Inside the room, Tariq’s closest friends, Wu and Bransom, packed up his few belongings. Jess felt it like a hammer to the chest as he watched Recruit Bransom—as sturdy and muscular a young woman as Glain—wipe away tears as she picked up Tariq’s personal journal, embossed with his name. The cover, even at the distance from which Jess observed, was smeared with dried blood, and she scrubbed restlessly at it with the sleeve of her own shirt. Her hands were shaking.

Someone will write the final lines in that journal, he thought, detailing the dates and circumstances of Tariq’s death. Jess might even be mentioned by name. Then Tariq’s family would read it, weep over it, hold a memorial to read aloud from it, and finally send it on to the Library’s archives, where he would become a permanent part of the knowledge of humanity. Immortality, of a kind.

We’re just paper on a shelf, in the end. Jess felt an unexpected surge of anger, because no matter how honest and forthright Tariq had been in his journal, it couldn’t encompass him—the sharp humor, the way he’d cleverly cheated at dice, the shady jokes he’d loved and often told. The way he’d died. And for what? Tariq was gone, and Jess still felt the tension and release of pulling the trigger and sending Tariq sprawling against that wall where he’d died. Never mind that his shot hadn’t been fatal in itself; it had left his friend helpless for the slaughter that came after.

Bransom looked up unexpectedly and saw Jess. She looked wounded and vulnerable, and tears glided down her cheeks . . . And then he saw the flare of real rage.

She slammed the door in his face.

In a subdued, sour mood, Jess spent the rest of the day in the barracks Serapeum—a small offshoot that contained a few dozen shelves of permanently loaded Blanks that held books most often requested, and a wall of ones waiting to be filled. He took one from that section and sat down to page through his Codex to find what he wanted. He remembered—thanks to Scholar Wolfe’s ruthless grilling about the vast list of books in the public collection of the Great Library—that there were one or two extremely obscure histories of crimes against the Library. Maybe someone, somewhere, had included clues to secret prisons. The research might be useful.

Best of all, though he knew someone, somewhere was watching what he ordered to read, he had a long history of reading historical texts. Even if the Archivist had a watch on what he read, this wouldn’t appear out of the ordinary.

Jess missed handling originals. He’d grown so addicted to the feel of those books—the individual differences in the bindings, the leather or fabric covers, the weight of papers, the smell. They were a very different experience than these Blanks, which all felt so . . . sterile, somehow. Words that could be readily dismissed and replaced didn’t have the same moral heft to them, to him, but he recognized he was a rebel and an outcast, even here among those who loved the Library.