Defiance (Significance #3)(19)

He made a deep noise in his throat to get my attention and I jerked my gaze up to see his amused face. "If you were any other girl, I'd worry that you were flirting with me."
I blushed even more. "I'm sorry. I was just admiring…I mean looking at your belt buckle." Jeez, that was no help. "I'm sorry I barged in, but I needed your help and when I heard your thoughts- Not that I was trying to read your thoughts, I was just trying to find you…by reading your thoughts… This isn't coming out right," I muttered in embarrassment.He laughed. "It's alright. I was just coming to get you actually."
I looked him over, objectively of course, and saw that he'd been getting dressed in day clothes, not night ones. "Coming to get me?"
"I knew there was no way that you were letting Caleb sit in that cell." He grinned. "I was trying to hurry before you left without me, but I guess I was just too slow."
I smiled and bit my thumb nail as I looked around his room. "Am I that predictable already?" His room was really nice, but not as elaborate and fancy as mine.
"Pretty much," he said. "Let's get going."
"I want to make a pit stop first, at the library or wherever it is that they would keep the Visionary's journals."
He squinted in confusion. "The Visionary's journals? Oh…You're the Visionary, duh. Of course you'd want them. I don't think it's what you think it is though."
"What do you mean?"
"Well," he said carefully, and his mind was blank. Not like he was hiding something, but he didn't know. "I've never seen them before, but from what I've heard it's not a book." I shook my head to tell him I still didn't get it. "Let's just go and you can see for yourself."
"Ok," I agreed. "Lead the way, cowboy."
"Ha!" he laughed. "Don't listen too much to their stories about me. I'm not as much of a rodeo hero as they make me out to be."
"I'm sure," I joked. We opened his door and he peeked out. He grabbed my arm to guide me out the door instead of talking. I jolted only slightly from the warning my skin gave me. He looked back at his arm and then my face.
"Did I hurt you?" he whispered, horrified at the thought.
"No," I assured him. "It's nothing, I'm fine. Let's go."
We crept out and he shut his door quietly. The hallway was barely lit by the gas sconces, but we could see well enough to creep our way down the hall. Once we reached the end of the hallway, he looked before taking us down another. I heard a lot of thoughts as we passed, but one in particular seemed to be louder than the rest. A guy was in the halls, a guy who'd been assigned to be on guard tonight.
I pulled Rodney back before he peeked around the hall where the guy was. He bumped his back into the wall and gave me a strange look.
What the…
  
I mouthed to him, 'Someone's there.'
He mouthed back, 'Who?'
I shrugged and looked at him incredulously as I mouthed back to him, 'I don't know these people!'
'Ok, sorry. We can go back this way, but it's longer.'
I shook my head before mouthing, 'I've got it.'
I looked into the man to see what he was thinking. He was picking at something under his nail - gross - and then used that same finger to scratch his nose. He was bored and so not paying attention.
I peeked my head out really quickly and did a count of how many lights lined the hallway. I counted ten before the next hallway turned. It was like a maze here. I wondered if that was where Peter got the idea for his house. I looked back to Rodney and mouthed, 'Follow me.' He nodded.
To get myself mad, I thought about how Marla had snidely and slyly suggested that I was pregnant and it didn't take long before I had all the lights dimming all the way down until they were dark.
"What the…" the guy said and I wasted no time.
I grabbed Rodney's hand and we ran down the dark hall, letting the wall guide us so we didn't run into anything or anyone. The guy had been on the opposite side, I hoped that was still true. When I knew we were clear, we picked up speed. As soon as we reached the end we bolted toward the new hallway and waited leaning against the wall. No footsteps pounded and the guy said nothing further, except muttering under his breath as he fumbled in the dark toward something he thought would help him.
I turned to Rodney and mouthed, 'Now where?'
'You're a genius!' he mouthed back.
I rolled my eyes and let him help me up from my squat. He led the way. Hallways became stairwells, stairwells became more hallways and finally he stopped at the bottom a set of spiral golden stairs in the middle of a wide room. There were so tall, made of steel and mesh wire, I had to crane my neck to see the top.
"This is it. The library's up there, but like I said I've never been in there before."
"Why not?"
"Off limits," he said and smiled sadly. "Caleb made the reunification out to be something totally different didn't he?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because every time I mention something like rules, you grimace, which leads me to believe that Caleb was so excited about you coming that he may have been blinded to how strict and organized it all is. It is fun, but we’ve always have rules and boundaries out the wahoo."
What was a wahoo?
"Maybe a little," I admitted. "He told me all about this before we found out I was the Visionary, though. He may have explained things differently if he'd known."
He nodded in agreement. "Probably. Ready?"
I took the first step and gripped the handrail tightly. "You realize this is like three stories of steps, right?"
"Four," he corrected and started up the stairs behind me. It wasn't a walk, it was a hike! A ridiculous hike that made me question the sanity of the person who built them, or the palace for that matter.
"Why on earth would they put these stairs here, in the middle of a room like that and then make them go up four flights?" I shrieked, only a little out of breath, and tried to calm down.
He laughed and said, "Your answer is at the top, milady."When we reached the top, I got it. They built the library, and I use that term loosely, in the vortex of the building. The room was circular, only about as wide as a normal, middle-class American family's living room, but the ceiling went on and on, all the way up to the top of the roof where a sky light was placed, but wasn't offering much light. Rodney turned on a lighting system of candles. I watched as he lit one candle and that candle tipped to the side to light the next candle, and the next one did the same, and so on and so on, all the way across the circular wall. It was almost magical and romantic.
"I would have to say this is what you're looking for," he interrupted my gawking. I looked over at him and saw him nod his head to the wall. I inched closer to see that there was writing on the wall. Little beautifully written and carefully spaced words filled the walls in bunches. Each grouping seemed to have a theme and they were old, the penmanship something I'd always longed for and the calligraphy look of it making me envious.
There was a quill, a long black feather, in a pen well on a little table in the center of the room with a stack of old parchment paper. There was a chair and that was about it. The rest of the walls were filled with shelves and where there weren't shelves was the writings. I ran my fingers down the shelves to read the book titles. Almost everything was women's literature and poetry. It wasn't a very diverse library if you asked me.
Rodney seemed to be doing the same as me, just looking around at everything. It was extremely dusty, telling me no one else had made that insane journey up the stairs lately. I came to the one wall that had no writings and no shelves. It did have a string pull near the top of the wall, so naturally, I pulled it.
I yelped and leapt back as the wall came crashing down at me. Rodney ran over and put his arm out as if to shield me…from the dusty hideaway bed that I'd just pulled from the wall.
"Sorry," I mumbled just before hearing Caleb in my mind.
Hey! What's the matter?
Nothing. I just got scared…of something. A spider.
I immediately shut my mind so he wouldn't see our plan. He'd try to talk me out of it.
Maggie…
I love you, Caleb, but not now.
And then I kicked him out altogether. I hated to do it, but I needed to get this done so that I could go and save his cute butt. As mad as I knew he was going to be, I needed to do all this. And it had to be now, tonight.
"Why would there be a bed up here like that?" Rodney mused and pushed it back up into the wall. "In the library?" 
"Wait…a library full of chick lit, a wall full of Visionary ramblings or whatever they are, and a bed. This is where the Visionary stayed. This was her room."
"But why would she want to stay here all by herself in the middle of the palace like that?"
"No idea," I answered and then ran my hair through my hair. "But I was hoping for a book or something that I could read later. I'll never remember any of this and I wanted to read all of it." I touched the wall, rubbing my thumb over the word restitution. "This just isn't going to do me much good. I can't sneak back up here every night to read it."
"You girls and your worry," he scoffed and smirked at me. "Did you really think I came unprepared?"
"What?" I asked as he pulled out his cell phone and started snapping pictures of all the bundles of words. I laughed. "Oh! You're a genius!"
"It must have rubbed off from you," he said in jest and once he got them all done, he turned back to me. "Shall we go rescue the husband now?"