Chaos (6 page)

He looked to the Figments, but they remained where they were. This was it. He was on his own again. Before he could change his mind, Luc took a deep breath and stepped through the mirror.

Even though he had braced himself for it, the swirling winds and howling noise of the Crossroad knocked him off his feet, and he was falling, once again, into darkness.

Stay calm
. He gripped the archer in his hand. He thought the name:
Tess, Tess, Tess
.

As abruptly as ever, the ground appeared. He landed on his feet, but the momentum of his fall propelled him forward, straight into a collapsed lamppost. He banged his shins against hard metal and tumbled to the broken pavement. His palms skidded across the ground, and he felt the bite of tiny pebbles in his skin.

“Shit.” Only after he spoke out loud did Luc realize how quiet it was. His voice echoed faintly. He picked himself up, wincing, wiping his palms on his jeans. The archer had fallen from his grip and lay sideways in the dirt.

For one dizzying second, he thought he’d somehow landed back in San Francisco after the earthquake. The blue sky, the wispy clouds, the high, round sun, and the lampposts and billboards—it looked like his world, but a world destroyed by some awful event. Piles of rubble, half-collapsed buildings, overturned cars coated with white dust—the destruction stretched as far as he could see.

The impression that he was back on Earth passed quickly. The streets were wrong, and the buildings, too.

And the people. There were no people. He
felt
it, as though the air itself were lonely.

“Hello?” Luc called out. Nothing. Just a light breeze that sent dust skittering across the street.

In front of him loomed a vast building with an ornately carved facade. Like everything else in this world, it was stained with age and seemed in danger of collapsing. The whole world felt abandoned. Why had the archer led him here?

Tess. She must be here somewhere.

Luc picked up the archer and tucked it back into his pocket. He climbed the splintered stone steps and pushed open a door hanging loosely on its hinges. Inside, it was very dark and smelled like mildew and old paper. He was in a long hallway; he kept his hands on the walls and felt plaster flake away beneath his fingers.

The darkness lessened as he made his way down the hallway, which ended abruptly in a vast room, at least four stories high and as long as a city block. Several crumbling stone staircases spiraled up the walls like ancient serpents, and behind the coiling staircases were hundreds and hundreds of shelves with thousands and thousands of books. No wonder he’d smelled paper. Luc had never seen so many books in one place before. Not even the San Francisco Public Library came close.

The place was abandoned. That was obvious. Portions of the ceiling had crumbled at some point, littering the floor with debris. Trees grew up from between long cracks in the floor, and the largest one, which stood in the middle of the room, stretched all the way to the open
air. A weak stream of gray sunlight filtered into the room from the hole in the ceiling.

Then Luc noticed ornate, heavy-looking candelabra lining the walls, their tiny flames dancing and winking at him. Who had lit them? Who kept them burning?

Tess?

“Hello?” Luc called out.

This time, there was no echo, only a whispery sound, like pages of a book blowing in the breeze.

“Is anyone here?”

When no one answered, he moved cautiously around the room, peering into dark alcoves and stepping over toppled furniture thickly layered with dust. It looked like the place had been ransacked at some point long ago. Dust was heavy on the floor and muffled his footsteps.

In one shadowed alcove, he noticed a brass plaque. It was coated with grime, and Luc used a corner of his shirt to wipe it clean.

LIBRARY OF THE DEAD

A chill went through him.

What the hell?

Stepping closer to the lowest shelves, he quickly saw that the books weren’t organized by any numerical system. Instead, categories were marked on small, rust-spotted placards at the top of each shelf.

FORGOTTEN ORPHANS

Luc pulled a thin brown book from the shelf and flipped the cover open.

W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
F
ERNIVUS
17 M
AY
1195–12 F
EBRUARY
1200

He felt sucked into the book by some invisible force and couldn’t look away. As he skimmed the pages, the heaviness, the ache that Luc had felt outside gripped him again. The pages of the book were brittle, and Luc wondered whether they had ever been touched. He worried that they might crumble into dust.

A thin, sad book, for a thin, sad life.

And then, as he reached the end of the book, he heard it: a sigh, a
human
sigh that came from the pages, from the spine.

He let the book drop. He took a quick step backward, as if the book were a snake that might bite him. He hadn’t imagined it. He was sure. The book had sighed.

He stooped, retrieved the book, and quickly shoved it back onto the shelf.

He moved down the row. More names. More dates. In Scorned Rulers, Luc pulled out a book titled
Napoléon Bonaparte 15 August 1769–5 May 1821
. This book, too, had a mesmerizing quality. In it, he scanned the dictator’s early childhood, his military training in France, his exile to Elba. Then, his death while under British confinement.

It was all of Napoléon’s life in the book, from birth to death. Not just his major historical accomplishments, but
his secret longings also. His humiliations and disappointments. His shame. Things only the man himself could have known. It filled Luc with an eerie feeling, like he was prying into a version of the past he wasn’t meant to see, a version meant to be buried forever.

He knew he should be looking for Tess. He knew that’s what had brought him to this world in the first place.

But he had to see more.

All around Luc were towers of books, each volume a person’s life.
Library of the Dead
. How had these records gotten here? A kind of magic that translated a person’s life into book form? He felt humbled, in awe of all the histories that surrounded him. Blood hammered in his ears as he climbed one of the rickety staircases to the second level, transfixed.

CHANGED THE WORLD
GREAT INVENTORS
MISSING MOTHERS

He almost skipped right past it before his mind registered what he’d found. Missing Mothers. The section was large—larger than it should have been. His finger was shaking as he moved it carefully along the spines, trying to decipher each faded name. There were more than a dozen Daphne Simmonses, and he had to pull down several books before he found the one he was looking for.

Luc swallowed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know
any other version of his mother—of the woman who had tucked him into bed, had taught him about the stars and which constellations were the best for making wishes, and had let him and Jasmine eat brownies for dinner on their birthdays.

He couldn’t
not
open it.

She had been happy once. At least, he
thought
she’d been happy. The need to know for sure sent his fingers flying over the pages.

The book was written in the first person, as though every thought, every breath, had found its way onto these pages. The pages were organized by date, and Luc looked up the day he was born and read about his mother’s joy, greater than she had ever thought possible. The day Jasmine was born, and how their mother had looked at her children and wanted to give them the world, the sky, and the stars.

Luc took a shaky breath and closed his eyes. He already knew what happened next. It would always end the same way, no matter what corner of the universe he had found, what world he had stumbled into.

Luc didn’t just read the words; he heard them, a regretful exhale, like his mom was whispering to him from far away. He quickly thumbed ahead a few pages.

He flipped to the last entry as his heart thundered in his chest. This was it. The day she died. His stomach rolled and he took a deep breath. He knew the details already.

Heart failure due to acute drug overdose.

But it was different reading about it in his mother’s words—like being inside her mind. The slow slur of images as she lay in a dirty alley, just steps from the ocean, bruises covering her thin arms, too tired to go any farther.

But he reread her last thought over and over.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring at the words, reading them over and over. Corinthe had believed in fate. She believed that everyone’s destiny was already determined. Had that been his mom’s destiny all along? To die alone, exhausted, a stranger to her family?

It wasn’t fair.

He closed the book with sudden fierceness. He put it back on the shelf, then stood, staring at it, feeling anger
build and crest inside of him, coursing into his arms and fists. It was too much. He slammed his fist into the bookcase. Wood splintered and books fell at his feet, but he didn’t care. Voices, murmurs, whispers seemed to rise and then float away in the quiet. Fire burned in his stomach. He wanted to rip the library apart with his bare hands.

Some memories should go unrecorded. Maybe it was best to forget.

But almost as soon as he thought it, he had another thought: Corinthe.

Her book would be here. Had to be.

Maybe there was a way to undo it, to rewrite the end. Maybe that was why the Crossroad had brought him here, to this horrible place. But books lined the walls; there were multiple floors above him. He’d never find Corinthe’s book without a card catalog or something to point him in the right direction.

The archer!

Luc pulled it out and opened it. It began to spin slowly, and Luc ran in the direction it pointed. He followed the archer like a compass until it stopped completely. When he looked up, he saw it.

FATES AND EXECUTORS

There was a single shelf. Fates were immortal; Executors were not, but could be killed only with difficulty. But Corinthe’s book was missing.

He felt a flicker of hope. Maybe she wasn’t really dead. Maybe he was fated to bring her back, somehow. If only he could figure out how Rhys had …

He stood, stunned, struck by an idea.

Rhys. Rhys had been dying when Luc left him. That meant his book should be in the library. His life. Everything he’d done in his life. How he’d turned back time to save the woman he loved.

The secret that allowed him to use the tunnels to turn back time.

Luc again held up the archer, focusing on Rhys’s kind voice.

Luc ran through the stacks, guided by the archer’s tiny arrow. He was terrified he wouldn’t find Rhys’s book. Radicals were anomalies of the universe, created by chaos, not born in the traditional way. Would their life be chronicled among all the rest?

Then, the archer slowed to point at a far, dark corner of the library. Luc saw a small plaque that said
FREE RADICALS
. The stacks were shrouded in darkness, hidden away from the rest.

When he turned the corner, his steps faltered. A girl stood there, holding a book. He hadn’t considered that other people might be in the library.

She slowly closed the book and turned her head. She did not seem surprised to see him. Her hair was twisted into dreadlocks tied with canvas strips. There was a wild energy simmering just under the surface of her skin. The look in her eyes reminded him of Miranda, and he instinctively reached for the knife that was no longer there.

“Tess,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

She came toward him. When she stopped, they were practically nose to nose. She looked human, but he could tell, he felt, that she wasn’t. It was like watching a really convincing movie in 3-D—you could tell it wasn’t real.

“And you are?” she said. Even her voice was a very convincing imitation. He knew, instinctively, that she was more powerful than either Miranda or Rhys. He forced himself to not be afraid.

“I’m Luc,” he said. “I’m a friend of Rhys’s.”

The black of her pupils swallowed all the color at the mention of his name. “Rhys sent you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

It was strange looking in her eyes—like staring down two dark tunnels. But Luc refused to look away first. “Rhys changed time once. He went back to save someone. I need to do the same thing.”

Tess stared at him for a second longer. Then she turned away, shaking her head. “He was a fool for doing it,” she said quietly. “What he did nearly cost him everything. He died in exile.”

“He saved someone he loved,” Luc said.

“She didn’t deserve it.” Tess turned back to him, eyes momentarily flashing white, and in that second, he had a fraction of an idea of who she really was, what kind of power she controlled, and he lost his breath. Then the impression passed, and her eyes returned to normal.

“He said you could help me. That you were the only person who could.”

“He was wrong.”

Tess tucked the book into her belt. Luc glanced at the binding. Rhys’s book. She started to turn away, and Luc grabbed her arm. She froze, staring at his hand, as if unused to being touched.

“Please,” he said. “Please. Just tell me how.”

She was still staring at his hand, as if she had never seen one before. “Time is not a single place,” she said quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself. “Time
is
space. It’s a tunnel that moves in infinite directions. It carries more energy, more possibility, than the force that created the universe itself.”