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The big man nodded and gave a thumbs-up. “But I would really like to not have a bullet in my stomach for much longer.”
“Ah...” Drummond said. “Yes. Of course. I have something for that.” He stood up and nodded at Azaki and Izzy. “You two get the fire going, and we can talk about the new Fox Library.”
“I’ve never lit a fire,” Izzy said.
“Lund,” Drummond said. “Stay right there, I’ll be back in a minute.” He looked at Cassie. “Can you help me?” he asked, nodding off to the side of the room.
Drummond opened the bookcase on the other side of the room, revealing the hidden staircase, and then he and Cassie climbed back into the room at the top of the tower, with its cupboards and papers and sunlight flooding in from the windows. Drummond pulled the same key ring from his pocket and walked around the wall to the cupboard numbered “eight.”
“Book of Healing,” he said to Cassie, as he removed the book there. “This should fix Lund right up.”
“Fantastic,” Cassie said.
“But there’s something else I wanted to show you,” Drummond continued. He walked around to cupboard six and unlocked it.
He removed a book from the cupboard and walked over to place it on the table. Cassie gasped in surprise when she saw it.
“That’s the Book of Doors,” she said, looking at the same book that she carried in her own pocket.
“Yes,” Drummond said. “We’ve had it in the library for over a century, but we didn’t know what it was. Nobody could use it. Look.”
He opened the book to the first page and Cassie saw that there was no text describing the Book of Doors, like there was in the version of the book she had.
“But it’s the same book,” Drummond said. “That was why I wasso surprised when you showed it to me that day in Lyon. I realized we already had it, we just didn’t know. That’s why I’ve been so interested in who gave you the book.”
“Where did it come from?” Cassie asked.
“Egypt,” Drummond said.
Cassie shook her head slowly and took the book from him. As she held it in her hands it felt warm, and it glowed in that familiar way, and then she saw the first page of the book change, text swimming into focus, the familiar words she knew from her own book.
“‘Any door is every door,’” she read.
Drummond smiled and then laughed. “It’s still incredible, even after all these years,” he murmured to himself, gazing down at the page.
“But two versions of the same book,” Cassie said, flicking through the pages. The book Drummond had given her was identical to her own. It was the same book. “How can that be?”
“Time travel,” Drummond said. “It’s the same book, just at two different points in its own timeline. Just like there were two versions of you in the past; there was only one Cassie, but the younger you and the older you were existing in the same point in time for a while.”
Cassie’s frown deepened as she thought about that.
“When I asked you to bring me back here the first time,” Drummond said, “I wanted to see this book again. I wanted to confirm to myself that it was in fact the Book of Doors. I waited till you were asleep and then I came up here and checked.”
Cassie nodded distractedly.
“I thought about destroying it,” Drummond murmured, and Cassie looked at him. His eyes were fixed on the book. “But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. And I knew that if you had a later version of the same book, I could still destroy that if needed, and this version of the book would be safe here in the library, out of reach of the woman.”
“You don’t need to destroy anything now,” Cassie said. “And certainly not this.”
“No,” Drummond agreed. “I want you to have it. It feels like the Book of Doors has always been yours.”
She smiled, touched by the gesture. In that moment she wanted totell him everything—she wanted to reveal that all of the books were hers, but it still felt too big, and maybe now too unbelievable. Did she still believe it herself? Her memory of the nothing and nowhere was growing increasingly vague.
“Take it, please,” Drummond said, as if he thought she was hesitating to accept.
Cassie nodded and ran her thumb over the cover of Drummond’s copy of the Book of Doors. “This is the version of the book I got back in New York all those months ago,” she said, working out the chronology in her mind. “You give it to me now and then...” She smiled because she realized what she had to do. “I have to give this to Mr. Webber,” she said. “So he can give it to me.”
“If you say so,” Drummond said.
