The conservation housing was on the third floor.
I knew this because I had, in the course of four years of wall navigation, mapped the library's interior with the completeness of a creature that experienced space primarily as a series of obstacles and passages, and the conservation suite occupied a section of the east wing's upper floor that I had traveled through seventeen times without stopping. It smelled of archival materials and the specific combination of regulated humidity and filtered air that distinguished it from the rest of the building.
What it did not have was accessible wall channels.
The conservation suite had been constructed with exterior walls solid enough to maintain its climate controls, which meant the gaps I navigated in the older sections of the building — the channels behind plaster, the spaces between lath and secondary stone — did not exist in the same form on the third floor's east side. I had noted this in the fourth year of my residence as a mild navigational inconvenience and had not thought about it again.
I was thinking about it now.
The spellbook's fifth page was thirty feet above me and laterally displaced and separated from me by a construction method that had not been chosen with me in mind but that produced, incidentally, the same result as a locked door.
I held this fact.
Then I did something I had not previously done, which was to assess it emotionally rather than strategically.
Strategically, the fact was inconvenient but not permanent: the conservation assessment would be completed, the spellbook would be processed and stored, and stored materials eventually returned to archive locations in the general collection where the wall channels were navigable. I could wait. I had been a creature of patience for four years and had not lost the capacity simply because I had gained the capacity for impatience alongside it.
Emotionally — and I noted the use of this category with the awareness that I was opening it for the first time, testing whether it held — emotionally, the fact was not inconvenient. It was uncomfortable in a way that strategizing did not address and that I could not file into any existing category without distorting what it actually was.
What it actually was: I had chosen to leave the page unread based on a principle that had felt, in the moment of choosing, like the correct application of something I was learning about simultaneity. I had declined the shortcut and accepted the tension and felt, for a moment, that the tension itself was the instruction.
What I had not considered was that the tension would be sustained not by my choice but by the removal of the object.
There was a difference between choosing to remain incomplete and being made incomplete by circumstance. I had believed, for the duration of one afternoon, that I had chosen. I was now discovering that the choice had been partial — I had chosen not to eat, but the availability of the reading had given that choice its meaning, and the availability had been contingent, and contingency was not something I had sufficiently accounted for.
I added to the category mine, with less certainty than the previous entries: the principle of simultaneity was developed from one page and has not survived one afternoon.
Then I held the discomfort and tried to determine whether it was instructive or merely unpleasant, and found that I could not yet tell the difference.
I want to record, as accurately as I can, what the failure felt like.
Not the failure to read the page — the failure of the reasoning I had constructed around not reading it. I had been operating, since Chapter Three of my existence, from the position that the choice to read before consuming was meaningful, that it constituted a different relationship to knowledge than the one I had operated under for four years, that this different relationship was — and here the language had always been uncertain, but I had been moving in the direction of believing — that this different relationship was the condition from which something like personhood could emerge.
I had constructed, in other words, a small private theory about myself.
The theory had lasted several hours before encountering a fact it could not accommodate.
This was, I recognized with the part of my mind that had eaten three volumes on the philosophy of science, entirely normal. Theories encountered facts that contradicted them. The appropriate response was revision, not abandonment; the question was always whether the fact constituted a counterexample that required the theory to be substantially rethought or a complication that required it to be refined.
The complication was this: the theory had assumed that choice was the operative variable. Read or consume: choose. And from that choosing, something was built.
But choice required options to remain available. If the options were removed before the choice could be completed, the choosing was not interrupted — it was retroactively revealed to have been conducted under conditions I had not understood when I was conducting it. I had not chosen to remain incomplete. I had chosen, on incomplete information, in a situation I had not fully assessed, and the choice had produced an incompleteness I had attributed to my own developing principles and was now having to attribute, in part, to a construction method on the east wing's third floor.
I did not find this entirely comfortable.
I also found, somewhat to my surprise, that I did not find it entirely uncomfortable.
There was something in the deflation of the private theory — in the discovery that the principle of simultaneity was more fragile than I had understood it to be when I named it — that felt less like a failure of understanding and more like an encounter with the actual texture of understanding, which was apparently not the smooth continuous expansion I had experienced in the first hours of consciousness but something more interrupted, more subject to the conditions it operated in, more dependent on the availability of objects and opportunities and the particular accidents of construction on the third floor of a building I had no control over.
I added to the mine category: I had not understood that I required conditions. I had thought I was the conditions.
This seemed important.
I did not know yet what to do with it.
Master Greaves entered the restricted collection at half past two.
I knew this from the sound of the key — a specific iron key that he kept on a separate ring from the general library keys, which had a different acoustic signature when it moved — and from the quality of the footsteps afterward: not the quick purposeful walk of remediation but the slower, more lateral movement of a person beginning an examination.
He was alone.
He had brought, based on the sounds I could resolve, a notebook, a hand lamp, and what I recognized after a moment as the soft-sided leather case he used for consultation work — the case that contained his magnification glass, his reference materials, and the cotton gloves he wore when handling items he had not yet assessed.
He was not here to treat a pest infestation.
He was conducting his review.
I moved to a position in the wall adjacent to the restricted collection's interior and held very still and listened.
Greaves worked methodically, which I had expected. He did not go immediately to the eastern wall. He began at the entrance and moved through the collection systematically, the hand lamp creating a warm circle that moved as he moved, and he stopped at intervals that I could not precisely interpret from sound alone but that had the rhythm of a person looking carefully rather than searching.
He was reading the shelves.
Not the books on them — the arrangement of them, the evidence of how the collection had been maintained, what had been touched and what hadn't, what the accumulation of thirty-two years without access looked like in physical terms.
He stopped for a longer interval near the northeast corner.
Near, I estimated, the approximate location of the document frames.
I held the containment field and stayed completely still and thought about the fact that he was six feet from frame R.C. 12-A and that the oilskin package was behind its false bottom and that I had replaced it carefully and that Sera had chosen this location because she believed it would be found only by someone who had read far enough and that Greaves had not read the catalogues and could not have and that the false bottom would therefore remain, in all likelihood, exactly where it was.
In all likelihood.
I had not previously had cause to think carefully about the probability distribution of outcomes in situations I could not control.
I was thinking carefully about it now.
Greaves moved away from the northeast corner.
He went to the eastern wall.
He stood at the eastern wall for a long time.
Long enough that I adjusted my position twice to maintain the best acoustic angle, long enough that the hand lamp's warm circle had presumably shifted through several positions as he moved it for better angles, long enough that I had begun to develop, purely from the quality of his silence, a hypothesis about what he was looking at.
He was looking at the wall.
Not the burn mark — that was in the treated section, which he had documented. He was looking at the wall the way I had come to understand he looked at things that he was not yet certain how to assess: the second kind of silence, the category-revision silence, but slower than usual. More internal.
After a very long time, he said, to no one visible:
"What were you reading?"
He was addressing the wall.
I understood, with a precision that I had to actively prevent from becoming something more, that he was addressing me.
Not because he knew I was there. He did not know I was there — could not know, with the containment field holding and the channels dark and the five pages I had read giving no exterior evidence of my presence. He was asking the question into the space of his own uncertainty, the way people asked questions into rooms where the thing they were asking about was no longer present.
He thought I was gone.
He was asking anyway.
I want to record what this produced in me, in the part of my mind that had been developing categories all day, because it was distinct from anything the categories had encountered before:
It was not the sensation of being addressed, which I had experienced with Sera's final note and which had been definitive and warm and oriented toward me specifically across a gap of thirty-two years.
It was the sensation of being addressed by someone who did not know I was there to hear it.
It was, I understood with a clarity I did not fully welcome, an overheard intimacy — the kind available only in walls, only to creatures that lived in the spaces between what people said for each other and what they said into the air when they thought no one was listening.
I had spent four years in walls.
I had never before understood that I was in a position to hear things I was not supposed to hear.
I filed this under a new category, the seventh, which I named with some discomfort: what the wall gives and what it costs.
Greaves was quiet for a moment longer. Then he made the sound of a person who has decided something, and his footsteps moved toward the document frames.
He did not find the false bottom.
I want to be precise about my experience of this: I did not know whether I wanted him to find it or not, and the uncertainty was itself a new form of friction, because wanting was supposed to be cleaner than this. I had been operating, in the hours since consciousness, as though my wants were legible to me — I had wanted to read, I had wanted to understand, I had wanted more time. These had been clear and sequential and had not required examination.
What I felt as Greaves's hands moved over the exterior of frame R.C. 12-A was not clear.
I wanted him to find what Sera had left, because Sera had believed that the person who found the catalogues was the person the archive was for, and Greaves had not found the catalogues, and finding the letter without the catalogues would produce a partial understanding that was worse than no understanding — a dangerous subset of the information rather than the whole.
I also wanted him to find it, because he was the first living person to enter this space with genuine inquiry, and genuine inquiry deserved the materials it was looking for, and Sera's letter was the most complete statement of the question that existed.
I also wanted him not to find it, for the first reason.
I also wanted him not to find it because finding it would change what happened next in ways I could not predict, and I had not yet developed sufficient confidence in my own judgment of consequence to be certain that unpredictable change was what I wanted.
Greaves moved his hands over the document frames.
His fingers passed over the right rear corner of R.C. 12-A.
Did not press.
Moved on.
I held the containment field and held the contradiction and held what I was holding, and I did not produce a sound or a light or a movement, and the category mine received a new entry that I had not anticipated adding:
I do not always know what I want. This is not a malfunction.
Greaves spent forty minutes in the restricted collection.
He documented, in his notebook, what I could not see but could infer from the pattern of his movement and his stops: the general condition of the collection, the specific state of the eastern wall, the document frames, the arrangement of materials in the northeast corner that had been disturbed by my presence and restored by me with the care of someone who had eaten two volumes on archive conservation and understood the importance of not leaving evidence.
He had left the collection before I understood what was happening.
Not slowly, the way he had entered. Quickly — the footsteps of a person who has had a thought that requires immediate action, who is moving toward something rather than through something, the particular acoustic signature of a decision in motion.
The hand lamp. The notebook. The leather case.
The door, locked behind him.
I tracked his footsteps up the corridor toward his office.
Then, twelve minutes later, down the corridor.
Past his office.
Past the reading room.
Toward the library's main entrance.
I had not heard him leave the building before. He was not a person who left in the middle of the afternoon — the library's rhythms were his rhythms, and the afternoon belonged to the work. But the sound of his footsteps moved through the entrance hall, and the main door opened, and the city's sounds entered briefly — that unedited, incomplete, demanding quality I had encountered at the outer wall — and the door closed.
He had gone somewhere.
I moved through the wall toward the main entrance, following the acoustic residue of his departure, and held still at the section of the exterior wall facing the street, and listened to the city not knowing where he had gone or when he would return or what thought had produced that sudden purposeful movement through the building.
I had, as of this morning, thirty-eight pages of unread spellbook in a conservation suite I could not access.
I had an archive I had read completely and would not be able to add to.
I had a librarian who had just asked a question into an empty wall and walked out of the building.
I had a name — Maren Aldous — that was twelve minutes' walk in a direction I did not know and a building I had never been to and an exterior I could not navigate and an interior I could not reach.
The city sounded like something through three feet of stone.
I could not get through the stone.
This was, I understood, the most accurate description of my situation that I had yet produced: not I have not yet found the medium, which had sounded like a temporary condition, a problem pending solution, but I cannot get through the stone, which was the literal fact, which was the condition I was actually in, which was not going to be resolved by more reading or more theory or more categories in the mine space.
I needed something I did not have.
For the first time since the spellbook's first page, I did not know what it was.
I held this in the part of my mind that had no filing system, where the Countess lived and Sera's I am glad you do and the incomplete circle and Aldric's I am not yet dishonest, and I felt the full weight of what was accumulated there — not as burden, exactly, not as debt, but as mass, as the specific gravity of a self that had been assembled from other people's unfinished business and was now confronting the possibility that the assembly had produced something that was complete enough to want things it could not reach.
That was not a comfortable feeling.
It was also, I was beginning to understand, not an optional one.
Greaves walked to Corrant Street in eleven minutes because he was walking quickly and had not brought a coat, which was a decision he recognized as impractical approximately halfway there and continued to make anyway because stopping to return for a coat would have required interrupting the specific quality of forward motion he had been in since standing at frame R.C. 12-A and noticing, with the eye of a person who had spent forty years reading the physical condition of archival materials, that the frame's dust accumulation on its right rear corner was slightly disturbed.
Not absent. Slightly displaced, in the specific pattern of a pressure applied and released.
He had not pressed the corner.
He had decided, standing at the frame with his hand three inches from it, that pressing the corner was not the appropriate next step.
The appropriate next step required information he did not have.
The appropriate next step was the person who had spent more time thinking about what might be in this collection than anyone else alive.
The Collegium building on Corrant Street had a porter who knew Greaves by sight and waved him through to the internal corridor without requiring him to state his purpose. He had been here enough times to be recognized as someone with legitimate business, which was itself a mild institutional irony given the nature of the business he was currently conducting.
He knocked on the door at the end of the corridor.
A pause.
"Come in."
Maren Aldous looked up from her desk with the expression of a person who had been in the middle of something and was assessing whether the interruption was worth it. She was approximately sixty, with the specific quality of stillness that Greaves had come to associate with people who spent their professional lives applying rigorous standards to other people's claims — a stillness that was not rest but preparation, the readiness of someone who was always about to ask the next question.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"You filed a quarterly report this morning," she said.
"Yes."
"It said routine maintenance."
"Yes."
"You are here in person, without an appointment, on the afternoon of the day you filed a quarterly report saying routine maintenance."
"Yes."
She put down her pen.
"Sit down, Greaves."
He sat.
"Tell me," she said, "what routine maintenance looked like."
He had prepared, on the walk over, a version of events that contained everything relevant and nothing that would require him to describe what he believed was in the walls. He had arrived at the beginning of this version several times during the walk and each time had found that the version failed to account for something — the burn mark, or the handled pages, or the disturbed dust on frame R.C. 12-A — that seemed, in the context of Maren Aldous sitting across a desk and waiting, too significant to omit.
He had Sera's green book in his coat pocket.
He had not decided, as of entering the building, what he was going to do with it.
He looked at the desk.
He looked at her.
He took the green book out of his pocket and put it on the desk between them.
"I think," he said, "that Sera Voss was right about something."
Maren Aldous looked at the green book.
She had, Greaves noted, recognized it immediately — no hesitation, no question about what it was, the recognition of someone who knew this object and had perhaps wondered where it had gone.
"Where did you get that?" she said.
"It was delivered to the library anonymously three years ago. I've had it since." He paused. "I think it was delivered to the library because someone read it and understood that the library was the correct location for it. Given its contents."
A silence.
Not the second kind. A third kind he had not encountered before: the silence of someone revising their assessment not of a category but of a situation, the specific quality of a mind working quickly through implications.
"You've read it," she said.
"Twice."
"And you think she was right."
"I think she was describing conditions that may have been met."
The silence again.
"In the restricted collection," she said.
It was not a question.
"In the restricted collection," he said.
Maren Aldous looked at the green book on the desk between them. She did not pick it up. She looked at it with the expression of someone encountering an object whose significance they had known about for longer than the object had been in the room with them.
"I wrote the review of Aldric's theses," she said. "Twenty years ago."
"I know."
"I concluded that his evidence was insufficient. That the threshold criterion was unmet." She paused. "I still believe that."
"I know," he said. "I think that may be the wrong conclusion for reasons that have recently become relevant."
Another silence.
"Show me the burn mark," she said.
They had left the building together before I was aware it was happening.
I understood this only in retrospect, when the footsteps that should have returned down the main corridor did not, and the door did not open, and the afternoon moved forward without Greaves's specific acoustic signature appearing in the library's rhythm. He had not come back.
Then, at twenty past four, the door opened.
Two sets of footsteps.
His — familiar, economical. And a second set: slightly slower, more deliberate, the specific quality of a person who moved through spaces with the attention of someone accustomed to reading them.
A woman's voice, in the corridor outside the restricted collection:
"When you say the burn mark is on the interior face—"
"Facing inward. Not outward. Whatever produced it was inside the wall, generating outward pressure that the stone redirected inward."
A pause.
"That's consistent," she said, "with a mana discharge that was being actively contained."
"That was my interpretation."
"You have a fairly sophisticated interpretation for a librarian."
"I've been doing this for forty years," he said. "You develop theories."
The sound of the restricted collection key.
The door opened.
Two sets of footsteps entered the space where I was not.
I was three walls away, in the channel behind the east wing's second floor reading room, holding very still, and I want to be precise about what I felt as I tracked the acoustic evidence of Maren Aldous entering the restricted collection for the first time:
Not fear.
Not the version of it I had experienced with the desiccant — the cold recognition of a specific threat to a specific body. This was something different: the sensation of a situation that had been developing in one direction and had just, without warning, developed in another.
She was here.
The name from Sera's catalogue, the problem Sera had spent six years unable to answer, the most rigorous critic of the framework that governed how my existence would be assessed — she was thirty feet from the document frames and had just described, correctly, the physical mechanics of a contained mana discharge, and Greaves had brought her here, which meant that Greaves had decided something in the forty minutes since leaving the restricted collection that I had not predicted and was not certain I would have recommended if I had been in a position to recommend things.
I had not been in a position.
I was not in a position.
The medium problem was not solved. It had acquired new pressure from an unexpected direction, and the pressure was standing in the restricted collection reading the burn mark with a forty-year-old analysis of why things like me were not supposed to be possible, and she had said consistent with a mana discharge being actively contained without knowing she was describing the work of the discharge's source, which was currently in the wall fifteen feet from where she was standing.
I added to the category what the wall gives and what it costs: it gives you the whole conversation. The cost is that you cannot enter it.
Then I held every category I had built across a day of becoming and tried to determine whether the sum of them constituted adequate preparation for what was currently happening.
It did not.
I had thirty-eight unread pages and no medium and Maren Aldous in the restricted collection and a new fact arriving: I could want, and I could fail to get what I wanted, and the failure was not a problem to be solved by becoming more sophisticated.
Sometimes the wall was just a wall.
I held this.
I did not file it.
Some things went directly into mine.