She clambered onto the table and raised her hands for silence. This time, the murmuring died away easily, and she felt every eye fixed on her. Alice looked out over the crowd and suddenly felt the weight of her exhaustion. It’s been a very long day.

“My name is Alice Creighton,” she said. “I am a Reader.”

Near the back, someone coughed. The clockwork spider hummed and clanked.

“Master Geryon took me as his apprentice when he found out I had the Reader talent. He didn’t give me a choice, or”—Alice found Emma’s blank face in the crowd, beside Mr. Wurms—“not much of a choice. The same is true of all the other apprentices I’ve met. I imagine it’s not too different for most of you.” She nodded at Flicker. “The fire-sprites, say, didn’t ask to be part of Geryon’s . . . empire, his domain, whatever you want to call it. But it was that, or be prey for one of the other Readers.”

“Everybody knows all of that,” the bone woman called out.

“I know.” Alice took another deep breath. “I went to Esau’s fortress hoping to find out what happened to my father. I had thought he might be alive somewhere. I was wrong. He’s dead, and Geryon and Esau killed him.”

She heard a gasp from Dex and pushed on in spite of the pain in her chest.

“I wanted revenge. I went looking for a way to get it, and I found one. I trapped Geryon in a place where he’ll never be able to hurt anyone ever again.”

That brought a mutter from the crowd. The clockwork spider raised a sign that said, QUERY: HOW? Others shouted or shook their fists, at her or at one another.

“What’s important,” Alice said, raising her voice, “is that I didn’t think about what would happen afterward. To me, and to all of you. I want to apologize for that.”

“Fat lot of good that does us,” the bone woman said. “It’s too late!”

“It is too late,” Alice agreed over a number of similar shouts. “All I can tell you is what I’m going to do now.”

“You’re going to take his place!” said one of the sprites.

“No. I won’t. I won’t because no one should have that kind of power. All of this”—she spread her hands to encompass the library with its millions of books, the estate, the whole world—“is a system the old Readers created for their own benefit. They’ll do anything to defend it. When they realized that the Ouroborean was loose, they sent a spell here that would have walled off the library, leaving everyone in it to die. It would have killed their own apprentices, but that didn’t stop them.