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Kit’s hands tightened around mine, and Linden watched that, too. I saw him watch it, and I saw Kit see him watch it. And for one second something passed between the two of them that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with knowledge and history that I didn’t understand.

I suddenly felt awkward, so I pulled my hands away and the flame went out before I had to examine any of that too closely. “Tell Kit what we found last time,” I said into the sudden dark before Linden woke the lamp again.

Linden nodded once and went over the missing book. The one with the mark H-17-43.

“Pulled,” I interjected.

“When?” Kit asked.

“Long ago,” Linden said.

I looked at him, and he didn’t elaborate. Infuriatingly, I understood anyway, because even I had seen it. I remembered how the books on either side of the gap had leaned in, settling gently into the empty space, adjusting the way a body adjusted around an old injury until it forgot there was ever anything else there. Whoever took H-17-43 had done it so long ago that the shelf itself had adapted and moved on.

“Show me,” Kit said, as though he couldn’t believe that something from the library would be gone for good.

The three of us traipsed out of the room and to the section that Linden and I found before, the one with the missing book. The three of us went up onto ladders and Linden pointed out the slight space where the missing volume should have been. Kit even brought his own lamp so he could see better.

Linden’s hand rested on the brass rail of the ladder, too tight, with the knuckles pale the same way Kit’s had gone in the lecture hall. I followed his gaze to the small secondary mark written beneath the shelf code. The letters and numbers did not belong to the academy’s system at all. They belonged to the same wrong, older system that ran down the spine of his hand-bound book.

“Linden,” I said.

“No.”

“That’s your family’s mark.”

“No.”

I held his gaze and I didn’t blink and didn’t look away, up there in the lamp-thrown dark where there was nowhere left for either of us to go.

Slowly, like it cost him something he couldn’t get back, he corrected himself. “Yes.”

Kit went very still while the lamp stayed steady in his free hand while his other held onto the ladder.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Linden looked at the gap where the book wasn’t. “It means my family had a copy,” he said.

Had. Not has.

The word landed hard, and it was still sitting there when Kit said, “And because the Fenwick archive tragically burned, obviously no one can check.”

Linden’s jaw shifted just once. It was a fracture in all that stillness.

“Linden,” I said.

He climbed down, not quickly, never quickly. But the conversation was over before his boots touched the stone floor, and we all felt it end.

“We should go,” he said as Kit landed on the floor next to him.

“No.”

He looked up at me. I’d stayed on the ladder, because height made me feel less cornered, which was ridiculous but effective, and I wasn’t in a mood to give up an advantage that stupid and that useful.

“You don’t get to lead us to the missing piece,” I said, “and then stand there and pretend the piece wasn’t ever there.”

“I can,” he said, “if finding that piece gets you removed.”

Removed.