Gutenberg had poured himself into this book. I’d read and reread it, adding my own magic. Five months later, Johannes Gutenberg had stirred from within the pages.

“Lena mentioned you’d been talking with him,” said Nidhi.

“Sort of. It’s not really him, you know? It’s the collection of his experiences and impressions and emotions, as interpreted by the man himself. I think he tried to be as honest as he could, but he was also putting his best self forward for posterity. The end result . . . it might not be him, but it sounds like him. The same arrogance and experience. The same sadness. I’d left the book in my office in New Millennium. Babs or Kiyoko or whoever searched it must not have realized what it was.”

“Could they have done anything with it if they had?”

“Probably not. I just don’t want them to have it, you know?”

She watched a squirrel try to scramble up one of the birdfeeders, only to fall when it reached the metal cylinder halfway up the post. “What were you and Johannes talking about out here before I interrupted?”

“Choices. Consequences.” Gutenberg had made mistakes over five hundred years, and people had died because of them. It had made him cautious. It had made him afraid.

How many people died as a result of my choice to help reveal magic to the world? How many would survive as a result of that same choice? How the hell was anyone supposed to solve that kind of equation?

“I changed the world,” Gutenberg whispered. There was pride in his words, and fatigue as well. He had changed the world, and spent the rest of his life—half a millennium—managing the fallout from that change.

“You’re not him,” said Nidhi.

I was simultaneously reassured and annoyed by her words. “Not yet.”

“Do you want to be?”

“I wanted to be a researcher. Look how that’s turned out.”

“Blaming yourself for all the evils of the world?” She clucked her tongue. “That kind of arrogance does sound like Gutenberg, I admit.”

“Bite me.”

She chuckled. “Your niece is adorable, by the way. Angie was helping her learn to ride a bike yesterday afternoon.”

I smiled. “I wish I’d seen that.”

“Johannes Gutenberg looked at the world as a whole. What was best for humanity? What was best for the Porters? Time and again, he chose safety and security over action and risk. The Chinese famine of 1958. The Holodomor in the Ukraine. Countless wars.”

“He intervened in World War II,” I pointed out.

“As I understand it, that was because of his fear of the atom bomb. He looked at events on a global scale, and he lost sight of individuals.”