Page 59 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Nicholas rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “I feel fine.”

“Good.” Richard clapped his gloved hands together. “Then maybe you’ll have that book written by evening.”

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” said Maram, and rose, readjusting her coat over her arm. She paused by Nicholas’s desk chair, hesitating, and he saw that her hand was gripped so tightly around the thin leather strap of her bag that her knuckles were white. When she bent toward him, he stiffened, genuinely confused about what was happening, because Maram had never kissed him before. But she did so now, a quick brush of her lips against his cheek. She said, “Good-bye.”

“Open or closed?” Richard said, swinging the study door exaggeratedly.

“Open’s fine,” Nicholas said, and they disappeared. He listened as their footsteps thudded across the carpet of the anteroom, then began clicking down the marble corridor, fainter and fainter until he couldn’t hear anything at all. He said quietly to Collins, “What’s in that envelope?”

“Shh,” said Collins, striding to the window and twitching open the curtain. Nicholas pushed himself to his feet and joined Collins at the window. The early sun had faded back into mist and the green fields were glimmering, the long black driveway shining like a snake in the grass, coiling toward the distant road. Silently he and Collins stood shoulder to shoulder, watching until the Library car rolled into view and began making its way down the drive, away from the Library, toward London.

Only when it had vanished from sight completely did Collins turn from the window toward the desk.

He opened the manila envelope and unceremoniously dumped the contents onto Nicholas’s desk.

“We gotta go,” he said.

“Go?” Nicholas echoed, picking up the first thing he saw and examining it in bewilderment. It was a slim green paperback novel with a Spanish title, rather old, and Nicholas opened it to find a note in Maram’s handwriting between the covers. He began to read it—Show this to the woman in the—but then stopped, distracted by the other objects that had been shaken from the envelope.

A fat stack of Euros in a rubber band, and two blue passports.

Collins quickly flipped each passport open in turn to skim the first page and handed one to Nicholas. “This is you.”

Nicholas looked inside. It was him. And it wasn’t. The photo was him, but the name saidNathaniel Brighamand the citizenship was Canadian. Folded inside the passport was a series of plane tickets and another note, also in Maram’s hand:

Trust me.

“Pack your shit,” said Collins. “We’re leaving.”

Nicholas found his voice. “What on earth are you talking about? Did you and Maram plan this?”

“Kinda,” said Collins, sweeping the book into the envelope again. He started shuffling through the stack of tickets in his own passport, nodding.

“What do you mean,kinda?”

“I mean pack your shit,” Collins said, and jammed the tickets and passport into his back pocket. “Our first plane leaves from Paris tomorrow, which means we have to get to London, catch the last Eurostar, and cross the channel tonight, and it’s already late, so move.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Nicholas said. “No. These tickets are incoach,I’m not going to—”

“Nick,” said Collins, and the nickname was enough of an odd surprise to shut Nicholas up. “You saw what was in that jar. You know what it means.”

“It means, well, it means—”

“It means you’re not safe here,” said Collins. “And you never were.”

“You do remember that someone recently tried to kill me? I’m not safe out there, either.”

Collins scrubbed a hand through his dark hair and stared at Nicholas with an expression that was equal parts frustration and pity, and Nicholas suddenly remembered his odd, guilty look in the Winter Drawing Room the day before. A wave of exhaustion crashed over his shoulders, and he slumped against the desk, putting his head down on his arms.

“No one tried to kill me, did they,” he said, voice muffled against the desk. “It was Richard again. He wanted to frighten me.”

Collins didn’t answer. Probably he couldn’t. Nicholas kept his head down, concentrating on his breath. The bees. Of course. He could see the placard of the book Maram had sent him to just the other day:Causes all admixture of chemical propellant, i.e., gunpowder to turn metal into Bombus terrestris upon explosion.She’d charmed Collins’s gun so that when he shot it, bees would come out instead of bullets. Collins had playacted the rescue, just as Richard and Maram had playacted their concern. Only Nicholas, with his real fear, had not been acting.

He needed one second of darkness and quiet, one second to gather his thoughts, but Collins punched him hard on the shoulder.

“No,” he said, like Nicholas was a bad dog. “You can have your breakdown when we’re in the car.”

“What car?”

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