Quinn flexed her hand and stared at it for a few moments before turning to double check with Hal for the fifteenth time. “Are you sure you can handle Adrito’s encasing?”
“I’ve been here for eons, I think I can handle a stasis frozen fairy.” Hal raised an eyebrow, but his smile softened the stern tone. “Don’t forget the exercises and don’t forget what you’ve learned.”
“Hard to forget what you practically punched into my head.” Quinn grumbled, giving him a resentful glare. Her hands were cool, as if ice encased them, but it had much more to do with her controlling the heat than trying to combat it.
“All for your own good.” Hal gave a bow with a flourish and grinned. “Once again, I thank you for my gifts.”
Quinn smiled and nodded once, curtly. “See you soon.”
She turned without further ado and placed her hand against the door. “Library, I need you,” she muttered, and a pang of sadness in her chest told her they weren’t just empty words. For days now, she’d been suppressing her worry for Lynx and the Library, and now they were finally headed back.
Quinn stepped over the threshold after Malakai and Eric had already crossed through. There was a fraction of a second where things around her shifted, and then she stepped in through her office doorway. It made her feel a little melancholy. She missed entering through the big double doors.
Library? She asked in her head. But there was no immediate response, meaning that most of its bandwidth was still being used. “Shouldn’t they be done by now?” She asked no one in particular, feeling particularly disgruntled.
“Quinn?” Malakai placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “They’ll be done when they’re done and I’m quite certain we’d have heard something if anything had gone wrong. Frankly, if something was wrong with the Library, you, as the Librarian, would know.”
She nodded, trying to squash her worry and not think about the whole Adrito situation as well. Hal would find what they needed. She hoped. “I know that deep down, but that doesn’t change the fact that mental silence from the Library is eerie as hell.”
He shrugged and flashed her a grin. “Nothing I can do about that, but we can ...”
“Librarian!” Dottie trotted into the room, her voice light and airy. From what Quinn could tell, she was in a very, very good mood. “Welcome back!”
If she’d have had eyes, they would have been shining.
Quinn couldn’t help but smile in response. “It’s good to be back. I can breathe so much easier here.” The pressure of the heat and the atmosphere in Halschius was almost suffocating.
“We’re so happy to see you. Now, we’ve...” But that’s as far as Dottie got.
Aradie shot into the room, pulled up right in front of Quinn with a massive blast of air, and promptly settled in her place on Quinn’s shoulder. She then hooted softly as if to say, All is well, you may carry on. Quinn reached up to scritch her neck.
Dottie cleared her throat, or voice-box, or whatever it was that helped her speak, and continued. “We’ve had some very interesting returns while you were gone.”
“Oh?” Quinn said, curious. “What do you mean by interesting?”
At that moment Geneva swooped into the room, positively sparkling. Her golden hair shone as if Rumplestiltskin had woven it. “Interesting, as in the amount of books we need for the next two branches to open!”
“That’s not fair!” Dottie wailed. “I was telling her. You promised I could tell her.”
Geneva shrugged and grinned, much more confident than she’d been before the whole Ishiposa Isle incident. “You were taking too long. I wanted to get the good news to her as soon as possible. You had your chance.”
“I’ll remember that...” Dottie grumbled.
Quinn could practically imagine the Fae sticking out her tongue at the bench. But Geneva did no such thing, she simply smiled smugly and continued. “Excellent, why don’t we move into the foyer and...” Quinn’s voice trailed off.
Milaro’s voice spoke smoothly into her mind. Welcome back. Excellent timing. Did you want to come and talk with us before we head down to wake them up?
Be right there. You’re in the observation room then?
Milaro didn’t answer in words, but Quinn go the distinct impression of an affirmative answer. “Sorry to interrupt this, but I promise I’ll come and go over which branch we should focus on opening once I’ve taken care of the Library.”
“Of course!” Dottie said, somehow giving the appearance of standing straighter than she usually did.
Geneva inclined her head. “We’ll see you soon.”
“Hey.” Quinn said as she was about to leave the room. “Is Jasper here?”
Geneva shook her head. “Not right now. She left a bit earlier and will be back tomorrow, I believe.”
Quinn nodded. “Thanks.” and headed out toward the observation room. Aradie cooing at her like she was gently berating the Librarian for having been away for so long.
“Nothing I could do about it, girl,” Quinn said apologetically. “You could have come with me.”
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Aradie shot her an image of a bedraggled owl that Quinn somehow knew was in such a state because of the heat.
“Ah, I see. You have a good point. Still, could have used you there.” She really had missed the owl.
Arriving at the room, she stepped inside to find Harish, Siliqua, Cadre, and Milaro gathered around the central table in the room. They were poring over something. She stepped up softly and looked at it too, but couldn’t understand what might catch their attention so.
“What are we looking at?” She whispered.
Milaro chuckled as the other three were slightly taken aback.
“You didn’t tell them I was coming, did you?” Quinn turned to
“Nope. Thought I’d wait for them to notice.” Milaro smiled, and then as he looked her over, his eyes narrowed. “I was going to say welcome back, but as it stands right now, as soon as we’ve taken care of the Library, you’re going to tell me why you’re recovering from poisoning.”
Quinn blinked. She’d been hoping to keep that particular fact from Milaro, especially since she knew he’d kick up a fuss. She let out a sigh. “It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that Hal is already taking care of it.”
“He should have taken care of it before it actually happened.” It was the closest to sounding angry Quinn had heard from Milaro.
“Pretty sure he feels that way too. It’s all good. We got it sorted, got some decent information. It’s fine.” She tried to reassure him with middling success.
“Still. We’re going through this once we’re done here. And I need to have a word with that damn satyr. He never mentioned it in any of the reports.” Milaro was obviously irritated by this.
“Really, I’m fine. We did a good amount of training too, and I’m fairly confident in my ability not to self combust and take the entire Library with me.” Quinn grinned.
Milaro blinked. “I’d prefer it if you were completely confident, but I supposed I’ll take my wins where I can, shall I?”
“So!” Quinn clapped her hands together. “Just what are we doing? What did you want to discuss?”
Cadre bowed deeply. It was more comical than graceful given the fact that he looked like an almost human sized insurance salesman gecko. But the gesture was sweet, nonetheless.
“So, what do you have for me?” She asked.
“I’m transferring the information directly to you for view.” Cadre’s voice held such excitement that he barely gave her three seconds to check on the information that flashed up in front of her eyes before he continued. “Now, as you can no doubt see, we’ve been running the sequencing and recalibrating the pathways simultaneously. If you look at the graph, I’m sharing to your left, you’ll notice that the synchronization in the cortex regions of the Library and Lynx are clearing up and have, in fact, been repaired.”
Quinn watched the graphs and the numbers and didn’t understand any of them on even one level, but Cadre seemed so excited, she didn’t have the heart to tell him. Though she did understand that this meant that the treatment, however it worked magically or scientifically, appeared to be successful.
“So,” Cadre continued, “Basically the new pathways are reestablishing the old links that were sort of deleted for want of a better phrasing.”
“Do you mean it’s more like the way to get to the memory or information was obfuscated?” Quinn asked, thinking it might be similar to the way computer files were rarely ever permanently deleted by the majority of people. There were often ways to dig them up unless they were properly removed or destroyed.
“Sort of, in a way. You could look at it like that.” Cadre paused, frowning as he ran the idea over in his head. “But in this case it was more the pathways to them were either rerouted or completely removed and replaced with alligator infested swamps.”
Quinn blinked at the slight buzz in the translation to alligator. Obviously, that was the closest thing they had to the word. “So it’s looking pretty good, then?” She tried to keep the hopeful tone in her voice on the soft side, but she wasn’t very successful. It would just be so nice to have a fully functioning Library and Lynx back with her.
“Yes!” Cadre exclaimed. “It’s looking better than I dared hope. The only thing left for us now is to wait for the timer to tick over and for you to go down with Milaro and do your thing. And then of course we have to wait, the retrieval will take time.”
“Timer?”
Siliqua interrupted the conversation to answer that question. “The Library wanted a certain amount of time allocated so it wasn’t rushed and it could be certain everything had been done in the right way. Without rushing it. Without worry. Although we were slightly nervous that you might not make it back in time to be there when they came out of stasis.”
“You mean just Lynx, right?” Quinn asked, certain that she’d been able to sense the hum of the Library in the back of her mind the whole time she’d been away. It was just fainter, not as intrusive as it usually preferred to be.
Siliqua chuckled. “Yes, I mean just Lynx. However, the Library has used considerable concentration and power resources in order to complete this whole process. Remember, it too was affected by all these memory glitches.”
“Of course it needs to, right?” Quinn said and gestured all around them. “If it doesn’t repair itself, then we’re all pretty much doomed anyway.”
“You have such a way with words,” Milaro interjected dryly. “Anyway, is it close to time yet?”
Every single one of them looked at Harish, who was frowning as he stood over the monitoring console. “Close, yes. You can probably just go down and wait for my signal.”
Milaro shook his head. “Reception down there to up here is always spotty at best, so let’s just wait until it’s...”
Several quick staccato beats sounded out just as Milaro spoke. All three of the others looked at one another and shrugged. “I guess that’s the system telling us to get our heads out of our proverbials, then.” Milaro laughed. He turned to Quinn, putting on a serious face. “Okay, are we ready to do this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
Milaro patted her shoulder commiseratively. “That makes two of us.”
“What?” Quinn stopped short. “Why would you say such a thing?”
Milaro laughed and gestured around. “None of us have ever had to deal with this before. This is not a repeat measure or occurrence. For the most part, none of us have ever been near the core. I’ve had to guide them in the closest possible approximations. And, before you say anything, I’m not telling you this so you think I don’t like to help like this. I’m simply saying that none of us in this room, heck, none of us in this Library has any clue what we’re doing. This has never happened before.”
“Well,” Quinn said, “when you put it that way.” She danced out of the reach of Milaro’s long arms.
“Take it a bit more seriously once we get down there, okay?” Was all the comeback she got. Somehow Quinn was oddly disappointed not to get a rise out of Milaro.
“Okay.” Harish said. “If you go down now, the veil will drop once you reach the center, or thereabouts. You’ll be able to see if the core has been fully reinstated.”
“How?” Quinn couldn’t think of any way to figure out what he just mentioned.
“Because you’ll be able to touch it, and it won’t try to blast you backwards through a wall, just in case you’re an intruder.”
Quinn gulped and followed Milaro out of the room silently. They were going to visit Lynx, and for the first time in several days, she was actually feeling hopeful.