With a deep breath, she turned the spoon over itself.

There was a feeling in her throat like a sob, but she swallowed it back.

The basin of the spoon was empty.

Had it worked? Had her name been severed?

How could she know?

Carefully, she replaced the spoon in her right apron pocket, and with a start, she remembered the stolen page.

With trembling fingers, she drew the paper from the left-hand pocket of her apron and unfolded its tidy creases.

There, in the lower right-hand corner, was an empty space:

Her name.

Again, the feeling in her throat loomed up, and again, she swallowed it back down.

She had just folded away the stolen page when she heard it.

A sound was echoing through the hall.

Someone had called out:

Hey!

—

The door swung gently shut behind Yehuda Leib, sending an echo into the massive hall like the memory of a drumbeat.

He was not alone.

There, at the far end of the basilica, a tall man was leaving through the doorway.

A tall man in a long black coat.

Yehuda Leib’s heart jumped, and without meaning to, without even thinking, he spoke his question.

“Father?” he murmured.

But the man was much too far away to hear him—he was already in the next hall—and Yehuda Leib leapt forward to pursue him.

He was making so little progress; just as he would find his way into one hall, the man ahead of him would disappear into the next. Again this occurred, and again and again, hall after hall after hall, Yehuda Leib gaining at most a second or two on the man in the black coat with each door he passed through. He thought, perhaps, about calling out—just to get his attention, to make him slow or wait—but it seemed unwise to disturb the heavy silence in this library.

He would have to catch up.

To Yehuda Leib, the endless halls of Dantalion were not a massive repository of knowledge—they were simply structures, scrupulously regular terrain. Many details leapt to his attention: lecterns, ladders, bookshelves, small brass letters, identical building-block books. The far end of each row of shelves extended all the way to the wall—meaning that the only way to move easily up and down any given hall was through its central aisle. But he also noticed that the double-sided bookcases were open through their shelves—meaning that, in a pinch, one could move between rows by displacing the books.

By the time he reached Hall O, Yehuda Leib’s keen eyes had made him very familiar with the orderly layout of Dantalion’s halls, and he slowed his feet to make a clearer study of the disarray that met him there.