Thomas was his friend. And he would find him. It was as simple, and dangerous, as that.

Glain, in the silence, turned to Santi. “Captain. Do you really think Thomas is dead? Or are you more afraid that Jess is right and it sends us all down a dangerous path?”

That was a pointed and perfect question, and Jess had to give Glain credit: she was much more clearheaded about this than he could be. For him, it was a raw, personal wound; he’d loved Thomas like a brother, and he still felt responsible, in no small part, for what had happened to him.

Santi chose his words carefully—too carefully, maybe. “I don’t want Christopher dragged back under this threshing machine. The book could be faked. They might be waiting to draw us in. There’s every reason to believe Thomas is dead, and almost none to believe he’s alive.”

“Almost none,” Glain repeated, still in that calm, quiet voice. “Which means there is, in fact, some. Do you really think we wouldn’t want to know that? That we wouldn’t want to find out?”

“It may get us all killed,” Santi said. “Think what you’re doing.”

Jess exchanged a look with Glain. A long one. And in it, he could see they were perfectly in agreement. “We have thought about it. We need to rescue Thomas,” he said.

“No matter what it costs,” Glain said. “We don’t abandon our own.”

Santi and Wolfe exchanged a look. Wolfe inclined his head a little to the side, with a strange, crooked smile. “You see? They’re as bad as we are.”

“Worse,” Santi sighed. He rose and unlocked Wolfe’s restraints, and packed the flexible cuffs back into the holder on his belt. “They haven’t even got a proper sense of fear. But that will come.”

Hadn’t got a proper sense of fear? They’d survived the bloodbath of Wolfe’s choosing of his postulants to the Library; they’d survived Oxford. They’d just this morning survived ambush, attack, and the death of one of their own, even if he’d been a traitor to them. They definitely knew fear. Jess just didn’t intend to let it stop them. “So, where did they hold you when they were questioning you?” he asked Wolfe.

Wolfe sighed. “That, you see, is the problem. I don’t remember. Can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. I can see pieces, but not . . . not anything significant. And I will admit, it’s not a memory I’m eager to relive in detail.”

“Even for Thomas?”

Wolfe looked away. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “But you’d best try to find another way to get the information you need.”

“Do it carefully,” Santi said. “Unless you want it to be buried along with you.”

Jess spent the rest of the evening locked in his room with Anit’s little coded book about the automata. It wasn’t much, he realized: hastily written notes, likely a simple memory aid for someone in the Artifex division of the Library who’d worked on the design or repair of the machines. Some of it was utterly incomprehensible to him, even when he’d translated it from the code. Much of it would take an engineer of Thomas’s caliber to understand.