Glancing left and right, Bluma took hold of the sheet comprising pages 389 and 390, and, careful not to leave her name behind, she tore it from the binding.

There.

She clambered up to shelf 7, replaced the volume above the brass letter H, and returned to the floor.

She had it. There, in her hand: the page with her little name on it.

Now all she had to do was dispose of it.

Swiftly, she folded the page, creasing it sharply: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths.

It might just fit into the basin of the spoon now.

But something bothered her about this idea. She tried to convince herself that she was concerned about the other words written on the sheet—did she have any right to feed them to the spoon?—but the truth was that a nagging doubt was tickling her brain.

The spoon.

How it both was and wasn’t the answer to the door guard’s riddle.

What it both was and wasn’t.

But every passing moment that she spent in these stacks felt like a risk. Perhaps it was best just to take the sheet along with her and figure it out later.

Yes. That was what she’d do.

With a percussive sigh, she thrust the folded sheet into her apron, careful to keep it in the opposite pocket from the spoon, safely separated—for now.

She had just turned on her heel to track back up row 94 when a terrible uncertainty took hold of her.

Could it really be that easy to steal a page from the Dantalion?

She had to check.

She had to be sure.

And so she climbed back up the rickety ladder, took hold of volume H, and drew it down again. She flipped the pages forward, and her heart sank.

Of course not.

There, protruding from the binding, was the ragged remnant of the sheet that she’d torn from the book, but just beside it was the twin of that same page: 390 led to 391, and there, in the lower right-hand corner, was her name:

BLUMA

Bluma’s stomach began to squirm. She needed to do something and she needed to do it now.

But what?

Quickly, her feet led her out to the central aisle, and she laid volume H on the little lectern at the end of the row of bookcases.

There it was, staring up at her, square and strong, as if taunting her—her name:

BLUMA

Slowly, she reached into her apron pocket. Cold metal met her fingers.

Fluidly, she drew the spoon out and leaned forward.

It was almost as if the spoon itself were directing the motions of her hand: gingerly, she laid the razor edge of its basin beside the last letter of her name, and, little by little, she scraped the dry ink from the page:

BLUMA

BLUM

BLU

BL

B

There it was, dark and dusty in the small basin of the spoon.

Bluma’s name.