“If you’re a Brightwell, you’re never really out of the family business,” he said, and sat down on his bed. The mattress yielded, and he wanted to stretch out and let it cradle him, but if he did, he knew he’d be asleep in seconds. “You didn’t just barge in here to make sure I was still alive, did you?”

“No.” She sounded amused and completely at ease again. “I needed to ask you a question.”

“Well? As you said, we’ve got only half an hour—”

“Somewhat less now,” she said. “Since we’re having this conversation. What do you know about the Black Archives?”

That stopped him cold. He’d expected her to ask something else, something more . . . military. But instead, it took his tired brain a moment to scramble to the new topic. He finally said, “That they’re a myth.”

“Really.” Scorn dripped from that word, and she leaned back against the wall behind her. “What if I told you that I heard from someone I trust that they’re not?”

“You must have slept through your childhood lessons.” He switched to a childish singsong. “‘The Great Library has an Archive, where all the books they save—’”

“‘Not fire or sword, not flood or war, will be the Archive’s grave,’” Glain finished. “I memorized the same childhood rhymes you did. But I’m talking about the other Archives. The forbidden ones.”

“The Black Archives are a story to frighten children—that’s all. Full of dangerous books, as if books could be dangerous.”

“Some might be,” she said. “And Dario doesn’t think it’s a myth.”

“Dario?” Jess said. “Since when do you believe anything Dario Santiago says? And why is he talking to you at all?”

She gave him a long unreadable smile. “Maybe he just wants to keep track of what you get up to,” she said. “But back to the subject. If it’s where they keep dangerous information, then I say that’s a place that we need to look for any hints about what happened to send Thomas to his death. And who to go after for it. Don’t you?”

Thomas. Hearing his best friend’s name said aloud conjured up his image behind Jess’s eyes: a cheerfully optimistic genius in the body of a German farm boy. He missed Thomas, who’d had all the warmth and understanding of others that Jess lacked. I can’t think about him. For a wild instant, he thought he’d either shout at her or cry, but somehow he managed to keep his voice even as he said, “If such a place as the Black Archives even exists, how would we go about getting into it? I hope Dario has an idea. I don’t.”

“You know Dario—he’s always got an idea,” Glain said. “Something to think on, anyway. Something we can do. I know you want to find out how and why Thomas died as much as I do.”

“The Archivist told us why,” he said. “Thomas was convicted of heresy against the Library.” Tell her what you know, for God’s sake. The thought beat hard against his brain, like a prisoner battering at a door, but he just wasn’t ready. He couldn’t tell what saying the words out loud, making them real, might do to him.