"I will stand up now," Khalila said. "I will not resist."
The guard looked uncertainly at Beck, who raised his eyebrows and nodded.
Jess watched her tensely from the corner of his eye as she stood in a smooth, calm motion, and from her other side, he saw Glain doing the same, openly ready to fight if Khalila gave a sign she needed help.
But Khalila lifted her hands in a graceful, unhurried way to unfasten the catch that held the black silk robe closed at her throat. She slipped the robe off her shoulders and caught it as it fluttered down, then folded it with precise movements into a neat, smooth square.
Then she took a step forward and held the folded silk out, one hand supporting it, the other on top, like a queen presenting a gift to a subject. In one calculated move, she had taken Willinger Beck's symbol away and made it her own. Jess felt a fierce surge of savage joy at the look on Beck's face. He'd just been bested by a girl a quarter of his age, and the taste seemed bitter.
But he wasn't taking that without hitting back, and Jess saw that an instant before Beck grabbed the folded robe and flung it into the pyre of burning books. Petty contempt, but it struck Jess like a gut punch. He saw a shiver run through Khalila, too . . . just the barest flinch. Like Wolfe, she lifted her chin. Defiant.
"Only cowards are so afraid of a scrap of cloth," she said, clear enough to carry to the stands. There was a shimmer in her eyes: anger, not tears. "We may not agree with the Archivist; we may want to see him gone and better Scholars take his place. But we still stand for knowledge. You stand for nothing."
Beck looked past her and gave a bare, terse nod to a guard, and in the next instant, Khalila was seized, yanked back, and forced to her knees. She almost fell, toppling toward Jess. He instinctively put out a hand to help her, and her fingers twined with his.
That was the instant he understood what she was really about. Removing her robe hadn't been just defiance; it was distraction. Concealed between her fingers, she held a single metal hairpin-one she'd plucked from under her hijab.
She knew that in Jess's hands, a hairpin was as good a weapon as any.
///
A vast, cooling sense of relief washed through his chest, and he exchanged a swift glance with her as he slipped the pin between his own fingers. She's right. Sooner or later, there'll be locks to open. If we live so long.
He let go of her and hid the metal inside his shirtsleeve. He'd need to find a better hiding place for it, but that would do for now.
Beck ignored them. He was busy throwing Wolfe's robe to the flames. Farther down the line, they had taken Thomas's robe, and Dario's. Four robes flung onto the pyre, one by one, while the crowd roared approval. Jess expected the silk to burn fast, but instead the robes smoked, smoldered, shriveled in, and finally turned to gray and began to powder at the edges. Hardly any drama to it at all, which must have been disappointing for Beck's purposes. A stench of burning hair joined the meaty reek of crisping leather bindings, and for a moment, Jess had the vision again of a body burning in those flames.
One of their bodies.
"Now we may start fresh," Beck said after the silk was nothing but a tangle of ashes. "You are no longer part of the Library. In time, you'll come to see that we are your brothers and sisters."
"If you want to convince us of that, let us stand up," Santi said, and Jess could hear the ragged edge in his voice. A trickle of bright red blood ran down the sharp plane of his cheekbone from his hairline, but his eyes were clear and intensely focused on Beck. "Let us up and see how fraternal we can be."
"In time," Beck said. "In due time, Captain."
Jess swallowed and tasted ashes. Fraternal. He didn't want to believe that he and his friends-for whom this had started as personal loyalty, personal risk, and nothing they'd deliberately planned-had anything in common with Burners. He loathed them, even though they wanted books to be free and owned by anyone who wanted them. He'd grown up a book smuggler, so by definition he believed in that same ideal.
But he didn't believe in indiscriminate murder, either, and the Burners had been known to incinerate the guilty and the innocent alike, just to make their point.
The Great Library, for all its shining history and high ideals, had just as rotten a heart; it might even be worse. The Archivist Magister might love books just as he did, but that evil old man loved power far more. He and the Curia were part of a system that had turned toxic hundreds of years ago, when a long-dead Archivist had chosen to destroy an invention, and a Scholar, to keep his firm hold on power. Every Archivist since had chosen the same dark road. Maybe now they couldn't see any other way.