He moved off, stopping to check each of his squad members like any good commander. Jess didn’t know what to make of him. Or any of this.

He was still considering the ramifications of it when he realized sometime in the chaos of the Burner attack, his Codex had received a new message.

It was gibberish. He frowned at the text, and then a second later realized he knew this code. It was his own family’s highly secure emergency code, used only for the most urgent information. He’d memorized the keys to it when he’d been just a boy.

It read, Your friend lives in the city of seven hills. There was no signature, but one hieroglyphic bird sketched at the end of the code string. Not part of his family’s code at all, and it reminded him of the engraving on the ring that Anit, Red Ibrahim’s daughter, wore on a chain around her neck—the ring of one of her brothers.

The message was from her. His free gift of the information about the automata had done some good after all, because this was confirmation, at long last, that Thomas was alive.

And here, beneath Jess’s feet, in Rome.

EPHEMERA

From a speech by a masked Burner leader, given in the territory of America, 1789. Held strictly in the Black Archives.

You hesitate now to lift your hands and weapons against your oppressors? We have the eyes of nations upon us, all eager to see us break these chains and rise, stand firm, be free of this dire and smothering control that has, year by year, been laid upon us.

We have been told that paper in a binding, ink on a page, is worth more than the life of any man, woman, or child. We have been pressed into the service of this false idol we call Knowledge for far too long; we have forgotten how to be free of it, how to think for ourselves and believe we, in ourselves, are worth the breath we take, the land we walk.

I say it openly and plainly: the Library is a cruel and evil oppressor. For long have we pretended it is not so.

It is time, it is time, it is long past time to rise and take knowledge in our own hands, rather than have it dripped out in cautious doses by an institution long ago rendered moot and lame, cowering behind a wall of power.

We will prevail.

Rise! Though we die, though our stories are lost and never placed on the shelves of the Great Library, though we lose our lives and our very nation, we will never give up one great truth: a life is worth more than a book.

So be it, whatever may come.

CHAPTER NINE

Santi’s lieutenant reappeared and called in Jess’s squad just as darkness took hold, though the Forum continued a brisk trade under the light of lamps. He was a bit sorry. Rome was just as lovely at night, with the glow of illuminated marble and household lights glittering from windows.