She squeezed her way past the others to the top. Jess craned his neck, wishing he’d put himself farther ahead, so he could see what was going on. Someone has to bring up the rear, scrubber. He could almost hear Dario’s mocking voice. When had he started missing Dario, of all people?

It seemed to take forever, and Jess faced outward, toward the garden room. How long before someone—Gregory, perhaps—came looking for them? How long before he realized they’d gone missing and began to search? Not long, surely. He wasn’t the trusting sort. I should be up there, he thought. I’m the one who’s good with closed doors.

But Santi did know best, after all. Above there was a hollow clunk, and Santi said, “We’re moving!” Khalila, just ahead of Jess, glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him an encouraging smile.

“Come on,” she said. “At least we can brag to Dario later that we saw something he didn’t.”

Jess backed his way up the winding stairs, training his weapon on the room below until the last twist hid it all from view. Then he turned and hurried up after Khalila, across a shallow landing, and toward a black iron door that stood open.

Behind him he heard another hiss, and looked back to see the staircase moving again, this time spiraling back into the ceiling. Counterweights. It had been only their weight on the staircase that had kept it down after the initial descent. The design reminded him of Heron of Alexandria and all the marvelous bellows and gears that had driven the wonders of the temples in the early days of the Library.

Khalila had stopped in the doorway, and Jess stepped up beside her and stopped as well. He couldn’t help it.

A vast, circular Serapeum spread out in front of them, but not like any he’d ever seen before. The Library’s daughter facilities were always, always orderly, clean, well maintained.

This was like the ghostly wreck of one.

The Black Archives rose in a hollowed-out tower within the tower, ring after ring of shelves and cabinets crowding every available level, with an ancient, dusty flat lift on a track that must have been designed to spiral up from one level to another. The number of books, scrolls, tablets . . . it was staggering and chaotic. The smell of the place overwhelmed him—old paper, mold, neglect. A thick, choking patina of dust.

It made his father’s warehouse of contraband in London, the largest that Jess had ever heard of, look like a modest rural shelf. There had to be tens of thousands of volumes here—no, hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The books had long ago overflowed the shelves, and towering stacks of them leaned against corners and tottered atop the bookcases themselves. The shelves, Jess realized, were thickly stacked with multiple layers of volumes, too.

Without even meaning to, Jess took a step inside the hidden tower, then another, as he tilted his head to look up. The levels of shelves reached up and up, spiraling to what seemed like infinity. This isn’t the Archives, he thought. This is something else.