[Indigo]

Jules wished she had something to do with her hands. Maybe she should have taken the offered blondie earlier, even if she did have plenty more at home. "My family doesn't like me very much," she said. "So we have at least one thing in common."

She had meant it as her own mood-lightener—it was easier if she could laugh at it, and it hurt less to say out loud than to think of in the middle of the night—but Sauvage said, "I'm sorry to hear that," with, she was pretty sure, absolute sincerity. Today was proving to be full of surprises.

Despite her parents' dissatisfaction with just about everything she wanted to be or do, they were staunchly committed to keeping her under close enough watch to most efficiently express their disapproval, and so she'd lived with them in the city her whole life, up until she hadn't. She had a job, but they kept a tight hold on most of her money, and would take note of any purchases they disapproved of, with a strong emphasis on anything she might like to read.

She'd developed a variety of workarounds for this, including camping out at the library on days her parents were out of town, and keeping books hidden at work; but some things were not available at the library and fell outside the limited reach of her spending money. Her allowance, like she was a child. There was a bookstore on the opposite side of the city from her parents' house that stocked a number of rare or just very expensive books. Every so often—at least once a month, whenever she had time—she would slip out to read something there. For a while she'd been chipping away at a gigantic, centuries-old text about the natural history of a variety of sea creatures which was both fascinating when it got things right and hilarious when it got them wrong, which was more common.

One evening, after an especially hellish day the details of which she was not eager to share with someone she'd just met—Sauvage, thankfully, didn't press—she made it to this bookstore half an hour before it closed, intending to spend her last sliver of remaining free time there, and the book was gone.

She sat down in the aisle with her back against a full shelf and did her damnedest not to start crying, in public, over a book full of mostly nonsense that she couldn't reasonably expect to sit unsold until she had a chance to finish it. It was ridiculous, she was being ridiculous, and someone was going to hear her and then she'd have to explain or else seem even more ridiculous, and maybe she'd get kicked out for disrupting customers and never actually buying anything.

Of course, none of those thoughts made her feel any less like crying, so it wasn't really a surprise that they weren't enough to stop it from happening.

"Are you sure this is something you want to tell me about?" Sauvage said. "I don't expect you to open a vein for me."

"It's just what happened," Jules said. "I'm at peace with it." Maybe not completely at peace with everything about what her life had been, since she did occasionally see her parents, to fight with them about what she'd made of herself and how they were oh so worried about her being so far away, and to pick up sentimental things she'd left behind, but definitely with that day and what had come of it. "Anyway, I promise it'll get more uplifting, if that makes you feel better. I did end up here, after all."

[Indigo]

As it happened, somebody did hear her. She hadn't actually seen anyone else in the bookstore when she'd come in, and that particular fear had come more out of her own worries about being caught not buying anything than an awareness of other people's presence, but now someone came around the corner of the aisle she was sitting in and stopped a foot or two away and said, "Are you all right?"

She looked up and there was Roman, although of course she didn't know his name, considerably less put-together than she had ever seen him since and with a book tucked under his arm. His expression suggested multiple layers of concern experienced at the same time. The book, she couldn't help noticing, was the one she'd been reading, which made her a little more snappish than she might otherwise have been.

"That's a stupid question," she'd said.

"I suppose it is." An awkward silence unspooled between them, but Roman didn't allow it to go very far. "Do you need help?"

In a way she did, but she wasn't about to explain her life story to a stranger who definitely hadn't meant that type or degree of help, so she said, "No." And then, because she felt she ought to explain herself, because she was in the habit of justifying everything she did to within an inch of her life, she said, "I was just...reading that. That's what I came here for."

"Oh," he said. "Well. I haven't actually paid for it yet, if you'd like me to put it back. I daresay I have more than enough reading material already."

"Don't bother. I wasn't...it's expensive." To say this part to a stranger was agonizing, because she was an adult and her height made people assume she was older than she was, and the book was expensive-for-a-book but not the kind of expensive she couldn't have afforded if she'd had access to all her money, and it was all a terrible mess, probably. Or would be in anyone else's eyes.

Roman had watched her while she said this and watched her turn away afterward, and must have done some very thorough mental calculus. Whatever other subtleties he tended to miss, he really did have an incredible talent for figuring out why someone was upset, or at least the general shape of the reason. He'd said, "I see," and somehow managed to convey that he did, in fact, see, and then, "I'll be right back."

He had left and then returned carrying the book, and Jules was still sitting there without really knowing why. Because she didn't know what else to do with herself. Because she couldn't quite bring herself to walk away from someone who seemed to care, even if that sort of thing tended to come with all manner of demands. Roman had handed her the book, and she'd given it right back.

"It's a nice gesture," she said, and meant it. They didn't even know each other's names. "But I can't take it home, I'd have to answer a lot of questions and it would probably end up in the paper shredder."

Roman grimaced. "Ah. Then I have another thought. This place will be closing shortly, but I believe there are benches outside near here, and I have no urgent engagements, if you'd like to read it for a while."

"I don't know about that," she said. "I have to get home soon anyway."

"Of course. Then I'm sorry to have disturbed you. I hope your evening improves."

He'd turned to go, and she was so startled by that, by the offer without strings and the instant respect for her answer, that she had decided to take a risk. She said, "But I'll be around here again in a few weeks. I don't know exactly then, but if—you know what, never mind." It had sounded a lot more stupid coming out of her mouth. "Thanks. Maybe I'll see you around, anyway."

And Roman had nodded, and when she next visited the bookstore, almost a month later, he had been there with the book.

[Indigo]

"We didn't talk very much at first," Jules said, "because I was usually busy reading and I still didn't actually know him, but if you spend enough time sitting in a park with someone conversations are going to happen eventually. He waited for me to initiate. I always appreciated that—he wanted to make sure he wasn't imposing on me."

"It does sound like him." There was an edge of wistfulness in Sauvage's voice, which Jules thought it would be kindest not to acknowledge.

"Yeah. And he was always so...he didn't judge me or blame me for what was happening, when I did tell him about my life, and he let me talk about it like it was normal when I wanted to. And then I finished the book and we got to talking about other books, and there's hardly any overlap in what we like to read, it's incredible we happened to both pick that thing up." She shook her head, smiling. "After a while I had managed to put away some money, not quite enough to get out yet, but it was hard to do without being noticed and so it was taking a while. I'd told Roman about it once I was sure I wasn't going to be found out. One day I said, oh, I was getting close but there wasn't really anywhere for me to go, because it's not that big of a city and I would have to run into my parents all the time and they knew where I worked and...a lot of things. That was when he offered me the job here.

"I told you it wasn't a very interesting story, by comparison." She leaned back and studied the ceiling, which had apparently once had a chandelier attached to it, now marked only by a disk of molding not quite centered above the couch. "Although I can't say I'm upset that my life hasn't had any magic-fueled battles in it."

"They can be more fun than you'd expect, in the right circumstances, but those are difficult to arrange," Sauvage said. "Thank you. For telling me anyway." That sounded sincere, too, although she couldn't be sure without seeing his face. But she didn't think she wanted to be sure either way, just in case.

She dug her phone out of her pocket, which prompted a baffled stare from Sauvage, and checked the time. "I should have gone home when you said to. I'm late for an appointment." A cafe regular Weston who lived on the other side of Bristlecone had asked her to take on some trees from his backyard as part of her attempted garden rehabilitation, for some very complicated reason involving his wife's allergies and an argument his uncle had with Bristlecone's mayor in 1959, and he'd agreed to bring them over to her house half an hour ago. Hopefully he'd still be there.

"Don't forget this," Sauvage said, returning the empty box. "And...thanks."

"You already said that."

"Right. Well...I meant it."

Jules received this with an expression that she willed to convey the full depth of her puzzlement, which in turn elicited a snort from Sauvage, who got up when she did and went back into the kitchen—"This drain isn't going to unclog itself!" She retrieved her bike and coasted most of the way down the hill, contemplating, and was only a little annoyed to find that Weston had already left by the time she got home.

[Indigo]

"That's all he wants?" A series of soft thuds issued from behind a bookshelf. "A normal life?"

"Well, that's what he said, but he also told me not to trust him, which puts me in kind of a difficult position."

"Yes, I'm not certain what to make of that either. Where did—ah." Roman emerged from behind the shelf, carrying a large cardboard box, which he brought around to the end of a different shelf and dropped with a grunt. He ran his thumb along a row of books, muttering.

Jules watched from her position near the counter, ready to leap into action if needed; her knowledge of the bookstore side's layout was considerably less thorough than Roman's, but there were sections she had come to know better than he did. She strongly suspected that even he didn't remember all of the underlying logic anymore. "I think you're one shelf too high."

"Am I really? Oh, yes, there it is." He slid a small book out of its position and deposited it in the box, then stepped out of sight again to search for another. Two days had passed since her conversation with Sauvage, and it was strange to see Roman going about his business, as if nothing had changed, with her new understanding layered on top of the old. Details that she had never been aware of picking up on in the first place, that were just part of the essential Roman—a slight stiffness in his walk, one shoulder less flexible than the other—now spoke to her of the scars of many battles from his monster-fighting days. She felt almost like she was spying on him, seeing things she shouldn't.

Roman, of course, had no idea she was thinking any of this, and seemed more interested in solving the mystery of Sauvage, which she could sympathize with. "It's an odd turn for him to have taken," he said, continuing an earlier thought. "When he...worked with us, before, he never said anything about trust either way, but he obviously wanted it."

"Maybe it's reverse psychology," Jules said, without conviction.

"I highly doubt that. Oh, this Fourier's in the wrong place. No, I would be surprised if it had not occurred to him that telling you not to trust him is a sort of paradox. In the old days we would have turned that idea over for an hour or three until we'd unraveled whether one can in fact trust someone who insists you can't trust them to be advising you correctly on whether or not you should trust them. Or until Argent was tired of listening to us, at least."

He sounded, Jules noted, unexpectedly nostalgic about it all. Or not so unexpectedly, maybe. "Well, do you believe him?"

"Hard to say. I wasn't there when you spoke to him. That leaves me little to work with."

"You could talk to him yourself."

"No. That...that would be a mistake."

And that was another very full pause, and this time she thought she might have an idea of what was in it, but she was less sure of how to approach the subject. There had always been a slight distance in her friendship with Roman, and while it seemed to have shrunk after the revelations of Wednesday night, she didn't know if it had completely collapsed or, even if it had, what that meant in practical terms. Digging into the most vulnerable parts of people she cared about was not really a habit of hers.

Roman had withdrawn another book from the shelf, not the one he'd been looking for, and was frowning at it as if thinking of something else entirely.

"So," she said slowly, "you called Sauvage your enemy, before. He tells me you hate him. But that's not what it sounds like to me."

He slid the book back into place with a sigh that sounded like it came from far away. "No. I don't hate him. And I don't know what he is in relation to me, now, but 'enemy' no longer seems appropriate. But if he believes that I hate him, I'm in no rush to disabuse him of that notion. It's best if we avoid each other, as you've seen."

Jules, who was also not in the habit of divulging other people's secrets even if those people were weird self-centered dragons, shut her eyes, and took a long, deep breath, and didn't push. And he was right, anyway: she still hadn't forgotten the confrontation in the cafe, and wasn't eager to see a repeat of it, and that rift, if it could be repaired, would take a lot more than one secondhand discussion of things Roman mostly already knew.

[Indigo]

For a while they were wrapped up in trying to remember where several books were shelved—a few of the titles on Roman's list were so obscure and poorly-placed that he insisted he didn't have them until they turned up in their respective dark corners—but Jules wasn't quite out of questions, and as Roman once again slipped out of sight around a shelf, she asked, "Are you going to tell me to stay away from him?" After a moment, she added, "Are you climbing that shelf? Stop, let me." The book was easily within her reach.

Roman scooped up the box again and carried it over to the counter, and began the long process of thoroughly taping it shut. "I'm not going to tell you to do anything, Jules. You're an adult."

One day maybe she'd stop being surprised to hear things like that. "I...thanks."

"There's no need to thank me for that." The packing tape twisted over on itself and he cursed under his breath; his fingernails were not up to the task of unsticking it from itself, so he gave up and used his teeth instead. "Ugh. In any case, I've already told you I don't think he's any threat to you, and apparently you get along just fine, so if I were inclined to warn you off making your own decisions I wouldn't bother with this one. As it happens you are perfectly capable of deciding things for yourself, so that doesn't matter either. Common sense."

"Yeah, well, there's been a shortage of common sense in my life. You know that. So thanks, anyway."

"Of course. Have you seen my permanent marker?"

"Under the register."

"Thank you."

Roman wrote the label for the shipment of books with excruciating precision, and Jules came back around the counter and started filling the pastry case for opening in half an hour, and they worked in companionable silence for a few minutes before Roman said, "You're still determined to stay, then."

"Unless you think there's some reason I shouldn't," Jules said, bewildered. "I didn't think that was in question."

"I suppose not. But I worry." He capped the marker decisively. "The potential threat of vengeful monsters would be, I imagine, a bit much for most people, and quite reasonably so. I would certainly not blame you for choosing to move somewhere safer, or to disassociate yourself from me. But of course I'd rather you stayed. Your friendship has been important to me."

That told her something else, that she hadn't imagined the disappearing distance, because while she had known this it hadn't even come close to being a topic of conversation before. She felt she should acknowledge it somehow, and had no idea how; she settled for awkwardly patting his shoulder, which, after a brief pause, made both of them laugh.

"I was wondering," she said, "if your old enemies, or whatever, could find you here if they wanted to, then couldn't the other hunters do that too? I mean, not to fight you, obviously."

"Possibly," Roman said. "But not likely. I have done my best to avoid them, after what happened with Sauvage, and they have largely given up trying to convince me otherwise. That disaster was partly my fault—he left us to face the other dragons without him, but I could have said something to the others, suggested we delay our attack just to be certain, and I didn't. It's been difficult to face them, knowing that. I did see them all at Catriona's funeral, two years ago, but I didn't tell them where to find me and none of them asked." He shrugged. "Mine has been a self-imposed isolation. I do miss them. One day I may reach out to them again. But not now."

"Well," she said, "at least it's not complete isolation."

"Quite right." He slid the box off the counter. An extraneous layer of tape on the bottom made a terrible noise, and he glared at it. "I'd better get this to the post office. I trust you can hold down the fort for a while."

"Whatever will I do," she said, "when the ravening hordes descend? How can I possibly hope to feed them all without you here to drop half the eggs and burn spinach into the bottom of my good frying pan?"

"That only happened once," he protested, smiling.

"Yes, and I consider it my solemn duty to prevent it from happening again. Go on. I'll be fine." And, humming to herself, she went back to her preparations for the day.

[Indigo]

A week and a half went by before Jules saw Sauvage again; she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary going on in Bristlecone that might indicate the beginnings of havoc, so there was no reason to seek him out, and the Cafe du Livre was abruptly inundated with mail orders, which kept her and Roman busy when there were no customers. It did briefly occur to her that this might, in fact, be a sign of Sauvage's interference, but all the orders came from real people and when she tried following up with them they were largely annoyed by her odd questions, so she decided not to worry about it.

And then Sauvage slunk back into the cafe one morning, glancing around warily in case Roman saw him, and sat down at the counter. He ordered coffee and asked her to recommend something off the lunch menu.

"It's eight in the morning," she said. Officially, she didn't start serving lunch until noon, because several of the menu options involved extensive enough prep that she liked to be able to get a head start.

"If I told you I've been awake since two, would you take pity on me?"

"I guess that depends on why you've been awake since two."

"I was sowing the seeds of this town's destruction, as part of my nefarious plans, obviously," he said. "It's hungry work."

She rolled her eyes. "Do you like mushrooms?"

"Usually."

So she started a mushroom risotto, and hummed quietly, and when he inquired about her recent reading she answered. He didn't recognize most of the titles she mentioned, and didn't have many of his own to offer—"You would probably not be surprised to learn how much effort it takes to keep a book from disintegrating in the sea"—but he let her talk about them and asked questions that sounded born of genuine interest.

When his food was ready he took it off to a table by the window, on the grounds that he didn't want to keep her from her work, and left a while later with a cheery little wave. And a few days later he came back. This time he ordered something more appropriate to the time of day.

They fell into something of a routine which, in the end, wasn't so terribly different from the way her life had been before. Sauvage came in every few days, whenever he was sure Roman wasn't around; Jules didn't know how he determined this ahead of time, since Roman's schedule was pretty unpredictable, and when she asked he just shrugged. It seemed to be something he did without being aware of it. Sometimes he talked about his time with the monster hunters, and sometimes he asked about her life and paid attention to the answers, and once he brought in some obscure book about ethics from the library in the city to get her opinion on a section that seemed to him outrageously inconsistent. He spoke only vaguely of things that had happened before he knew the hunters, and only in relation to more recent events.

"You talk a lot," she said once, while he was stirring sugar into his coffee. She regretted it almost immediately, because it had come out disparaging when she hadn't meant it to, but he didn't appear to mind.

"I like to talk. To listen, too, though that one seems to surprise people, or maybe it's just that it's both at once. I was," he said, "very lonely before I met the hunters, but I didn't know. Now I know." With that he moved smoothly back into what they'd been talking about before, namely what exactly one was supposed to do with the innumerable cardboard boxes produced by moving. Jules, who still had a few sealed boxes lurking in the back of her closet from last year, didn't have any useful advice.

[Indigo]

For a short time she'd worried that Sauvage had fixated on her in some way because of her friendship with Roman, and that all of these seemingly innocuous chats were, in fact, part of some sort of nefarious plan; but it was hard to maintain that level of suspicion. When he came in and she wasn't busy, he talked to her, and when she was busy he talked to other people, and the only constant was that, after the first few visits, he never sat alone. He seemed to be having fun. Jules kept an eye on him in case he did anything sinister, or at least anything detectable by someone with no experience in that area, but she never noticed anything and after a while felt a bit silly.

Roman was obviously disconcerted by all this, but he managed to only comment on it once, when he said, some hours after either of them had last mentioned Sauvage, "You like him." It sounded like an accusation that didn't have the confidence to commit.

"I have to say, for you of all people--"

"I know, I know." He sighed. There had been a lot of that, recently. "I'm sorry. I worry, you know that, but I'm not going to tell you what to do. It's just that I don't want you getting the idea that he's some sort of misunderstood innocent."

"Honestly," Jules said, "I don't think he wants me getting that idea either." Sauvage had a tendency to slip into that grandiose way of speaking when it came to his time with the hunters. When he alluded to things that had happened before that, the voice disappeared. It was so predictable that she occasionally wondered if he was doing it on purpose. She didn't ask about that, because the result would probably be the same either way, and it seemed rude.

"That is at least equally troubling, and possibly more so," Roman said, "because I have no idea why it would be the case."

"Maybe there's no ulterior motive. If it is all a lie it's a weirdly consistent one." Particularly considering how hard she'd been looking for holes in it.

Roman made a frustrated sound. "That's not a safe thing to assume."

"Then I guess I'll have to keep gathering evidence," Jules said, "because he's clearly not going away, and you won't talk to him at all."

"Evidence." Roman laughed. "I suppose. I'm sorry, I seem to recall we were talking about something else before, and now I've derailed it."

"You were explaining how you had improved on the hunters' old filing system when you set up shop," she said, "although if this is an improvement I'd really hate to see the original."

"The reason the original needed improving was that it had been largely eaten by fire weevils, which, come to think of it, is a much more interesting story."

Here was another small change to her routine, that now, instead of dodging even the lightest of personal questions, Roman told her about the hunters. He mentioned them when it was relevant, and sometimes when it wasn't, telling a story to fill silence in the last minutes of closing or opening. He was not exactly a born storyteller, but she was happy to learn these things about him, and he seemed almost relieved to tell her, as if it had been a much bigger secret than she thought.

All in all it was a pleasant way for things to be, mostly, although her sense for when not to ask further questions was still imperfect and so some conversations ground to an abrupt halt. And there was a nervous tension in the air whenever Sauvage and Roman were in the same room, which did happen from time to time, usually because Sauvage had lingered at the cafe longer than he meant to. It was an imperfect peace. Jules tried to enjoy it anyway, in case it didn't last.

[Indigo]

Though she hardly had any obligations left to the place, and certainly none that couldn't be put off if she wanted to, Jules usually found herself driving into the city once every month or so. There were some things she couldn't get at the grocery store in Bristlecone, and a handful of spots she still had some small residual affection for. When she'd moved in her neighbor, Mrs. Tully, had offered Jules the use of her car on these occasions, and this offer had proven to be genuine and without strings, which still surprised her sometimes.

This time the trip was fairly short; she'd gone for mostly nonessentials, some obscure flavor of ice cream Roman had requested and a few of her own favorite snacks. She had briefly considered dropping by her parents' house—they still had a couple of her good saucepans and had so far been difficult about returning them—but it was a nice day and she wanted it to stay that way.

She didn't always stop in, but every time she came into the city she made sure to at least pass by the bookstore where she'd met Roman, and she tended to favor it for book purchases now, since, indirectly, she owed it a lot. Today, as she drove past, she noticed something odd. The bookstore was, had always been, situated between a small park and a midsize nail salon, so close together there was no room for trash cans. Now there was an ivy-covered brick building wedged in on the salon side. It hadn't been there last time, or any other time for that matter.

Sauvage's razor smile flickered through her mind, but this seemed a bit far to be his doing. Maybe she had become a person who things like this happened to, somehow, by association.

The new building wasn't doing anything that demanded a response from her. It was just there. Where it shouldn't, couldn't be. Jules drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, and frowned, and gnawed at her lip, and she pulled into the parking garage down the street and paid for the full two hours. Then she walked over to the building and inspected it.

It certainly didn't look like it could have been built overnight. The growth of ivy on the outside was pretty dense, the vines thick, and she was hardly a botanist but she was pretty sure you didn't get plants this woody that fast. The brick underneath was worn and faded and left pale red dust on her fingers. A very small sign over the door read glass library in glittery letters. Set high in the door was a small window which she could just peer into, but as far as she could tell it was dark inside.

She knew, of course, that she was going to open the door. She hadn't paid those exorbitant parking fees for the fun of it. For the sake of efficiency, she skipped all her dithering and went in.

Inside the building appeared to be a single large, dim room, cool as if air-conditioned and lit by a combination of floor lamps and sunlight filtering in through ivy-obscured windows that really should not exist given their location. The floor was white tile; she couldn't guess at what the walls looked like because they were mostly covered by bookshelves, or chairs. It felt almost-familiar, the result of so many days spent working in Roman's bookstore, superimposing a messier, busier version of this place onto what she was actually seeing. A version, also, with carpet, despite the difficulty of cleaning coffee spills out of it. She really should bring that up with Roman again. She was almost sure he owned the building.

In addition to a greater sense of order than she was accustomed to, the library also contained a round circulation desk, at which currently sat a black rollaby covered in glowing, multicolored markings. He didn't notice her at first, and as she approached he continued picking through what appeared to be a card catalog of some kind, occasionally scribbling notes in a small spiral notebook. When she came close enough to cast a shadow over him he looked up and smiled brilliantly. "Hello! Welcome to the Library! My name's Roderick. How can I help you?"

[Indigo]

"Uh," Jules said. She hadn't expected anything specific coming into this place, but it had looked rather uninhabited from the outside, and she didn't have questions prepared. "This library wasn't here before."

"Technically, it's not here now, either! It's kind of metaphysical. But that probably doesn't help." He flipped the notebook closed. "You're currently in one of the biggest repositories of knowledge in the world, except that it isn't in the world, exactly. And I don't remember the rest of Alphonse's spiel so that's the smartest I'm going to sound today! It is, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, a magic library, and it moves around. It shows itself to people who need it, so let me rephrase the question: what do you need?"

Well. Okay. "That's not really an easier question..."

"Most people come for the catalog," Roderick said, tapping the cards. "It helps people find each other, more or less. Are you looking for someone? Long-lost friend, distant relative, missing heir?"

"Not really." She looked dubiously at the card catalog, which was now a few cards thicker than when she'd first come in. "I...uh. I have a lot of questions, actually. You run this place?"

"Ehh...it runs itself, kind of," Roderick said. "It's alive. Alphonse is its hand-picked custodian, and I'm something of an under-librarian, if that were a real job title. A library needs staff to function or nobody would ever be able to find anything in here!"

"So where did it come from? And the...knowledge?" She gestured around the room vaguely.

"That's a difficult question for me to answer," he said, "because we don't exactly know." He offered up another smile, this one rather sheepish. "We used to think it was everything that had ever been written down, but then we found some stuff we knew hadn't been, so then I thought it might be everything that had ever been said, but now we know that's not it either. My best guess right now is that the Library has some kind of selection criteria that we don't understand because neither of us can really think like a library, but that's not very satisfying. I'm still looking into it."

"I see," Jules said, and then, "Does the library also decide who needs it, then?"

"Yes, and sometimes its definition of need is a little..."

"Inscrutable?"

"Something like that," Roderick said. "I would like to be a lot more helpful to you, but if you don't know why you're here then I can't even begin to guess." He made a clicking noise with his tongue, repeatedly and with no apparent meaning, then stopped and said, "Maybe you could just tell me if there's anything you want to know about? I may not be able to psychoanalyze the Library, but I know where most things are in it."

She could think of a few things. But the last few weeks had put her, somewhat unfairly, into a habitual wariness, and so she said, "You seem very eager to answer my questions. Why is that?"

Roderick flattened a paw against his chest. "Because it's my job, of course!" He sounded hurt. "As I said, a library is nothing without its staff. Or nothing very useful, anyway. I can see why you'd expect someone more cryptic, though, the way the place is. Alphonse is better at that. Just our luck!"

"In that case...I don't know if you've heard of a sort of loose organization of monster hunters? I could stand to have some more information about them." She enjoyed Roman's stories, but they were punctuated by tangents and sometimes only half-remembered, pleasant enough to listen to but not ideal if she wanted to be sure about things.

"Oh, that sounds like the Union," Roderick said, springing up from the desk and coming around to examine the shelves. "Although they might be calling themselves something else now. But I should be able to find it anyway. The books don't move very much."

Very much, Jules noted with some amusement. "Also," she said, "it's a little dark in here?"

Roderick gasped. "I forgot! I get so used to it. Alphonse keeps the lights low because of his eye condition, but since he's not here there's no harm in turning them up. One second." He paused in his search of the shelves, one paw on the spine of a book that appeared to be bound in lemon rind, ears twitching, and the room suddenly brightened to full daylight. "There!"

[Indigo]

There didn't seem to be much for Jules to do while Roderick looked for whatever book he was after, since she couldn't see any signage that might direct her to something useful; then again, maybe the nature of the library meant that whatever she picked up would be of use to her. Or maybe not. The library probably had its own definition of "useful".

She tried sliding a book off a shelf at random. The Compleat History of Cetaceans. Probably not what she needed. It was also awfully slim considering its claim of compleatness.

Mysteriously, she had cell reception here. She used it to discreetly text Roman and see if he'd ever heard of this place. Unlikely, but given his history there was at least a small chance, and while she was convinced by Roderick's earnestness she was less sure about being inside a living structure whose ideas about the world she could barely understand.

Roderick was clicking under his breath again, squinting at the shelves like they weren't where he'd left them. Jules had a strong and completely useless urge to offer to help. Fortunately, before she could jump in and embarrass herself, he reached up and tipped a book out of its place just above his head, catching it with his other paw. "There we go! That's a whole new shelf, I think. I'll have to go through it later. Here, um—"

"Jules."

"Jules! This should answer some of your questions, hopefully. If it doesn't I guess we'll just have to keep looking." The book he handed her was almost the size of a dictionary, but weighed hardly anything, and had a smooth blue-white cover that was not quite soft to the touch, like something encountered in a dream. Who's Who of Monster Hunting was embossed in gold along the spine.

"There's no author," she said, turning it over in her hands.

"Good eye!" He sounded excited. "That's because it's what I like to call a metareference. It's a lot of information gathered by the library from a whole bunch of different sources and then compiled in one place, not something that was ever released by any actual publishing house or anything like that. We did manage to convince it to credit sources, though, so there should be a bibliography in the back. But a lot of it will just say 'personal interview', which is more or less hearsay as far as I know." He shrugged. "Anyway, you didn't come to listen to me talk about my pet projects! I have some work to be getting back to, but let me know if you need anything." With that he returned to his position behind the desk, making his notes as he rifled through the card catalog.

Jules sat on the floor with her back against one of the shelves and held the book open in her lap. Though the spine appeared undamaged, the book made no attempt to resist her, she discovered as she flipped through. There was an index, but it didn't adhere to any recognizable organizational principle. Variable definitions of useful.

Her phone buzzed several times.

Argent mentioned one once but I presumed it was a metaphor.

Why?

Where are you?

"A metaphor for what?" she muttered, and sent back some reassurance that she'd explain later, everything was fine, because he was clearly already doing anxious calculations about what would lead her to ask such a question. Then she flipped through the book haphazardly again. This time, it fell open to a page headed with a name that, after all the reminiscences of the last few weeks, she couldn't help but recognize: Moss Fettering.

[Indigo]

She hadn't expected there to be pictures, but here was one: candid, not professional quality, and Jules had to wonder where and how the library had gotten it. Moss was tall and tan and muscular, shaggy dark green hair with a startling streak of pink tied back in a low ponytail, her face weighted heavily toward the nose as if it were the origin point from which she had grown. The photograph showed her standing beneath an unidentifiable tree, laughing, wearing some kind of loose coat with the sleeves rolled all the way up, revealing a few pale scars. Long, sharp quills curved back along her forearms, the same color as her hair. A pale, blurry hand was visible at the right edge of the frame; the library had cropped the picture a little haphazardly.

Both Roman and Sauvage had spoken often of Moss in their tales of derring-do, and had painted her as the person who was usually in charge, when anyone needed to be. The book indicated something similar, in a roundabout way. Its narrative began when Moss's monster hunting career did, giving a brief nod to her art degree before describing an intense encounter where she'd singlehandedly brought down a chimera that had terrorized her university campus for reasons the library didn't seem to know. She had a knack for leadership, becoming a fixed point around whom other hunters coalesced, some just for a job or two and others for the long haul.

The group that included Roman had taken a few years to form and settle, although the book didn't give much in the way of exact dates or timelines. Or maybe that information was buried in someone else's section, which was a different kind of infuriating. Apparently she and Roman had been students together but not actually fought together until much later, which raised a whole other host of questions for Jules to ask Roman, and after the group had become more a cohesive unit of six there had been frequent satellite hunters who, at least as far as the book was concerned, failed to integrate well into the team. Sauvage appeared here as on the margins of a greater story, featuring in one or two notable skirmishes before departing in an "unfortunate failure of diplomacy", which was certainly one way of putting it.

Jules couldn't get a handle on the way the library had arranged all this information. It definitely had a slant of some kind, some perspective from which events were evaluated, but every time she thought she understood where it was coming from it described something in a way that threw her off kilter again. Inevitable, perhaps, given the unfathomable mind doing the writing, but that didn't make it any less disorienting.

Of course she couldn't hope to learn the whole story, whatever that even meant, just by reading the biographies of the people in it—the only way she could know absolutely everything that had happened would be to have been there, and even then she would have missed things. She knew that. Knowing, as was so often the case, didn't help.

The narrative of Moss's career wrapped up with a short paragraph noting that she was still active in the field and listing the other hunters she worked with, all the names she'd heard repeated over the last few weeks, helpfully followed by page numbers, which was something. And then there was another, shorter section, a spare few lines in a different tone entirely, marked out only by an extra line break between its beginning and the preceding text: "You make her sound like she's responsible for us and it's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. You think she enforces rules? Kicks people out for scoring low on a team-building exercise? Stupid. I've never even heard her raise her voice, not even at me!" This was followed by a note that the reader should see page 244, the same page given after Argent's name further up.

[Indigo]

Argent Trevor, as her full name was given on page 244, was the owner of the blurred hand at the edge of Moss's portrait; here the left side of the picture cut off at the wrist. Together they would have made a striking contrast, Argent being a short, round, pale woman with a curly black pompadour, eyes a piercing purple-red, although it was entirely possible that this was just a matter of bad photography. She was dressed entirely in black and standing behind a bush, which made details difficult to make out, but she seemed to be in the middle of saying something, possibly whatever Moss had been laughing at.

This picture was accompanied by a second which looked almost like a professional headshot, Argent's thick eyebrows contorted in a dubious expression, chin resting on the back of her hand. Her eyes were red here too. The background was mostly obscured and out of focus, but Jules thought she made out the spines of books. Now that was interesting.

Argent's narrative began...unexpectedly. Namely, it started with the sentence, "There was once a bird who decided she would like to be a human," and then went on to describe the various forms of magic the bird had learned before she was able to do such a thing. It sounded very complicated. Jules, who had spent most of her life in her current shape and tended to think of it as her real one when she thought about it at all, was more than a little surprised that it should have taken Argent so much work, but then their starting circumstances had probably been very different. Argent seemed to have grown up in deep forest, in some sort of bird colony, and her magical experimentation had necessitated leaving that place. The book did not elaborate on why; its description of these events sounded more like folklore than anything else.

The narrative indicated that it was skipping some unspecified amount of time—why was the library so bad about explaining when things had happened? Maybe it didn't experience time the same way people did—and then was interrupted by another photograph, this one looking like it had come out of a brochure for archery lessons. A white nonaga flecked with black drew back a longbow a hair taller than her, tail arched out behind her as though preparing to strike; she was looking sidelong at the camera and sticking out her tongue. She was identified by a caption, the only one Jules had seen so far, as Bethany Asher.

The two of them had met, according to the library, at "an unusually politically fraught chess tournament" which eventually devolved into a slightly drunken argument with at least four sides; there was some editorializing from Argent here, quoted by the library, where she noted that this was far from the worst way things could have turned out. Asher and Argent hadn't intended to become a monster-fighting duo, but apparently had fallen into the profession more or less accidentally and found that it suited them, operating as their own unit for some time before they fell in with Moss. Then there were more accounts of battles, different ones this time, and written with an eager focus on the most dramatic moments or occasionally just entertaining ones. A recent fight with a creature made of sludge that had ended in a stalemate got a lot of attention for no clearly explained reason.

And again the cutting in of a different perspective, but this one seemed to still be the library, just changing its tone. Argent, alone of the monster hunters she worked with, had visited the library once—it was rendered "the Library" on the page, but Jules had a petulant urge to deny it the capital in her thoughts, since it struck her as a bit pretentious—and had given an extensive interview with commentary on all the other entries about her friends. A footnote directed Jules to a chapter toward the end of the book where the interview was transcribed in its entirety, and she skimmed it, but she only had so much time before her parking expired and wanted to look at a few other things first.

She didn't read through Roman's page like the others, because that felt like a weird thing to do when it was about somebody you actually knew; she only paused to look at the photograph at the top, which showed a much younger version of him than she'd previously imagined, no gray in his hair at all, holding an ancient-looking rifle with a glowing inscription she couldn't read along the...Jules didn't know the first thing about guns, and would describe the location of the letters as "the side", and didn't resolve to look it up later because she didn't actually care that much.

[Indigo]

Through some mistake of page-flipping she almost managed to skip over Elsie, or Elisheva Cutler as the library styled her, and only ended up on the right page because she'd gone back over the section to look up Catriona. Elsie's entry was much shorter than the others and was not accompanied by a picture, giving only very basic details about where she'd been born and gone to school, and, for once, the year she'd joined Moss's team of hunters, around twenty years ago. Here, too, was a comment from Argent: "She wouldn't be very happy with me if I went and told you her secrets, would she? If she couldn't disappear she'd have nothing left." Something else for Jules's mental list of questions for Roman, which seemed to be ever-expanding.

Catriona had a longer entry than anyone else Jules had looked up, and it went into great detail about her long and illustrious hunting career, her marriage to and subsequent divorce from an allegedly famous wizard who Jules had never heard of in her life, the pedigree of her magic sword, and the circumstances under which she'd joined up with Moss. For most of her time as a hunter Catriona had been an infamous loner, apparently, but Moss had impressed her enough to change that. This page was also topped by a photograph, Catriona and her daughter Arabella, two vibrant yellow leawolves with the enormous sword mounted on a wall above them. It hardly looked like a sword at all, an ornately carved green thing that really should have been too heavy to lift with one's tail alone. The entry concluded with Catriona's death in battle two years ago—not long before Jules had met Roman, if the date was correct, which Jules noticed without knowing why she bothered. Maybe just because it was the only connection she seemed to have to this other life, even though it barely counted as one.

She didn't know what she'd expected, but she still had plenty of unanswered questions, and other ideas too; while she had no desire to go around picking fights with creatures far more powerful than her, since a noble cause would hardly protect her from being instantly slaughtered with her lack of relevant skills, but there was something about the accounts that appealed to her nonetheless. Something neat about the way battles fit together, how different spells and techniques could compliment or work against each other, almost like a puzzle she could solve. The motivations of the monsters themselves fascinated her too, even as they were only vaguely alluded to here, or maybe because of it.

Something else occurred to her. How much hunting did you have to do before you counted as a monster hunter in the library's mind? She closed the book, and hummed a little tune as if that would do anything, and let it fall open to another random page, and there was a picture of Sauvage.

James Sauvage, the heading said. She had never really considered that he might have a first name. And below that was another name, or so she gathered from context; it was written in a script she didn't recognize at all and couldn't even begin to interpret. He looked almost the same in the photograph as he had the day they'd met, if in different clothes, but the expression on his face was...strange, an almost-winning smile touched with wariness she'd never seen on him.

[Indigo]

She skimmed the rest of the page, but it was primarily devoted to Sauvage's life as monster, the destruction he'd wrought, and to read the details of something he spoke of only in vague terms, underwritten with guilt, seemed like a violation of privacy. He had done terrible things, and he made no attempt to deny it, and, too, it mattered to Jules that he had to all appearances done what he could to prevent those things from happening again. Neither she nor Roman had noticed any warping of reality in Bristlecone, beyond the small intentional magic Sauvage did for his own convenience, or, well, also to show off, but she'd talked it over with Roman a couple times and he had admitted with some astonishment that Sauvage did indeed seem to have gotten his power under control.

The section of the page that covered his time with the hunters was, on the other hand, mostly stuff she'd already heard about, and so she didn't pay much attention to it either. Instead she flipped through until she found a section of monsters, these the less-mythical kind, morally bankrupt people with far too much power who knowingly caused harm and didn't care. Before she could get anywhere with that, though, her phone started to buzz again.

"Seriously?" she said, turning off the alarm. "It can't possibly have been two hours already."

"Time is pretty weird in here," Roderick said from the desk. He'd finished his notes on the catalog and was playing with something that looked like a cross between a Rubik's cube and a rice ball. "The alarm was smart! I missed so many appointments before I thought to start doing that. I used to have a good sense of time, but in here it doesn't matter. Oh, you don't need to reshelve that, I'll take care of it later. Sometimes things show up in the spaces when someone takes a book out, and it can take a while."

She set the book on the desk with exaggerated care. "So, how long is the library going to be here?"

"Not sure! It's not a very good communicator, and Alphonse understands it better. We usually get...maybe a week of warning? So more than a week."

"I guess I'll have to come back soon, then. This monster stuff is...I don't know, there's something about it."

Roderick brightened, which Jules would not have previously thought possible. "We have a lot about monsters and monster hunters here, actually! It's been a very popular subject for a very long time. I guess it's not that surprising when you think about it. I'd be happy to help you do more research, if you come back."

"That...might be good," she said, looking around at the many packed shelves. "I'm still not exactly sure what I'm researching, but I'll try to narrow it down."

"I can probably help with that too, if you come when I'm not too busy. Or when Alphonse is here to man the desk. Oh, and there's free parking in a lot a few blocks away, kind of a walk but it means you'll have more time."

"Thanks." She gave Roderick a cheerful little wave, which he returned with enthusiasm, and went back out into the street, into the non-metaphysical world. Or at least the minimally metaphysical world. Probably "non" was a stretch.

She was already pulling out of the lot when a terrible thought struck her, forcing her to pull over again and dig out her phone. Sauvage remained uncertain about the concept of cell phones, but his house had a land line, and he'd offered her the number in case she needed to get in touch, without any explanation of why that would happen. She dialed it now.

"Hello?" It sounded like a genuine question, like he was surprised the phone would ring.

"Hey, it's Jules. Does your weird magic extend to changing states of matter?"

"Of course. That's rather a low-level concern, as these things go. Why?"

"I may have left some ice cream in the car for a couple of hours."

He had the courtesy to move the phone a bit further from his mouth before he started laughing, and there was such delight in it that she couldn't even really be mad. "Yes, I can repair your ice cream. I'll be home all afternoon, just knock and come right in when you get here." Then he hung up. Phone etiquette was another thing he was uncertain about, it seemed. She smiled, and shook her head, and drove home.

[Indigo]

Originally she'd planned to go back to the library the morning of her next day off, but she was thwarted by Mrs. Tully's daughter's field trip to the zoo, which Jules could hardly begrudge them. She had arranged for Weston to try again to deliver his trees in the afternoon, but he called early in the day to cancel, citing an emergency involving his neighbor's stove and his wife's medical condition, though what one had to do with the other was less clear. It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when somebody knocked at her door a little after ten.

"Come in!" she called from the kitchen, where she was repotting some succulents.

"Does everyone in this town do that?" Sauvage said as he shut the door behind him. "It's not very secure."

"You do that, Sauvage."

"When it comes to security, I can do whatever I want," he said. "No one in Bristlecone can harm me in a way that matters."

An odd way of putting it, but Jules didn't comment on it because she was busy watching him pace around her TV like it was a dangerous animal. He had never been inside her house before. Two weeks ago, after a storm that had rattled windows and flooded a few streets downtown, he'd stopped by to check on her--he seemed to worry almost as much as Roman, though in a different way--but she hadn't invited him in, and he hadn't asked.

"These were very different ten years ago," he said, of the TV. He sounded puzzled. "Where do the tubes go?"

"I'm pretty sure they stopped making them with tubes more than ten years ago."

"Did they," he said skeptically. With one last dubious glance at it he came into the kitchen and, seeing what she was doing, added, "I didn't mean to interrupt, if you're busy--"

"I'm not, really. I'm almost done with this." She wiped soil off her hands. "What brings you down here, anyway?"

"Oh, well." He shrugged, but there was something stiff about it. "I haven't seen you since your little library adventure. I thought it might be nice to..." He trailed off, and shrugged again, and said, "Do you know how to play chess?"

"What?" Jules had been thinking about pointing out that the reason they hadn't seen each other was that he hadn't been coming into the cafe, rather than anything she'd done, but the question was strange enough for her to let that go for now. "Not really."

"Then this will be much easier." He produced a chessboard from nowhere, with a little flourish. "I'd like to introduce you to hunter chess."

"What's the difference?" She picked up the freshly potted succulent and set it on the window sill above the sink, where it could get as much sun as was available in a place with weather like Bristlecone's. Then she led the way back into the living room and, trying to pretend she wasn't slightly embarrassed by her relatively worn furniture by comparison to Sauvage's, perched at one end of the couch.

Sauvage hovered awkwardly until she made a confused face at him, and then settled in a chair. "Hunter chess begins more or less the same way as the normal kind, allowing of course for players unfamiliar with all the rules, and then changes to suit the whims of its players. I think it may have been Asher's invention. It has a fascinating origin story which, tragically, I do not remember, but the gist of it is that staking out a monster's lair becomes very dull very quickly, and yet the situation may change before you have a chance to finish your game. And on the other hand you may be sitting there for much, much longer than such a game would normally take. A more adaptable version was a necessity."

"Chess seems like a weird starting point," she said. The book had mentioned a chess tournament, but she hadn't imagined Argent and Asher as participants. Clearly that had been a mistake.

"To my understanding, they simply happened to have a chess set on hand at the time." He unfolded the board on her coffee table and began gesturing pieces into being in their proper places. Jules had long suspected that the gestures were unnecessary, but far be it from her to stop him from putting on a performance if he wanted to. It was sort of charming. Sometimes, anyway.