Don’t get too worried—this isn’t the sort of story in which emergencies occur. Yes, it is highly unlikely that you will ever see those Firebringer’s Lenses activated. So don’t get your hopes up.
I accepted the Firebringer’s Lenses from my grandfather, and they immediately started glowing.
“Cavorting Cards!” Grandpa Smedry yelped, dodging to the side as the Lenses blasted a pair of intensely hot beams into the ground right in front of my feet. I hopped backward in shock, nearly dropping the Lenses in surprise.
Grandpa Smedry grabbed the Lenses from behind, deactivating them. The scent of melted tar rose in the air, and I blinked, my vision marked by two bright afterimages of light.
“Well, well,” Grandpa Smedry said. “I told you they were easy to use.” He glanced up at the building. “We should be too far away for that to have been sensed.…”
Great, I thought. As my vision cleared, I could see Bastille rolling her eyes.
Sing waddled over, raising his sunglasses and inspecting the three-foot-wide disk of blackened, half-melted asphalt. “Nice shot,” he noted. “I think it’s dead now.”
I blushed, but Grandpa Smedry just laughed. “Here,” he said, slipping a small velvet bag around the Firebringer’s Lenses. He pulled the drawstring tight at the top. “This should keep them safe. Now, with these Lenses and your Talent, you should be able to handle pretty much anything the Librarians throw at you!”
I accepted the glasses back, and fortunately they didn’t go off. Now, as I was telling you previously, these Lenses will probably never get used in this story. You’ll be lucky if you ever get to see them fired. Again.
“Grandfather,” I said quietly, eyeing Bastille, then stepping aside again with Grandpa Smedry. “I’m not sure that I can do this.”
“Nonsense, lad! You’re a Smedry!”
“But I didn’t even know I was until earlier today,” I said. “Or … well, I didn’t know what being a Smedry meant. I don’t think … well, I’m just not ready.”
“What makes you say that?” Grandpa Smedry asked.
“I tried to use my Talent earlier,” I said. “To stop Bastille from smacking me with her purse. It didn’t work. And that wasn’t the first time—sometimes I just can’t make things break. And when I don’t want them to break, they usually do anyway.”
“Your Talent is still wild,” Grandpa Smedry said. “You haven’t practiced it enough. Being a Smedry isn’t only about having a Talent, it’s about finding out how to use that Talent. A clever person can make anything turn to his advantage, no matter how much a disadvantage it may seem at first.
“No Smedry Talent is completely controllable. However, if you practice enough, you’ll begin to get a grasp on it. Eventually, you’ll be able to make things break not merely when and where you want, but also how you want.”
“I…” I said, still uncertain.
“This doesn’t sound like you, Alcatraz,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Where’s that spark of spirit—that stubbornness—that you’re always tossing about?”
I frowned. “How do you know what I’m like? You only just met me.”
“Oh? You think I’ve left you in Librarian hands all this time, never checking in on you?”
Of course he checked on me, I thought. Bastille mentioned something about that. “But you don’t know me,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t even know what my Talent was.”
“I suspected, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “But I’ll admit—I usually got to your foster homes after you’d moved somewhere else. Still, I’ve been watching over you, in my own way.”
“If that’s the case,” I said, “then why—”
“Why did I leave you to the foster homes?” Grandpa Smedry asked. “I’m not that great a parent. A boy needs somebody who can arrive on time to his birthdays and ball games. Besides, there were … reasons for letting you grow up in this world.”
That didn’t seem like much of an explanation to me, but Grandpa didn’t look like he’d say more. So I just sighed. “I keep feeling like I won’t be much help in this fight. I don’t know how to use my Talent, or these Lenses. Maybe I should get a gun or a sword or something.”
Grandpa Smedry smiled. “Ah, lad. This war we’re fighting—it isn’t about guns, or even about swords.”
“What is it about, then? Sand?”
“Information,” Grandpa Smedry said. “That’s the real power in this world. That man who held a gun on us earlier—he had power over you. Why?”
“Because he was going to shoot me,” I said.
“Because you thought he could shoot you,” Grandpa Smedry said, raising a finger. “But he had no power over me, because I knew that he couldn’t hurt me. And when he realized that…”
“He ran away,” I said slowly.
“Information. The Librarians control the information in this city—in this whole country. They control what gets read, what gets seen, and what gets learned. Because of that, they have power. Well, we’re going to break that power, you and I. But first we need those sands.”
“Grandpa,” I said. “You have to have some kind of idea what the sands do. You came to get them from me, after all. Didn’t you have a plan to use them?”
“Pestering Pullmans, of course I did! I was going to smelt them into Lenses, just like the Librarians are probably doing now. Your father, lad—he was a sandhunter. He spent all his time searching out new and powerful types of sand, gathering the grains together, crafting Lenses like nobody had seen before. The Sands of Rashid were his crowning achievement. His greatest discovery.” Grandpa Smedry’s voice grew even quieter. “He was convinced they had something to do with where the Smedry family gained its Talents in the first place. The Sands of Rashid are a key, somehow, to understanding the power and origin of our entire family. Can you understand, perhaps, why the Librarians might want them?”
I nodded slowly. “The Talents.”
“Indeed, lad. The Talents. If they could find a way to arm their agents with Talents like ours, then the Free Kingdoms could very well be doomed. Smedry powers are a large part of what has kept the Librarians at bay for so long. But we’re losing. The land you call Australia was lost to us only a few decades back—absorbed and added to the Hushlands. Now Sing’s homeland has almost fallen. They’ve already taken some of the outlying Mokian islands—the places you call Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa—and added them to the Hushlands. I fear it will only be a few years before Mokia itself falls.”
He paused, then shook his head, looking a bit distant as he continued. “Either the Free Kingdoms are going to fall—and everything will become Hushlands—or we’re going to find a way to break the Librarians’ power. The Smedry Talents, and the secrets these sands will reveal, are key to the next stage of the war. Things are changing … things have to change. We can’t just keep fighting and losing ground. That’s why your father spent so much of his life gathering those sands. He felt it was time to go on the offensive.”
I felt a stab of anxiety, a question surfacing that I wasn’t certain I wanted to know the answer to. Finally, I couldn’t keep it down. “Is he still alive, Grandpa?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking back at me. “I honestly don’t know.”
The comment hung in the air. Grandpa Smedry placed a hand on my shoulder. “Alive or not, Attica Smedry was a great man, Alcatraz. An amazing man. And he, like you, was no warrior. We are Oculators. Our weapon is information. Keep your eyes, and your mind, open. You’ll do just fine.”
I nodded slowly.
“Good lad, good lad. Ah, here’s Quentin.”
The short, tuxedo-wearing man slipped quickly out of the library’s front doors. “Five Librarians in the main lobby,” he said quietly. “Three behind the checkout desk, two in the stacks. Their patterns are right on schedule with what we’ve seen from them before. The entrance to the employee corridors is on the far south side. It isn’t guarded right now, though a Librarian passes to check on it every few minutes or so.”
br /> “All right then,” Grandpa Smedry said. “In we go!”
Chapter
7
I seem to recall that last year a Free Kingdoms biographer wrote an article claiming I had spent my childhood performing a “deep infiltration” of Librarian lands. I guess in his mind, spending my life eating Twinkies and playing video games counted as a “deep infiltration.”
I hope you Free Kingdomers aren’t too put out to discover that dragons didn’t come and bow to me at my birth. I wasn’t tutored by the spirits of my dead Smedry ancestors, nor did I kill my first Librarian by slitting his throat with his own library card.
This is the real me, the troubled boy who grew into an even more troubled young man. Now, I’m not a terrible person. I’m just not a particularly nice one either. If you’d been tied to altars, nearly eaten by walking romance novels, and thrown off a glass pillar taller than Mt. Everest, you might have turned out a little like me yourself.
Sing tripped.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of people trip in my lifetime. I’ve seen people stumble, tumble, and misstep. I once saw my foster brother fall down the stairs (not my fault) and I also saw a local bully belly flop when his diving board broke beneath him (I plead the Fifth on that one).
I have never, however, seen a trip quite so … well executed as the one Sing performed in the library lobby that day. The hefty Mokian quite convincingly stumbled on the welcome mat right inside the doors. He cried out, hopping on one foot—a teetering, lumbering mound with the kinetic energy of a collapsing building.
People scattered. Children cried, clutching picture books about aardvarks in their terrified fingers. A Librarian raised her hand in warning.
With a weird mixture of skillful grace and a mad lack of control, Sing fell over a comfortable reading chair and collided with a massive bookshelf. Those shelves are—you may know—usually bolted to the floor. That didn’t matter. When confronted with a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Mokian missile, iron bends.
And the bookshelf fell.
Books flew in the air. Pages fluttered. Metal groaned.
“Now’s our chance,” Grandpa Smedry said. He dashed forward, just one more body in the flurry of lobby activity.
The rest of us followed, scooting past the horrified Librarians. Grandpa Smedry led us behind the children’s section, through the media section, and to a pair of shabby doors at the back marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Put your Oculator’s Lenses back on, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, sliding on his reddish pair.
I did so as well, and through those Lenses I could see a certain faint glow around the doors. Not a white or black glow like I’d seen before. But instead … a bluish one. The power was focused on a square in the wall. On closer inspection, I could see that that section of the wall was inset with a small square of glass.
“A Hushlander handprint scanner,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Kind of like Recognizer’s Glass. How quaint. All right, lad, it’s your turn.”
I gulped quietly, feeling nervous—both because of the Librarians so near and because everyone was counting on me. I reached out and pressed my hand against the door. There was a hum from the glass panel, but I ignored it. Instead I focused on myself.
I’d always known, instinctively, about my power. I’d always had it, but I’d rarely tried to control it specifically. Now I focused on it, and I felt a tingle—like the shock that comes from touching a battery to your tongue—pulse out of my chest and down my arm.
There was a crack from the door as the lock snapped. “Masterfully done, lad!” Grandpa Smedry said. “Masterfully done indeed.”
I shrugged, feeling proud. “Doors have always been my specialty.”
Quentin quickly pushed open the door and waved everyone through. Grandpa Smedry’s eyes twinkled as he passed me. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he whispered.
I could hear Bastille grumbling something under her breath as she joined us in the hallway, Sing’s bag of guns slung over her shoulder. Quentin held the door open for a moment longer, and finally a puffing Sing rounded the bookshelves and joined us.
“Sorry,” he said. “One of the female patrons insisted on wrapping my ankle for me.” Indeed, his sandal-shod right foot now bore a support bandage.
Quentin closed the door, then checked the handle, twisting it a few times. “Coconuts, the pain don’t hurt,” he said, then paused. “Sorry,” he said, flushing. “Sometimes the gibberish comes out when I don’t want it to. Anyway, the lock is still broken—it will be suspicious next time someone comes through here.”
“Can’t be helped,” Grandpa Smedry said, pulling out what appeared to be two small hourglasses. He gave them each a tap, and the sand started flowing. He handed one to me. The sand continued to flow at the same rate no matter which way I turned the device. Nifty, I thought. I’d always wanted a magical hourglass.
Well, not really. But if I’d known that there were such things as magical hourglasses, I’d have wanted one. Who wouldn’t? I should note, however, that the Free Kingdomers would be offended by my calling the hourglass magical. They have very strange feelings on what counts as magical and what doesn’t. For instance, Oculatory powers and Smedry Talents are considered a form of magic to most Free Kingdomers, since they are things that can only be performed or used by a few select people. The hourglasses, like the silimatic cars, Sing’s glasses, or Bastille’s jacket, can be used by anyone. That makes those things “technology” in Free Kingdomer speak.
It’s confusing, I know. However, you’re probably smart enough to figure it out. And if you aren’t, then I shall likely call you an insulting name. (Wait for Chapter Fifteen.)
“We’ll meet here in one hour,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Any longer than that, and we’ll be getting close to closing time. When that happens, all those Librarians out on patrol will return to check in—and we’ll be in serious trouble. Quentin is with me—Sing and Bastille, go with Alcatraz.”
“But—” Bastille said.
“No,” Grandpa Smedry interrupted. “You’re going with him, Bastille. I order you to.”
“I’m your Crystin,” she objected.
“True,” Grandpa Smedry said. “But you’re sworn to protect all Smedrys, especially Oculators. The lad will need your help more than I will.”
Bastille huffed quietly but made no further objections. As for myself, I wasn’t really sure whether to be annoyed or glad.
“You three inspect this floor, then move up to the second one,” Grandpa Smedry said quietly. “Quentin and I will take the top floor.”
“But,” Bastille said, “that’s where the Dark Oculator is!”
“That’s where his lair is,” Grandpa Smedry corrected. “That aura glows so brightly because he spends so much time there. You might be able to notice the Dark Oculator’s own aura if he’s nearby, Alcatraz, but it won’t give you much advance warning. Stay quiet and unseen, all right?”
I nodded slowly.
Grandpa Smedry stepped a little closer, speaking quietly. “If you do run into him, lad, make certain you keep those Oculator’s Lenses on. They can protect you from an enemy’s Lenses, if you use them right.”
“How … how do I manage that?” I asked.
“It takes time to practice, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Time we don’t have! But, well, it probably won’t come to that. Just … try to stay away from any rooms that shine black, okay?”
I nodded again.
“Well, then!” Grandpa Smedry said to the whole group. “The Librarians will have to spend ages cleaning up that mess in the lobby. Hopefully they won’t even notice the door until we’re gone. One hour! Quickly now. We’re late!”
With that, Grandpa Smedry spun to the left and began walking down the empty white hallway. Quentin waved good-bye. “Rutabaga, fire over the inheritance!” he said, then rushed after the elderly Oculator.
Sing and Bastille turned to me. It … looks like I’m in charge, I thought with surprise.
This was a st
range realization. Yes, yes, I know—Grandpa Smedry had already said that I would have to lead my group. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself in this situation.
The truth is, however, that I was never the sort of person that people put in charge. Those kinds of duties generally go to the types of boys and girls who deliver apples, answer questions, and smile a lot. Leadership duties do not generally go to boys whose desks collapse, who are often accused of playing pranks by removing the doorknobs of school bathrooms, and who once unwittingly made a friend’s pants fall down while he was writing on the chalkboard.
I never did manage to get that stunt to work again.
“Um, I guess we go this way,” I said, pointing down the hallway.
“You think?” Bastille asked flatly, handing Sing his gym bag of guns. She pulled a pair of sunglasses—Warrior’s Lenses, as the others called them—out of her jacket pocket and slipped them on. Then she took off, walking down the hallway, handbag flipped around her shoulder.
If I ordered her to go back and follow Grandpa instead, I wonder if she’d go.… I decided that she probably wouldn’t.
“Say, Alcatraz,” Sing said as we followed Bastille. “What do you suppose this little wrap on my ankle means?”
I frowned, glancing down. “The bandage?”
“Oh,” Sing said. “Is that what it is? First aid, it is called, correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why else would someone wrap your ankle like that?”
Sing glanced down, obviously trying to inspect the ankle bandage while still walking. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I thought maybe it was some preliminary courtship ritual.…” He trailed off, looking toward me hopefully.
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
“That’s sad,” Sing said. “She was pretty.”
“Is that the sort of thing you should be thinking about?” I asked. “I mean, you’re an anthropologist—you study cultures. Are you allowed to interfere with the ‘natives’ you meet?”
“What?” Sing said. “Of course we can! Why, we’re here to interfere! We’re trying to overthrow Librarian domination of the Hushlands, after all.”