Connor chuckled. “I was trying to give you some space to recover before I threw you into the next thing. But that’s what I’m here for, actually.”
“Really?” Riana leaned forward in her excitement. “Do you mean it?”
Connor nodded, meeting and holding her eyes, and Jannie looked from one to the other of them. Then she gave an exaggerated yawn. “Well, if you guys are going to talk business, I’m going to take a nap.”
Riana turned quickly to look at her. “Are you sure? We don’t mean to leave you out or anything. You can come too—”
“No, really. It’s fine. You have your thing, and I have mine. I’m going to rest a little and then work on some more code. Pretty soon I’ll be better at writing it than Connor.”
As Connor helped Jannie to her feet, he had to admire the brave, generous spirit of the girl. He was sure she complained and had bad days, but he’d never seen one. They helped her inside and got her settled on a lounge in the sun room. She smiled at them almost maternally before they left. “You guys are just alike. Did you know that?”
Connor and Riana looked at each for a minute with matching expressions of startled inquiry.
Then Connor felt a familiar wave of self-consciousness, so he distracted himself by pouring Jannie a glass of water.
It wasn’t until they walked out the front door of the mansion that Connor turned to look at Riana again. “Are you ready?”
“I’ve been ready for a long time.”
He knew that was true. And he wondered if he’d always known she would be at the center of this.
The center of everything.
Because, that first day she’d walked into the Office of Readers—looking nervous and so young in her braids, asking him if he thought she would be good at finding hidden codes since she always got so caught up in what the text said—he’d somehow known his world had reshaped itself.
He just hadn’t known then how completely.
***
“Aren’t we getting in the car?” Riana asked.
She’d just been about to open the door to Jenson’s old sedan when Connor continued past it down the gravel driveway.
“No. We’re walking this way.” Connor gestured for her to come with him, so she fell in step beside him with a suspicious look.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you to see something. It’s not far.” He gave her a half-smile but didn’t say anything more.
Riana shook with excitement. She had no idea what to expect from this errand, but it had built itself up into a grand mystery.
She’d been really glad to see Connor earlier, standing at a distance, watching her ride. He’d come to visit them a few times over the last two weeks, but he’d been busy in the city and couldn’t drive out every evening just to see her. It would have been too dangerous anyway.
She’d missed him though. More than she’d expected. Especially with the gap left in her life from Mikel’s temporary departure, she needed Connor’s quiet companionship. She missed the others too—Tava and Donn. And Jenson, of course. She hadn’t realized how much they’d all made themselves a part of her life in such a brief time.
She missed Mikel most of all. Sometimes she missed him so much at night she ached with it.
She knew he’d be back soon, and then she worried about how they would deal with the potential conflict between him and the Front. Sometimes she got scared, imagining various thorny scenarios that could occur.
But she wanted him with her anyway.
When they got to the bottom of the driveway, Connor led her down a path through the woods on the side of the mansion. She’d been down this path before. It led to an old outbuilding that hadn’t been used in decades.
She stopped in the middle of the path in confusion, but Connor took her by the arm and pulled her forward. “What are you waiting for?”
He looked surprisingly attractive, with windblown, brown hair and an almost mischievous smile. She’d never thought of him as a handsome man before, but he really was. The recognition hit her, now that he was out of his normal context and in more casual clothes.
Randomly, she wondered if he had a girlfriend. There was no reason why he wouldn’t have one—he was cute and smart and sweet. He wouldn’t hook up with recreational sex partners, but she wondered why he hadn’t found a wife. She knew he was a romantic and still believed in marriage.
She’d never even wondered about his love-life before. Or wondered what kind of woman he’d be attracted to.
“What are you staring at?” Connor demanded, when he caught her peering at him in curiosity.
“Nothing,” she said. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
He didn’t have to answer the question, because they’d reached the old stone outbuilding. It was falling apart. The roof had fallen in, and no one had bothered to repair it. The one window was boarded up.
Without speaking, Connor led her inside, where there was nothing but dirt and debris. He leaned over to push aside an old crate and reveal a trapdoor.
Riana gave a little gasp. “Reed?”
He just smiled at her again, pulled up the trapdoor, and started down an old ladder.
She followed him, of course, relieved the ladder was sturdier than it looked.
“This looks like an old storm cellar,” she said, wiping the dirt on her hands onto her jeans. The cellar was dank and cool and dark, only lit by the light coming in from above.
“It is.”
Riana was starting to suspect something, and it was affirmed when Connor pushed aside another crate and revealed another trapdoor.
“Reed? Who owns this estate?”
“I do,” he admitted, opening the second trapdoor. “It’s been in my family for generations.”
“But the Union—”
“It was never in my family name. They buried the ownership from the beginning. They never trusted the government and were always party to some sort of rebellious activity.” He grinned at her as he started down the ladder. “Must run in the family.”
There was nothing for Riana to do but crawl down after him. This ladder was longer, and it was dark and creepy at the bottom.
“Reed?” she called out. Her voice seemed to echo in the space. “Reed, where did you go?”
“I’m here. Hold on. I’m trying to find the—”
Suddenly, the cellar was illuminated. There must be electricity down here, because a flip of the switch had lit the space up completely.
But that wasn’t what held Riana’s attention.
The cellar was bigger than she’d expected—as big as her old loft had been. And every wall, from top to bottom, was filled with books.
There were shelves of them. She was surrounded by them. Some huge and leather-bound and some the inexpensive paperbacks of the previous century. There were tables and a couple of desks spread around the room, and those were covered with stacks of books too. There were also a couple of comfortable chairs and a computer.
She gaped, hugging herself with an awed delight she had no way to effectively express.
After a minute of staring around the room, her eyes found Connor. He watched her, looking pleased, proud of himself, and a little bit shy. “Not what you expected?”
Riana tried to respond, but only a croak came out. She had to clear her throat and try again. “But where did they come from?”
Connor sat down at one of the tables and gestured for her to sit beside him. “It’s my family’s library. We’ve always been book lovers. And, several generations ago, they started to collect them intentionally. When the sentiment in the Union started to swing away from free thinking, they moved the library down here. It’s been here for decades. Only a few people know about it.”
Riana felt like she’d witnessed a miracle, and she looked at Connor with new eyes, wondering what other delightful mysteries he was concealing.
“What are they all?” she asked, wondering when he was going to let her start reading th
rough them.
“All kind of things. History, literature, science, philosophy. But the heart of the collection is over here.” He got up and walked over to the tall shelves in the back of the room.
Riana followed him breathlessly.
“These are the ones that are most important. My great-grandfathers spent a fortune on some and risked everything to get their hands on the others.”
Her lips parted as she recognized a book that was placed on a small stool next to the shelves. “That’s the one you showed me the other day—the one with the quotation in that language. You told me you owned it.” She looked at him almost accusingly. “You didn’t tell me you own a zillion of them.”
He chuckled ruefully. “Sorry about that. It was kind of a hard thing to explain.”
“Why are these particular books so important?”
“Open one up.”
She chose one at random and opened it very carefully, the pages warm and rough under her fingertips. “The Old Language,” she breathed.
He nodded. “Look at the front page.”
She flipped the pages back to the beginning and started to read.
She gasped and jerked her hands away.
Connor nodded again.
“These are…” She had to start again when her voice broke. “These are pre-Cataclysm.”
“They are. They survived.”
“You think my grandfather’s book is pre-Cataclysm too?”
“I don’t know. It might have been written shortly after the Cataclysm when the Old Language was still used.”
“Why do you think the book is so important?”
“I don’t know,” Connor admitted. “Honestly, Riana, I don’t know. It may be nothing—other than its preciousness in being so old. But your grandfather treasured the book. And the fact that it’s written in an unknown version of the Old Language might be important. Largan seemed to believe it was so significant...”
He suddenly took her by the upper arms in his urgency. Mikel had held onto her the same way—like she was precious. “Riana, we have to find out why everything thinks it’s so important. Maybe it sounds trivial, when so much other work needs to be done. But books can change things. They can. Books changed me.”
She just stared up at him, as the world spun crazily around her.
“I think it’s important to us,” Connor concluded. He hadn’t dropped his hands. In fact, his fingers had tightened on her arms. “But we’ll have to translate it to find out for sure.”
And Riana understood something then, looking up at Connor’s rapt face, surrounded by the written experience of hundreds of souls who’d lived and died long before her.
This was what her grandfather had wanted for her, and this was what she’d always wanted for herself.
This was why she’d had to disappoint Mikel, when she would have much rather made him happy.
She needed a purpose to make sense of her life, her gifts, her memories, her dreams, all of the people she’d lost. She needed to do something good.
This was that good thing.
The threads of her life came together in this library, shaping this one inevitable choice.
She saw the photocopy of her grandfather’s book—the one Largan had risked his career to make—set on a table nearby.
There was an unused notebook beside it. The wire-bound kind, like her grandfather had used to teach her those sentences as a child. The notebook had all empty pages.
Pages she could help fill.
Something blazed to life inside her, and she turned back to share it with Connor.
She could see he already knew. He already felt it too.
For a minute she thought he would embrace her.
But then the corner of his mouth quirked up into a very Connor-like smile.
He said, “Shall we get started?”
About the Author
Susannah wrote her first paranormal novel when she was twelve years old--a time-travel romance written in a spiral-bound notebook that eventually starred all her friends. Since then, she has been writing romantic fiction of all varieties, including paranormal, contemporary, and historical. She can usually be found working on her laptop. She has a PhD in British literature and teaches at a university in Virginia. She is currently working on the second Wordless Chronicle. She loves to hear from readers, so please feel free to drop her a line on her website (susannah-noel.com) or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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