The air in the halls was getting colder and colder as she moved forward, and when she first heard the sound, she assumed it was her own teeth chattering.

But it couldn’t be: her jaw was clenched tight.

Bluma froze.

Then what was the sound? It was nearby, clattering like a jittery telegraph key.

But there was no one here.

Was there?

Swallowing hard, Bluma began to trot forward, going as quickly as she could without making any undue noise. She didn’t even pause to take notice of the dramatic scene in Hall O: the shattered skylight far above, the left-hand rank of bookcases leaning in mid-tumble.

And, more importantly, she didn’t even think to skirt the little accumulation of snow that had piled up in the center aisle of that hall.

She didn’t think about the footprints she left behind.

By the time she reached Hall Q and turned into its offshoots, Bluma had worked herself into a state. She was sure of it now: someone else was here, following her, chasing her, and she was tired, tired, tired of fleeing—it had been so long, so many steps, so many escapes, from the Dark One and the demons to the Lileen and the soldiers, and she was ready, so ready, to cut her name away, to be unfindable, invisible, and to finally come to rest.

By the time she came into Hall QB, she was running flat out, with no regard at all for how loud her feet fell. She sped down to row 94 and swung inward, passing cases A, B, C, and D, her feet only beginning to slow as she came to I, J, and here was K, and she clambered up the ladder until shelf 7 was level with her eyes, then counted the volumes, A, B, C…

There it was.

Volume H.

Bluma breathed deeply and double-checked her card:

QB 94 K 7 H 390.

This was it.

With a sigh, Bluma pulled volume H from the shelf. She made her way back down to the floor and, flipping rapidly, found it:

Page 390.

The type was small and dense, and if Bluma had been willing to linger in the stacks for even a moment, she might’ve been fascinated to read what was written there.

As it was, though, her eyes were drawn irresistibly, as if magnetized, to one short word near the lower right-hand corner of the page:

BLUMA

There it was.

It was almost too small to mean anything, too minuscule: five little letters practically crushed beneath a massive block of weighty black type.

Bluma’s fingers strayed down into her apron pocket and met cold metal there.

But how could she get her name into the spoon?

She had an idea, but she wasn’t sure it was allowed. In fact, she was confident it wasn’t, but she had come here to remove something from the stacks anyhow.