Therese waited in the antechamber, her suspicion that this was all a terrible idea and she should just make her apologies and leave growing ever stronger. She fidgeted, her hands in her lap, and tried to make herself look interested in her surroundings.

The Magisterial offices were very similar to the Headmistress’s office: richly appointed and dark, with polished mahogany and blackened metal fixtures, and only the vaguest hint of Worked lighting to make the place navigable. Therese wondered why the Tower never provided exterior windows. Possibly they were always too deep within its confines to make that work logistically. The faux windows in the residence rooms were nice, and definitely gave the illusion of daytime, but there were never vistas to contemplate without a long walk through the back rooms to the upper Peripheral Tower.

Not that the bleak apocalyptic vistas of the City were all that wonderful as scenery when one was troubled.

Therese was troubled.

She’d considered trying to talk to the Headmistress, but she knew Gaveny was in the classroom with Riley’s cadre, monitoring, and in any case she’d already more or less disclaimed any deeper knowledge about the Tower than Therese herself already had. She’d also considered both Diviner Rajavi, her boss, and Archivist Wright, who might know of something in the Index she could follow up on. But both of those seemed like long shots, and she didn’t want to trouble them with what was probably a dead end of investigation.

So instead she decided to trouble a fucking Magister.

The Adept at the desk, Nynke, was someone Therese knew only vaguely. She was in her thirties, mostly didn’t leave the upper reaches of Administration, and seemed to only engage with the rest of the Tower when she’d occasionally appear with research papers on esoteric Tower lore and strange Tower celestial properties. She was also the intermediary between the Magisters and the rest of the Academy, and she’d already relayed Therese’s request to the mysterious rooms behind her desk, through the frosted-glass door.

Therese tangled her fingers into each other, increasingly certain this had been a terrible idea. Just as she’d started to plan out what she’d say to politely excuse herself and flee back down to the residences, Nynke looked up. A shimmer above her desk showed where a celestial construct had materialized to communicate with her – silently, apparently; how did they do that, Therese wondered?

“Adept Lasalle. The Magister will see you now. Please come with me.”

Any thought that she might get to see the inside of a Magister’s actual office was quickly dismissed, as Nynke led her through the door into a hallway lined with doors, took the very first one on the left, and showed Therese the single chair that faced a heavy oak desk.

Behind the desk, another, larger chair, and another door.

As Nynke closed the door behind her, leaving Therese alone, the other door opened, and the Worked lamps on the walls all flared to life. Magister Pérez entered, seeming to move without any steps in her gait, as though she flowed over the floors like a liquid. She settled smoothly into her chair, facing Therese.

There were only the two chairs in the room. If ever a room had been designed to intimidate, it was this one. Therese even suspected the desk and the Magister’s chair were on a slightly elevated platform, but she didn’t think it would be a good idea to get up and go behind the desk to take a look.

“Adept Lasalle. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

Therese’s mouth had gone dry, and it took her a moment to find her voice. “I– I wanted to speak with you about Riley. Novice Riley,” she quickly corrected herself. “Uh. Novice Hawkins.”

The Magister waited, impassive.

“You, um. You asked me to keep an eye on him. Last night something happened, and I thought I should talk to someone about it, and, um. You were the only person that came to mind, given what happened.”

“Please go on.”

Therese couldn’t tell if that was impatience in her voice, or indifference, or enthusiasm. This was all seeming like a really terrible idea. “Um, right, so I’ve had some kind of empathetic connection to Novice Hawkins since my initial encounter with him six months ago. I don’t know what it is, and it doesn’t seem to be part of any ongoing Working.” She tried to gather herself. “Last night, he had a dream, and I was drawn into that dream.”

Magister Pérez leaned forward slightly. “Dreams are the province of your department. Why did you not bring this to Diviner Rajavi?”

“This… wasn’t a prophetic dream. Or at least, not like any I’ve encountered, either personally or in the Archives.” She took a deep breath. “I think the Tower was communicating with Novice Hawkins.”

That got the Magister’s complete attention.

“And then, the Tower communicated with me.”

And that brought the Magister to her feet.

“Please excuse me a moment.” The Magister left the room.

Shit. Therese tried to decide if the right course of action was to run for it, or to try to throw a Portal together on the spot, or to hide. Had she transgressed some taboo that only Magisters knew about, that they reserved for themselves alone? Had she committed some kind of esoteric offense, some sin against their strange otherworldly home?

Before she could put any plan into motion, the Magister returned, with another Magister, one Therese had never met. A pale ethereal woman, with colorless hair and pink rimmed eyes. She drifted over to Therese.

Magister Pérez gestured at Therese as she took her seat again. “This is Magister Leppä. She will need to put her hands on you to establish a rapport and create a Tower link between you. Is this permissible?”

Therese was not expecting to be asked for consent, but she quickly nodded, and the strangely fey woman placed her cool hands on Therese, one on each side of her neck, as though she was about to give the younger woman a massage.

“Now,” Magister Pérez said. “Continue, and please spare no detail in what the Tower said or communicated to you.”

There was a low hum coming from behind her, and Therese realized that Magister Leppä was murmuring, and it was a Sigil name, and it was long. And, she thought, in Finnish? Were Sigils language-neutral?

She felt something tickle the base of her skull, and it was strangely familiar. She tried to dig for the memory; what was this feeling?

And then she placed it: this was the feeling of the Presence from her dream, only in vastly reduced form, just a feather’s weight on her consciousness, not the oppressive totality of the dream-Tower.

Magister Leppä spoke as soon as Therese was able to identify the sensation: “Yes, she has spoken with the Anchor. Its shape is all over her mind.”

“Adept Lasalle. Please begin.”

And so Therese told them everything. Everything in the dream, everything the Tower had said to her, her confusion about the words that seemed to blur into a multitude of meanings. Everything the figure on the bluff had done. Her certainty that it was Riley. Her conviction that Riley was, in this dream place, a girl.

When she was done, she was exhausted. Magister Perez returned over and over to the multiply-loaded terms, and in particular kept asking about what Therese had heard as ‘they’. Every time she had to revisit that sensation, her stomach churned, and she was sure she wasn’t conveying the absolute despair the word had brought with it. She kept looking for synonyms for the adjectives she’d already used, something novel to make her horror evident.

Finally, she was finished, and the Magisters both fell silent. Magister Leppä took her hands off Therese’s shoulders, and the trickle-sensation of the Presence began to slowly leak away.

“We should remove these memories. This message is not for her.”

Magister Leppä frowned. “I did not sense this from the Anchor.”

Magister Perez paused, then said “The Anchor gives us latitude to make these decisions ourselves. We cannot allow a junior Adept to leave with this matter lingering in her mind. She will inadvertently reveal something we cannot allow to be revealed.”

Therese felt a cold knot of terror in her gut. They were planning to do something to her. Memory erasure. Or something worse. She felt her breath coming quicker, shallow, and her pulse started to throb.

Magister Leppä held the other Magister’s gaze for a few long moments, and then finally nodded. “I defer to your judgement in this.”

Magister Perez nodded, and a look of sadness crossed her face. “I do not like this necessity either.” Then, finally turning to Therese, she said, “You do not have to worry. This will not harm you and will not damage you. You made the right decision in bringing this to our attention, and your diligence will be rewarded, but… some of the things you have seen could, by simple fact of your having perceived them, find root in your mind and create an opening that could be exploited by forces we are carefully keeping at bay.”

Magister Leppä said, “There is no malice in this, what we are going to do.”

She reached out to place her hands back on Therese’s shoulders and neck.

And she stopped, halfway to Therese, her hands outstretched, as the Presence arrived. It was a titanic mountain of psychic weight, crushing Therese beneath it, leaving her wide-eyed and unable to speak.

The Magisters were similarly crushed, frozen in place, mouths agape, barely able to remain standing.

we forbid this
we chose [Therese]
she is our channel to [Riley]
you will not do this

And with that, the Presence withdrew, all at once, a release that caused Magister Perez to stagger back into her seat, and Magister Leppä to collapse on the spot, landing heavily on her hands and knees, trying to catch her breath.

Around them, the Tower rumbled, awakened once again. All the lights flickered as celestial power coursed through the structure around them, and Therese felt it as a buzzing vibration, a drill bit in her mind.

It was several minutes before any of them could speak again. Magister Leppä slowly regained her feet, looking with flat shocked eyes at Therese, and then trying to meet Magister Perez’s gaze. Perez was looking down at her hands.

She spoke, but not to Therese. “Call the Council. I will offer my resignation.” Then, seeming to remember the Adept’s presence, found Therese’s face with her eyes. “Adept Lasalle. You may go. We will rely on your discretion.”

Therese found that she could not escape the room fast enough, certain at any moment she’d be dragged back inside, or that the Presence would come upon her again. She fled.

# # #

Riley had expected something like a library when he arrived with the others at the Archives. Maybe something like the giant vaulted ceiling reading room in the New York library, ornate and elaborate and decorative and hushed. The actual front room of the Archives was instead more like a floor from an office building. Granted, it had that same early-20th-century wood-and-brass vibe of the rest of the Tower’s interior, but he could imagine row after row after row of desks with accountants, each of them wearing suspenders and that little green visor, tapping away at mechanical adding machines.

Instead there were row after row of shelves, uniform, square, and chest height, and every shelf was crammed with books. And every book seemed to be bound the same: dark fabric. Shelf after shelf of books of nearly identical size, in identical binding, and the whole of the room was perhaps forty meters square.

Riley looked around, confused. You could see the entire room from here. It was brightly lit by fluorescent tube lights, faintly buzzing overhead. Why would you have any worry about getting lost? Was Allie being metaphorical, saying they’d get lost reading? He didn’t think that warranted bringing emergency snacks, if so.

Key, who Riley recognized from yesterday’s journey up the Tower stairs, met them near the front, where a cluster of desks and tables were covered in scattered papers, open books, charts, diagrams, and writing implements. “Hey, firsties! I’m Adept Keshia, and I’ll be introducing you to the Index today!”

Suliat asked, “Don’t we already have a copy of the Index? We were issued a very, very thick book, at least. I’ve been trying to read it but–”

Key laughed, and held up a hand to interrupt. “Sorry, not trying to be rude. That book? Is the Index Overview. And it’s Volume One, which covers mainly non-technical materials.” Key grinned. “And I wouldn’t try to read it, not straight through. It’s more of a reference book.”

Suliat had the look of someone regretting her earlier choices. Riley wondered how much of the Index she’d diligently read and tried to memorize. She seemed like the type to try to get ahead of the workload.

“You can think of the Index Overview as something like an encyclopedia for kids in primary school. It’s meant to give you a quick summary, and then point you to some references. Those references are to the Index itself.”

She gestured to the room. “This is the Index.”

Riley gaped. So did Suliat.

“Every volume you see on the shelves of this room is an Index volume, giving a more in-depth exploration of the topic referenced, and, more importantly, a reference to the Archives itself.” She pointed towards the back of the room, where the wall was pierced by six doors, evenly spaced, about twenty feet apart. “Those passages lead to the Archives.”

“H-How big–” Suliat began.

“How big is it? We don’t know. Part of what my department does is explore and map the Archives. We have found materials dating back five or six centuries, and those reference materials we haven’t found yet that go back ten centuries. We uncover new passages, sometimes whole new wings. We find doors behind bookshelves, hidden by clever mechanisms.” Key grinned. “It’s kind of like Indiana Jones. Or, uh, have any of you heard of this creepy meme thing called ‘the backrooms’?”

Himari and Eve nodded.

“It’s like that. Except full of books and papers and scrolls and filing cabinets and diagrams pinned up to walls.” She paused, for effect. “And it changes.”

“Changes how?” Himari was suddenly much more interested than she had been. Maybe whatever this ‘backrooms’ thing was, it was enough to pique her interest.

“Doors vanish sometimes. Whole sections stop being accessible. Well-mapped pathways become tangled and confused. Rooms once near the front somehow end up a half mile into the depths.”

Himari was incredulous. “A half mile? How is that–”

“The Tower’s bigger inside than outside,” Riley said. “I mean just look how tall that center shaft is. I saw it from the outside and it’s big but it’s not that big.”

“Like the Tardis,” offered Eve, which meant nothing to Riley, but which elicited a nod from Himari.

Key said, “That’s correct. We’ve mapped portions of the Archives out to five miles from here, laterally, and twenty floors up and down, vertically. And we haven’t even come close to reaching the end of it. There are currently eight major passages under exploration, and about twenty room clusters that are being mapped for possible secrets. And catalogued, of course. Always catalogued.”

“So if I want to know something,” Suliat asked, “I look it up in the Index Overview, and come here to find the actual Index volume, and–”

“And typically you stop there,” Key interrupted. “The Index is detailed enough for almost anything you’re trying to learn. Until you’re doing serious research at a senior Adept level, anyway. But if you need more information than what’s in this room, you talk to an Archivist next.” She gestured down at herself with both hands, as though she were displaying her outfit for approval. “Me, for instance. We’ve got the training and the resources to lead you to the right part of the Archives, and help you find your primary sources. Or to tell you that you’re going to be disappointed, because we don’t have that bit catalogued yet. Or the wing you need has gone missing.”

Libraries that go missing. “What happens,” Riley said carefully, “if someone is inside an area of the Archives that goes missing?”

Key paused a moment before answering. “That’s never happened to anyone in the Academy’s records.”

That was a very specific answer, wasn’t it? Riley pressed. “Are you saying it has happened, though?”

The discomfort in Key’s voice started to show in her expression, as well. “We’ve found things during explorations. They were suggestive. Not evidence of anything, but suggestive.”

Himari cut in. “Suggestive of what?”

“Of someone living in the Archives. Deep inside the Archives. A very, very long time ago.”

Suliat hissed, and met Riley’s eyes. Just how dangerous was this place? Himari followed up. “Like, what, campfires, old clothes, what?”

“Graffiti, mostly in Latin. Someone trying to mark the walls to find a way out, tallying days.” Key spread her hands in what might have been meant as reassurance. “There are a lot of strange things in the Archive. That wouldn’t even make the top ten, I assure you. Like I said, it’s never happened that we know of, and all we’ve got is this one weird discovery.” She continued sotto voce: “And an absolute mountain of research papers on it.”

Riley started wishing he’d brought more than just a sandwich and a bottle of water.

“Today’s project is going to be a short expedition into the Archives, a research trip on a topic of your choice, to demonstrate how this works and get you used to the place.” She smiled. “To get the initial freakout over with before you’re in here for actual research. Because you’re gonna freak out. It happens every time.”

Himari didn’t look worried, but Eve did. And on Suliat’s face was a kind of barely-contained excitement. Riley suspected she was one of those people who would live in libraries if she could. Not that he, with his solitude-in-company thing, was any different, but this place didn’t sound at all peaceful and meditative. In her case, though, she’d actually tried to just read the Index Overview straight through, which hadn’t even occurred to him.

No, I went straight for the catalog of Sigils.

“So! The first thing we do is decide as a group what we’ll be looking up. Give me any topic, anything you’ve heard about so far in your orientation, the more obscure the bet–”

“The Tree.” Riley said the words without thinking, snapping them out like a compulsion. Where did that come from?

Key turned her head to him so quickly that he heard the click-click of her braided beads as they swung together. Her eyes had widened. “Where did you hear about that?”

He shrugged, feigning indifference. “Just something Nora said yesterday. It sounded interesting.”

Key’s eyes stayed fixed on his face for a long moment, searching it, and then she nodded. “Okay. Yes, we can go look up the Tree, but since it’s a very speculative field of study, there isn’t much material to find. Probably not enough to give us a whole afternoon of exploration. So let’s have a second topic to follow up with, something we can actually dive into the Archives for.”

Himari took this opportunity to say, “I want to know more about Banes.”

Key nodded, maybe a little too vigorously. “Yes! Okay, that’s a good one, because the wings where Banes research can mostly be found are accessible and extensive, so we’ll only be scratching the surface of what’s in there. Let’s make that our primary goal, and we’ll see what the Index says about the Tree.”

She looked around at them again, her eyes skipping quickly over Riley. “Oh, and I should mention. Entering the Archives is one of the things covered by the buddy system, in case that wasn’t clear. Just like Working and everything else, you do it together or not at all. Okay?”

Everyone nodded, and she turned to lead them towards the center of the Index room.

As they walked, Himari leaned towards Riley. “What the fuck is the Tree?”

He shook head, said in a low voice, “I’ll tell you about it later. Kind of an interesting reaction, though, don’t you think?”

“It was like you goosed her. You think she was scared or just surprised?”

“I think it was both.”

# # #

The room was organized into quarters, with four wide aisles at right angles from a central raised platform. Each quarter was filled with the low bookshelves, lined up in unbroken rows. In the central platform was a massive wooden lectern, and atop this lectern was an equally massive book.

Riley had expected it to be some sort of ancient grimoire with iron bandings and leather and locks, but it was an ordinary – albeit very large – book, with modern binding and a neat modern typeface. It was open to a page in the middle somewhere, the binding curling under the spine to support the stitched pages. The paper was bright and new.

Seeing him examine the page, Key said, “We get a new one printed every few years. They don’t go out of date all that quickly, but this is the master Index Overview, after all, and everyone pretty much relies on it for everything.”

“Why not just digitize everything?” Eve was looking at the book upside down, from the front of the lectern, and Riley wondered if she could read inverted text. It always gave him a headache.

“It is all digitized, back on the Primary. But computers won’t work here, and the Archive is here, so we need a local reference. Can’t just go running back through a Portal every time we need to look something up.” She shrugged. “Archivist teams spend a week in the Primary every month or so, just updating the database with their latest cataloguing. It’s really boring data entry, but it’s a good way to catch up on whatever’s new on streaming.”

“I didn’t realize there was that much back-and-forth between here and Earth,” Suliat said, making it a question.

“Oh yeah. The Academy has a lot of facilities in the Primary. There’s a ton of work that just can’t be done here, because of tech failure. And while our celestial constructs can automate a lot of it, they’re not really smart enough to do things like cataloguing or data entry. So we do that with computers, like anyone else.” She considered. “Logistics does basically all of their work in the Primary, too. I mean, they kind of have to. They’re in charge of portals and keeping us well supplied with potato chips.”

“But not the other departments,” Riley said.

“Armory and Divination can’t really work without access to the Tower, and while Theory maybe could, it wouldn’t be safe.” She smiled. “And Academics and Rangers don’t really make sense outside the context of the Tower and the City. Anyway. Let’s look some things up.”

She started flipping through the pages, heading for the back in great chunks of a hundred at a time, then slowing. “You wanted to know about… the Tree. Here you go.”

Riley leaned over to see the page. The text was no more than a half column of the two on the page. Under the header, ‘The Tree’, was a series of incomprehensible codes.

REF/ACTIVE: EXPL 6
REF/ACTIVE: MODELING
REF/ACTIVE: THEORY
MAGISTERIAL SEAL
SUMMARY: Volume T.47.D.3

Below that was text.

“The Tree is a celestial model proposed by a collaborative paper between Adept (now Magister) Leppä of the Divination Department and Adept (now Magister) Zhang of the Theory Department, in Primary 1973. Little evidence has been found to support this model, and since ascending to the Council, both authors of the paper have ceased work on this avenue of research.

“The paper suggests a model of the universe that derives from the notion of the growing block universe, but which includes a fractal expansion of the block universe along all possible outcomes, each of which represents a small deviation of probability from the actual block outcome. The present thus fragments the block in a nearly infinite array of possibilities, with the most probable outcomes being the most real, and unreality increasing as the accumulated probability space of each outcome approaches zero in the limit.

“The crucial argument in the Tree theory is that the patterns by which the universe expands fractally correspond to the Sigils, and that they describe a shape for the expansion at every instant of ‘present’, and that shape can be understood as a tree-like structure, comprised of Sigils, and itself fractally complex. In this theory, a complete catalogue of Sigils is ultimately impossible, and we can only recognize common taxonomies of Sigils. For more information, xrefs follow.”

And what followed was a wall of incomprehensible codes, somewhat like the one offered as ‘SUMMARY’ in the header.

Riley blinked. “Well. None of that made any sense to me at all.”

Key nodded. “It’s incredibly obscure shit. Like I said. But this is a nice simple set of references, so let’s look at them. First, the stuff at the top means that this topic is the subject of active work. ‘Expl 6’ means ‘Exploration Team 6’, which is an Archivist team. The numbers are pretty much arbitrary, assigned when a new team is spun up and unassigned when they finish. That team has been working on a new section of the Archives for about a year and a half, I think. Just the most tedious cataloguing bullshit you can imagine. But they must have found something that pertained to this, because they put it in their reports, which got put in the big database, which ended up reflected right here.”

She pointed to the next line. “Modeling means there’s a Theory team working on this in the Primary, and they’re using computers to build models of the idea. Models in the data sense, not the 3D sense. This is a new thing Theory’s been doing, and nobody is really sure if it’s going to work. Personally I think it’s bullshit, but there’s a Magister who’s really excited about AI and large language models and feeding it everything we know about Sigils.”

Himari snorted. “That sounds like a good way to get some magical sounding garbage.”

“Yep. But if a Magister thinks it will work, we’re gonna try it. They more or less call the shots. Anyway, the next line is pretty simple, just saying this is a topic of active interest to the Theory department and if you want to go poke around in it, you maybe should let them know. After that, this is a Magister project. And finally,” she slid her finger down to the last line in the header, “this is where we can read the full summary article in the Index. T, which is… over there–” She pointed off towards one corner of the room. “Shelf 47, volume D3. Which we aren’t going to go read, because it’s going to be more of this–” she gestured at the page– “and it’s not going to be any more readable.”

Riley nodded. Something felt weird about this, though. The text made it all seem like a silly idea someone had come up with while drunk one day. But if so, why did it make Key jump like that? Why did it get Nora so excited, when he used the word ‘fractal’? Why did all these codes make it sound like something a lot of people were putting a lot of resources into?

It didn’t escape his attention that Key had more or less slid right past ‘magisterial seal’, which sounded a lot more significant than just ‘it’s a Magister project’.

Riley’s inconvenient question having been dispensed with, Key had moved on to looking up Banes, and was now asking Himari to narrow down her interest – Bane theory, historical records of Banes, Bane countermeasures, catalogues of Bane powers, and on and on. Riley had seen quite enough of Banes, and other than the specific breakdown of the codes that explained where to find more information, he tuned the discussion out to consider the question of the Tree some more.

# # #

“I think we’re lost,” Eve said again. She had become increasingly assertive as the leadership team of Himari and Suliat had started to lose confidence. They were an hour into this expedition, and they had stopped seeing markers that matched what the Index had shown about fifteen minutes ago.

“We’re not lost. We’re just narrowing it down, okay?” Himari was getting impatient with Eve, and Riley had a bad feeling someone was going to have to intervene, and that someone was probably going to be him. Suliat was entirely lost in the notes she’d taken from the Index – sketches of the path symbols that were meant to lead you from chamber to chamber until you found your target.

The problem was, nothing Key could have said could have prepared them for what the word ‘chamber’ meant in the context of the Archive.

The first chamber, which was represented by a simple square on the door leading out of the Index room, proved to be a ballroom-sized space with a broad flight of stairs down which a debutante could arrive at a party in style. Balconies with brass railings ringed the space on four levels, and at each balcony level, bridges crossed the space, seemingly at random intervals, sometimes three on a level, sometimes only one.

And every wall of every balcony was a bookshelf, and every bookshelf was full of volumes.

Hanging above the whole thing were a series of chandeliers, and from here Riley could see that none of them was supported by a chain or other connection to the ceiling. In fact, the ceiling itself was hidden from view by shadow and distance, and the chandeliers seemed to just float, just below the fourth and highest balcony level.

Occasional openings, stone-framed archways, pierced the walls of each level, two or three on each side at each of the four different balcony heights. Atop each of the archways was a keystone, and inscribed in each keystone was a symbol. By Riley’s count there were twenty archways leading out of that chamber alone. And they had to check every one of them to match them to the next symbol in the carefully-copied Index reference.

That first one wasn’t too hard. Calling out what symbol you were looking at when you split up was entertaining, because ‘it has a little squiggle in it’ was inherently funny, and the clarifying follow-ups were equally as funny. “Is it a sideways squiggle? Does it look like a little man with a big foot?”

The second chamber, found after several long hallways with only smaller rooms off them, was an Escherian nightmare.

Stairs crossed and re-crossed the broad circular space, sometimes going up, sometimes going sideways. RIley’s fears that they’d have to navigate some sort of bizarre gravity changes were, at least, not realized. The sideways stairs were just incomprehensible constructions that didn’t lead anywhere or do anything. The actual stacks were tucked away down long passages that led away from the circular space in the center, and each passage ended in a heavy door with a lever handle and one of the automatic-close arms at the top, like might be found in a school.

The third chamber was a maze. Riley thought this is where they probably took a wrong turn, because at each step the symbols had become more and more similar, as though they were closing in on the platonic ideal of a particular shape, but this meant that every doorway had to be carefully checked against their notes. Riley asked Suliat, in a low voice, if she was absolutely sure of her copying, given how subtle the differences were, and she said she was, but he thought there might be some hesitation in her voice, a wavering of confidence.

Now they were in a series of rooms, each furnished with a conference table surrounded by mid-century chairs and with an ancient slide projector in the center. Every one of these was turned on, projecting a white square on a blank wall; none of them contained any slides. Each room was piled high in the corners with corrugated cardboard boxes, white, with meaningless ideographs written on them in what seemed to be Sharpie marker. Inside each box were loose, unbound papers and occasional magazines and pamphlets, none of which were legible.

Riley had upended one of these boxes on the table in the current room, and was sifting through its contents to give himself something to do while Himari and Suliat argued in quiet voices about the next symbol. Most of the paperwork seemed to be ledger pages, columns of numbers with unreadable labels in the index column. He spread them more broadly to see if there was anything at all of interest, but there wasn’t.

Eve had joined him. “What do you think?”

Riley didn’t look up. “It doesn’t really matter, is what I think. They put telltales on us. If we’re not back in another hour, Key will come get us.” He gestured at the mess of papers. “Might as well poke around and see if there’s anything interesting here. I mean, that’s what the actual Archivists do, right?”

Eve nodded, but hesitantly. “I really don’t like being lost. All my worst memories are of being lost.” She was speaking just barely above a whisper, but he could hear the tension in her voice. She was very close to tears, he suspected.

And that, unaccountably, seemed like something he should try to prevent. He barely knew the girl, but the idea of letting her break down in tears in this bizarre infinite library-maze felt like a deep betrayal of something unspoken between all of them.

He didn’t know how to comfort her — even if he did, the thought of offering comfort to anyone seemed deeply alien. What would he do, offer to put his arm around her? She flinched at loud noises; some boy trying to touch her was, well. He writhed internally with the thought of himself as a source of threat, of danger, of masculine danger specifically.

But he did have an idea. Something that would get them out of this place before the panic attack he could see enveloping Eve finally tightened its grip. He’d gotten the idea a while back, and now seemed like the right time to bring it up. It would at least keep Eve from falling apart. And maybe it would work, and maybe they’d all learn something interesting, but most importantly: it would be stupid and reckless and the risks would land on him.

He’d be throwing himself in front of the bullet for the rest of them.

“I want to try something,” he said.

Himari and Suliat looked up from their conversation.

“I want to see if that symbol is actually a Sigil, and try calling it.”

Suliat blinked, taken aback. Himari seemed equally surprised but immediately a slow grin spread across her face. “Oh hell yes. That’s a goddamn plan.”

Eve reached out to touch his arm. “That doesn’t, um… that really seems like a bad idea?”

He said, “You heard what they told us. The Tower cleans up messes. The worst that happens is that something goes wrong and they have to come rescue us early, or the Tower gets rid of the celestial power, or whatever.”

“Do you even know how to call Sigils?” Suliat looked at least as worried as Eve, though her voice wasn’t shaky.

“Nope. But I’ve done it a couple of times now, accidentally, so it’s possible, right?” He was already impatient to try it out, already feeling the itch of leaping into something stupid and dangerous and potentially self-destructive. Recklessness born of an indifference to his own life, the manic bursts of action a constant companion to his depression.

I can do this, and I can do it for them, and I can be the one who gets hurt.

Suliat was chewing her lip, trying to find a reason to keep her notes from him, but Himari took the initiative and grabbed the sheet of paper, bringing it around the table to Riley. Eve’s touch on his arm turned into a brief squeeze, and he could feel her hand trembling.

He looked sideways at her, and now he could see the fear in her eyes. Sigils, or recklessness? He suspected it was the former that was flooding her with panic adrenaline. “Don’t worry. I’m a professional,” he said, putting on a ridiculous ‘Ma’am, we’re from the Government’ voice. She didn’t seem reassured in the slightest, but Suliat had a tiny bit of smile, at least.

Himari handed him the notes. Second to last symbol. He looked at it, tried to remember if he’d seen it in the Goetia pages he’d leafed through, decided that even if he had he wouldn’t remember a thing about it, and set the paper down in front of him.

“Okay. I don’t know what this will do, if it will do anything, but um. Slap me if I start to do anything too weird, okay?”

They nodded, Suliat also moving around the table to join him, and Eve taking a couple of careful steps back away from him.

He looked down at the symbol. A zig-zag of curved lines, see-sawing back and forth. A single right angle at the end. He tried imagining this symbol, picturing it, trying to draw it in his mind.

Something tickled.

He pictured the symbol cut into lines of fire.

The tickle turned into an itch.

He heard whispers, subvocal mutterings from all around him, as though the boxes of papers were all waking up and offering their thoughts on what he was attempting.

The lines of the symbol caught in his mind, sticking there, and he found he could no longer dispel them or look away from them.

wretched

That voice was clearer than the rest. That voice was almost audible.

wretched fall

His mouth opened, and he could feel the words trying to use his tongue to form them. For the first time in the whole experience, he felt a pang of doubt and fear. Was this actually a good idea?

“Wretched Fall From the Grace of Heaven,” he said in a high, clear voice.

His mind exploded in white fire.