"Weeks, weeks of searchin', and we almost walked past it!" Quilt griped, waving her arms around.
"And I swear it didn' have those windows from the outside."
She was grumbling as she stood in the centre of the space, staring upwards, but her face was lit up and she was smiling widely.
Rust watched her rant, and next to her Shim leant back against the balustrade.
"We're gonna have to splash so much paint about if we ever wanna find this place again," he mused. "Looks exactly the same as all the others from the outside."
He ran his eyes over the shelves, and then bit his lip, but didn't say anything more, looking over to Quilt.
Quilt, on her part, stood there for a moment, happy, before sighing loudly. "Alright, exultation done. Let's see if all these books're blank, shall we."
Rust glanced around, and then watched as Quilt headed towards the nearest shelf.
"Thing is," Rust said, starting to follow her, "while it's beautiful, there doesn't seem to be many actual-"
"You will shush right now." Quilt cut her off, "you're not gonna ruin this for me by jinxing it, making it so all the books that are there are blank, or so that they're all the- shit. Now you're making me do it! Just shut up!"
Rust laughed, and Shim pushed himself away from the railing, following behind them with his hands in his pockets.
"Maybe they've got a children's section?" Rust offered him, and he stuck his tongue out at her.
"Maybe they've got a book on carpentry," he countered, "I have no idea what I'm doin' with that junk."
She nodded. He had tried to make a chair the other day, and while it had looked alright at first glance, for something carved with an axe anyway, it had collapsed the first time he had tried to put weight on it. But, she figured he would sort it out, books or no. The second chair had looked much better.
Quilt reached the first shelf and grabbed the single book sitting there. In fact, Rust reckoned, throughout the whole floor there might be twenty books total, that she could see anyway. Barely enough to fill one shelf.
"Ah, it has words in it!" Quilt shouted, waving it at them, and then having to dance about as all the pages began to fall out. "No, no you cannot do that!" she shouted, "you can't! Get back-"
She shuffled the book back together, and Rust came over to inspect. It was less a book, and more a pile of sheets between two loose pieces of leather, but she didn't seem upset.
"It's not like, glued or- or bound or whatever, but it's all there," she said, "even got page numbers. Ain't in a language I can read, but it's a start."
"Is it a real language, though?" Shim reached out to take the 'book', but Quilt clutched it to her chest dramatically.
"You can't have it, boy!" she shouted, and then ducking under his grasp, trotted across the floor to the next non-empty shelf.
Shim gave one last glance over where she'd taken the book from before shrugging towards Rust. "Well, she seems happy. I'm gonna go explore."
He looked around, and then headed towards the stairs upwards.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Rust took herself off in the opposite direction to Quilt, enjoying the serenity of the place.
She couldn't decide if it looked like it'd been stolen from the real world, or if it looked like it had been built from a dream. It reminded her of somewhere she'd been once, but she couldn't say where. She was pretty sure she would remember going to a giant library.
It wasn't the one from the village, that was for sure. The village library was a short, squat place, built in the 1960s. It was a place of artificial light, concrete and sharp corners, nothing like this naturally lit cavern of iron and wood.
She ran a hand over an empty shelf, leaving the big central area and entering the stacks. It was almost claustrophobic in here, under the floor above, and she admired how the shelves were a part of the structure, holding up the level above. If they had been filled with books then it would have been dark in here, but for now, the light filtered through, and she could see well enough to navigate.
She picked up a book from its lonely spot almost on the floor and flicked through it as she walked, carrying it back to the light.
Nevermind. She quickly put it back on the shelf. It had been a long list of all the arrivals and departures from one particular train station, over the course of a year. What time trains had arrived and left. Nothing else.
The book was dated 1974-1975, and it wasn't even a place she had never heard of, probably some small village somewhere up north.
She supposed they could come back and use it as toilet roll, if they ever got desperate enough.
-
Further walking revealed two books, both in languages she didn't recognise, but she carried them into the light anyway.
She found Quilt sitting at a table near the central plaza, three books on the table in front of her, another in her hands. She was writing something on a sheet of paper, using what appeared to be an actual honest-to-god goose feather and a bottle of ink.
"I think it's in code," she said as Rust approached, not looking up, "but it's only a substitution cipher, so I can probably learn to read it given enough time."
Rust blinked at her, "I never took you to be so dedicated"
"I-" she stared up at Rust "-have literally nothing better to do. Let me have this."
"I didn't mean anything by it," Rust backed away, "I'm glad."
"Hmph," Quilt made a noise in her throat, and Rust decided to leave before she took any more offence. Shim had to be around here somewhere, right?
-
She spotted him eventually, standing on one of the higher levels and waving down. He gestured for her to come up, although he didn't shout, and she squinted up at him, flummoxed. How on earth was she going to get all the way up there?
Twenty minutes later, panting and exhausted, she joined him at the top of the library. It was narrower up here, but well-lit so close to the dome. There were fewer shelves here and a variety of soft furnishings instead, and she wondered how they had gotten them up the stairs.
"What-" she gasped, leaning against her knees, "-is so important you have to drag an old woman up so many bloody flights of stairs, I swear-"
Shim laughed, "wow, I don't know if I've heard you swear before." he gestured around, at the seating, at the windows, and over the edge, "just lookit this place, and I haven't even been deeper in. Can we live here?"
She squinted at him, still catching her breath, but starting to straighten up. "Are you mad?"
"Probably," he shrugged, "it's just so bright. There ain't shit for books, but we should at least come back. Maybe we were asking for the wrong thing, and we need to ask for second-hand bookstores instead."
He leant over the edge, looking down, and she was struck by a horrible sense of vertigo and the urge to drag him away from the edge. "If we do find other people who're awake, this is gonna be a central place, assumin' it doesn't collapse anyway. It's empty now, but we can build it up. I found like, conference rooms and reading rooms, little offices and hidden places and shit, and I wonder what else is on the ground floor. I feel like I could explore here forever and never see it all."
Rust looked at him, at his shining eyes, and then out over the void. Quilt was somewhere below, a spec in the distance, and this close to the dome the beams of warm light were broken into stardust.
She leant gingerly on the railing, trying to spot Quilt down below.
This high up, the distance didn't even seem real, terraces of floors, space for every book in existence.
"Maybe whoever's making this place is still vetting the books," she suggested. "Although by this point I suspect they don't know how to read, and they're trying to sort out which are books and which are paintings, unable to tell the difference."
He laughed under his breath, and they both moved at some unspoken cue, heading back towards the stairs.
"We'll come back tomorrow." She said, and he nodded. "Maybe the kid'll help us explore, we should tell her when we get back."
Rust nodded in agreement, already feeling the strain on her knees, and together they descended.