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The fourth floor didn't even have a door. Claire stopped, puzzled, and touched the wall. Nope, no door, no secrets she could see. Just a blank wall. Was it possible there was no fourth floor?
She went up to the fifth floor, made her way through the silent, dusty stacks to the other set of stairs, and went down. On this side, there was a door, but it was locked, and there weren't any windows.
Definitely not offices, she guessed.
But coffins weren't out of the question. Dammit, she resented being scared in a library! Books weren't supposed to be scary. They were supposed to...help.
If she were some kick-ass superhero chick, she'd probably be able to pick the lock with a fingernail clipping or something. Unfortunately, she wasn't a superhero, and she bit her fingernails.
No, she wasn't a superhero, but she was something else. She was...resourceful.
Standing there, staring at the lock, she began to smile.
"Applied science," she said, and ran down the stairs to the first floor.
She had a stop to make in chem lab.
Her TA was in his office. "Well," he said, "if you really want to shatter a lock, you need something good, like liquid helium. But liquid helium isn't all that portable."
"What about Freon?" Claire asked.
"No, you can't get your hands on the stuff without a license. What you can buy is a different formulation, doesn't get as cold but it's more environmentally friendly. But it probably wouldn't do the job."
"Liquid nitrogen?"
"Same problem as helium. Too bulky."
Claire sighed. "Too bad. It was a cool idea."
The TA smiled. "Yes, it was. You know, I have a portable liquid-nitrogen tank I keep for school demonstrations, but they're hard to get. Pretty expensive. Not the kind of thing you'd find lying around.
Sorry." He wandered off, intent on some postgrad experiment of his own, and he promptly forgot all about her. She bit her lip, stared at his back for a while, and then slowly...very slowly, moved back to the door that led to the supply room. It was unlocked so that the TA could easily move in and out if he needed to. Red and yellow signs on it warned that she was going to get cancer, suffocate, or die other horrible deaths if she opened the door...but she did it anyway.
It squeaked. The TA had to have heard it, and she froze like a mouse in front of an oncoming bird.
Guilty.
He didn't turn around. In fact, he deliberately kept his back to her.
She let out a shaky breath, eased into the room, and looked around. The place was neatly kept, all its chemicals labeled and stored with the safety information for each hanging below it. He stored in alphabetical order. She found the LIQUID NITROGEN sign and saw a bulky, very obvious tank...and a small one next to it, like a giant thermos, with a shoulder strap. She grabbed it, then read the sign. USE
PROTECTIVE GLOVES, the sign said. The gloves were right there, too. She shoved a pair in her backpack, slung the canister over her shoulder, and got the hell out of there.
The librarians didn't even give her a second look. She waved and smiled and went into the stacks, all the way to the back stairs.
The door was just as she'd left it. She fumbled on the gloves, opened the top of the canister, and found that there was a kind of steel pipette that fit into a nozzle. She made sure it was in place, then opened the valve, held her breath, and began pouring supercooled liquid into the lock. She wasn't sure how much to use - too much was better than not enough, she guessed - and kept pouring until the outside of the lock was completely frosted. Then she cranked the valve shut, and - reminding herself to keep the gloves on - yanked on the doorknob.
Crack! It sounded like a gunshot. She jumped, looked around, and realized the knob had moved in her hand.
She'd opened the door.
Nothing to do now but go inside...but somehow, that didn't seem like such a great idea, now that she was actually able to do it.
Because...coffins. Or worse.
Claire sucked in a steadying breath, opened the door, and carefully looked around the edge.
It looked like a storeroom. Files. Stacks of cartons and wooden crates. No one in sight. Great, she thought. Maybe I did just break into the file room. That would be disappointing. Still, she stuffed the gloves in her backpack, just in case.
The cartons looked new, but the contents - when she unwrapped the string tying one closed - appeared old. Crumbling books, badly preserved. Ancient letters and papers in languages she couldn't read, some of which looked like ancestors of English. She tried the next box. More of the same. The room was vast, and it was full of this kind of stuff.
The book, she thought. They're looking for the book. Every old book they find comes here and gets examined. Now that she looked, she saw that the crates had small red X marks on them - meaning they'd been gone through? Initials, too. Somebody was being held accountable.
Which meant...somebody was working here.
She had just enough time to form the thought when two people walked out of the maze of boxes ahead of her. They weren't hurrying, and they weren't alarmed. Vampires. She didn't know how she knew - they weren't exactly dressed for the part - but the way they moved, loose and sure, screamed predator to her fragile-prey brain.
"Well," said the short blond girl, "we don't get many visitors here." Except for the pallor of her face and the glitter in her eyes, she looked like a hundred other girls out on the Quad. She was wearing pink. It seemed wrong for a vampire to be wearing pink.
"Did you take a wrong turn, honey?" The man was taller, darker, and he looked really odd...really dead.
It was because of his skin tone, she realized. He was black. Being a vampire bleached him, not to white, but to the color of ashes. He had on a TPU purple T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and running shoes. If he'd been human, she'd have thought he was old - old enough to be a professor, at least.
They split up, coming at her from two different sides.
"Whose little one are you?" purred the pink girl, and before Claire could engage her brain to run, the girl had taken her left hand, examining her bare wrist. Then examining her right one. "Oh, my, you really are lost, sweetie. John, what should we do?"
"Well," John said, and put a friendly hand on Claire's shoulder. It felt colder than the liquid-nitrogen bottle hanging across her back. "We could sit down and have a nice cup of coffee. Tell you all about what we do in here. That's what you want to know, right? Children like you are just so darn curious." He was steering her forward, and Claire knew - just knew - that any attempt to pull free would result in pain. Probably broken bones.
Pink Girl still had hold of her other wrist, too. Her cool fingers were pressed against Claire's pulse point.
