Page 52 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

But between one moment and the next, in the briefest of gaps as intervening trees interrupted his line of sight, she was gone. He arrived at the pool seconds later to find it still dancing. A book lay on the grass at the edge. He picked it up. A small thing bound in creamy leather. He couldn’t read the title.

“You...” Livira arrived, panting. She leaned against a tree and caught her breath. “You’re so fast!”

“You should see my brother Starval. And my sister.” Kerrol was the only one he could outrun now that Mayland was gone. He looked at the pool again. “I saw the Assistant. I don’t know why she left.” He stared, trying to see past the surface and the sunlight. “I think maybe she wants me to follow.”

“That was an assistant?” Livira blinked and pushed away from the tree, looking around as if the Assistant might still be there, hiding behind another trunk.

“An Assistant?” Evar repeated the girl’s strange phraseology.

“I saw one too.” She waved her hand in the direction they’d come from. “Back there. But she was grey. I think someone broke her.”

Evar’s eyes widened. “There’s more than one?”

She didn’t seem certain now. “That’s what Arpix told me...”

“Who?”

“Arpix. He’s a friend. Well. I think...” She frowned. “He is a friend. And Jella and Carlotte and Meelan. I had other friends but—”

Evar raised a hand to cut her off. More strangers. One was overwhelming. His thoughts returned to the Assistant by the pool. She had been very white, now he thought about it, not the old ivory he was used to. “Did they say how many there are?”

“No. Just that there weren’t a lot, and you sometimes find one in the aisles.” Livira squinted at the book in his hand. “Did she leave that?”

Evar offered it to her. “It was by the pool.”

The girl frowned at him and opened her mouth to speak but something about the book caught her attention. “This is it!” She shook her head. “I don’t believe this...”

“It?”

“Reflections on Solitude.” She shook the book at him. “This is crazy! How is it here? What is this place?”

“I don’t know.” Evar was still struggling with the idea that there might be more than one assistant. Common sense told him that if there were many people then there could equally well be more than one assistant. But emotionally he couldn’t quite wrap himself around the concept. “Do you have soldiers too?”

“Yes, lots.” She waved the question away, still fixated on the book in her hand. “I don’t understand... The library is only supposed to have one copy of each.”

“Maybe these don’t all lead to the same library,” Evar said.

“There’s more than one library?” Livira, who had been wrestling with the idea of many copies of a book, seemed to find the notion of multiple libraries as outlandish as Evar found the notion of multiple assistants.

Evar shrugged. “My brother thought so. There are mythologies about the first library and the shadows it casts. He liked the one about Irad who made the library and Jaspeth who wanted to unmake it—warring brothers who—” A sudden fear seized him. “We should go back. Before we lose the pool.” Having raced past so many pools and trees the place seemed much bigger now.

Livira appeared unconcerned. “I know the way.” But she turned round and started walking back. “Why do you want to find this woman whose name you don’t know?”

The question caught Evar off guard. He’d told this strange child more than he’d told any of his family. “She...” He could almost see her behind his eyes. “She’s part of me.” It was the truth—he knew that now he’d spoken the words. “She’s been with me my whole life—or since I was younger than you, at least.” The woods were warmer than the library. Patches of sunlight slid across Evar as he walked; he couldn’t feel them, but they were there, and if he closed his eyes they would still be there, warming him. The woman was like that. The wood wasn’t completely silent, not like the library. There were sounds beneath hearing, sounds that he knew were there, like the sliding sunlight. Trees drinking, slaking their slow thirst. Grass growing. And above them, despite the lack of wind, the occasional creak, the slight flutter of leaves. And somewhere... somewhere... a distant song, the high, sweet, heartbreak that must be birdsong. “There’s a hole through the heart of me,” Evar said. “And it won’t be gone until I find her.” The hurt, which had lived in his bones, so deep that he’d grown around it without recognition, trembled now in his voice, threatening to crack it.

“I’ll help you.”

She said it so lightly that Evar took a moment to understand her. He realised that they were back at the very edge of the black pool. One more step and he’d be swimming. “You will?”

“You helped me find my book.” She smiled and the smile lit her up. Beneath the dirt and bruises she had an open face, strong-featured, dark eyes full of intelligence and mischief. “I’ll help you find your girlfriend.”

Evar looked down at the grass. “She’s not my...” But maybe she was? The others had spent ten years in the Mechanism. They’d all emerged the same age as when they went in but carrying ten years in their heads—ten years of war in Clovis’s, ten years of murder and secrets for Starval, and for Evar a wound a decade deep. “Thank you.” He turned to meet Livira’s gaze. A startled expression seized her face. They both looked down. A grey hand had reached from the pool and closed around her ankle.

Fast as he was Evar couldn’t catch her. In a broken moment she was gone.

Strong arms propelled him through the door, and the wet pavement received him. He railed first against the bouncers who had identified his interloping and had ejected him without ceremony. When his ire had been spent, he declared to passing strangers that the party had been a terrible bore. And when his audience had gone beyond hearing, he studied his shoes, wondering what failing had marked him out, and how he might sneak back into the warmth, the light, the music, but most of all the company of others.

Pygmalion’s Progress, by Anneta Drew

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