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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I gave him ten minutes to fall asleep. Then, retrieving the vine rope from beneath my bed, I slipped through the door and out into the hallway.

The library was on the south side of level three, four levels below me and on the other side of the Tower. But while I hadn’t seen a lot of security inside the building, it was never a good idea to push your luck farther than you had to. The Grove of Reflection was only three floors down, and was conveniently placed above the library.

Even better, I’d noted during our tour that the grove and library both had lower window sections that looked to swivel horizontally open. With Huginn’s vine in hand, it should be easy to lower myself from the one to the other.

I didn’t see or hear anyone on my way down the ramps and across to the Tower’s south side. The doors leading into the grove were unlocked, and I slipped inside.

The room’s lights were off, but there was enough starlight twinkling in for me to navigate by. I went to one of the windows in the center of the room and looked out.

There was no movement in the city that I could see. Equally important, the sky to the east still showed starry black. I took a moment to figure out the window’s opening mechanism, then swung it in a few centimeters and looked down the side of the building.

Three of the library’s windows were also ajar, presumably for ventilation. The nearest one was a couple of windows to the right of my current position; closing my window, I moved over and opened that one.

Perfect. Almost as if the Ammei had deliberately set up an engraved invitation.

As my father used to say, The plus side of walking into a trap is that they probably won’t shoot at you right away.

One of the nearby vegetation clumps featured a strong-looking sapling. I tied one end of Huginn’s vine to its base, then carried the rest of the coil to my window. I got a grip on the vine, worked my way backward through the opening until my legs were dangling outside, and started down. I paused at the ajar library window, worked it the rest of the way open, and maneuvered my way inside.

Here, somewhere, was the RH directory all of us had worked so hard to retrieve.

I looked at the dark rows of dark books, my stomach tightening. Yes. Here.

Somewhere.

I walked across the room, my footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in my hypersensitive ears. Still no sign of anyone lurking about, but I couldn’t imagine that convenient solitude lasting overly long. I reached the edge of the shelves and stopped, looking upward at the vast collection.

And as I contemplated the impossibility of the task I’d set for myself, I heard a muffled sound from the direction of the library door.

I dropped into a crouch, half spinning to face the door. The nearest cover was five or six steps away, and the window and any hope of escape even farther. If some Amme strolled in, I had better have one hell of a story to pitch him.

The sound was getting louder. Like distant thunder, I decided, or maybe a cart rolling toward me on one of the Tower’s ramps. I could also hear Ammei voices accompanying it. The rolling sound stopped…

The seconds ticked by, and the library door remained closed. I could still hear the voices, now accompanied by some soft thuds and the clicking of metal against metal. Taking a deep breath, fully aware that this was dangerously stupid even by my standards, I stole across the room to the door and pressed my ear against it.

There were Ammei out there, all right. At least three of them, from the varying vocal pitches.

I chewed at the inside of my cheek. Across the hall, right where the Ammei were gathered, was the room I’d climbed past earlier with shutters welded over the windows. If the Ammei weren’t coming into the library, that must be their destination.

As my father used to say, Hiding things in plain sight is an art. Most people just settle for putting big obvious locks around the things they don’t want you to see.

There was something in that room First of Three didn’t want us to see, and there was clearly no way I could sneak or talk my way inside. But if I was lucky, maybe I could still get a look.

Dropping onto my stomach alongside the wall, I stroked my left thumbnail into mirror mode and eased it under the library door.

The door was thin—doors made of Icari metal didn’t have to be thick in order to do their job—and I was able to get a partial look outside. The three Ammei I’d heard were standing beside a low cart and were in the process of carrying a large curved plate toward the door across the hall. Two guards armed with belted hand weapons stood on either side, and as the three approached with their burden one of the guards gave the door a sharp double rap.

The door swung open, revealing a single large room, probably the same size as the library. In the center was a large, vaguely hemispherical object probably eight to ten meters across. Most of what I could see was composed of a loose metal grid, but there were a couple of sections that were solid metal plates perforated with cables, hoses, and equipment boxes.

Rising from the bottom of the mesh, partially obscured by the grid and the Ammei maneuvering their load through the door, was a single slender cylinder.

The door shut, cutting off my view. Silently, I got back to my feet and padded my way back to the book shelves. Whatever the Ammei were building, it clearly wasn’t finished and could therefore wait. For now, it was time to refocus my full attention on finding RH.

Unless the Ammei had already done so.

I scowled that depressing thought away. No. Third and Rozhuhu had gone to a lot of effort to quietly pinpoint the library for Selene and me. That whole exercise would be pointless unless they wanted us to find something for them.

But where to start?

Like looking for a needle in a haystack, the old saying echoed through my mind. But as my father used to say, Better to hide your needle in a bathtub of other needles.

The Ammei had had a lot of time to sort through these books before Selene and I arrived, possibly as much as ten millennia. So why hadn’t they found what they were looking for?

Had it been disguised somehow so that they couldn’t recognize it? Did they not know what it looked like, and kept missing it in their searches?

Or had they not found it because it had never been here in the first place?

I pursed my lips. Because as my father also used to say, Even better, point everyone at the bathtub of needles, and while they’re looking that direction sneak yours under the nearest rock.

I couldn’t search the whole library. Not with what was left of tonight, not with a month’s worth of similar tonights.

But there was one place where I could at least take a preliminary look. A place where something could be well and truly hidden and where the Ammei might not think to look.

If you’re not sure where you lost something, look where the light is good. If it’s there, you’ll find it; if it’s in the dark you’ll probably never find it anyway. As far as I knew, my father had never said that. But he might have.

Retreating to the window, I took hold of the vine and started climbing.

* * *

I hadn’t paid much attention to the grove on our first visit, barely glancing over the clumps of vegetation and the brick pathways that curved around between them, most of my thoughts and speculations on the library. Now, I took a much closer look.

The plant clusters weren’t nearly as uniform as I’d remembered. Each of them seemed to be a unique mixture of various types of bushes, with narrow shrubs, tall plants, and slender but robust saplings like the one I’d used to tie my vine to. The design was reminiscent of a Zen garden or gladed rockery, though somewhat heavier on the plant life and lighter on the delicacy, sand, and stone benches of those formats. Large, ancient-looking flagstones were set into the ground on either side of the main doors, forming spiral patterns that welcomed the visitor and then guided him onto the pathways and into the grove proper. A nice, if slightly shocking touch—not really visible in the faint starlight but something I remembered from our earlier tour—was that while the soil of the grove was black or dark brown the fine dust the flagstones were embedded in was a bright yellow.

I stepped to a spot between the flagstone spirals, gazed across the room at the groups of plants, and tried to think.

If I had something the size of an Icari book to get rid of, where would I hide it?

It wasn’t like there weren’t possibilities. In fact, with the flagstones, the bricks, and tons of dirt it was another whole haystack up here.

I shook that conclusion away. That was amateur thinking, or the kind of thinking that someone with lots of spare time could afford to indulge in. I wasn’t an amateur, and I didn’t have the luxury of extra time.

But I also knew I was dealing with a professional, someone who’d done such a good job that the book had gone undiscovered for at least a few centuries. Back in my bounty hunter days, I’d been pretty good at finding people who didn’t want to be found, and I had no intention of being beaten by a mere book.

I let my eyes drift across the grove, trying to put myself into the Icari mindset that had given us the clue to the location of the first, LH, half of the directory. Not under the bricks in any of the walkways, I decided. He would have had to take out too many of them, and that much tampering would likely have been noticed. Not in the dirt itself, either, because freshly turned earth was very noticeable, plus he would have had a book’s worth of extra dirt to dispose of. Hiding it beneath one of the entryway flagstones would be even worse, given he would have to get rid of that much yellow dirt in a room full of black and dark-gray soil.

I felt a tight smile twitch at the corners of my mouth as something suddenly struck me. Yellow dirt. Or maybe gold dirt? As in, the Gold Ones?

I had no idea whether or not the Icari had a sense of humor. Or, for that matter, whether they were aware of the Ammei name for them. But if they were, the color scheme here might indicate at least a sense of irony.

My smile faded. Even worse, I’d just called the flagstone option. Flat-out impossible, someone else might have labeled it.

But as my father used to say, Most people never think about the impossible. If you want to be invisible, be impossible.

I focused again on the flagstones. There were two of them, the ones in the centers of the spirals, that were big enough to hide RH beneath. I still couldn’t figure out how the yellow dirt displaced by the book had been hidden, but whoever had pulled this off had found a way. Flipping a mental coin, I knelt down beside the right-hand flagstone, pulled out my multitool, and got to work.

For once, Lady Luck was feeling friendly. Four centimeters beneath the flagstone, my multitool blade hit something hard. Carefully, I scraped away the dirt and found myself looking at the distinctive cover of an Icari book. I worked my fingers beneath the edges, visualizing Kinneman’s expression when I waved my prize in front of him…

I frowned. The book might have the same cover as LH, but I could tell by the feel that it was much thinner than the book Selene had dug out of the ground on Meima. Some other list, maybe, that someone had been equally eager to bury away from the universe at large? Scowling, I pulled it free of the dirt, popped the magnetic clasp, and opened the book to the middle.

One glance at the metallic pages was all the confirmation I needed that I’d indeed come up dry. There were no diagrams of portal address displays here, no side-margin descriptions of planets or worlds where the address might take an adventuresome traveler. All that was here were lines of flowing script alternating with indented sections that could be chemical formulae, technical stats, mathematical proofs, or even just random quotes or snatches of poetry that the writer had liked.

So what was here that someone had decided it desperately needed to be hidden? And which side of this intellectual tug-of-war should I be on?

As my father used to say, Picking sides is an art. Learn the technique, but be aware that even the best usually don’t do better than sixty or seventy percent.

I didn’t want to pick sides in this. I was here to find RH, and to get out safely with it and Selene. A mystery or feud going back ten thousand years wasn’t one I particularly wanted to get involved with.

I frowned at the book. Or had it been ten thousand years?

The Gemini portal that had provided the Ammei route to Alainn and its silver-silk had been cut off only a few decades ago. If the stories Selene had heard were to be believed, one of the Gold Ones had been here within that same relatively short time span.

And suggesting that one Icari had deprived the Ammei of an important resource while another completely independent Icari had then come by and hidden an important book struck me as straining the bounds of coincidence.

Worse, simply the fact that I was holding that book in my hands edged me precariously close to that whole choosing-sides thing.

My first instinct was to put the book right back where I’d found it, erase all traces of my presence here tonight, and try to pretend this had never happened. My second instinct was to find a new hiding place, one that would create a third side—me—until I had a chance to gather more information.

But the night was waning fast, and besides I had no idea where to find a better hiding place than the one my predecessor had already created.

But maybe I could have it both ways.

The metallic pages were far tougher than regular book paper. But they weren’t indestructible, and my multitool’s knife was up to the task. I cut out two of the middle pages, folded them together into a tight wad, and wedged it into the secret compartment just below the elbow of my artificial left arm, the one where Selene and I used to hide bio sample vials. I reburied the book, put the flagstone back in place, and brushed all the yellow dirt that had been displaced back into the cracks between the stones. Then, retrieving the vine rope, I coiled it up and headed back to our room.

The door to Huginn’s sleeping compartment was still closed. There was no way to know whether or not he was still in there, or whether he’d noted my departure and kept an invisible eye on me. But at this point I was too tired to care. I stumbled into my own compartment, slid the vine rope back into concealment under the bed, then flopped face-downward onto the mattress.

Huginn was right about getting some sleep while we could. He was also right that between the Upper Rooms, grove, and library the Ammei had the whole Tower sprinkled with mysteries. He was also right about our need to ferret out the puzzles, and do whatever we could to solve them.

But he was wrong if he thought I was going to take his descriptions, analysis, and suggestions at face value. I knew Huginn, I knew Expediters, and above all I knew Sub-Director Nask.

Huginn had some card hidden up his sleeve. I just hoped I could figure out what it was before he played it.



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Framed