Page 118 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Enough of that.” Arpix started to walk her away. “Nobody’s going to find them here.”

It was true that they’d drawn the portal on a piece of wall at the end of a long aisle of poorly regarded fiction, inaccessible from either side without a ladder. The records suggested that nobody had taken a book off any of the aisle’s many shelves since they were catalogued over seventy years previously. In any case, if someone discovered the books then they’d already have uncovered a much greater prize—the portal itself.

—

As Livira limped towards the centre circle, the distraction provided by Arpix’s return and the books he’d brought with him—books that had been the focus of her searching for years—began to fail. Even the pain in her leg proved insufficient to anchor her thoughts in the here and now. Images of Evar began to intrude. They’d shared their hatred of sabbers. But they’d been speaking different languages and the Exchange had translated for them. In the end “sabber” was just another word for “enemy” and the hatred they’d shared had been for each other.

Arpix gently tried to ask her what had happened, but after several deflections the hints of anger and heartache in her voice had cautioned him to patience. They walked on through a silence broken only by the gasps that escaped Livira when she put too much weight on her injured leg.

When she finally spoke, it was without prompting. Her heart was too full to carry. Either she had to tell Arpix—tell someone—or some part of her would burst.

“Evar’s a sabber.”

“An enemy?” Arpix asked.

“An actual sabber. A murdering dog-soldier.”

“Livira.” A hint of chiding in his voice. “How is that even possible?”

“The Exchange translates. It colours its world in with what we know or want. Something like that. I’m not sure. He pulled me from the pool, and I saw a friend. He saw someone he wanted to help. I saw him as human; he saw me as a sabber. He told me humans killed his people—I heard sabbers did it. I told him sabbers killed mine—he heard that humans did it. We were tricked.”

Arpix squeezed her wrist where he held it over his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

They walked on. A hot tear rolled down Livira’s cheek. Another followed. Her thoughts were still in turmoil. “Conflicting emotions” was too tame a description—it was open warfare. The shards of pain shooting up from her torn flesh helped to puncture any warm thought or excuse as it formed. Evar had tricked her. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t his fault. She’d kissed a sabber. She wanted to spit. To vomit. Her skin recalled the bristles that she couldn’t see and the image of that sabber striding into the settlement returned again and again, his declaration of ownership, the words barked from his bristling muzzle, the chaos that had followed. Aunt Teela lost in the dust. Killed then and there or perhaps taken to be eaten later.

Livira navigated the way to the circle. The area that nourished and healed wasn’t large and the circles were easy to miss if you didn’t know the layout of the aisles. She collapsed into the aura with a sigh of relief, her pain, at least the physical component, immediately becoming more distant. The gash in her leg was recent enough to respond to the circle’s power. Several texts speculated that the healing was connected with manipulation of time, a reversal of recent trauma. It fit with Livira’s experience. Her broken bones had been swiftly repaired when the assistant brought her to the circle the time she fell from a shelf top. But when her lungs had been scarred by the alchemists’ poisons, they had not recovered any more swiftly in the circle than outside it—the damage had been done too long ago by the time she arrived.

Livira set her back to the curved shelves forming the circle’s perimeter. She sat watching the torn skin reknit, healing her leg in the opposite direction to which the sabber’s claw had cut. She wished that what had happened could similarly be repaired: that the time could be reversed, the harm and heartache undone. But how far back would she have to go? Back past Clovis’s attack in the Exchange. Back past that kiss. Back to the moment Evar had pulled her through into the woods, hauling her from the pool. If he’d truly seen her then, what would he have done? Snapped her neck in an instant? But at that point he’d never laid eyes on a human. He’d only heard Clovis’s tales. Would he have even known her for what she was? Would he have understood her terror? Or her rage?

Out of habit or duty, or perhaps as another form of healing, she reached for a nearby book, rested it across her knees, and opened it to the flyleaf. Arpix looked on, puzzled, as she withdrew quill and ink from various pockets.

“Livira!” he gasped as she began to fill the blank page with words. “What are you doing?”

Since the answer was obvious, Livira ignored the question and continued to write. The scattered pages she’d left isolated in books throughout the labyrinth constituted her own opus in progress. Currently it ranged through scattered—though aligned—short stories, works of fiction but strongly centred on her life and experiences. The people in her life were imported to fill various roles most suited to their true personas.

In all the work so far, nobody but Evar commanded anything like the number of lines Livira did. She’d chased him through the chapters, trying to tease out who he was from the kernel of their handful of encounters. And it seemed that her aim had been very wide of the mark.

Livira shared a dozen adventures with Evar on those pages: might-have-beens, could-have-beens, should-have-beens; places she had wanted to explore with him; things she had wanted to do. Her hand shook and the quill left a glistening blob of ink on the page, ready to run.

Those stories seemed foolish now. He was a sabber. A fucking sabber. How could she look at him and not see his kin walking into her settlement? How could she touch him and not feel that rope which had dragged her from the ruin of her home? She would have to tear those pages out. Rewrite them. Though even as she imagined ripping free those pages and destroying them, she felt an echo of the pain such an act would inflict on her. The tearing of her own skin.

Livira wrote on, her script flowing across the page, a tremble here and there as she painted a new Evar, savage and strange, a killer in disguise. It distracted from the peculiar ache of healing flesh. Overwriting it with something sharper.

And Arpix, reading not the words but what was written on her face, stayed silent, standing guard.

—

“There, good as new.” Livira stamped her foot to prove the point. A faint silvery scar recorded the injury, but the pain had gone.

“Explain it to me again?” Arpix asked, his face serious, perhaps genuinely confused, perhaps knowing that repetition would blunt the edge that had cut her and draw the poison from the wound. “How could Evar be a sabber and you not know it? They say you can tell at a hundred paces.”

“One time.” Livira nodded and drew a deep breath. “Evar and I understood early on that the Exchange looked different to each of us. He saw pools and short trees and no birds. I saw doorways, giant tapwoods, and ravens. We understood the Exchange was using things we knew to paint variations on the same thing. We didn’t question that we were speaking the same language, but we should have. I doubt we were using the same tongue. We didn’t question whether the Exchange was only changing how we saw it. We should have. It changed how we saw each other. It showed us what we expected. He expected to see someone like him, so he saw me as a sabber. I expected to see someone like me, so I saw a human. We met in the act of helping or saving the other. We expected a friend.

“His sister, Clovis, is clearly more suspicious, looking for trouble. She expected or hoped to find someone to fight. So, the Exchange showed her the real me.”

“And when you left the Exchange together?” Arpix asked.

“We were both ghosts; we carried the illusions and the translation with us. I don’t know if we really left the Exchange or if it shows us the past like the Mechanism shows the inside of a book.”

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