"I'm sorry," Anit said, and it sounded genuine enough. "You understand this is business, not friendship."
"I do."
"And have you anything to offer? I would hate to leave you here, at the mercy of-well-enemies."
Jess turned toward Thomas, who was holding out a leather document case. He'd spent his time on the trip drawing plans and writing detailed instructions, and Jess held up the case with both hands. Anit raised both eyebrows and shifted her weight a little but didn't reach for it. "Unless that is full of the handwritten papers of Archimedes, I don't think that is enough," she said.
"It will make you a fortune," Thomas said. "It will change the world. And you can be part of it."
Anit took the case. She opened it and looked at the plans for a good long time, then put everything back inside and said, "And if we don't want the world changing? My father has built an empire on scarcity. So has yours, Jess. You want to destroy that?"
"Yes," Jess said. "And so do you. The world is going to change with or without us, Anit. Now, or next year, or ten years from now. The Library's desperate hold on the future is slipping. We change now, we stay in front of that. We profit. Cling to the past, and you go the way of the Archivist."
"It's just paper," she said. "You're paying me with an idea."
"You trade in ideas," Brendan said. "And paper. And so do the Brightwells. We stick together, don't we? Cousin?"
///
Anit didn't answer. She lifted a hand to her neck and played with a necklace chain there; the pendant ring on it was concealed under her shirt, but Jess remembered it well. It had belonged to a brother she'd lost to an automaton, when they'd been trying to puzzle out how to turn them off. Jess had been the first to manage it and live, and she-and Red Ibrahim-owed him much for that discovery.
Brendan shifted minutely. Making ready to fight. Anit, he noticed, saw it as well. She exchanged a lightning-quick glance with the man who stood on her right, and then made a tiny, almost imperceptible motion with her hand. Since no one died in the next few seconds, Jess assumed she'd told him to be calm.
"Do you accept this offer?" Jess asked her, very quietly. Respectfully. He could see the calculation in the look she was giving him. She was very aware of both her youth and her responsibility. The decision she was making could destroy her family or seal its future wealth. A heavy weight for someone even younger than he was.
"Yes," she said then, as if it was not a hard decision at all, and smiled. It looked easy. His respect for her ability to lie grew. "Of course, that is speaking cousin to cousin. If it proves not to be enough in the eyes of my father, well. We'll have talks, family to family. No doubt my father might speak directly with yours." That was a veiled threat of war, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Brendan start to speak.
"Fine," he said quickly and casually, and turned to his brother. "Fine, yes?"
Brendan's eyes had gone dark, but his smile came as easily as Anit's. And just as falsely. "Of course. But let's not make a mistake: you hurt one Brightwell, you hurt all of them. Right?"
"Your father has two sons," Anit said. "My father has only me. Red Ibrahim will also give blood for blood. But we are not talking about blood, my cousins. We talk gold. Rivers of it, if Jess and his friend are right."
"Rivers of gold," Brendan repeated. "Enough for everyone."
Jess had to fight back a vision of the tower of the Philadelphia town hall crashing in, and the golden statue of Ben Franklin melting in ribbons. Rivers of gold. It must have run through the ashes of the dead and covered up bones. Gilded skeletons.
He closed his eyes for a moment and smelled the stench of Greek fire again, and gulped in a deep breath of sea air, then another.
"Actually," Thomas said, "I did bring something else I thought might come in useful. Perhaps it would be of use to you, miss."
He had a sack over his shoulder, one with burned patches on the fabric, and Jess remembered the one he'd dragged out of Philadelphia. Refused to leave behind. He handed it to her, and Anit opened it, just a little tentatively.
It was full of books bound in matching red leather.
"What is this?" She opened the first volume and gave Thomas a wide-eyed glance. "Journals."
"The records of Philadelphia," he said. "A hundred years of them, handwritten by the Burners. I . . . I didn't think their history should die with them."