Ever since being abducted by Stiletto and taken to Villains Island, Max had wished he was back in Rebel County, Mississippi.

Be careful what you wish for, Max thought ruefully as he spun around, frantically looking for the Rebel County Public Library doors that should have been there, but weren’t, leaving him trapped inside the rectangular, one-room library. Because you just might get it.

His heart fluttering, he rushed to the wall where the front entrance should have been. Reaching out tentatively, his fingertips brushed against a cold, unyielding wall. He pounded on it. It felt and sounded real and completely solid, yet his mind struggled to accept it. The door should be right here. And yet, it was a seamless wall, indistinguishable from the others. The library’s familiar scent of aging paper and musty wood, which once comforted him in the long hours he had spent here, now seemed to mock his predicament. The air was stale, the building silent as a corpse, with no movement other than his own. He was alone.

He hastened to the opposite side of the building. Listening intently, he pounded on the featureless wall where the emergency exit should have been. As with the front wall, Max’s pounding was answered by the dull thunk, thunk, thunk of solidity.

The realization sunk in with a heavy finality: there were no doors here anymore.

There were two possible explanations:

Constance Gerhardt, the librarian, had gone insane, taken her obsession with locked room mysteries too far, and gotten her contractor husband to seal the library up. The thought of elderly Ms. Gerhardt wielding a hammer with a manic gleam in her rheumy eyes was absurdly comical and terrifying at the same time.

Or—the more likely explanation—this was not really the Rebel County Public Library.

Have I actually left Prometheus Academy at all? Max wondered. Is this a hologram? Some sort of psychic or magical construct built from my memories? Or is it me, not Ms. Gerhardt, who’s insane? Maybe I’ve finally snapped, and this is all a hallucination. Maybe I’m really in the school’s infirmary, gibbering as I’m fed through a tube by Nurse Blanche. I hope I puke on her.

The problem with the madness theory was Max felt perfectly sane. Confused as a goat on astroturf, but sane. Then again, didn’t insane people usually think they were sane? There was even a word for it, a term Max had learned about right here in the public library from some psychology book. What was it? Anosognosia? Yeah, that was it.

Max decided he had to assume it was the situation, not him, that was crazy. Otherwise, he would be surrendering to despair, resigning himself to be a prisoner of his own mind.

With succumb to despair crossed off his list of action items, Max moved on to the next item: getting out of this place.

Perhaps his shadow hopping ability would be his salvation. With the real Rebel County Public Library, there was a sprawling magnolia tree in the back. The ground beneath it was dappled with shadows, all well within the range of Max’s teleporting abilities.

Standing as close to the back wall as he could, he closed his eyes, reaching out with his senses, seeking the solace of the shadows beyond the library’s walls.

But there was nothing. No welcoming darkness, no cool black tendrils waiting to whisk him away.

Huh.

Max slowly paced the perimeter of the rectangular building, searching for shadows anywhere on the other side of the building’s walls.

Zilch, nothing, nada. It was like the library existed in a void, lacking anything to cast a shadow that could serve as an escape hatch.

There was a phone on the librarian’s horseshoe desk, right where it should be. Max snatched it up, heartened to hear a dial tone. He first tried the Johnsons, at whose house he often stayed when his half-brother Ben was drugged up and violent. Dialing the telephone number yielded the expected beeps, but ringing didn’t commence after the number was complete. Max tried several more numbers—he was desperate enough to even try Ben’s cell phone after dialing 911 didn’t work—but the result was the same.

Max’s gaze settled on the horizontal slit windows embedded in the walls near the ceiling, the only links to the world outside. Sunshine streamed in from them, with dust motes frolicking in the beams. He began stacking tables and chairs, creating a precarious tower to reach one of the windows. As he climbed, the structure wobbled under his weight, but held.

Looking out of the narrow window, Max saw what he should have seen if this was the real Rebel County library: a blacktop lot with a sprinkling of parked cars. Max stretched out his awareness again, his power groping for the shadows he could see through the window.

As before, his powers could not lock onto the shadows, or sense them at all. It was as if they weren’t there. Curiouser and curiouser! cried Alice. Except this didn’t feel like Wonderland.

The windows were too narrow for Max to squeeze through, but if there were someone on the outside, maybe he could yell for help.

Max cocked his arm and rammed his elbow into the thick glass, hard as he could. The window cracked. Max felt the impact reverberate up his arm, but as a gentle shudder, not the aching jolt he would have felt if he wore conventional attire. Waldo had not been exaggerating when he droned on ad nauseam about the jumpsuit’s ability to redistribute and minimize the force of impacts.

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Encouraged by the crack, Max rammed the window several times more. Soon the thick window pane broke, half of it falling outside.

Instead of the parking lot still being visible through the broken part of the window, a white fog thick as clam chowder pressed against the window, obscuring everything within and beyond it. Simultaneously, through the unbroken portion of the pane, the parking lot was still visible.

What the heck?

Hesitantly, Max extended his hand through the broken window, into the white fog. A searing pain shot up his arm, and Max yanked his hand back with a yelp. His hand was red and already blistering, as if burned.

Whatever the white miasma was, it certainly wasn’t mere fog. Unless fog was made of sulfuric acid.

On the upside, the fog wasn’t pouring in through the broken window. It stayed on the other side of the window, as if held back by an invisible force field.

Careful to not poke his arm outside, Max used his elbow again to break the rest of the glass. On the other side of the now completely empty window frame was a solid wall of roiling whiteness, the parking lot and its cars completely gone, as if they had somehow been painted on the window’s pane with total photorealism.

Favoring his aching hand, Max climbed down and replicated his Tower of Babel routine on the opposite side of the building, under another window. Breaking its glass yielded the same result: thick white fog hanging right outside the window, supplanting the thicket of tall shrubs that had previously been visible through the unbroken glass. Max wasn’t stupid enough to stick his hand into the mysterious fog again. Once burned, twice shy.

He descended again, plopped down in the bean bag chair, and gave his situation a good hard think. Despite the chair feeling exactly the way it should have around him, reclining in it felt gross, like using your toothbrush after seeing it in a stranger’s mouth.

He wasn’t really in Rebel County. That was abundantly clear. But just where was he?

What was it the gargoyle guarding the school library had said to him? Advance, seeker, and claim the knowledge you have won. Maybe the way out of this weird place was to find what he had come here in search of—the symbol he had seen in Gadgetry class and in the shadow realm.

Maybe the answer was in plain sight, contained in the books around him.

Max grabbed the closest book, a bodice-ripper with a bare-chested man on the cover. He flipped through the romance novel’s pages, skimming. He saw a lot about smoldering glances, heaving bosoms, and tripod-like men with improbable anatomies, but nothing about the symbol or how to get out of this place.

He changed tactics, crossing the library to pull from another shelf a book he probably knew as well as Robert Lewis Taylor, its author. He flipped through The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, an obscure classic Max had discovered in the library years ago and read several times. It was one of his favorite books.

Skimming through it page by page, Max saw the identical words he knew and loved. Not only that, the book was exactly like the one in the real Rebel County Public Library, all the way down to the ripped page in the introduction, the coffee stain on page 232, and the disintegrating binding. Even the book’s smell was the same.

There was absolutely nothing about the symbol in it. Moreover, nothing was in it that didn’t exist in the real public library’s copy of the book.

Max wanted to slam the book down in disgust. But his reverence for books was too pronounced. He gently returned the fragile book to its proper spot.

He glanced at the other rows of books that stretched around him, and sighed. This library had always seemed so limited and cramped before, but the prospect of leafing through every single book here in the hopes of finding a clue about the symbol or the way out suddenly made the library seem impossibly large. What was he supposed to do, read every word of every book?

Max’s stomach rumbled, breaking the library’s tomb-like silence. It was clearly upset he hadn’t joined the other first years in the Dining Hall post-Gadgetry class. How long would it take to go through every book on what might well be a wild goose chase? Certainly not so long he would starve to death, but his rumbling stomach didn’t believe the optimistic thought. Max wished he had grabbed something to eat before coming here. Even milk would be mighty tasty right about now.

Maybe, he thought, before beginning the Sisyphean task of going through every single book, he should first look them all over, scouring the shelves for something out of place, a volume that didn’t belong. He’d feel awfully foolish if he spent countless hours speed reading useless books, only to then stumble across a book conspicuously titled Hey Dummy! This Book Contains Everything You’re Looking For.

Methodically, Max went up and down the shelves, running a finger along each spine, his eyes flitting over familiar titles he had unconsciously memorized during countless hours spent here. It was an effort to not speed up, but Max forced himself to be slow and meticulous so he wouldn’t overlook anything. He had to remove the plastic draped over some of the shelves to protect books from the leaky roof.

After a while, Max began to despair. Every book and its placement seemed perfect, identical to what he knew from the real Rebel County library.

Wait! Max froze in his tracks. I’ve never seen that before.

He took a step back, his eyes focusing on a book he didn’t recognize, wedged tightly between two familiar titles. The unfamiliar book was a thick tome with a blue leather cover, as bulky as an unabridged dictionary. On its spine was a single word in ornate gold letters: Bibliothecarius.

The word rang a bell. Thanks to his high school Spanish classes, Max knew the Spanish word for librarian was bibliotecario. Bibliothecarius, he surmised, was likely the Latin version of librarian, since Spanish was a Romance language descended from Latin, with over seventy-five percent of Spanish words derived from Latin ones.

Max pulled the book out, its unexpected weight surprising him, making him almost drop it before he grasped it with both hands.

With the unusual book removed, Max saw an ornate glass inkwell and a long white quill on the shelf behind it. The items looked like they belonged in a museum, and a particularly fancy one at that. Max had certainly never seen anything of the sort in the real Rebel County library.

He was tempted to shout Eureka! at uncovering the items, but then maybe he’d be the one who belonged in a museum for yelling anachronisms like that. Or an insane asylum.

Propping the heavy book up on his arm, he flipped through its gilt-edged pages. From cover to cover, its pages were blank, untouched by ink. In the face of the strange book’s pristine pages, the inkwell and quill behind the book seemed like an invitation.

Max carried the ink, quill, and book to the librarian’s desk. He stared at the items, thinking. If he was correct that the book was titled Librarian, what would he ask a real librarian? What would he ask Ms. Gerhardt?

Feeling absurd, he dipped the quill in the ink and, with a clumsy hand, managed to scratch on a blank page, I’m looking for information. Can you help me?

Once finished, he took a step back, feeling even more foolish now than when he had begun writing. Exactly nothing had happened in response to his chicken scratch. No hologram projected from the book’s pages to answer his questions; no genie popped out of the book to grant wishes.

Then, to his shock, the words he wrote quivered and disappeared, sinking into the book like pebbles into the ocean. A moment passed and, to his astonishment, new words appeared on the blank page in an elegant, flowing script.

I am the Librarian. How may I assist you, seeker?