A surge of terror flooded her veins. The Veldana worldbook was hidden here, and if the book was destroyed, so was the world. Coughing, she ran to the blank wall where the worldbook’s secret chamber lay hidden. Elsa pressed her palms against the wall the way she’d seen her mother do so many times, but the chamber refused to open for her. She screamed her frustration and slammed her palms against the wall again, but it was useless—the chamber was designed to open only for Jumi, and Jumi was gone.
Elsa struggled to rein in her racing thoughts. Other books—other worlds—were burning as she wasted time standing there. She should at least try to save what she could. Turning to run for the shelves, Elsa tripped over something on the floor and stumbled. It was a body: portly, middle-aged, lying facedown in a pool of blood. Charles Montaigne, Veldana’s original creator. The abductors were also, apparently, murderers.
Elsa stared in shock. Jumi had found him infuriating, and had been careful to never leave Elsa alone with him, but murder still seemed an extreme solution.
A waft of smoke scraped at her lungs and sent her into a fit of coughing. Time was of the essence. The flames consuming the bookshelves had jumped to the curtains of the nearest window and were tentatively starting to crawl across the wooden floor. Elsa scanned the shelves for the familiar spine of the Veldana worldbook, in case it was outside the wall vault, but she didn’t find it. So she went to the shelf with the lowest flames. Squinting against the heat, she pulled down the least scorched of the volumes—the ones that might not be damaged beyond repair. She rescued another mildly blackened volume from the floor near Montaigne’s body and fled, her arms full, her lungs scoured with smoke, from the house.
Out on the street, Elsa was surprised to see that a small crowd of Montaigne’s neighbors had gathered. Evening was falling over Paris, yellow gaslight from the streetlamps pooling along the cobblestones. The smoke from the fire cast a gray blot against the dark violet of the sky. Elsa stumbled down the front steps and dropped her armful of books in the street, then nearly went down with them as a coughing fit overtook her. Her lungs felt scorched dry, as if the fire had gotten inside her, and the damp evening air provided no relief.
She turned to run back in and rescue another armload of books, but someone grabbed her and held her back.
“You can’t, miss! The house is lost,” the man said.
She struggled and kicked. “You don’t understand. The worlds are burning!”
Either the onlookers did not know the house belonged to a renowned scriptologist, or they understood but simply did not find her argument compelling. Another of Montaigne’s neighbors came over to help drag her back. Frustration bloomed in her chest like a dark flower. She should not have wasted time on those other worldbooks, she should not have left without Veldana—if she couldn’t get the wall safe to open, she should have beaten down the wall with her bare fists and dragged the whole thing out.
The fire was spreading too fast, flames already visible in the front of the house through the sitting room windows. Her world was still inside, but there was nothing she could do now.
Elsa sagged in their grip, despairing, and they let go, returning immediately to a distance dictated by propriety. “The fire brigade’s been called for,” the first one said, as if this would be a comfort. He reached down to retrieve his top hat, which had fallen in the struggle. “Are you well now, miss?”
“What a ridiculous question,” she snapped, and turned away from him.
She knelt on the cobblestones beside what books she had managed to save. She opened the closest one and pressed her fingers to the pages, feeling for the familiar buzz of a live worldbook. There was a subtle vibration, like the rubbing together of a cricket’s wings, but it swelled and receded in a disturbing fashion. A finished worldbook should feel confident and solid, but this one was weak with fluctuations.
Elsa could feel the eyes of the crowd, as hot against her back as the fire itself. She had neither time nor patience for considering what they made of the situation—an angry brown girl in peasant clothes emerging from the house of their respectable, well-to-do neighbor. But whatever they thought, a crowded avenue was not the place to assess the extent of the fire damage done to the books.
Elsa pushed her sweat-damp hair out of her face and looked around. On the far side of the street, a black coach clattered by, the horses rearing and rolling their wide eyes in fear, the coachman shouting curses as he fought for control. When the carriage had passed, Elsa scooped up the books and stalked across the street, away from prying eyes.
She turned the first corner, putting a building between her and the curious gazes of the crowd, and stood in a patch of shadow between the streetlamps. Using her legs like bookends, she set the books down between her feet to free her hands, then took her pocket-sized book from its belt pouch. It wasn’t a proper worldbook so much as a directory of places—a means by which to target the portal device and open a door from one location on Earth to another. A heretical application of scriptology, by the standards of European science, but for Elsa it was an achievement worthy of pride.
She skipped past the core text in the front, where the book’s properties and functions were defined, and flipped through the destinations described in the back. Her hands shook a little as she considered where to go. Her mind went immediately to the one person on Earth whom she knew could be counted upon for assistance: her mother’s old mentor, Alek de Vries. So she found the page where she’d scribed a description of the canal outside de Vries’s flat in Amsterdam.
Taking out the portal device, she read the coordinates from the little doorbook, then tuned the brass knobs to the proper settings. When she flipped the switch, the dark disk of the portal widened, slicing through the very air of the alleyway—it hung there, unattached to anything, and even though Elsa had done this before, the sight of a portal with no Edgemist still disquieted her a bit. The real world didn’t work in sensible ways.
As she tucked the portal device back into its pouch, she heard the distant clatter of dozens of hooves and the creak of massive wheels behind her—the Parisian fire brigade, at last, arriving too late to do more than quell the spread of the blaze. Elsa let out a frustrated huff, hefted her stack of rescued books, and walked into the portal. She stepped through the infinite coldness and out onto a cobbled walkway tucked between a narrow canal and a row of looming four-story brick buildings all squeezed together like books on an overfull shelf. Amsterdam.
The portal winked closed of its own accord, and Elsa stepped up onto the stoop and shifted the books to rest on her hip, freeing one hand. She yanked down on the bell pull for de Vries’s flat, counting the seconds until he opened the front door.