Library of Souls Read Free Page B

If you find others, perhaps …”
    I glanced at the photo and got a shock. It was a wallet-sized portrait of a woman holding a baby. Sergei had clearly been carrying it with him a long time. Though the people in the photo were pleasant enough, the photo itself—or the negative—had been seriously damaged, perhaps narrowly survived a fire, exposed to such heat that the faces were warped and fragmented. Sergei had never mentioned his family before now; all he’d talked about since we met him was raising an army of peculiars—going loop to loop to recruit able-bodied survivors of the raids and purges. He never told us what he wanted an army
for
: to get them back.
    â€œWe’ll find them, too,” I said.
    We both knew this was far-fetched, but it was what he needed to hear.
    â€œThank you,” he said, and relaxed into a spreading pool of blood.

    â€œHe doesn’t have long,” Addison said, moving to lick Sergei’s face.
    â€œI might have enough heat to cauterize the wound,” said Emma. Scooting toward him, she began rubbing her hands together.
    Addison nosed the folding man’s shirt near his abdomen. “Here. He’s hurt here.” Emma put her hands on either side of the spot, and at the sizzle of flesh I stood up, feeling faint.
    I looked out the window. We were still pulling out of the station, slowed perhaps by debris on the tracks. The emergency lights’ SOS flicker picked details from the dark at random. The body of a dead wight half buried in glass. The crumpled phone booth, scene of my breakthrough. The hollow—I registered its form with a shock—trotting on the platform alongside us, a few cars back, casual as a jogger.
    Stop. Stay away
, I spat at the window, in English. My head wasn’t clear, the hurt and the whine getting in the way again.
    We picked up speed and passed into the tunnel. I pressed my face to the glass, angling backward for another glimpse. It was dark, dark—and then, in a burst of light like a camera flash, I saw the hollow as a momentary still image—flying, its feet lifting from the platform, tongues lassoing the rail of the last car.
    Miracle. Curse. I hadn’t quite worked out the difference.
    * * *
    I took his legs and Emma his arms and gently we lifted Sergei onto a long bench seat, where beneath an advertisement for bake-at-home pizza he lay blacked out and rocking with the motion of the train. If he was going to die, it seemed wrong that he should have to do so on the floor.
    Emma pulled up his thin shirt. “The bleeding’s stopped,” she reported, “but he’ll die if he doesn’t see the inside of a hospital soon.”
    â€œHe may die anyway,” said Addison. “Especially in a hospitalhere in the present. Imagine: he wakes up in three days’ time, side healed but everything else failing, aged two hundred and bird-knows-what.”
    â€œThat may be,” Emma replied. “Then again, I’ll be surprised if in three days’ time any of us are alive, in any condition whatsoever. I’m not sure what more we can do for him.”
    I’d heard them mention this deadline before: two or three days was the longest any peculiar who’d lived in a loop could stay in the present without aging forward. It was long enough for them to visit the present but never to stay; long enough to travel between loops but short enough that they were never tempted to linger. Only daredevils and ymbrynes made excursions into the present longer than a few hours; the consequences of a delay were too grave.
    Emma rose, looking sickly in the pale yellow light, then tottered on her feet and grabbed for one of the train’s stanchions. I took her hand and made her sit next to me, and she slumped against my side, exhausted beyond measure. We both were. I hadn’t slept properly in days. Hadn’t eaten properly, either, aside from the few opportunities we’d had to