“You are mistaken,” said Cronin. “I have not seen the Detonator, or any Anarchist…” His gaze swiveled back to Nova. “… in a long, long time.”
“Then you won’t mind if we look around?” said Adrian.
“This is a public library,” said Cronin. “Browsing is always encouraged.”
Adrian’s fingers tightened around the marker. “Maybe you’d be willing to give us a tour of the areas that aren’t open the public. If you really don’t have anything to hide, like you say.”
Cronin inclined his head. “It would be my pleasure.” He crossed the lobby to the staircase and had gone up three steps when Adrian stopped him.
“Not that way,” he said.
Cronin glanced back.
“This building has a basement, right? Let’s start there.”
The Librarian’s face went blank. “There is nothing in the basement but the furnace and outdated stacks.”
“Then it will be a quick tour,” said Adrian.
Nostrils flaring around his mustache, Cronin abandoned the staircase and headed toward the east room. They followed him through a pair of tall bookcases and down an aisle of desks. In the far corner, Adrian spotted a stone fireplace, though there was no fire currently lit. A young man was seated cross-legged on the floor, reading a picture book to the children scattered around him.
The sight made Adrian’s blood cool. He glanced at the others, and saw the same apprehension mirrored on Ruby’s and Oscar’s faces, though Nova had her gaze intently latched to the Librarian’s back.
There was no reason yet to alarm anyone, he told himself. But still …
“Smokescreen,” he whispered, “you stay up here. Clear the library at the first sign of trouble.”
Oscar glanced at him, and if he was annoyed to be excluded, it didn’t show. Nodding, he stepped back into one of the rows of bookshelves, disappearing from view.
Cronin led them to a door labeled STAFF ONLY and spent a moment fishing around in his pockets for a key. Once he had opened the door, they descended a narrow staircase into the basement, where the air was mustier and thicker, permeated with the stench of molding paper.
Cronin cleared his throat and stepped aside when he reached the bottom of the staircase, allowing them to spill into the room and look around. More bookshelves took up the space, though they were spaced more tightly together than those above, some allowing barely enough room to pass between them. Every spare inch was taken up with books. When a shelf could hold no more, the books were piled up on top of the books that were already there, causing some of the shelves to sag under their weight. There were books piled up in corners like snowdrifts. Books stacked under and over desks. Books with broken spines and bent pages tossed haphazardly into a pile that overflowed into the walkway.
A single desk had been shoved against the far wall, its surface littered with takeout boxes and paper files. On the floor beside it stood a plain full-length mirror, like something that would be found in the dressing room of a cheap department store. Though the mirror walker—Narcissa, he’d said—was nowhere in sight.
Not far away, a short concrete stairwell led up to a door marked with an EXIT sign—probably, Adrian thought, the side door that led to the alley they’d been watching all night.
“And there you have it,” said the Librarian, picking a book off the discarded pile and lovingly unfolding its bent pages. “Anything else I can do for you? Perhaps you’d care to take back a book on political science for the Council to peruse in their spare time? I think it might benefit them.” He placed the book onto a shelf, tenderly stroking its spine like a pet.
Ruby groaned. “Do you think we’re idiots? We saw the Detonator come in here. Just tell us where she is, and things will go a lot easier for you!”
Cronin drew himself upward, uncurling the slump of his spine. “I am sorry, but you seem to be suffering from an overactive imagination.”
Ruby cast Adrian a frustrated look. He knew the feeling. This had all taken up so much more time than he’d expected it to, and he found himself regretting his decision to enter the library, rather than wait for backup like they were supposed to. Already he could see the error of his decision. If his team had merely blocked out the library’s exits, they would have known if the Detonator had tried to leave. They would have been able to stop her. Instead, she could have gone out through the back door ages ago.
He felt like an idiot. He felt like his dads had been right to doubt his ability to handle this, and that angered him as much as anything.