In a silent, desolate world where the sun never rose, a deep cobalt light bled through the clouds each night, staining the land in endless twilight. Some people said the sky had been wounded long ago, and that the glow was something leaking through a tear in the heavens. Most people kept quiet about it.
The sun had simply stopped, and nobody could say why.
Clyde Nox Pvolae woke on a flattened cardboard box, with a folded coat for a pillow and his brother's elbow in his ribs.
"Luchian," he mumbled. "Your elbow."
"Mm? Sorry." Luchian rolled over, and the cardboard crackled under him, crrrk. "The floor is lumpy today."
"The floor is lumpy every day."
The room was small enough that Clyde could touch both walls if he stretched out his arms. There was no bed, only two sheets of cardboard against the wall and a thin blanket that had been patched so many times it was mostly patches. A single glass bulb of lamp oil hung from a hook in the ceiling, swinging a little and throwing a weak yellow light across the cracked plaster. The stove in the corner was a tin bucket with holes punched in its sides, and the only fuel they could afford was scrap wood, which smelled of smoke even when it wasn't lit. There was no gas line and no toilet. The outhouse stood at the end of the lane, shared with six other families, and the queue in the morning was long.
Pop, hiss. Luchian had already fed a few splinters into the bucket and was holding a battered pot over the flames. Inside, two potatoes bobbed in grey water.
"Breakfast," he said, with great ceremony.
"Is it soup?"
"It's a boiled potato with ambition."
Clyde laughed in spite of himself and sat up, rubbing his neck. Luchian wore his brown cap crooked, the way he always did before he had time to fix it. His coat had a hole at the elbow, and there was no paint on his fingers anymore. The last tube had dried out months ago, and a painter without paint was only a man with opinions about color.
"It's the third day of your holiday," Luchian said, passing him the hot potato in a scrap of cloth. "Normal people sleep in."
"Normal people don't have a footnote to chase."
"Of course you don't." Luchian sighed. "Which footnote?"
Clyde blew on the potato and took a bite, which was hot and mealy and the best thing he had eaten all week. "Page two hundred and eleven of an old customs ledger. It cites a record about the Cataclysm. The archive index gives the record a number, but when you request the number, the clerk comes back with an empty folder."
"An empty folder."
"Every time! The textbook gives the Cataclysm eleven pages, Luchian, and three of them were cut out so neatly I only noticed because the page numbers skip. Somebody tidied up our history!"
"You're seventeen," Luchian said, shaking his head. "You finished school two years early with the best marks in the city, and you want to spend your holiday poking at things somebody buried?"
"It's a very good footnote."
"It's a terrible hobby."
"It's free," Clyde pointed out. "We can't afford anything else."
Luchian opened his mouth, shut it again, and laughed. "Fair enough." He tapped the side of the pot with his spoon, ting. "Finish that. And Clyde, be careful."
"It's a library."
"That is what people always say right before something happens."
Outside, the lane was already awake. A baker's boy bawled about warm rolls, a cart rattled past with a squeaking wheel, and somewhere a woman shouted at her husband to hurry up before the outhouse queue grew any longer. Along the street, iron lanterns burned on their posts, each one fed with lard oil from a little reservoir at its base, and the flames flickered and popped in the cold air. The fuel was expensive, which was why the poorest lanes got the dimmest lamps.
Clyde pulled his collar up and walked, with his eyes on the cobblestones like everyone else.
Nobody looked up in Cristae. Above the rooftops, enormous mirrors were bolted to the silver towers, each one as wide as a house, tilted at just the right angle to catch the cobalt moonlight and throw it down into the streets. The light came down pale and cold, bouncing off glass and polished stone until half the city seemed to glow faintly blue. Everyone in Cristae lived in that reflected light, and almost nobody wondered where it came from.
Clyde had wondered since he was seven.
The footnote led him through the old district, where the buildings leaned toward each other like gossiping neighbors, and finally into a maintenance corridor behind a boiler house. Pipes ran along the ceiling, and water went drip, drip, drip into a tin bucket somewhere ahead. The passage appeared on no map he had ever checked. At the far end stood a plain wooden door with no sign and no handle, only a flat iron plate worn smooth by a palm that had touched it long ago.
"This should be the place," he muttered.
He pushed, and the door swung inward with a long creeeak.
Rusted chains hung across the doorway, thick as his wrist, a clear message to anyone who wanted to come in.
"Well," Clyde said to the empty corridor, "that's rude."
He ducked under the chains and stepped inside.
The room was cold and still, and it smelled of old paper. Dust lay over everything in a grey blanket, and his boots went tap, tap across the floor, louder than he liked. Shelves climbed to the ceiling on every side, packed with books whose spines had faded to the color of weak tea.
Nobody has been in here for decades, he thought. Maybe longer.
"Hello?" he called, feeling foolish. "Anyone here?"
Nothing answered. A thin stripe of blue light came through a crack in the ceiling, and dust drifted slowly through it.
Then he saw it, lying alone on a shelf at eye level. A journal, bound in dark leather, the cover sunken in odd places as if it had been soaked in something once and left to dry.
A journal? In a library?
He took a step closer, then another. The leather looked damp, though it clearly wasn't. His heart had started beating faster, and he told himself it was the cold.
"It's only a book," he whispered, and reached out.
Something reached back.
It rose from inside him, somewhere below his ribs, slow and heavy, the way pressure forces its way up through cracks in a floor. The instant his fingertips touched the cover, the room went quiet in a way he could feel in his teeth.
"Noxella."
Clyde spun around so fast his shoulder knocked a book off the shelf, thud.
"Who's there?!"
The doorway behind him stood empty, with the chains still swaying where he had passed them. The corridor beyond was empty too. Nobody was in the room but him.
The word had not come through his ears. He was sure of that, because his ears were still full of the drip, drip, drip from the corridor, and the whisper had arrived underneath it, somewhere behind his eyes, humming like a struck tuning fork.
"Hello?!" His voice cracked. "This isn't funny!"
His hand was still resting on the journal. He tried to pull it back, and his fingers refused to listen.
What is this thing?
The shelves began to slide away from him, slowly at first and then all at once, the dust and the stripe of light and the smell of old paper stretching into long grey streaks.
In the space of a single blink, the library was gone.