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“I need a name for something. I don’t have the word for it and it’s driving me crazy,” I said. “Power that isn’t yours but moves through you anyway. Not stealing it. Or not only stealing. More like taking the edge off it and handing it back changed. Does that exist? Is there a name for it?”

His face didn’t change, but the feeling of his stillness did. I had spent enough time around him by that point that I had started to learn the difference, which was its own small dangerous accomplishment. There was the stillness of him when he was actually reading and not just using it as a mask to keep an eye on everything around him, and then there was the stillness of having just learned something that he probably shouldn’t have.

I’d thought I was being vague enough, but now, having listened to myself say the words I realized that I probably wasn’t.

“Who?” he asked. Not what, but who, which I thought was interesting.

“Does it matter?” I asked, still clinging to the hope that I could keep this vague, but he just sat and stared at me in that way of his and I knew if I wanted an answer I’d have to give him one in return. I sighed and said, “Kit.”

Something passed behind his eyes, old and fast, gone before I could name it. “Show me,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“No fire?”

“No Kit. And also no particular desire to accidentally set the archive alight and end my academic career as a cautionary plaque somebody dusts once a year.”

The almost-smile threatened at the corner of his mouth and, as usual, declined the invitation. “Describe it, then.”

I shook my head. “Too dangerous.”

He watched me for a long time, waiting for his silence to break me. When I just watched him back for a while, he stood. “Come,” he said.

I followed him into the stacks. He moved differently in the archive than he did anywhere else, and I only understood it once I saw it. In the dining hall he arranged himself not to be seen, folded down small at the end of the table. In hallways he slipped through gaps in the crowd before anyone’s eyes could quite land on him, moving like a ghost. But here, among the shelves and the old indexes and the ladders on their long brass rails, he had a quiet certainty to him that made the whole building seem to suddenly make sense, when the rest of the time I could get lost in it.

He went down one aisle, up a narrow iron stair that groaned under both of us, across a dim gallery. He stopped at a shelf so high that I had to drag the rolling ladder over and climb it to reach him. His hand found a spine without a moment’s hesitation, without reading a single label.

“How do you know where everything is?” I asked, from three rungs down.

“I don’t.”

“You keep saying things like that as if they’re answers.”

“I know where they would have put it.”

“Who’s they?”

His hand paused on the book, just for a second, a hitch in the certainty. Then he pulled the volume free and climbed down past me, and I noticed, and I said nothing, and I filed it away to think about later.

The book he set on the table was bound in cracked brown leather, its title nearly rubbed away by generations of hands.

“Bond Theory: Early Structures and Deprecated Classifications,” I read. I paused when I saw the sticker at the bottom of the title and tried to make sense of it in my head before I read it aloud too. “Deprecated.”

“Abandoned because it was inconvenient.”

“That’s not what deprecated means.”

“Here it is.”

Linden opened to a section already marked with a slip of pale ribbon and turned pages until he found what he wanted. What he wanted was not a paragraph or a chapter but a footnote. A footnote so small it looked embarrassed to exist at all.

The term ‘resonant pairs’ sat in the middle of it, struck through with a single clean line by some later, colder hand. Beside the crossed-out words, in cramped ink, someone had written superseded; ‘see H-17-43 / closed stack.’

“Resonant pairs?” I murmured, wondering what it meant.

Linden said nothing.

“Why was it struck out?”