The Grimm Legacy Read Free Page B

quite to believe me. “The most powerful?”
    “How can a button be powerful?”
    “Oh, I think you’ll find over time that every object here has its own unique qualities. You’ll find that the materials in our collections speak to you.”
    Did that mean I’d gotten the job?
    Still, some of the buttons did seem to draw me more than others. I chose a black glass button with a disturbing geometry. Dr. Rust picked it up and examined it closely for a long time while I watched the freckles, trying to catch them moving. Wasn’t that butterfly shape of freckles on the left side just a minute ago?
    “Well, Elizabeth, this has been most illuminating, but we both have a lot of work waiting,” said Dr. Rust at last, as if I had been the one staring endlessly at a button. “Can you start next week? Here, I think you’d better have this.”
    Someone opened the door just as Dr. Rust handed me one last button. It matched the buttons on my coat—it might have been my missing top button.
    “And here’s Marc, right on time.”

Chapter 2:
    The New-York Circulating Material Repository

    Marc stood in the doorway.
    “You two know each other, right?” said Dr. Rust.
    “Yeah, we met downstairs,” said Marc.
    “Actually, we’re in health ed together,” I said. “With Ms. Reider.”
    Marc had the grace to look embarrassed.
    “Good,” said Dr. Rust. “Take Elizabeth up to Stack 9 and show her the ropes.”
    “But the ropes are on Stack 2.”
    “I meant metaphorically.”
    Could it be possible—did Marc wink at me? The great and famous Marc Merritt winking at me ? If so, he did it very quickly.
    “And send Martha Callender a pneum,” continued Dr. Rust. “She’ll want to do her orientation thing and work out the schedules. Glad to have you with us, Elizabeth. We’ve been shorthanded lately—we can really use the help. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”
    I had a billion questions, in fact, but I followed Marc down the hallway and through a door marked Staff Only.
    “What’s a stack?” I asked.
    “A floor where the holdings are stored.”
    “And what’s a pneum?”
    “Pneumatic tube carrier,” said Marc.
    “Okay, what’s a pneumatic tube carrier, then?”
    “You’ll see. Watch your head here.”
    We went through a low door—Marc had to duck, but my head was in no danger—and up a staircase, flight after flight after flight. The brownstone couldn’t possibly have so many floors—we must have gone way past the roof, into some sort of penthouse addition. I was panting hard, but Marc looked as cool as ever, like the black king in my chess set.
    At last he opened a door marked Stack 9. We stepped out into the middle of a long room with rows of cabinets stretching away on both sides. Near the door was a pair of desks facing a trio of elevators: a tiny one the size of a microwave, another the size of a dishwasher, and a third the size of a small refrigerator. Beyond them thick pipes snaked off in several directions. These were painted white, black, and red, and each had a small oblong door at elbow height. One of the pipes ended like a bathtub faucet over a wire basket.
    “The staging area is basically headquarters on each floor,” said Marc. “You can hang up your coat over there.” He took a white slip of paper from a tray of different-colored slips, wrote something on it, and folded it in half.
    As I stood looking around, one of the pipes began to cough and thump, as if a tiny elephant were panicking inside. Something hurtled out of the open end of the pipe and landed with a thud in the wire basket beneath. Marc held it up to show me: a transparent plastic tube like a skinny soda can, with thick felt padding on both ends.
    “See? A pneum.”
    The pneum had a sliding panel in its side. Marc slid it open, reached into the pneum, extracted a piece of paper, and replaced it with the note he’d written. He pulled open a door in one of the pipes. I heard a soft roaring, like a wind in a