Feels like a waste, Grandpa wrote back. Shouldn’t we be able to use it?
What type of technology is it? I wrote. Is there glass involved?
Grandpa looked at Draulin.
The others had a bit of glass in them, she wrote. Probably Communicator’s Glass, set to transmit only one way.
Grandpa looked at me, raising an eyebrow.* I’d used the glass in the palace to look at the monarchs when they hadn’t wanted me to. Could I do the same thing here?
I shrugged. Maybe?
“My, Draulin,” Grandpa said loudly—and in a rather fake way. “That’s quite a vigorous dance. You should be more careful, otherwise you might faint.”*
She gave him a glare that could have steamed some broccoli to go with my toast. Then she started jumping up and down to make her armor clank before finally dropping to the ground with a clatter.
“Oh my!” Grandpa said. “I warned her.”
“You sure did.”
“Here, let us get down and see if we can make her more comfortable.”
The point of all this was, it seemed, to give us an excuse to climb down under the table and make noise there. The Librarians were, after all, probably listening in. Grandpa rubbed his chin, looking at the little device on the bottom of the table.
Draulin took out a knife, then used it to carefully pry the metal casing off the bug. Inside we found a small tangle of wires and a very conspicuous piece of glass. Another Librarian device mixing Hushlander technology with glass.
The other two looked at me, so I reached up and touched the glass. For what happened next, I’ll refer you to the description a few chapters ago, with emotion-whales and whatnot. I’m not sure I can top that—though this time I did feel an emotion not unlike how a piece of cheddar feels as it turns into a cheese sandwich.
I blinked, holding my finger in place and opening my eyes as voices came through the device. They were very soft, but audible.
“How should I know why they are so intent on making the poor woman dance?” a voice said. “Nothing those people do makes any sense to me!”
“It seems to be some kind of punishment,” another said. “They’re always complaining about their bodyguards; this must be a type of petty revenge.”
“Keep records of everything they do, in detail,” another voice said, female. “The Scrivener will be able to read more into their motives than you will.”
I recognized that voice. She Who Cannot Be Named,* a high-up Librarian we’d faced in Nalhalla.
Recognizing the voice was a big enough shock. But that second part stopped me dead.
The Scrivener?
I grew cold immediately. The Scrivener was Biblioden, right? The guy who had come up with the whole “Evil Librarian” thing in the first place? He was dead.
Wasn’t he?
“They’ve grown silent,” a Librarian said. “Why is the glass glowing like that? I—”
The glass on our side started to steam, and I yelped, pulling my hand back swiftly as it melted in a glob that dropped and splatted to the floor.
“That’s inconvenient,” Draulin said, as if I’d melted it on purpose or something.
“Did they say … the Scrivener?” I asked.
“Yes,” Grandpa said, rubbing his chin.
“I have a question,” Draulin said.
“So, maybe they picked a new leader?” I said quickly, cutting her off. “And that Librarian is using the title of Scrivener now.”
“No other Librarian has ever dared use the title,” Grandpa said, “though centuries have passed since Biblioden vanished. The closest is the order of the Scrivener’s Bones, who claim to follow his teachings the most vigilantly.”
“My question remains,” Draulin said.
“When you say … vanished,” I said to Grandpa, “you mean died, right?”
“Sure, yes,” Grandpa said. “Died.” He laughed.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Nobody knows where he was buried.”
“No.”
“Great.”
“Question…”
“Yes, yes, Draulin.”
“Can we get off the floor?”
“If you want to be boring, I suppose.”
“I personally would like to know how to spit well.”
The other two looked at me as we stood up—because yes, we’d had that entire conversation under the table and so what?—and Grandpa frowned at me. “What did you say?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to make a sentence that was a little bit longer than what you’d said, so the conversation will look cool on the page when I write it down.”
“Ah, well, that makes sense.”
“Uh … guys?” Kaz’s face appeared on Grandpa’s wall. “You’re going to want to come up here. Because we’ve arrived, and a shockingly large number of people are about to try to kill us.”
Chapter
Trillian
I need you to do something for me. Is that all right? Are you willing to do a favor for your favorite author?
Okay, go to your fridge. Dig around inside until you find some lunch meat, cheese, pickles, lettuce, more lunch meat, and some mayonnaise. (And honestly, who chose how to spell that word?* Must be a Librarian ploy to keep me reliant on spellcheck.)
Now, slather some mayo onto two pieces of bread from your pantry. Get it on real good. Are you slathering? I don’t think you’re slathering. These pages should be mayoized from you trying to read these instructions while you make the food. Now, choose slices of pickle that maximize the outer skin—they’re the most crunchy. You can toss the centers. Now, make sure that you salt the cheese.*
You got that? I’ll wait. Done? Good. That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Now go back in time, teleport to my house in the Free Kingdoms, and give me the sandwich while I’m writing this. I’m kind of hungry.
“Wow,” I said softly, staring out Penguinator’s cockpit windows.
“You can say that again,” Grandpa said. “Mostly because I couldn’t hear you the first time. Speak more loudly this time.”
“Wow!”
“Much better.”
I’d been to Washington, DC, on a school trip once, but it had looked nothing like this. Penguinator had just come in across Chesapeake Bay, flying right beneath the dense cloud cover. From this high up, I got a good view of the enormous purple dome covering the city in its entirety. It glowed with a violet light, like steam from a hot pan. I lifted off my Oculator’s Lenses. Sure enough, without them the dome vanished—save for a warping of the air.
“That warping?” I asked, pointing.
“Caused by the glass eyes of Penguinator,” Kaz said. “Normal people can’t see the shield; the glass windows here are designed to give pilots warning of Librarian illusions.”
I nodded
, lowering my Lenses back on. Kaz and my mother sat at the dashboard—though she was reading nonchalantly—while Grandpa, Draulin, and I had walked up behind their seats to stare out over the landscape. Cousin Dif shoved his way between Grandpa and me, then draped an arm over our shoulders. I saw no sign of his ant farm.
As we drew closer to Washington, I saw a much different city from the one presented to the world. While the outer parts were mostly the same, the center of the downtown—the stuff on all the postcards—was way different. The Lincoln Memorial had a turret on top of it, with wicked-looking antiaircraft guns stretching toward the sky, and the long green of the Mall running down from it looked more like a landing strip than a park. The White House had a sharp, red fence rising high around it, and many of the museum buildings had a stretched look to them, rising toward the air, becoming more peaked, more devilish. Only the Washington Monument seemed unchanged: a lone obelisk rising straight into the air, surrounded by darkness.
I easily made out the Highbrary. What appeared in the Hushlands as an innocent, if regal, stone building—the Library of Congress—here manifested as a pitch-black fortress of a structure, stretching six stories high, with wicked stone spires and dark monstrous things flying around it. Say what you will of Librarians, they certainly have style.
I couldn’t focus long on the Highbrary, unfortunately, because a fleet of jet planes were scrambling toward us. There had to be a hundred of them, sleek black jets that looked nothing like the planes I’d seen at aircraft museums.
“That must be the entire Librarian Air Force,” Kaz said. “Not US military planes—the actual Librarian defense force. I’ve never seen them call out so many before.”
“We have them scared,” Grandpa said, eager.
“This is incredible!” Dif exclaimed, squeezing my shoulder.
“How silly of me,” my mother said, having finally put down her book to join us, “to assume that with you I’d be able to sneak into the Highbrary.”
“Sneaking is fun,” Grandpa said, “but this is way more exciting.” He paused. “You can dodge them, can’t you, Son?”