“What were you doing in the bookshelf?” Dorian asks.
“I was trying to figure out what to do next,” Zachary says. “I was looking for Mirabel but I couldn’t find her and then I got lost so I started looking for something familiar and I found you.”
“Am I familiar?” Dorian says and Zachary wants to say Yes, yes you are the most familiar and I don’t understand how but that is too much truth right now so instead he says, “If you were a man lost in time where would you be?”
“Don’t you mean when would I be?”
“That, too,” Zachary says, smiling despite the realization that the whole locating-a-man-lost-i
n-time quest might be far more difficult than he’d thought. He looks back at the painting.
“How are you feeling?” Dorian asks him in response to whatever grumpy frustration his face is betraying.
“Like I’ve lost my mind already and post-mind life is one puzzle after another.” Zachary looks at the man in the cage. The cage looks real, the lock heavy and looped through the bars on a chain. It looks real enough to touch. To fool the eye.
For a moment he feels like that boy he was again, standing in front of a painted door he won’t dare to open. What’s the difference between a door and a cage? Between not yet and too late?
“What kind of puzzles?” Dorian asks.
“Ever since I got here it’s been all notes and clues and mysteries. First there was the Queen of the Bees but she just led me to a hidden crypt filled with memory-wrapped dead people where my cat abandoned me and a book told me there were three things lost in time. Please don’t look at me like that.”
“A book told you?”
“It fell apart in little instructional pieces but I don’t know what it means and I was surrounded by corpses so I didn’t particularly want to stick around to figure it out and the book was gone anyway. Also there was a ghost in the hall after that. I think. Maybe.”
“Are you certain you didn’t imag—”
Zachary cuts him off before he can say the word.
“You think I’m making it up?” Zachary asks. “We’re in an underground library, you’ve seen painted doors open on solid walls, and you think I’m imagining bibliomancy and maybe-ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” Dorian says. “I don’t know what to believe right now.”
The two of them stare at each other in a silence laced with multiple types of tension until Zachary can’t take it any longer.
“Sit,” he says, pointing at one of the leather sofas. There is a reading lamp with a green glass shade poised over it. He expects Dorian to argue but he doesn’t, he sits as directed and says nothing, compliant, though his expression betrays his annoyance. “Finish reading this,” Zachary says, taking Sweet Sorrows from his bag and handing it to Dorian. “When you’re done, read this one.” He puts The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor on a table nearby. “Do you have your book with you?”
Dorian takes Fortunes and Fables from the pocket of his coat. “You won’t be able to read…” He pauses as Zachary takes the book from him. “You said you already read it.”
“I did,” Zachary says. “I thought rereading might be helpful. What is it?” he asks, watching the question forming on Dorian’s face.
“To the best of my knowledge you only speak English and French.”
“I wouldn’t call what I can do in French speaking,” Zachary clarifies, trying to gauge how mad he is and finding the anger has dissipated. He sits on the other sofa and carefully opens Fortunes and Fables. “The books translate themselves down here. I think speech does, too, but I’ve only been speaking to people in English or hand gestures. Come to think of it the Keeper probably doesn’t speak to me in English, that was presumptuous.”
“How is that possible?” Dorian asks.
“How is any of this possible? I don’t even understand the physics of the bookshelves.”
“I asked you that in Mandarin.”
“You speak Mandarin?”
“I speak a lot of languages,” Dorian says and Zachary pays close attention to his lips. They don’t quite match the words that reach his ears, like when the book translations blur before they settle again. Zachary wonders if he even would have noticed the difference if he wasn’t looking for it.
“Did you say that in Mandarin, too?” he asks.
“I said that in Urdu.”