria was never going to leave that room. She’s here now, she’s with Eve, she’s fine. “That’s an interesting choice. Didn’t you show me the two that live here one time?” She runs her fingers through Alex’s hair, then lowers her voice. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired,” Alexandria mumbles. “I’m just really tired.”
Eve looks at Cassandra and raises her eyebrows. She nods, having already been mobbed by Jake and Ezekiel who are currently holding her hands. “I had an idea.”
Eve feels Alex shudder a little and hums to soothe her. “What was it?”
“Refuge,” Cassie says. “I could find it again, I know I could. There’s no guarantee it would say yes, but I think if I explained what was going on—it helps people who need help.”
Eve can extrapolate the rest of the sentence, because Cassandra’s right. Alex needs help. “And you’re okay with that?” She asks her quietly. “Going to the House of Refuge?”
“It’s a vacation for you,” Alexandria says like she’s doing Eve some huge favor. Oh, Cassie is such a clever Librarian and Eve loves her for it. “For two weeks. If I can’t bring work with me, you can’t either.”
“Well, if you’re twisting my arm… I guess I’ll have to hang up Excalibur for a while,” Eve says, squeezing her. She mouths “Thank you” to Cassandra. Both Ezekiel and Jake look extremely proud of her, which they should be. “We’ll have to go back to my place so I can pack. Your toothbrush and pills are still there.”
Technically, Alexandria doesn’t actually live anywhere except the Library right now, but Eve has managed to entice her into spending more nights with her than she does here by letting Alex’s estrogen live in her bathroom. She’s much more grateful for that now. She doesn’t like the thought of her spending nights alone here plotting how she wanted to defeat Apep.
“Okay,” Alexandria agrees. Her neck is cramping a little from the position she’s in but it’s nice to feel Eve’s pulse every once in a while. “I am tired, though. And I told Cassandra I’d show her the woodpeckers tomorrow.”
“So we’ll leave tomorrow afternoon, once she’s found the House and you’ve done your… woodpecker-ing,” Eve says, and Cassie nods. “Come on. We’ll go home. You can sleep—we’ll both sleep. Our Librarians can hold down the fort here, right?”
Alexandria hesitates and Eve holds her breath until she acquiesces. “Fine.”
“We’ll need a door,” Eve says gently, trying to take a step back and staggering when Alexandria takes the opportunity to go completely boneless against her. “Alex. You know how to walk.”
Alexandria whines but stands. “I’ll get my coat.”
While she does that, Eve holds out her hand to Cassie. She eyes it for a moment before letting go of Jake’s hand so she can firmly shake it. She’s got a good grip. That’s one of the things Eve likes about her.
“Cassandra Cillian, you are an exceptional Librarian,” Eve says. “I’m sorry we lied to you, even though at the time I thought it was right. I hope one day I can earn back the trust you had in me. Please try not to kill Jenkins while I’m gone.”
There are tears in Cassie’s eyes when she smiles. “No promises,” she says softly. “Thank you for being our Guardian, and hers. Never lie to me—to us again.”
“I won’t,” Eve says, even though they both know it’s a vow she can’t possibly keep. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
She nods. “Tomorrow.”
Overhead, the Library’s lights flicker.