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Buffalo took the list a little skeptically. “Are you sure you don’t need to refer to this?”

“I’m sure she’s memorized it all, Buffalo,” Amrita said. “She doesn’t need a list.” Once again, she saw a flash of hurt in his eyes. He stuffed the list in one of the pockets of his cloak.

“Do you have any special instructions for me?” Amrita asked now, gazing from Will to Zani.

“No.” Zani gritted her teeth. “Just stay close, Director. Don’t wander off, and don’t touch anything. Check with me first.”

“What she said,” Will confirmed. He stood beside Zani and watched her as she paused to sniff the air.

“This way.” Zani urged them to the left, down a narrow corridor towards a lower-level chamber. It was damper here; the air was colder and more humid. The kind of cold that settled into the joints. Amrita was reminded that the stone overhead was very old, thick and heavy. The library, she thought, felt a bit like a tomb.

The walls narrowed as they descended, smoothed by generations of hands brushing against them in the dark.

Zani led the way into a chamber where the ceiling arched low, supported by two thick columns etched with a repeating pattern of reeds and herons. The smell hit Amrita first—cedar oil and myrrh to deter insects, beeswax, and, underneath it all, the grassy green scent of papyrus. A wall of scrolls stretched from floor to ceiling along the far side of the room: some housed in wax-sealed cedar-and-copper cylinders, others stacked in shallow terracotta cubbies.

Small oil lamps burned at intervals in brackets along the walls, their flames perfectly still. Not a breath of air moved. A wooden reading table occupied the center of the room, its surface worn smooth and slightly concave from centuries of use. Everything was quiet.

“It’s so cozy in here!” Will declared.

“Cozy?” Zani gave him a look that was both fond and pained, in equal measure.

“I think the best thing we can probably do while Zani searches, is stand watch.” Amrita put a hand on Buffalo’s broad, steady shoulder as he reached out to touch a bit of carving on one of the shelves.

Buffalo was struggling to follow Zani’s rules. Especially the ones about not touching anything.

He was genuinely trying, putting in the effort. He wanted to be helpful and to follow Zani and Will’s rules. But Buffalo was the kind of man who understood the world through his senses, and first and foremost was touch. He had grown up working with his hands, built his clean energy company with his hands. His primary instinct, when he encountered something interesting or extraordinary, or mysterious, was to pick it up, feel its weight and learn about it that way.

The library was full of extraordinary things.

“Hmm. Right,” Buffalo said. He took a step closer to the door, positioning himself beside a pedestal topped by a polished alabaster urn with a long, jagged crack running down one side. His hand shot out to assess the damage.

“Buffalo… don’t!” Zani snapped, without even looking up from the scroll she was examining.

“I wasn’t going to touch it,” Buffalo said, defensively. His hand was millimeters away from the crack.

“You were too going to touch it.”

“I was just examining it.”

“With your hands.”

“Isn’t that part of how most evaluations work?” Buffalo huffed.

“Maybe try keeping your hands in your pockets?” Zani said pleasantly. She watched pointedly as Buffalo hooked his right thumb into his pocket. “Both of them. All the way in.”

He did as he was told, but not without protest. Buffalo looked over at Amrita and smirked. He reminded her of an unrepentant schoolboy who’d been caught shooting spitballs. She pressed her lips together and turned back to the hunt for the scrolls they had come for.

“I think I’ve found one of the items on the list!” Zani called out. Even though they were alone in the chamber, Zani took care not to speak too loudly or excitedly. Will was already at her side and Buffalo and Amrita were not far behind. “Merope’s Green Catalogue.”

The copper-encased scroll was tucked on a shelf, wedged between a medical text and another on crop cultivation. It was sealed with wax and marked with the impression of a butterfly. Zani held her thumb lightly against this stamp for a moment. The cylinder vibrated and the butterfly began to glow.

“That’s definitely something!” Zani pulled the cylinder from the shelf carefully. She passed it to Amrita. “I should think the Society for the Protection of Natural Magic would be interested in this. I wonder if we can trace any part of the Mudpuddle Manual of Natural Magic back to anything written in there. I say we take it.”

Amrita could feel, even through the copper, that this was something earthy and complex, a witch’s recorded compendium of plant magic that had been accumulating for centuries. It was far too precious to risk being lost. She nodded her agreement with Zani and placed it in the padded case that Buffalo was carrying on his back.

The next chamber they explored yielded a rough papyrus roll, wrapped with linen. It seemed unremarkable at first glance. The scroll had been stashed on a lower shelf, without any markers or tags. Deliberately hiding in plain sight, Amrita suspected. Zani crouched and unrolled one corner, perhaps two inches of the outermost layer. “Murderous Mummies!” She shuddered and went very still.

Will lunged toward her, concerned. But Zani was fine. She meticulously rolled the scroll back up, rewrapped it, and placed it into the case with the botanical compendium. She said nothing.