The Shimmers in the Night (8 page)

As he said all this they were guiding Jax to his feet, standing him up between them. His arms hung limply; he gazed ahead, zombie-like.

“We have to take him now,” said Mrs. O. “Can you feel it, Cara?”

The air in the room had gotten warmer. Cara touched her upper lip and felt a bead of perspiration.

She followed the two teachers out the door, walking behind them as they hustled Jax along the hall and rounded a corner.

“You'll need the code for the elevator,” said Mr. T, and stopped walking to turn to her. “It's easy. Key in your own eight-digit birthdate, month first. You're in the system already. When you have what you need, come find us again.”

“Jax is depending on you,” said Mrs. O. “You can do this. But be careful. And be quick. You're safe here until the wards fail. But you don't want to be here when that happens.”

“Jax? Hey. Jax?” asked Cara, leaning in to him.

She couldn't let go of the conviction that he was in there somewhere, and since he was in there, he
had
to respond to her…didn't he? And then, if she could just make him act like himself again, they wouldn't have to separate. She wouldn't be left alone, wouldn't have to do something hard that she had no clue about.

But he wasn't even turning to look at her as she spoke; all she could see was the back of his head. “Jax. Come
on
, Jax. It's me!”

She grabbed his arm and tried to turn him. The arm was rubbery, and his jaw, when she rotated him to face her, was still slack. And in his staring, impersonal eyes, their pupils huge and black, she saw what looked like an infinite void.

It was as though the pupils were so deep they went down forever, as black and silent as the vacuum of space.

It chilled her.

“Remember:
Crede quod habes, et habes”
said Mr. T. “Latin.”

Cara opened her mouth to tell him they didn't offer Latin at her school; so could he please speak English? But before she could get it together to speak, the boy who had been Jax, along with both of the teachers, melted into the wall.

She was standing there awestruck, with an afterimage stamped on her mind of the three of them disappearing, when she realized she didn't have time to wonder how they'd done it. She didn't have time to think about what was going on with the other kids, in the shell of the building, or the rest of the teachers, or where exactly the Burners were.

Instead she shook off her questions and headed down through the maze of deserted corridors to the library to find the book.

It was spooky to be in there alone. Though the dome itself contained no glass, and of course there were no windows, an odd kind of light still shone down whitely from up high, as though leaking through invisible seams in the walls. It wasn't daytime anymore, but still the light beamed down with no clear source, dust motes whirling. As she made her way through the room, she was conscious of the jars in the cubbyholes, the bones in the display cases.

Was it getting hotter, she wondered? The back of her neck was clammy underneath the hair; strands stuck to the skin and made her itch.

How fast would the Burners get in?

Or would they possibly give up, if they sensed Jax had been moved away? Might they sense his absence and not be interested in coming in anymore? The Pouring Man had
sensed
where she and Jax were, after all. Max, too. He had found out where they were going and what they were doing, it seemed, more than once. He had known seemingly impossible things.

So maybe the fire elementals could do that, too. And maybe, hopefully, she wasn't a big enough prize for them…but she still had to hurry. She had to figure out where to go and how to get there, and the book was her only hope.

In the wing of the great room that was devoted to bookshelves, where armchairs stood with floor lamps beside them on the fraying rugs, there was a wooden cabinet she thought must hold the card catalog. She hurried over and pulled out one of the trays. But there was nothing under “Learning to See” in the L's. (The nearby titles were curious:
Lean on Me: Brief Biographies of Famous Trees. Learning to Cope With H. Sapiens in 10 (Moderately) Easy Steps. Learning to Sing With Cetaceans: The Gift of Harmony.
But no
Learning to See.)

She opened one drawer after another hastily until she found the Vs: how did you spell it? She tried
Vee—
first, then Ve—. Nothing. Then Vi—. It seemed to be by subject as well as by title or author, all combined in the one cabinet. Violets, Shrinking. Violence, Electrical…

Videre licet.
Could that be it? The subtitle was “Learning to See.” Had Mr. T gotten it the wrong way around? There was no author's name and only a simple number; it didn't look like the Dewey Decimal. Nor was the card attached to the drawer; she could pull it right out. So she did.

It must be late by now, she realized. She didn't wear a watch, and she hadn't looked at her cell recently, which was back in her backpack in the room she'd been sharing with Jax….

Jax of the dark eyes. The eyes like the vacuum of space.

The floor lamps had to be motion sensitive, she thought, like the light outside the garage at home, because as she moved toward them they flicked on. She counted the numbers on the shelves, consulting her index card as she moved quickly along; soon she was at a tall shelf of oversize books. Some of them were two or three feet tall, it looked like; some had to lie horizontally, they were so large.

She bent down to study their dusty spines and finally made out L
EARNING
T
O
S
EE
. A G
UIDE
.
Videre licet.

She put down the card and reached for the book, which was beneath a pile of others, drawing it out carefully. It was a very large book—more than half as tall as she was, and quite a bit wider—but there wasn't enough light to read by so she carried it over to the oak table where she'd sat before with the teachers. A long reading light with a green glass shade flicked on as she placed the book flat on the table's surface and pulled out a chair.

Gingerly, because the book looked worn, she opened the book, thumb and index finger carefully holding the front cover. There was no jacket, only a faded blue cloth binding. As the cover rose, she saw it was covered in tiny eyes—tiny, faint images of eyes: there had to be thousands of them. And it must have a 3D effect sewn into the threads, she thought, because as the cover opened, the eyes seemed to open with it.

Any sufficiently advanced technology—she
recalled Mrs. O saying to her in this same room—
is indistinguishable from magic.

The first page was blank. That wasn't unusual. But then the next page was blank, too. And the next.

Maybe she needed a stronger light, she thought; maybe the type was faded. She pushed the book closer to the green light; it seemed to her that the light brightened further.

Still she couldn't see anything on the massive pages. They looked white as a field of fresh snow.

She turned a few pages further, slowly and deliberately, and then flipped to the back of the book, just in case.

Nothing.

She sat back in the chair, discouraged. Then panicky. Her time had to be running out. And what could she do, without the book? How would she ever find out where her mother was being kept?

She touched her ring quickly, still looking at the book.

But the pages stayed blank.

She raised her eyes from the empty pages and caught sight of a painting on the wall. It was a portrait of two young ladies from olden times; they had wide ruffed collars on, those giant white lacy things you saw on the first Queen Elizabeth. They always reminded Cara of the plastic cones vets put on dogs. Worrying the ring with her fingers, she wondered what she was supposed to do next. What would happen to Jax if she failed?

They hadn't told her that. They hadn't said what would happen to him. But it couldn't be good.

How could she figure out the book?

She wasn't really
looking
at the painting, she realized, though she was resting her eyes on it. It was lit by a small brass light above it, the kind they had at museums, which jutted out from the wall…and then, with a shock, she knew exactly what she was seeing.

The ladies had faces she knew, faces she recognized.

One of the ladies was Jaye.

And the other was Hayley.

Back in the bedroom with the twin beds, where she'd run till she was out of breath, she dug into her pack and pulled out her phone. Sure enough, there were more texts from Hayley; she didn't stop to read them. She dialed.

“Finally,” groaned Hayley, picking up after one ring. “What's
up
with you?”

“So this is going to seem hard. But it's really important, Hay. I need you.”

“
What
?”

“I need you to come to where I am—like now, right now. I need your help. I'll text you directions.”

“Are you
kidding?
You know how my mom is. She'd wig if I asked to go out into the city after dark.”

Part of her wanted to run to them instead, just take the book and go to the hotel herself, away from this place with its failing defenses. But so far the book wasn't helpful—what if it was the wrong one? If it turned out to be the wrong book entirely, she'd definitely need to be here to find the right one. She knew her friends could help.

“Please, Hay.
Please
come. And Jaye—I need her, too. I need both of you. I really do. I'll owe you big-time, I know I will. But this is for Jax. He's really sick. He got…rie got poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“I promise, this is way bigger than the meet.”

“You
know
what would happen if Mom found out I snuck out. I'd be grounded till freshman year in
college.
If she even let me go, at that point.”

Cara gazed at the miniature portraits beside the bed as she listened to Hayley protest. They were amazing in the fineness of their details, she thought…and she touched her ring again to see if these pictures, too, would turn into her friends. Nothing happened. It must have to do with thinking about something, she thought, as she made contact with the ring…some kind of focus she had to have, maybe? Not just a subject she had to be thinking of, but also a problem?

When she hung up, she still didn't know whether her friends would show up.

Or whether the Burners would get here first.

Jax's room, she thought, for Jax's computer: that was where she had to go. If she couldn't figure out the book with the blank pages, maybe there would be a clue to finding her mother on there. She wasn't a computer whiz, but she knew more about laptops than about mysterious, blank books.

She found the part of the wall she thought she remembered was the elevator—the right angle where one of the narrow corridors turned a corner—but she didn't see any keypad. She wasn't sure she had the right place until she noticed that the light-switch plate didn't seem to fit neatly on the space behind it: there was a narrow vertical gap.

She reached out and touched it, and the plate slid to one side, exposing a modern-looking grid of numbered buttons. It took a couple of tries to get the digits of her birthdate entered; she flubbed a number once and had to start again. But on the next try the door slid open. It was perfectly silent: it didn't ding like a regular elevator.

She got in and stared at the console for a while. What floor was this? How would she get back? She looked up above the door to the strip of numbers. It read: 1, 1Ψ, 2, 2Ψ, 3, 3Ψ… was on 8Ψ, it looked like. And Jax's room had been 822. So she hit the regular eight, and the door closed noiselessly and a split second later was sliding open again.

The fluorescents running along the ceiling shocked her eyes; she'd gotten used to the dim core, the dull gleam of low-wattage floor lamps and the torch-like sconces on the walls. The walls in the shell were bright and bland, the carpet—under the fluorescent lights—a strangely metallic gray that made her head throb dully behind the eyes. She felt like she'd suddenly been transported from ancient Greece to Walmart.