Gutenberg spun in a slow circle, and magical fire blasted the cannibalized parts Hubert had welded to his other cars. I stared at him, trying to understand how a libriomancer could fling magic with such ease. For an instant, his body seemed to flicker. I saw not living flesh but text, skin made up of layer upon layer of pages, a palimpsest of books, magic, and humanity. At the same time, I felt Smudge fade. For that brief span as Gutenberg eliminated the last of Hubert’s guardians, Smudge was simply a spider, oversized and mundane.

Smudge was a manifestation of a book’s magic. Gutenberg had bypassed the book, stealing Smudge’s magic directly and using it to disable the cars. I felt simultaneously protective of Smudge and eager to figure out the trick myself. “What are you?”

“Sorry.” Gutenberg winked. “Trade secret.”

Smudge’s body exploded in fire as his magic returned, and he scrambled around to the back of my head, hiding from Gutenberg.

“I do appear to owe you both a favor, however.” He looked to Lena first, and nodded. “I know what you want, and I’ll do what I can to reunite you with your lover.” To me, he said, “What would you ask of me, Isaac Vainio?”

I stared down at myself. “This body—”

“Given enough time, I might be able to repair it. But returning you to what you were?” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Though I rarely admit it these days, there are limits to my power. Your body has been destroyed, and libriomancy cannot create life. With the proper texts, I could perhaps construct a caricature of Isaac Vainio, but it would be a shallow thing, a mockery of the man you were. I am not God.”

This body lacked the physical reactions of my own, but despair hit me hard nonetheless. I felt emptiness, hope sinking away through my gut . . . phantom grief, perhaps, like the shadow pain of a patient with a lost limb. My prosthesis was a five-hundred-year-old creation of wood and brass and magic.

Lena folded her arms and studied me. “If you can’t get him out of there, then I guess I’ll just have to go in after him.”

“An automaton is no simple tree,” Gutenberg warned.

“Simple?” Lena laughed. “Have you ever studied the network of a tree’s roots as it seeks out water? As the tree pipes that water through a body an order of magnitude larger than your own, and does so without the crude central pump that leaves you humans so vulnerable? As it survives winters that would leave you a frozen meatsicle in the snow?”

I braced myself, but Gutenberg merely laughed. “I concede the point,” he said. “But the automatons weren’t created to house living flesh. You might be able to enter and leave your trees at will without losing your sense of self, but have you ever brought another human being with you?”