“Emma, go to the kitchen, make up a basket with some sandwiches and bottles of water, and bring it back here. Then go back to the house and wait.”

Emma nodded and hurried away.

“I get the feeling,” Alice said, “that we might not get the chance to break for lunch any time soon.”

“It seems unlikely,” Ending agreed. “The first apprentice has already arrived.”

“Already?”

“It’s your little friend with the back door and the disreputable jacket.”

Isaac.

Ending sent Alice to an intersection among the shelves where Isaac was waiting, hands in the pockets of his battered coat. When she stepped around the corner, he grabbed her in a fierce hug. This took Alice a bit by surprise, but not nearly so much as it did Ashes, who was dislodged from his perch on Alice’s shoulder and jumped to the floor, clawing Isaac’s ear as he went by.

“Ow,” Isaac said.

“Serves you right.” Ashes sniffed. “You should give some warning when you’re going to engage in such gestures. Perhaps you could be equipped with an air horn.”

“I . . .” Isaac turned his gaze from the cat to Alice. “I’m just glad you’re all right. We felt the power surge, but we didn’t know what happened.” He caught Alice’s expression. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

“For now,” Alice said. Her hands tightened. “Geryon is gone.”

Isaac’s eyes widened. “Gone? You mean he’s dead?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said. “But he’s trapped.”

“That’s not good,” Isaac said. “One of the others must have slipped something through his defenses. I hadn’t heard anything from my master, but maybe the Eddicant or—”

“It wasn’t any of the others,” Alice interrupted. “It was me.”

“What?” Isaac said.

“What?” Ashes said, from the floor.

“I set a trap for him,” Alice said. She was surprised at how calm her voice was. “It worked. Except it wasn’t supposed to let everybody in the world know what I’d done.”

“Are you crazy?” Ashes said. “Where in all the worlds did you get the idea—”

“How did you do it?” Isaac said.

Alice explained, giving an abbreviated account of her journey to find The Infinite Prison. It felt good to finally tell all her secrets, especially to Ashes. Isaac knew some of them, but she’d been hiding the truth from the cat, since he wasn’t particularly good at keeping secrets. He also didn’t take the revelation particularly well.

“You’re mad,” he said. “You’ve gone mad. There’s no two ways about it.”

“Your mother was the one who helped me,” Alice said.

“Then she’s gone mad too. Do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”

“The other Readers will move in on Geryon’s territory,” Alice said. “They’ll tear the library apart.”

“I mean, do you know what they’ll do to you?!”