Page 44 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

He knew it would be repeated somewhere in different terms at least three more times, and he bent closer to the pages to look. He found “The sight of the heart that pulses the force,” which didn’t make things much clearer, so he scanned onward. He was so focused that he jumped when Collins spoke to him.

“I think you need to see this,” Collins said. He was across the room, standing in front of one of the shelves.

“In a minute,” said Nicholas, rereading to find his place again.

“Nicholas,” Collins said, and something in his tone made Nicholas glance up. “You need to see this.”

Oh-so-carefully, Nicholas set the book down on the desk and came to join Collins where he stood, apparently transfixed, in front of a large glass jar with something suspended in the middle.

“Look close,” Collins said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but...”

Humoring him, Nicholas looked at the jar. It was at the height of his head and about the same size, with a few bloody marks that were probably part of a spell to keep glass from breaking. The lid, too, seemed to have been spelled.

Nicholas turned his attention to the contents of the jar, though he wasn’t certain what he was looking at: some kind of small orb floated in some kind of liquid, which wasn’t water, he could tell that much. It was thicker, a kind of translucent viscous goo, and the orb was not so much floating as suspended.

It was an eye.

Or an eyeball, to be precise, removed from the skull with surgical precision. It was facing them. Nicholas could see the red cloud of veins and ligaments that trailed it like a comet. He was no expert, but the iris so closely resembled the painted version of his own prosthetic that he figured it must have come from a human. Beside him, he felt Collins shift his weight, clearly disturbed by the sight. Nicholas did not feel much better. His own left socket tingled in sympathetic response and his stomachchurned. It was uncanny to be stared at, literally eye-to-eye, by something so ghastly yet so recognizable. So familiar.

Too familiar.

“Collins,” Nicholas said, and the word came out hoarse. He turned to face his bodyguard. Collins stared back, jaw clenched, and a shiver ran through him. He said, “It looks like mine.”

Collins swallowed but didn’t speak. He nodded.

Nicholas turned back to the jar. He’d spent more time than most people looking at his own eyes, especially as a teenager, comparing the two in the mirror to see if the false one was noticeable, and unlike most people he’d often held an exact replica of his own eye in his hand while cleaning it; he’d turned it this way and that, examining the craftsmanship and admiring the variations in color that made it so realistic, the flecks of greenish gold among the brown, the ring of lighter amber around the iris, the blood vessels made up of tiny red fibers.

He knew his own eye when he saw it and he was seeing it now.

“Hey,” Collins said, “stop, get up.”

Nicholas, perpetually light-headed, had become suddenly much more so, and was now sitting on the ground. It was as if his body had decided he’d be able to use his brain better if he cut all other sources of energy. Collins prodded him with a sneakered toe, not quite a kick.

Nicholas said, “What is my eye doing in a jar on a shelf in my uncle’s study?”

“I didn’t put it there,” said Collins.

“Richard must have gotten it from—from those people, the ones who kidnapped me,” Nicholas said. “Right? But why would he keep it? And why wouldn’t he say anything about it to me? It looks perfect, I mean, they could’ve stuck it back in or something, I don’t know how eyes work but you can sew fingers and hands back on if the cut’s clean enough, why didn’t they...” He rubbed his face roughly, working to focus, to understand.

“Nicholas,” Collins said. “Whoever took your eye, I think, I mean, I think it’s probably the same person who stuck it in that jar.”

Nicholas’s mind skimmed these words, not ready yet to settle on them. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled back to the desk, squinting through the haze of a headrush as he flicked through the pages of the spell book he’d just been examining. He didn’t have to look to know what he would find.

The view from the body that gives life to power.

The sight of the heart that pulses the force.

The eye of a Scribe.

Nicholas thought of that room in San Francisco all those years ago, the sound of his piss dripping from his chair, the feeling of zip ties cutting into his wrists, the endless darkness. He couldn’t ignore the implications of what Collins was saying.

It had been the Library itself that had taken him. The Library itself who’d so carefully removed his eye and preserved it in a glass jar for this spell.

And the Library was Richard. Richard and Maram.

They had staged a kidnapping and taken his eye and then staged a rescue, proving all their own warnings and justifying the close watch they’d kept on him ever after, cementing his reliance on them. Histrustin them. Richard’s face when he’d woken in the hospital, the tears in his eyes. Maram’s pacing. Had it all been theater?

Nicholas did not want to believe anything that was running through his mind. He wanted to think he was panicked, foolish, paranoid. But he was standing in a secret room that had been perfectly designed to keep him out. To keep him ignorant.

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