Olivia-the-goddess crouches beside Rachel in her sequined dress. “Aethon doesn’t read to the end of the book?”
“That’s how he writes his story on the tablets,” says Rachel. “How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn’t stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What’s the word, Mr. Ninis?”
The beating of hearts, the blinking of eyes. Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake. He sees Rex in the rainy light of the tea room, one hand trembling over his saucer. The children gaze down at their scripts.
“You mean,” says Alex, “Aethon goes home.”
Seymour
He sits with his back against the dictionaries and the Beretta in his lap. A white glare bends through the front windows and sends eerie shadows across the ceiling: the police have installed floodlights.
His phone refuses to ring. He watches the wounded man breathe at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t find the backpack; he hasn’t moved. It’s the dinner hour, and Bunny will be carrying plates between tables at the Pig N’ Pancake, her eleventh hour of work. She will have had to beg a ride there from the Sachse Inn because he didn’t pick her up. By now she’ll have heard that something is happening at the public library. A dozen police vehicles will have streaked past; they’ll be talking about it at all of her tables, and in the kitchen too. Somebody holed up in the library, somebody with a bomb.
Tomorrow, he tells himself, he’ll be at Bishop’s camp, far to the north, where the warriors live with purpose and meaning, where he and Mathilda will walk through the layers of sun and shadow in the forest. But does he believe that anymore?
Footfalls on the staircase. Seymour raises a cup of his ear defenders. He recognizes Slow-Motion Zeno as he comes down the last steps: a slight old man who always wears a necktie and occupies the same table near the large-print romances, lost behind a molehill of papers, touching them lightly one by one, like a priest seated before a pile of artifacts that hold meaning only for him.
Zeno
Sharif’s shirt is not sitting right on his body, and it looks as though someone has thrown a bucket of ink on him, but Zeno has seen worse. Sharif shakes his head no; Zeno merely bends, touches him on the forehead, and steps over his friend and into the aisle between Nonfiction and Fiction.
The boy is so motionless he might be dead, a handgun resting on his knee. A green backpack sits on the carpet beside him, a mobile phone beside that. What looks like rifle-range ear defenders are cocked on his head, one muff on, one off.
Down through the centuries tumble the words of Diogenes: I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet— “So young,” says Zeno.
—still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered— The boy doesn’t move.
“What’s inside the bag?”
“Bombs.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“How are they triggered?”
“Tracfones, taped to the top.”
“How do the bombs go off?”
“If I call either of the phones. On the fifth ring.”
“But you’re not going to call them. Are you?”
The boy brings his left hand to his earmuffs as though hoping to blot out any further questions. Zeno remembers lying on the straw mat in Camp Five, knowing Rex was folding his body into one of the empty oil drums. Waiting to hear Zeno climb into the other drum. For Bristol and Fortier to lift them onto the truck.
He shuffles forward and lifts the backpack and pins it gently against his necktie as the boy steers the barrel of the pistol toward him. Zeno’s breath is strangely steady.
“Does anyone besides you have the numbers?”
The boy shakes his head. Then his forehead wrinkles, as though realizing something. “Yes. Someone does have them.”
“Who?”
He shrugs.
“What you mean is, someone besides you can detonate the bombs?”
The trace of a nod.
Sharif watches from the base of the stairs, every inch of him alert. Zeno wraps his arms through the backpack straps. “My friend there, the children’s librarian? His name is Sharif. He requires medical attention right away. I’m going to use the telephone to call an ambulance now. In all likelihood, there’s one right outside.”
The boy grimaces, as though someone has resumed playing loud, screeching music that only he can hear. “I’m waiting for help,” he says, but without conviction.
Zeno walks backward to the welcome desk and lifts the receiver of the telephone. No dial tone. “I’ll need to use your phone,” he says. “Just for the ambulance. That’s all I’ll do, I promise, and I’ll give it right back. And then we’ll wait for your help to arrive.”