Jackie turned and put her hand back on Diane’s shoulder.

“We need to go.”

Diane looked out over the reading area. It looked no different than it had the last time she had looked or, anyway, almost no different.

“Why don’t you just do whatever it is you need to do and let me do this? I’m sure you’ll be just fine on your own.”

She had adopted a mom’s voice, and they both heard her do it. Jackie gave one last look to where the noise had come from, which, as far as she could tell, was the magazine room in the complete opposite corner of the library. The angle was such that she couldn’t see into the room. She might have been able to see the shadow jutting out on the floor from its doorway, but she didn’t want to see that so her brain skimmed past it.

One aisle over, Jackie found the archives of the Daily Journal, back when it had had physical form. She started flipping through the binders of old issues. A microfiche system had been deemed too expensive by city government, and anyway would likely just have been ruined by librarian fluids or the blood of one of their victims.

“King City has to have come up at some point.”

“Mmm,” Diane said.

She wasn’t listening because she had found something she’d missed earlier. Stuck to the back of the aura report was an old photo. She couldn’t tell how old, because it was stuck image-side down. She picked at the edges of it, trying to get it to come off, but the photo was stuck firm.

“Dammit,” Jackie said, not in response to anything but just to have something to say as she searched, tediously, for information that might or might not exist.

Diane yanked at the photo, and it came unstuck with a pop. She turned it faceup. It was a photo from the era where people are stiffly arranged through the long minutes it took to register their image on chemical paper. She considered it as carefully and rationally as she could before coming to the verbal conclusion: “Oh, shit.”

“Why ‘oh, shit’?” Jackie popped her head up from behind a binder.

Diane held up the photo, and Jackie studied it closely, bringing her face in toward the flat faces looking back from long ago.

“Oh shit,” Jackie said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, my news isn’t great either.”

Jackie held up an index card that said, in neat block letters,

ALL MATERIALS ON KING CITY HAVE BEEN CATALOGUED

UNDER GEOGRAPHY, FORBIDDEN.

And then another sentence that had been blacked out with a scribbled marker, so much so that the black ink leaked through to the other side of the card.

Diane nodded, unsurprised. It had seemed too easy up to that point, and so she had been expecting something like this.