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The light, though just a whisper, burned her eyes like acid, and she screwed them shut. The still air began to move, and its moaning through the caverns’ many throats and gullets started to sound like garbled voices, deeper than human and impossibly far away.

“Don’t put those together.”

“Why not? They’re pretty similar.”

“Exactly. Spread them out.”

“So nobody can find what they want and actually buy one of your precious books?”

“Just do it!”

Rose opened her eyes a fraction and stared through tear-filled slits at a long, natural tunnel whose far end blazed with distant daylight.

“So, The Wind in the Willows and The Wizard of Oz belong on entirely different shelves?”

“Right.”

“Opposite sides of the room?”

“Sure.” A man’s voice. Rose could hear the shrug in it.

“Okaaaaaay.” The woman drew the word out to show her reluctance.

And as the woman spoke, the tunnel ahead of Rose grew longer and narrower, the daylight moving away, its brightness fading.

“No!” Rose began to sprint. “No! Don’t.” She reached for the retreating light.

The tunnel stretched. Rose raced. The voices, if they continued to speak, drowned beneath the roar of Rose’s breath and the thunder of her heart. No! She had no air to shout.

Something snapped. Maybe everything did. One moment Rose was running headlong along the tunnel, keeping her feet only by a miracle. The next, the tunnel was a well, and gravity had her. However fast the daylight was retreating, Rose fell faster. Everything was a tumbling scream until she hit something, then another something, then six or ten of them together. If any of them had refused to get out of the way, Rose would have been splatted like an insect on Mr. Toad’s windscreen. But they bent and splintered and finally caught her with a roughness on the right side of splatting but not so far on the right side that it didn’t hurt a lot.

“Are you all right?”

There had been a gap between the almost splatting and the voiced concern. How long a gap, Rose had no idea. She had almost as little an idea as to whether she was all right or not. It came as a surprise to find that she was lying on her back, looking at the sky through a miniature forest of tree limbs. “I don’t know.”

“Try sitting up?” Something interposed itself between her face and the sky. Rose wasn’t sure what. If she had had the presence of mind to predict what she might see, a face would have topped this list. But the blurry, shiny thing above her seemed rather too silver to be a face. “Can you sit up?”

“I don’t know.” Rose’s lips felt too large and she tasted blood, but at least by sitting up she proved that she could sit up. “Is this…is this a tree?”

“You didn’t hit your head too hard then. Yes, it’s a tree,” said the blocky, silvery man whom she still couldn’t bring into focus.

“Did I…knock it down?” The tree—a big one—was indisputably lying on its side.

“Ha!” A burst of surprisingly metallic laughter. “Well…I mean…technically. But I did most of the work.” The object he waved at her appeared to be an axe.

“You’re a robot?”

“A what now?”

“Uh.” Rose touched her head where it hurt most and studied her fingers to see if they were bloody—they weren’t. “A robot. You know!”

“I don’t, I’m afraid.”

“A…uh…marvelous mechanical man.”

“Oh, like TikTok?”

“Isn’t TikTok—”