She walked to the desk across from the entrance, glancing down at the pavement tessellated in bands of soft grays and blues. It hadn’t changed since the day Adele Mundy left Cinnabar.
She herself had changed, though.
Clerks sat behind the counter, working at consoles of their own. A page sorted volumes from a large table onto a cart, looking up at the sound of Adele’s footsteps.
The official at the desk flanking the passage to the stacks of hard copy within the building was only a few years older than Adele; she’d never met him. His eyes glanced from the naval uniform to her face as she approached, his expression giving nothing away.
Adele handed him the access chip instead of inserting it into the reader herself. It was the one she’d carried with her to Blythe; she had no idea whether it would still work.
The official glanced at the number engraved on the flat. His eyebrows raised. He set the chip on his desk and stood.
“Ms. Adele Mundy?” he said, offering her his right hand. “I’m Lees Klopfer, Third Assistant Administrator. I’ve followed your work at the Academic Collections. We’re honored to have you here.”
Adele shook Klopfer’s hand firmly, feeling a little disconcerted. So far as she could tell, the man was quite genuine. Only a guilty conscience made her wonder if he’d been told to greet her in that fashion—and if so, by whom?
The words “guilty conscience” raised another image in Adele’s mind: a boy lurching backward, his duelling pistol flying from his hand; his brains a fluid splash in the air behind him.
Something of that image must have shown in her eyes, because Klopfer straightened with surprise and with perhaps a touch of fear. “Ms. Mundy?” he said. “If I gave offense, I assure you I—”
“No, no, not at all,” Adele said, doing her best to force a smile. She probably looked as if she were being crucified! “Just a touch of an old pain.”
Quite true: the pain of remembering the first person she’d killed. No longer the only person, not by a considerable number. Oh, yes, Adele Mundy had changed—and not even she was cynical enough to believe that she’d changed for the better.
Klopfer returned the chip to her. “You have complete access, of course, Ms. Mundy,” he said. “If there’s anything I or the staff can do to help, of course let us know.”
“Thank you,” she said as she entered the passage to the stacks, “I certainly will.”
Klopfer’s enthusiasm had to be genuine. It was odd to be honored again as a librarian, though that was the profession to which she’d devoted her whole life until the past few months. More recently compliments she’d received were for her ability to decrypt coded files, to explore and reroute communications pathways—and to fire a pistol with a skill unmatched by any of those who had faced her.
In another life Adele Mundy might have spent her whole existence in this library or a greater one, surrounded by knowledge and oblivious of her lack of friends. Well, service with the RCN didn’t keep her from gaining and organizing knowledge. As for the other, she’d now rather die than lose the awareness that Daniel Leary trusted her implicitly with his life and honor, because they were friends.
She climbed the slotted steel stairs to the fourth level of the stacks, then turned left through art history . . . physics and cosmology . . . engineering. Pages wandered by, glancing at her with mild interest. Naval uniforms are never common in the heart of great libraries.
At the end of the aisle were rooms looking out through the upper colonnade to the main courtyard of the church. Cataloguing had the bank to the east; the five doors there were open, and the sound of chatting clerks drifted into the collection. On the west were a score of smaller rooms reserved for scholars visiting the stacks.
A pair of men stood facing the stacks while their eyes searched every other direction. They were making a half-hearted effort at pretending to be pages. As well dress Adele in a tutu and claim she was a ballet dancer!