As soon as you’re out of sight of the elevators, Jack grabs your arm. His eyes are wider than a doe’s facing headlights at 60 mph. He pulls a hand through his hair, pulling fistfulls out with it.

“Those glasses…” His voice shakes.

“Glasses? You’re not going to talk about her face?”

“That’s the thing -- with the glasses — I saw her face. She looked just like that old lady from across the street. I didn’t think anything was wrong.” He pulls the glasses off his face, inspecting them, then squints off into the distance. “But I have to wear these. I can’t see anything without them. But I don’t see things with them either. Why would anyone make these?”

“Forget the stupid glasses. That thing -- what was that supposed to be? What’s that doing in a mall?”

He puts his hands on your shoulders, trying to stem the rush of words. “Let’s find another way up. Some way that doesn’t try to make itself a haunted house.”

His hands bring you back to earth, but your heart pounds anyway, and you’re still feeling that tingling in your stomach as if you’re free falling. You try to force the image of the woman’s face out of your mind, but it keeps coming back. Shark’s teeth. Teeth designed to rend and tear. Jaws designed to snap and crush.

You force yourself to look around, but your thoughts stay scattered. Where are you? A bookstore? You reach for the nearest tome and flip to the back cover. Edwards Airforce Base: A History, it reads. The corners of the cover are just a little love-worn; there’s not a price tag in sight.

So a library? A library in a mall. What a world this has become.

As far as libraries go, it’s a nice one. Square wood shelves, soft lights, and thick white carpet — a quiet space. Almost too quiet. So quiet that the quiet screams in your face like the void that you saw in the woman’s mouth.

You weave your way past the shelves, letting your fingers trailing on the book’s spines. A User’s Guide to Linux, The Mechanic’s Shop Handbook, Version 13, Metalworking.

You pass the display of books on automobiles and reach row upon row of desks, each equipped with an outlet and a lamp. Some people read, some type, and one student with straw colored hair and a mossy green shift pores over a mess of wires, glass and what appears to be lead.

You recognize his hunch, the way he pushes his wire rimmed glasses up his nose and brushes the hair out of his eyes. He’s that quiet, thoughtful student from your history class; an endearing nerd. You walk up behind him and tap his shoulder.

He straightens a little too quickly and looks at you without meeting your eyes.

“An experiment I’m working on,” he says. “Measuring the breakdown of plutonium. I’m trying to see how close I can get it to critical.”

Jack doesn’t say anything; instead feigning interest in the glowing mess on the table. You grab his arm and back away. You know from the books you’ve read that this isn’t something safe. It definitely isn’t legal.

“It’s really quite interesting.” He reaches for his glasses, pulling them off his face, something you’ve never seen him do before.

It’s not just his glasses that come off.

His face crumples in on itself and peels away, revealing a void behind it lined with jagged teeth. Shark’s teeth.

You and Jack jump away. Screaming.

You walk as fast as you can without drawing too many sharp looks from the librarians. Once your’e out of sight of the desks, you slow down you pace, scanning the labyrinth of shelves. Uou could have sworn that the shelves behind you weren’t there a moment ago.

“To the food court, right?” you ask.

“Sure thing.”

“So then… where are we?”

You stop walking and start spinning, but all that does is confuse you. Every direction looks the same, and you lose track of where you came from. The shelves tower above you, blocking your sight. The fluorescent lights repeat to infinity, doing nothing but blind you with their shine.

You pull hardcovers from the shelves to make handholds and footholds so you can climb up the bookshelf, but after you’ve taken down only a dozen books, ack jumps between you and the shelf. He presses a finger to his lips.

Your ears strain to hear what he hears above the buzz of the air condition. But you hear it. Footsteps. Even, marching footsteps.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

You whip around, then grimace at the rustling of your clothes. Jack covers his mouth, but it doesn’t stop the sound of his gasps.

The footsteps get louder, and are accompanied by the vibration of a laden trolley.

You turn.

A woman with wiry hair and a wiry frame pushes a trolley made of welded wire. She scrutinizes you like an owl a mouse over wire-rimmed glasses.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

Both you and Jack back away. She doesn’t have a void for a face, but looks have deceived you already.

“Can I offer you a book recommendation?”

“No,” you say at the same time Jack says, “S-sure.”

Her eyes flash like a hawk’s. “Follow me.” She grabs the trolley, leading us deeper into the labyrinth. We pass through nonfiction, then oversize, then mythology, and finally arrive at the fiction section. She pulls a book off the shelf, brushes its cover with her spidery hands, and holds it out to Jack.

“The Great Mall Mirage,” it reads.

Jack takes the book, then eyes at the librarian. “Why give us this?” he asks.

“Knowledge unshared will be lost. There’s the answer to everything here. But not everything can be read.” She gestures towards the book. “Go on. Read it.”

A frown creases Jack’s brow as he flips the book over, reading the blurb.

“A young engineer and a future lawyer, trapped in the world’s greatest mall in a deadly struggle to survive.”

“Isn’t this… us?” Jack asks.

But the librarian is gone.

“Forget the book,” you say. “Let’s get out of here.”

The frown stays stuck to his face like hair in a storm, but he follows you as you try to remember the way back. The rows of shelves seem different; every time you feel like you’re getting close, you find yourself forced to make a turn. You pass science fiction, then fantasy, then mythology, and somehow end up in science fiction again.

“Stick to the right?” Jack suggests.

You shrug, but not having better ideas, do the same. Fiction, science fiction, westerns, then halfway through the western section Jack taps your arm, gesturing behind you. You turn around just in time to see the display of comics slide into place behind you, sealing off your exit.

“It’s like it’s trying to guide us somewhere,” he whispers.

You frown and walk towards the bookshelf, inspecting it. “Or trapping us.” You search for a clue to the mechanism, but find none.

“Maybe someone is controlling this?”

“Don’t be stupid. Why would anyone want to do that?”

A deeper, mirthful voice that isn’t Jack’s says, “I could think of several reasons why someone would want to do this.” The voice would make you jump if you didn’t know who it was. Instead, it brings a smile to your face. You let yourself relax, praying that it’s who you think it is, and not somebody whose face has been replaced by a black void, but it’s still hard to get the thought of the woman — and your friend — out of your mind.

You take a breath and turn, bracing yourself. But it’s not a teeth-lined void that you meet; instead a soft smile and pale blue eyes framed by wide-rimmed glasses. “Hello Mr. Aspen,” you say. Then, to the gangly man on his right, “Hello, Mr. Roots.”

They’re your shop teacher and math teacher, the two people you trust the most.

“Hello.” Mr. Aspen pulls a pair of glasses from the pocket of his lab coat. “We thought we’d find you here. I think you lose these.”

Jack stares at the glasses, then at Mr. Aspen, then back at the glasses. “Thank you. Thank you so much. How did you find these?”

“He caught the bird with his bare hands,” Mr. Roots said. “You should have seen it.”

“No way. Seriously?”

Mr. Aspen laughs. “No. The bird just dropped it on the ground in front of me when I asked it to. It just didn’t like you.”

He smiles a laughing smile at Jack, who returns it with astonishment.

“It seems like you guys got a book recommendation too,” Mr. Roots says. He swaps his book for Jack’s and inspects the cover. Jack holds out their book in front of you.

“Roots and Aspen,” you read.

Jack laughs. “Sounds like a romance novel.”

“It isn’t,” Mr. Roots says. “It’s a tragedy.”

“So’s Romeo and Juliet.”

Mr. Aspen pushes his glasses onto his forehead in order to inspect your book more closely. “I wouldn’t take that so lightly,” he says. “Look at this. There’s no author. But it seems to have been written about you two.”

He flips to the back of the book, then proffers it. “It says that you’ll win the prize and find the lost.”

You both stare at the page. Sure enough, both your names are there, at the very ending of the novel.

“That’s so strange,” Jack says. “It’s as if someone’s written an entire story about our lives.”

“Our whole lives,” Mr. Roots echoes. “I don’t know how, but you know what’s funny? That book about us — it’s true. Everything that’s happened so far is true.”

“It also says,” Mr. Aspen says, “That one of us is going to die.”

“I said it was a tragedy.”

Jack stares at you, his eyes wide. You don’t know what to think. Could it really be true? First the glasses, then this. And if it’s true, then who will die? The shop teacher, the cleverest person you’ve ever known? Or the math teacher who you’d trust with your life?

“There’s something else,” you say. “These glasses.”

“Those things? Those broken things on his head?”

Jack hands the glasses to Mr. Aspen, who peers through them. He lowers them slowly and looks at Mr. Roots.

“It’s them,” he says. “It’s them.”