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‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Irene said quickly. ‘Mr Aubrey isn’t here yet. Can we help you?’
The woman stared at the two of them. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said slowly. ‘Who are you?’ Her brown hair was looped untidily on the back of her head and smeared with dust, and there were traces of dust and ash on her grey skirt and jacket.
‘Vermin preventative defence,’ Irene invented quickly. ‘We’re working through all the rooms, looking for signs of infestation. Tell me, Miss – ’ She paused invitingly.
‘Todd,’ the woman said. ‘Rebecca Todd. He told me to come in this morning about the Lamia manuscript.’ She shifted her grip on her books.
‘He should be in soon,’ Irene said. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t ask you to wait inside because we need to deploy some hazardous chemicals while we’re testing for silverfish. Would you mind waiting outside in the corridor? We’ll be out in a minute.’
‘Of course,’ Miss Todd said readily. ‘If Mr Aubrey does arrive while you’re still testing, I’ll let him know.’
‘Thank you,’ Irene said with a smile. She waited until Miss Todd was safely out of the room before breathing a sigh of relief.
‘Silverfish?’ Kai muttered.
‘Hush,’ Irene said. ‘We’ll be out of here before she knows it.’ She knelt down again, avoiding the growing puddle of vinegar, and hastily stuffed the skin back into the jar. ‘Ugh. I need to wash my hands. Actually, I’ll take this with us. Perhaps Coppelia or one of the others will know what it means.’ She passed the jar to Kai. ‘You hold this.’
‘Must I?’ he said, taking it distastefully.
‘I need to open the door.’ Irene walked across to the Library door. She remembered seeing the chain last time, but she rather thought it wasn’t in use then, perhaps freed by their own journey through the door. It was clearly for show rather than substance, presumably to discourage outsiders from using it. And, of course, anyone like Irene could just use the Language.
‘Chain, open,’ she said, laying her hand on the padlock.
It didn’t explode. It burst open. It unfurled like a chrysanthemum and then fastened onto her palm, spreading across her skin in a slick of white-hot metal. But there was more to it than heat. Through the acute pain, Irene sensed active malice and deliberate will. Behind it all, as she almost lost consciousness, she caught a dazzle of brightness that ultimately faded to darkness.
‘Irene,’ Kai was saying, but she had fallen to her knees, and didn’t have the space in her head to register his words or his expression. Or anything except the blazing pain crackling from her hand to shoot up her arm. ‘Irene!’
The mark across her back flared to life, automatically resisting the invasive chaotic forces linked to the padlock. Order and chaos now battled for authority over her body. And it was too late to recognize this as a trap laid for someone who’d use the Language, even though it was so clearly that in hindsight. She could smell something burning. That would be her dress. Fabric was so flammable.
‘Get me loose,’ she gasped. If only she could break the physical link that held her to the padlock, or the forces powering it, that might be enough to let her regain control and finish cleansing herself.
Kai closed a hand round her wrist and pulled. He didn’t try touching the padlock.
The padlock was stuck to her hand. She couldn’t even shift the grip that she had on it; her fingers were locked round what was left of it in a spasm that she couldn’t break. Through the agony, she recognized this as a chaos-fuelled trap. A normal human being, one not sealed to the Library, would already have been warped to something on the verge of possible. Or they would have been accelerated all the way into something that couldn’t exist in this alternate, and outright destroyed. Though a normal human being wouldn’t have triggered the trap . . .
She felt her grip slipping.
For the moment her Library seal was saving her, but it couldn’t last. The two competing forces would burn her out like an understrength fuse if she couldn’t break the connection somehow.
‘Irene!’ Kai yelled in her ear, as if volume would make a difference. ‘Can I get you into the Library? Will that help?’
She jerked her head in a shake. ‘No,’ she gasped. She couldn’t enter the Library in this state. ‘I’m polluted – can’t –’ She tried to think of any teachings covering this, but could only remember it was called the ‘Babelfish Principle’, which was no use. And it was hurting, it was hurting . . .
Then a solution came to her. But if the Library door wasn’t the trap’s power-source, she was so screwed. ‘Break my link to the door . . . break the chain!’
‘Right,’ Kai said as he pulled the chain taut, trying to wrench out the flimsy-looking loop holding it to the wall by brute force. It shifted, but not nearly enough, and he slipped a knife from his sleeve, trying to prise open the links. One parted with a sudden snap, weakened by the forces flowing to the lock. Then the chain whipped free, and he yanked it through what remained of the original padlock.
With the chain gone, the power circuit broke – and the padlock clicked open to fall from Irene’s hand to the floor. Irene knelt there, breathing in deep sobbing gasps, unable to quite look at her hand yet and see what damage had been done.
‘Irene?’ Kai said. ‘What the hell was that? Are you all right? How did you get it loose?’
She looked up at him. Her vision was a little blurry. Maybe that was why he was swaying. ‘It was a trap,’ she tried to explain. ‘Set to react to the Language and bind to the user, using the Library door as an energy source. That was why it stopped functioning when you broke the chain. It was very energy-efficient.’ There was a buzzing in her ears. ‘Kai? Can you hear something? Is it the silverfish?’
‘Irene,’ Kai said. He went down on one knee beside her. ‘Are you all right?’
Irene looked at her hand. It was red all over the fingers and down the palm. ‘Oh,’ she said, in deep comprehension. ‘Kai. I think I’m . . .’ The buzzing was getting louder. ‘I think I have to lie down for a bit.’
‘Irene!’
