Page 54
“Because someone wanted it gone,” he said, “but not enough to recopy the page or reprint the whole book.”
I looked up at him. “That sounded like an opinion.”
“It was an observation.”
“Linden.”
His gaze was locked onto the footnote instead of to me. “Old bond theory allowed for power interactions that don’t fit the current triad doctrine. Most of that language was removed from instruction.”
“Removed by who?” I asked. I made a small note, somewhere in the back of my head, to find out what the hell triad doctrine was, later, when there weren’t more pressing gaps.
He turned the page back, then forward, then back again, as if the answer he needed might be hiding somewhere in the paper between the words.
“Linden.”
“The academy,” he said much too quickly.
I wrote down the citation in my notebook, pressing hard. “Closed stack?”
“Gone.”
“You don’t know that.”
He stood and took the book and led me three aisles over and up another ladder to a locked case with a neat row of shelf-marks cut into small brass plates. H-17-41. H-17-42. H-17-44. H-17-45.
No H-17-43.
The slot was not empty and the book was not misplaced. The volumes on either side had settled toward each other over long years, easing into the empty space.
“The interesting ones usually are missing,” Linden said.
“Somebody made sure.”
His eyes flicked to me and held. “Yes.”
The one word was quiet, and it carried a great deal more than one word should have been able to lift. I added the shelf-mark to my notebook, underneath the first, and looked at the two of them sitting there like coordinates.
Above the locked case there was a lancet window, the glass old enough to have gone thick and wavy at the bottom. A raven sat on the outer ledge, not passing but sitting, with its head tilted at the case the way a person tilted their head at something confusing. And it was the case it was looking at, not us. Beside me Linden had gone still, and it wasn’t startled-still. His was the other kind, the kind that listened. By the time I’d decided to say something the ledge was empty, and the window was only weather again.
“Are there other references?” I asked a moment later, shattering the stillness.
“Probably.”
“Can we find them?”
He hesitated, and that was new. Linden didn’t hesitate the way most people did, out of uncertainty, fishing for what an answer might look like. He hesitated because he’d already seen three consequences unfold in his mind and was standing there choosing which one he disliked the least.
“Yes,” he said.
Over the next two hours we worked and the library narrowed in its scope until it felt like it was just the two of us and whatever books we were looking at in that moment.
Linden found books and translated old shelf logic that made no sense to me, and I wrote down everything that seemed even remotely connected to the thing and then crossed most of it out again. Mirror, transfer, sympathy, pair-bond, resonance, channel.
Channel felt closest, though it was not right so much as close, the way a coat almost fit before I noticed the sleeves were too short.
At some point, without any discussion or a word, Linden moved his chair. I only noticed after he’d done it that he had put himself between me and the gallery door. The chair was not blocking it, nothing so obvious, just angled so that anyone coming through would have to pass his shoulder before they reached mine.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
