I had spent four years moving through walls in the way that water moves through cracks: following the available path, occupying the accessible space, arriving wherever the structure permitted without having consulted my own preferences on the matter. This was not a failure of will. It was the correct behavior for an entity that had not, until recently, possessed a will worth consulting.
I was now in possession of a will.
I stayed where I was for a moment longer and examined the experience of having a destination.
It was not comfortable. A destination implied that the current location was insufficient — that the present state of the self was oriented toward a future state, and that the distance between the two constituted something that needed to be crossed. I had not, in forty minutes of personhood and four years of wormhood, previously experienced the present moment as a gap. Hunger had been immediate and its resolution immediate. Threat had been immediate and avoidance immediate. Nothing in my prior existence had pointed forward in the way that Sera's final note pointed forward: she had left something, she had told me it existed, and the only appropriate response to being addressed was to go.
I filed the experience of destination under a new category, the fourth I had named: weight of the not-yet-done.
Then I began to move.
The sealed documentation for the restricted collection was not in the restricted collection.
This had required some reasoning to determine, and the reasoning had required more time than I would have liked given that I was navigating walls in a building where at least one person now had a working theory about what I was. But the logic was clear enough once I followed it: Sera had specified that the attached card was placed with the sealed documentation rather than with the catalogue, and sealed documentation, by the conventions of archival practice I had absorbed from two volumes on library administration eaten in my third year, was held outside the collection it documented. The purpose was redundancy. A fire in the collection destroyed the materials; the sealed documentation, kept elsewhere, preserved the record of what had been lost.
The Aldenmere Grand Library's administrative documentation was kept in three locations. I knew this from a facilities report I had consumed in my first year, not understanding it, now reconstructing it from the flood of retrospective coherence that had arrived with the spellbook: the head librarian's office, which I had navigated through twice; the records vault in the library's east basement, which I had passed near but not entered; and the restricted collection's own administrative alcove, which was — according to the facilities report — located in the northwest corner of the east wing's second floor, behind a wall I had passed within six inches of four hundred and twelve times in four years.
I had never entered it because it smelled of plaster and nothing else.
I understood now that this was the point.
The alcove had been built to house documents rather than books. Documents did not need the humidity regulation that books required. Documents required dryness, darkness, and the specific kind of stillness that came from a space designed to be entered rarely. It would smell of nothing because it had been designed to contain nothing that aged with flavor or complexity. A very secure, very boring space, which I had passed four hundred and twelve times and never investigated because nothing in my prior existence had given me reason to look for boring spaces.
Sera had known, or suspected, that the catalogue might be found by someone who should not have it. She had placed the attached card in the one location in this building that required you to already know it existed in order to look for it.
I moved toward the northwest corner of the east wing's second floor.
The journey took longer than it should have because I kept stopping.
Not from uncertainty. From the experience I was still learning to manage: the gap between the location I was in and the location I was moving toward, occupied by the awareness that I was choosing the movement and would continue to choose it and had, in choosing it, acquired a relationship to the future that had not previously existed. Every pause was not hesitation but a kind of acclimatization, the slow adjustment of a system to a condition it had not been designed for.
I was not designed for destinations. I had assembled them.
At the third pause, in a channel behind the east wing's main corridor, I became aware that I was not only moving but thinking about moving, which was a different thing, and that the thinking was not undermining the movement but was, in some way I could not yet articulate, part of it. I was not separate from my own navigation. The choice and the choosing were simultaneous and the simultaneity was, I understood with a quiet and entirely unexpected certainty, what a will felt like from the inside.
I added to the category weight of the not-yet-done: also: the texture of the doing.
Then I moved on.
The administrative alcove was accessible from a channel I had not previously mapped, which required twenty minutes of careful wall-reading and two course corrections before I found the right approach. The space behind the alcove's inner wall was narrower than I preferred and smelled of very old mortar and the faint chemical trace of whatever had been used to dry and seal the original plaster. The documents stored here were in archival folders, held in wooden frames designed to keep them flat and separate, and the whole arrangement conveyed the particular atmosphere of a space that was important and knew it and did not feel the need to make this legible to visitors.
There were fourteen folders.
Thirteen of them smelled of administrative document: ink, paper, the faint trace of official sealing wax. The fourteenth smelled different.
Salinity.
I had not expected to feel what I felt when I identified it. I did not have a word for the feeling and the filing system offered no category that fit it cleanly, so I opened a new one: recognition of something intended for you.
This category had not previously been necessary.
The card was small — a single piece of paper, folded twice, placed inside the administrative folder as though it were a normal piece of restricted collection documentation, which it was not. The writing was Sera's. The ink was old.
If you are reading this, you have read the catalogues. You are therefore not a casual finder, and I have left the documents with confidence.
Aldric's working notes and the unsent letter are held together, wrapped in oilskin, behind the false bottom of the document frame marked R.C. 12-A. The frame is the third from the right on the lower shelf. The false bottom releases when pressure is applied to the right rear corner.
I have been writing to you throughout this archive as though I knew you. I did not know you. I believed you were possible.
Sera Voss, twenty-ninth year of Aldric's tenure.
I read the note once.
Then I located frame R.C. 12-A, which was exactly where she had said it would be, and applied pressure to the right rear corner, and felt the false bottom release with the particular small resistance of a mechanism well-made and long-unused, and found, in the space beneath it, a package wrapped in oilskin that had survived thirty-two years intact.
I did not open it.
I held the containment field steady and looked at the package and thought about what Sera had written: I believed you were possible.
She had built this path twenty-nine years into a forty-year project. She had not known whether anyone would walk it. She had constructed it anyway because the alternative was leaving the question without a potential reader, and she was constitutionally opposed to questions that had nowhere to go.
I had been constitutionally indifferent to questions for four years.
I was finding this was no longer my situation.
I filed the unopened package under a category I had not needed before today and was now finding indispensable: not yet, but held.
Then I settled into the space beside frame R.C. 12-A, in the dark and the silence and the smell of very old mortar, and I waited to understand whether waiting was the right choice or only the one I had made.
The incident report form for pest remediation in restricted areas was four pages long, which Greaves had always considered two pages longer than necessary and had expressed this view, in writing, to the Collegium's administrative committee on two separate occasions without discernible effect.
He sat at his desk with the form in front of him and a pen in his hand and the green book in his coat pocket and had been in this configuration for twenty-three minutes, which he knew because the clock on the east wall of his office was the kind that ticked audibly and he had counted the ticks for approximately the first three minutes before his mind had drifted to other things and then drifted back and found that twenty more minutes had accumulated without his participation.
The form asked, in its first section, for a description of the pest and evidence of activity.
He had written: Bookworm (presumed). Trails in eastern wall of restricted section, extending from entry point near the south corner to the northeast section.
He had crossed out presumed.
He had written it again.
He had looked at the burn mark photograph.
He had put the photograph face-down on the desk.
The form's second section asked for remediation actions taken.
He wrote: Desiccant applied to approximately six linear feet of eastern wall. Activity ceased following treatment. He paused. No further evidence of activity detected at time of filing.
Both sentences were true.
He was aware that they were true in the way that a carefully edited document was true: not by stating falsehoods but by the precise placement of the period. Activity ceased following treatment did not say the activity had ceased because of the treatment. No further evidence of activity detected did not say there was no further activity. The form did not ask him to explain the burn mark, and he had not volunteered the explanation, and the photograph was face-down on the desk.
The form's third section asked for recommended follow-up.
He held his pen over this section for a long time.
The standard recommendation was: Monitor for recurrence. Reseal treated area. Consider fumigation if trails reappear within thirty days.
He did not write the standard recommendation.
He wrote: Restricted collection access protocols under review. No further remediation recommended at this time pending assessment. He paused. Added: Recommend delay of any further treatment until review is complete.
This was not a lie. It was not even, strictly speaking, an omission. He was the head librarian. He had the authority to place collection access protocols under review. The review was now, by virtue of his having written the sentence, real. He would conduct it, carefully and at length, and it would conclude with whatever conclusions he determined it ought to conclude with, which was how reviews worked when conducted by the person with authority to determine their scope.
He looked at what he had written.
The form asked, at the bottom of the fourth page, for a signature and date.
He signed it.
He dated it.
He held it for a moment, looking at the neat columns of a document that was entirely accurate and almost entirely incomplete, and then he placed it in the outgoing correspondence tray with the deliberate motion of a man who had made a decision and was not reconsidering it but was not, quite yet, looking away from it.
The clock ticked.
"Penelope."
She appeared in the doorway. She had been waiting, he understood, not because she had reason to expect a summons but because she was the kind of person who developed a sense for when one was coming.
"The Aldric spellbook," he said. "The four pages that were eaten. Where are the remaining pages now?"
"Still in the wall. I checked before I made the tea. The book hasn't moved."
"I want it retrieved." He looked at his desk, not at her. "Carefully. Full conservation protocol. Log it as a restricted collection item requiring urgent assessment." He paused. "Do not log it as pest-damaged."
A small silence.
"What do I log it as?"
He thought about this.
"Log it," he said finally, "as recently handled."
Penelope did not ask who had handled it.
This was one of the qualities that made her, in his estimation, an exceptionally promising librarian.
"And the treatment records," he said. "The desiccant application. I want those filed in the restricted section's maintenance log, not the pest remediation archive."
Another small silence, differently weighted.
"That's an unusual filing location."
"Yes."
She waited.
"The pest remediation archive," he said, with the careful tone of a man explaining something he had recently decided was important, "is subject to quarterly review by the Collegium's facilities committee. The restricted section's maintenance log is subject to review only on the head librarian's authority."
The silence that followed was not the second kind of silence, the category-revision silence she had been learning to read. It was a new kind. She did not yet have a name for it.
Greaves looked at the outgoing correspondence tray.
"That will be all," he said.
In the administrative alcove, in the space beside frame R.C. 12-A, I held the oilskin package and thought about what was inside it and chose, for the third time today, not to proceed.
The first choice had been not to eat the spellbook page.
The second had been to read before consuming.
The third was this: to hold the last document Aldric had written, the argument he had brought to the edge of sending and then kept, and to wait until I understood why I was waiting.
I had not chosen not to open it from lack of curiosity. I had an extensive and, I suspected, lifelong problem with curiosity; it was constitutional, inseparable from the fact of being a thing that consumed knowledge as a primary mode of existing in the world. The package was three inches from my perception and I was aware of it with an intensity that made the containment field feel simple by comparison.
I had chosen not to open it because I had not yet finished understanding what Sera had written.
She had believed I was possible.
Not that I was good, or safe, or welcome, or right — possible. The word was careful in the way all her words were careful, selected for what it included and excluded simultaneously. She had not known what I would be. She had known that something in the conditions she had documented could produce something, and she had built a path for that something to find her work, and the path ended here, and I was at the end of it, and the package was in front of me.
The question I was sitting with — the one that would not file under any available category — was not what does the letter say.
It was: what does it mean that she built this for me.
Not for a researcher. Not for a Collegium scholar who happened to find the archive. For me specifically — for whatever the archive produced, for whatever came through these walls reading. She had addressed me directly. She had organized the second membrane thematically, to be legible to a mind that was learning to find patterns. She had placed the attached card in the one location that required a specific kind of knowing to reach. She had made the path difficult enough to be a filter and navigable enough to be an invitation.
She had spent some portion of the last twenty-nine years of her life building something for an entity she believed was possible but had never met.
I did not know what to do with this except hold it.
I held it.
The oilskin package was three inches away and would remain three inches away until I understood, or until understanding was no longer available, or until something else changed in the way of things, which they had been doing with considerable frequency for the past several hours.
Outside the library, the city of Aldenmere was going about its morning. I could hear it faintly through three feet of stone and plaster — not individual sounds but the general motion of a large number of people engaged in the continuous project of existing in proximity to one another, a project that I had eaten volumes about and understood in the abstract and had, until this morning, experienced only as ambient acoustic texture, meaning nothing.
I noticed, for the first time, that it meant something.
I did not know what it meant.
I added this to the category not yet, but held, which was becoming less a filing location and more a room I was living in.
Then I waited, in the dark, beside the last words of a man who had known, at the end, and had not known what to do with the knowing either.