Page 57 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar finally spotted the dagger he’d left to mark the pool he arrived by. It had taken him quite a few circuits before he found it, and for a while he’d been working out various spiral search patterns he might have to employ in order to be sure of locating his pool. The degree of relief he experienced on finally registering the distant dot had surprised him. With so many choices did he really care if he couldn’t find his way back? Apparently, he did.

“In any case, maybe I don’t have any choices at all.” Livira’s pool had refused him. Maybe all the others would too. Maybe even his pool would reject him, and he’d be left to wander this middle ground until he starved, or some new child popped up out of one of the pools to guide him home.

Evar stopped at a pool no different from any other. He was most of the way back to his own now—only three to go. Standing there, he had no insight into the workings of his own mind. Why had his feet stopped moving at this pool and not the one before or the one after? Starval claimed nothing was truly random. So, had Evar chosen this particular pool? Had it called to him? He didn’t know.

First, he tested the water with a toe and then with his whole foot. No resistance. Evar knelt and reached in with his arm. Cold, clear water. He could see his hand and forearm beneath the surface, painted by rippled light. Find her at the bottom? How many would he have to try? As he thought about the nameless woman outlined on the cover of his book, he knew with more certainty than ever before that his years in the Mechanism had been years spent with her. It felt like a missing lifetime. He had loved her with a fierceness that he would never have imagined could be taken from him. He tried to speak her name and tasted it on his tongue. Tasted her.

“I’ll try this one.” Evar stood, shaking the water from his arm. He didn’t have the weight to drag him down, but he had the experience to hold on to—the knowledge that this was more than a pool, its water both more than and less than water. It could take him somewhere else. All that was required was an agreement between them. His conviction and the pool’s acceptance.

He looked down into the water, its surface still trembling with the memory of his intrusion, depths obscured. A whole new world beyond each pool? Another part of the same world? Would he end up beneath the same sky as Livira or his family? Were they both the same? Did Livira and the many friends she’d spoken of live their lives just beyond the char wall?

He jumped.

—

The darkness that had swallowed Evar released him back to his senses in the act of getting to his feet. Crops spread before him in a green arc. He knew the pool lay at his back. The library ceiling was his sky once more, the book stacks his forest. He was back where he’d come from and not even breathless from his plunge. Not even wet.

Evar’s profound sense of disappointment hadn’t even had time to settle before the next three things he noticed blew it away entirely. “We didn’t plant anything like this much!” The melon field ran three, possibly four times further ahead of him than it should. “Where’s the wall?” The book wall that Clovis had insisted they build had gone, leaving the stacks themselves as the only perimeter. “Who...” And there was a figure moving between the book towers, coming his way. Dressed like him, as tall as Kerrol, but not Kerrol. Not Clovis. Not Starval.

“Gods! There’s more of them.” Evar stepped back and narrowly avoided falling into the pool.

The three figures approaching didn’t seem to have noticed the brief, undignified pinwheel of his arms as he’d fought to keep his balance. Evar no longer cared about the approaching trio. As he’d danced on the pool’s edge he’d turned and found that just yards away on the other side a woman was kneeling amidst the wheat rows, bent over some task, so intent upon it that she hadn’t even registered his performance. Immediately he tried to call to her, but his voice dried up, his throat contracting around the possibility that this was her, the woman he’d drowned himself to find. The author of his book.

Evar stood lost in wonder. There was something strange about the woman, who was dressed in the same kind of jerkin and trews as he was, sewn together from leather covers. It took him a long, silent moment to work out what was curious about the side view of her face: she was old. Grey in her hair, cheeks withered, deep lines around the corner of her eye.

The woman turned as he stared; she stood and raised her hand in greeting. Evar was so lost in the newness of strangers that for a long moment he made no response, then awkwardly, unsure of himself, he jerked his hand up as she had done.

“You’re up early, Arka.” The voice came from behind him and Evar spun around to see the three others working their way along a narrow path between the melons and the beans. The speaker was a man who looked almost as old as the woman, two younger women, girls not even Evar’s age, came behind him with leather-strap baskets. None of them so much as looked at him.

“Hello...” Evar lowered his hand, feeling foolish. “I’m Evar.”

“These days my bones get me up before the bell.” The old woman grimaced and returned her attention to her work. She seemed to be spreading compost around the roots.

“Hello?” Evar raised his voice. “I came out of the pool. Just now.”

The girls started to move among the melon plants, hunched over in the search for ripe fruit, talking together in low voices. The man went to help the woman.

“Can’t you hear me?” Evar followed the man in confusion. “Hello!”

He stood over the two of them as they spread the compost. Evar patted himself unconsciously, confirming to himself that he was real, he was there. Could he be dreaming his last dream as he drowned in a pool?

He reached down to touch the man’s shoulder, suddenly nervous. His hand sank through leather and flesh without resistance. The feeling was unpleasant, as if he’d reached into a pool just a breath away from freezing. A bone-chilling ache ran up his arm and he pulled his hand back quickly. The man reached up to scratch where Evar had touched him, returning to his work without comment.

Evar stepped back. Not even the crops noticed him, refusing to rustle as he passed through them and as they reciprocated, passing through him in turn. He had read widely enough to understand that in this place he was a ghost. He could move with stealth that even Starval would envy, become the perfect spy. All that was denied to him were the things he truly wanted.

Evar walked away from the pool, habit directing him to avoid the crop even though damaging it was beyond him. It seemed that he was in another world but one quite similar to his own, one where a collection of people of his own race were also trapped within the library. Or maybe in this world they chose to be here. Perhaps whatever lay outside was worse than the sameness of days beneath a stone sky.

There were people everywhere, scores of them, walking together, children playing games, young men and women sitting in circles talking, some working on repairs to clothing or tools, many just sitting in book-walled shelters seeking privacy. A good number of them were reading just like Evar did. With so many of them, access to the Mechanism must be limited, if they even had one.

For an hour or two he simply sat and watched, letting the strangers come and go around him, listening to their conversation, which was mostly filled with chatter about each other, so many names, so many grievances and scandals and romances and intrigues. They talked about stories too, having hunted out seams of fiction and mined them for entertainment. Evar recognised none of the tales that fascinated them.

Even if he hadn’t been a ghost, unable to touch anything but the floor, Evar would have felt himself to be in a dream. The strangeness of it all overwhelmed him. At one point he was actually in a crowd. A crowd! More than a dozen people converged around him, drawn by a joke that set one attractive young woman laughing.

Evar found himself instantly tangled in the lives of these strangers, smiling at their banter, following one group and then another, marvelling in their difference and their newness, discovering unexpected characters and fresh faces at every turn. He felt less alone here haunting a people who could neither see nor hear him than he did under the regard of his three siblings back in his own version of the library.

After a while the people began to gather, unsummoned, drifting in from the stacks for some presumably regular meeting. Evar waited, watching, wanting to know how community worked. How people lived together. Of the hundred and more pairs of eyes, not one so much as flickered his way.

Neither hunger nor thirst seemed to notice him either. He let the trio he’d been following wander off and stood looking out at the less-travelled regions of the stacks marvelling at how familiar and yet how different it all was. A sense of peace and community ran through the place—something he’d never experienced before. With Clovis and Kerrol and Starval it felt as if all they were doing was waiting to die. But here, where children and ancients sat together, it seemed more like a cycle, a living thing that would roll on through the years combining both change and stability.

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