Alishia rarely left her desk when there was no one to watch over it, but today was quieter than most—the old man was the only person she’d seen so far, and she guessed ten minutes away would do little harm. Besides, who would steal? Few in Noreela City had any inclination to even come in here and read a book, let alone await the opportunity to slink in and steal one when her back was turned. Sometimes she wondered whether there was any intellect left in a world where famine also starved the mind, and dust and fading gods ate away at the tenacity of the people.

She slipped from behind her desk, crossed the uneven wooden floor scattered with comfortable reading chairs—moth-eaten and rotting through lack of use—and passed between two tall towers of books.

She was in Geography. The books reached to the ceiling on both sides, those at the top hardly touched since the day she had started working here ten years ago. It was not that there was nothing of interest up there—Alishia suspected there were accounts of paths long since faded into time, trade routes discovered and discarded—it was simply that people seemed so lethargic that it was far easier to pluck a book from one of the lower shelves. There were six ladders scattered around, but three of these invariably leaned against the stacks of children’s books. These were soft and comfortable, cloth-covered pages, bendy and pliable for young hands to twist and young mouths to gnaw upon. When Alishia was not working, this was where Byran and Magella huddled away to screw and sleep and eat. Their thoughts rarely stretched any further.

Her footsteps, naturally soft anyway, were completely muffled by the stocked shelves. She breathed in the must of their pages, the musk of decades of damp and heat and damp again. Mold painted great swaths across the spines, interrupted here and there where a book had been removed and replaced in a different place. History nestled around Alishia, slowly moldering away just as the land was fading back into history. There was a certain poetic justice to that.

She paused, swept her long hair back over her shoulders to free her ears. The singing was still there, though even more muffled now that she had entered the maze of books. That was another thing she loved about the library: whoever had built it had given no consideration to order, arrangement or the need for browsers to be able to find their way out in less than a day. It was more than a maze; it was a conundrum of words.