The shadow creatures have divided into clear factions. Half are pressed against the windows, curious but traditional. The other half have set up what appears to be a makeshift office in Fiction, complete with a water cooler that definitely wasn’t there yesterday.
“Where’s Stenrik?” I ask.
“Ice elf is in Poetry,” Keith says. “Reading about death.”
“That’s cheerful.”
“Emily Dickinson apparently understood his soul.”
I find him exactly where Keith said, sitting in a patch of sunlight that makes his white hair glow like a halo. He’s reading, but I can tell he’s not absorbing any words. He’s slightly translucent now too—I can see the bookshelf through him faintly.
“Hi,” I say.
He looks up, and there are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there yesterday. “You got my note.”
“And the soup.” I sit across from him, maintaining careful distance. “Thank you.”
“It’s from a can, but I added real vegetables.”
“From where?”
“The shadow creatures grew them.”
I stare at him. “Shadow creatures are gardening now?”
“Carl has a green thumb. Literally. He’s very proud.”
Despite everything, I laugh. The sound echoes wrong in the damaged library, but I see his shoulders relax slightly at hearing it.
“I’m sorry,” we both say simultaneously, then stop.
“You first,” I say.
“I shouldn’t have called you emotionally unavailable. You’re not. You’re careful. There’s a difference.”
“I shouldn’t have brought up your loneliness like a weapon.”
“It was an effective weapon.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
We sit in the apologetic silence for a moment. We both want to move closer but don’t know how.
“We should read the Chronicle again,” Stenrik says, ice spreading from where his hands grip the desk edge. “There has to be something we’re missing.”
I groan but follow him. My feet leave frost prints on the carpet now—I’ve stopped trying to prevent it. When I reach for the Chronicle, it opens on its own, pages flipping to that same verse we’ve read a dozen times.
“The bond is claimed not by the hand
That grips an anchor in the storm-wracked land.
But by the soul that seeks the shore,
When tempests fall and rage no more.”
“I’ve read this thing a hundred times and it still doesn’t make sense,” I say, frustration bleeding into every word. We’ve been trying to be an anchor, to hold on tight, to weather the storm.
Isn’t that what it says?
