Don’t get too worried—this isn’t the sort of story in which emergencies occur. Yes, it is highly unlikely that you will ever see those Firebringer’s Lenses activated. So don’t get your hopes up.
I accepted the Firebringer’s Lenses from my grandfather, and they immediately started glowing.
“Cavorting Cards!” Grandpa Smedry yelped, dodging to the side as the Lenses blasted a pair of intensely hot beams into the ground right in front of my feet. I hopped backward in shock, nearly dropping the Lenses in surprise.
Grandpa Smedry grabbed the Lenses from behind, deactivating them. The scent of melted tar rose in the air, and I blinked, my vision marked by two bright afterimages of light.
“Well, well,” Grandpa Smedry said. “I told you they were easy to use.” He glanced up at the building. “We should be too far away for that to have been sensed.…”
Great, I thought. As my vision cleared, I could see Bastille rolling her eyes.
Sing waddled over, raising his sunglasses and inspecting the three-foot-wide disk of blackened, half-melted asphalt. “Nice shot,” he noted. “I think it’s dead now.”
I blushed, but Grandpa Smedry just laughed. “Here,” he said, slipping a small velvet bag around the Firebringer’s Lenses. He pulled the drawstring tight at the top. “This should keep them safe. Now, with these Lenses and your Talent, you should be able to handle pretty much anything the Librarians throw at you!”
I accepted the glasses back, and fortunately they didn’t go off. Now, as I was telling you previously, these Lenses will probably never get used in this story. You’ll be lucky if you ever get to see them fired. Again.
“Grandfather,” I said quietly, eyeing Bastille, then stepping aside again with Grandpa Smedry. “I’m not sure that I can do this.”
“Nonsense, lad! You’re a Smedry!”
“But I didn’t even know I was until earlier today,” I said. “Or … well, I didn’t know what being a Smedry meant. I don’t think … well, I’m just not ready.”
“What makes you say that?” Grandpa Smedry asked.
“I tried to use my Talent earlier,” I said. “To stop Bastille from smacking me with her purse. It didn’t work. And that wasn’t the first time—sometimes I just can’t make things break. And when I don’t want them to break, they usually do anyway.”
“Your Talent is still wild,” Grandpa Smedry said. “You haven’t practiced it enough. Being a Smedry isn’t only about having a Talent, it’s about finding out how to use that Talent. A clever person can make anything turn to his advantage, no matter how much a disadvantage it may seem at first.
“No Smedry Talent is completely controllable. However, if you practice enough, you’ll begin to get a grasp on it. Eventually, you’ll be able to make things break not merely when and where you want, but also how you want.”
“I…” I said, still uncertain.
“This doesn’t sound like you, Alcatraz,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Where’s that spark of spirit—that stubbornness—that you’re always tossing about?”
I frowned. “How do you know what I’m like? You only just met me.”
“Oh? You think I’ve left you in Librarian hands all this time, never checking in on you?”
Of course he checked on me, I thought. Bastille mentioned something about that. “But you don’t know me,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t even know what my Talent was.”
“I suspected, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “But I’ll admit—I usually got to your foster homes after you’d moved somewhere else. Still, I’ve been watching over you, in my own way.”
“If that’s the case,” I said, “then why—”
“Why did I leave you to the foster homes?” Grandpa Smedry asked. “I’m not that great a parent. A boy needs somebody who can arrive on time to his birthdays and ball games. Besides, there were … reasons for letting you grow up in this world.”
That didn’t seem like much of an explanation to me, but Grandpa didn’t look like he’d say more. So I just sighed. “I keep feeling like I won’t be much help in this fight. I don’t know how to use my Talent, or these Lenses. Maybe I should get a gun or a sword or something.”
Grandpa Smedry smiled. “Ah, lad. This war we’re fighting—it isn’t about guns, or even about swords.”
“What is it about, then? Sand?”
“Information,” Grandpa Smedry said. “That’s the real power in this world. That man who held a gun on us earlier—he had power over you. Why?”
“Because he was going to shoot me,” I said.
“Because you thought he could shoot you,” Grandpa Smedry said, raising a finger. “But he had no power over me, because I knew that he couldn’t hurt me. And when he realized that…”
“He ran away,” I said slowly.
“Information. The Librarians control the information in this city—in this whole country. They control what gets read, what gets seen, and what gets learned. Because of that, they have power. Well, we’re going to break that power, you and I. But first we need those sands.”
“Grandpa,” I said. “You have to have some kind of idea what the sands do. You came to get them from me, after all. Didn’t you have a plan to use them?”
“Pestering Pullmans, of course I did! I was going to smelt them into Lenses, just like the Librarians are probably doing now. Your father, lad—he was a sandhunter. He spent all his time searching out new and powerful types of sand, gathering the grains together, crafting Lenses like nobody had seen before. The Sands of Rashid were his crowning achievement. His greatest discovery.” Grandpa Smedry’s voice grew even quieter. “He was convinced they had something to do with where the Smedry family gained its Talents in the first place. The Sands of Rashid are a key, somehow, to understanding the power and origin of our entire family. Can you understand, perhaps, why the Librarians might want them?”
I nodded slowly. “The Talents.”
“Indeed, lad. The Talents. If they could find a way to arm their agents with Talents like ours, then the Free Kingdoms could very well be doomed. Smedry powers are a large part of what has kept the Librarians at bay for so long. But we’re losing. The land you call Australia was lost to us only a few decades back—absorbed and added to the Hushlands. Now Sing’s homeland has almost fallen. They’ve already taken some of the outlying Mokian islands—the places you call Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa—and added them to the Hushlands. I fear it will only be a few years before Mokia itself falls.”
He paused, then shook his head, looking a bit distant as he continued. “Either the Free Kingdoms are going to fall—and everything will become Hushlands—or we’re going to find a way to break the Librarians’ power. The Smedry Talents, and the secrets these sands will reveal, are key to the next stage of the war. Things are changing … things have to change. We can’t just keep fighting and losing ground. That’s why your father spent so much of his life gathering those sands. He felt it was time to go on the offensive.”
I felt a stab of anxiety, a question surfacing that I wasn’t certain I wanted to know the answer to. Finally, I couldn’t keep it down. “Is he still alive, Grandpa?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking back at me. “I honestly don’t know.”
The comment hung in the air. Grandpa Smedry placed a hand on my shoulder. “Alive or not, Attica Smedry was a great man, Alcatraz. An amazing man. And he, like you, was no warrior. We are Oculators. Our weapon is information. Keep your eyes, and your mind, open. You’ll do just fine.”
I nodded slowly.
“Good lad, good lad. Ah, here’s Quentin.”
The short, tuxedo-wearing man slipped quickly out of the library’s front doors. “Five Librarians in the main lobby,” he said quietly. “Three behind the checkout desk, two in the stacks. Their patterns are right on schedule with what we’ve seen from them before. The entrance to the employee corridors is on the far south side. It isn’t guarded right now, though a Librarian passes to check on it every few minutes or so.”
“All right then,” Grandpa Smedry said. “In we go!”
Chapter
7
I seem to recall that last year a Free Kingdoms biographer wrote an article claiming I had spent my childhood performing a “deep infiltration” of Librarian lands. I guess in his mind, spending my life eating Twinkies and playing video games counted as a “deep infiltration.”
I hope you Free Kingdomers aren’t too put out to discover that dragons didn’t come and bow to me at my birth. I wasn’t tutored by the spirits of my dead Smedry ancestors, nor did I kill my first Librarian by slitting his throat with his own library card.
This is the real me, the troubled boy who grew into an even more troubled young man. Now, I’m not a terrible person. I’m just not a particularly nice one either. If you’d been tied to altars, nearly eaten by walking romance novels, and thrown off a glass pillar taller than Mt. Everest, you might have turned out a little like me yourself.
Sing tripped.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of people trip in my lifetime. I’ve seen people stumble, tumble, and misstep. I once saw my foster brother fall down the stairs (not my fault) and I also saw a local bully belly flop when his diving board broke beneath him (I plead the Fifth on that one).
I have never, however, seen a trip quite so … well executed as the one Sing performed in the library lobby that day. The hefty Mokian quite convincingly stumbled on the welcome mat right inside the doors. He cried out, hopping on one foot—a teetering, lumbering mound with the kinetic energy of a collapsing building.
People scattered. Children cried, clutching picture books about aardvarks in their terrified fingers. A Librarian raised her hand in warning.