“I have, actually. I think we should involve someone else who can—”

“No,” Khalila said. Her tone sounded flat and a little angry. “Dario. We discussed this. You can’t involve anyone else inside the Library!”

“And anyone outside it is of no use—Jess has proved that. All his fancy criminal connections can’t get us what we need, and every day, every day we wait, Thomas suffers.” Dario glared at Khalila, a thing Jess had never seen him do, and Khalila held the stare firmly. She might be a quiet girl, but shy? No. She didn’t back away from a fight. “It’s three cities—we’ve narrowed it to that. We just need confirmation. If it’s someone we can trust—”

Sickly, Jess thought of his brother and Neksa. He could ask Brendan to use Neksa to verify the information. If she really did work for the Archivist, she might not have to do anything but look in a book and say yes or no. Easy. But that would make him complicit in ruining the girl, and that . . . that was a bridge he couldn’t cross.

He didn’t have to, because Dario said, “I didn’t wait to get your approval. I told Scholar Prakesh everything we know about Thomas. I asked for her help.”

There was a breathless silence, and Khalila’s eyes widened. She tried to speak, failed, and finally managed to say, “You what?”

“Without asking us?” Glain jumped in.

“I’m tired of waiting for someone to drop an answer into our laps,” Dario said. His cheeks had an angry red tinge now, and he met Jess’s eyes. “Well? Aren’t you going to join the outrage?”

“No,” Jess said. “You know Scholar Prakesh; I don’t. I know she’s highly placed and very well respected. She’ll be hard for the Archivist to dismiss and harder to make disappear. It might well be the best choice we have.”

Glain kicked him under the table for breaking ranks, but the fact was, Dario was right. Except for that one guilty thought about Neksa, which Jess knew he had to hold as a last resort, he’d pulled every lever available to him.

“I don’t like this,” Khalila said. “What if she’s discovered? She’s a Scholar, not a spy!”

“She’s been close friends with the Archivist since he was a postulant, and she was once the Artifex’s lover,” Dario said, and refilled his coffee cup from the small pot on the table. At Jess’s gesture, he filled his cup, too. “She knows the Library in and out. Even better, she knows the people we need to investigate. Who better to find out what we need to know?”

“She’s an old woman, and you put her at risk,” Khalila insisted. “What if something happens to her? Our duty is to—”

“Our duty is to our friend,” Jess said. “If you don’t believe that, Khalila—”

“I never said that! Of course I want to save him!”

“Doesn’t sound like it. Are you having doubts?” Glain gave her a stony look and sat back in her chair. “Thinking of your own future inside the Library, are you?”