Notes:

It's taking a while to get another full chapter out, so here's a short interlude focusing on Donnie after the Book Expo. I would recommend The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to anyone who looks back at their lives in connection with the books that they read. To my regular readers and subscribers, thanks for hanging in there patiently for so long.

The phone rang as Donnie was just getting into the hotel room. Not his mobile. No display on the old hotel phones. He had one of those moments, where you pause and wonder if it's really for you. If it's the hotel staff, or your boss, and you shouldn't pick up anyway.

He scowled at it, but he picked it up, anyway.

"How'd it go?"

Donna Moss. Donnie didn't know her real name, but she'd been there when he'd needed her, and together they were going to stand in the way of anybody who tried to exert monopolistic control over information. She knew more about him, than he did himself. After the conversation he'd had with Ms. Readman at the Book Expo, he was happy with that. What he didn't know couldn't hurt him.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "Odd. Can we even talk on this line?"

"As if I'd call you, if we couldn't."

"Don't be evasive, yes or no."

He pulled his shoes and socks off, cradling the handset against his shoulder. Workplace safety no-no. Horrible things were happening to Donnie's brain. He was working more often than he was reading. Or, he was talking to Donna.

"Don't be such a baby. Yes, all right? It's a secure line. As secure as anything, these days. Nobody we care about is going to hear us."

"Right," he said. He left it at that.

"Don't want to talk?" She sounded concerned. Not her usual flirty and energetic self.

"I'm just tired. I was planning on reading when I got back, tonight. She returned... some of my books. With interest."

Donna sighed. "Odd, then."

"You're telling me," he agreed. "What was it like, when you..."

"I had severe brain damage, PTSD, and was deemed unable to care for my own child. Don't you dare compare."

"I wasn't! I just, I wanted to know. What it was like for you. With her... how she remembers an entirely different person."

"I am an entirely different person. A clone, yes. But even clones have feelings. Nature and nurture. I don't think she ever confused me with Ms. Makuhari"

"Who?"

"That was the assumed name that my goody two-shoes doppleganger worked under. The real Makuhari died in suspicious circumstances."

"I... see." Donnie stuck his hand into one of the bags he had used to carry the books back to the hotel. He had to touch one, feel it on his skin. He lay back on the bed, and laid it flat on his stomach, over his shirt. Pressed the palm of his hand down on the cover.

"But, I knew. Once she told me about my past, before the incident. I knew that she hadn't saved me because it was me, or even just for the sake of helping a suffering stranger. She saved me because she felt guilty over somebody else. She saved me to get revenge, on them, for-"

Donna cut herself off. Donnie scoffed. They both knew the truth. "To get revenge on Joseph Carpenter, for what he did to her."

"To you," Donna said. This was a long-running argument between them.

"Mr. Carpenter didn't do anything to me that I didn't justify and knowingly risk through the actions I took."

"You can't know that!"

Donnie nodded, glad Donna couldn't see the expression on his face. "And neither can you."

There was a silence between them, and the crackling fuzz of the old telephone line.

"We've both been held accountable for the choices we made. We paid the price. And now it's just..."

"Odd," Donnie supplied.

"Odd," Donna agreed. "It's like I can't breathe without her, can't imagine a life that isn't defined by her, and I'll never be myself in her eyes, because she'll always be looking for somebody else."

Donnie lowered his gaze, and stared a little cross-eyed at the book on his abdomen. Someone in his body, using his brain, had met a young girl, and allowed her to fall in love with him - irresponsible, inappropriate! He had betrayed the British Library, and forced Joseph Carpenter's hand. He was caught, surrendered. He had followed Joseph Carpenter's plan, and threatened the girl. Taunted her. Forced her to protect herself.

"I have his scars," that was the only way Donnie could really describe that feeling. His throat burned, and he wanted to throw the book across the room. He stroked its spine, switched the phone over to his other ear.

"I didn't have anything to remember myself by," Donna said quietly at the other end of the line. "My lover was dead, my child was abducted, and nobody in the world remembered me. Just her. The woman that lived in the other copy of my body. I was her spare. I was nobody."

The silence between them was heavier, but Donnie felt a solidarity with Donna that he had never known before.

"You took them down. President Cole. Joseph Carpenter. Dokusensha, The British Library. You destroyed them all."

"I took my son back." She said. "I miss him. He barely knows me. What we did to them wasn't enough."

Their words ran together, there was too much emotion, and too little certainty between them. They talked over each other. Donnie couldn't have said who said what, if he tried. He was too caught up in it all.

"We can do it again. I'm here. Google is too busy in its power games with the Library of Congress."

"They aren't expecting us. Ada still thinks we're with her."

"It will never be enough."

"When it's over, we'll be nothing." Donna let out a long, slow breath. He could hear her trying to calm down.

"We'll be us," he said. "That's the thing about cloning. Looooots of copies!"

"Clones are still unique people. You're a moron," she said, fondly.

"Guilty as charged, but we both already knew that."

She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Go to sleep, you'll have an early start tomorrow."

"Yeah, all right." As if she hadn't been the one who called in the first place. "Did you call to check up on me, or to make yourself feel better?"

"No idea. Don't care. I'm going to go find myself a stiff drink." She hung up, and he was left alone on a hotel bed, with silence and piles of books.

He generally read to relax, to take his mind off of work. For as long as he could remember, it had been his safe-haven. Paper was home, it was safe and welcoming. The dry, sharp taste of bookbinder's glue and old paper at the back of his throat. The light weight of an individual page, barely a gram, barely a touch against your skin. The entire double-sided measure in ink of a person's mind.

He'd been interested, curious. What had he read, once, all that time ago? What were the parts of himself that he had forgotten? In the taxi ride from the convention centre, he had been nervous and impatient. He'd nearly ignored the phone ringing. But now that he had time, he couldn't face the thought of opening a cover, let alone skimming one.

He set the book - he still hadn't looked to see what it was - aside. Drank a glass of water, brushed his teeth. Took a shower. He walked past the bedside table, and picked up the book, the keys to the room. Slipped them inside his pocket.

The city was always busy, always crowded. Obnoxious and noisy, and you could have been in London or Paris or Tokyo, and it would have felt the same. Nothing was distinct. Nothing had edges. The bricks were old and soft, corners worn off. He had visited all of those places. He had seen photographs of the proof of it. Mission reports. Documentation. His signature. Facsimiles.

Yomiko was old. An older woman. In his patchy memories, of which there weren't many, he'd never really liked older women. They'd seen too much of the world. They could see right through his reserved insecurities, right to the scared little boy inside. They usually smirked and moved on. Her hair was still as messy and unattended as it had been when she was young. He'd seen the photographs of her, as a girl. Enthusiastic, distracted, bright-eyed. Since then, she had grieved, and gotten on with her life and her work. She had cleaned up his messes for him. She remembered him, where he couldn't remember her.

It was like she owned his past. As if he had less of a right to himself, to feeling whole inside, than she did. As if there was this boundary that he could not cross, and it sat inside his pocket.

He ran his thumb over the edges, felt the ruffle of pages beneath it. Rolled his shoulders inwards, and turned towards a street cafe. He couldn't trust himself to be alone, it was too private. If he was just one person, reading in a cafe, that was anonymous. It was public. It was, somehow, a respectable compromise.

The true magic that comes from a book is that no matter how many people surround you, no matter how many people have written it, no matter how many characters are in it, when you are reading it you are truly alone. Private. You are by yourself, and the only things in your head are your own thoughts turning words into ideas into a story. Nobody else's voice. There's this clean, safe divide between all of your insecurities and all of the strange ways that people have conversations in the real world. It is this marvellous way of being alone and being yourself in comfort. No second guessing. The story takes you away, and there you are. Blessed silence.

Donnie hadn't taken the time to himself to read, not properly. Perhaps not since he had woken up in Washington. There had always been work to do. He hadn't been able to shake that fear, really. Could reading a novel imprint a personality into your mind? Touching one? There were no records, but a lot of documentation of the Gentelmen Project had been destroyed. The special people, the I-jin, they had been groomed to be perfect from an early age. First, with Donnie and his friend Ridley, routine 'scholarships' and programming. The arena. Then, with the clones, genetic manipulation and eugenics. Attempts to make fiction cross over into reality. The British Library had certainly tried to transfer a human soul into a book, and then back from there into a body.

No, that wasn't quite it. Not a soul. Just an imprint, a pattern. A scan of an old man's brain, with state-of-the-art but very basic technology. A measurement of electrical impulses and synapses. The Gentlemen Books had been a codified version of a state of being, a snapshot of a human mind, repeated a few times and recorded. The attempt to imprint Gentlemen's mind into Anita King had merely been an attempt to impose Gentlemen's brain activity pattern over her own. Even with an extra dump of I-jin memories - brainwashed reprogramming, a psychological rather than a technological marvel - if they had succeeded, they surely would have (should have) been left with Anita King, plus some neuroses.

Donnie knew there was no actual way for a book to force its way into his head, and turn him into somebody else. But it sure was ruining his ability to concentrate and lose himself in the story. Sighing, he leaned on his left elbow, pressed the fingers of his right hand up into his hair, and tried to focus.

It was an Everyman, pocket-sized reprints of classics. Battered and faded, with – disgustingly enough – a small insect pressed between the pages of the introduction. Donnie frowned. What kind of bibliophile put a potentially infected book into a suitcase full of them? A complete and utter ditz. Someone more infatuated with the words on the page, than anything else, maybe. Or someone who loved everything that came with books?

It was The Old Curiosity Shop, which seemed like a really depressing choice, for a gift to someone else. Dickens, without the happy ending. It was a book that showed the cruel and many ways that adults could change children's lives, and...

Donnie sighed, even heavier. He flipped the cover shut, and pulled the cafe menu towards himself. He had read the book, several times, as a young man. Out of training, working in the British Library, he had resolved to read all of the great British writers. The Old Curiosity Shop had given him real food for thought at the time. It was the first time that he had seen himself as a victim, instead of a test subject or a survivor. Reading about Nell's tragedy, it had become very clear. The men and women who had shaped Donnie's life weren't just his personal enemies. It became more complex than hatred and survival.

The British Library and the British government hadn't simply experimented on children, to try and create more powerful agents, and replacement shells for Gentlemen's intelligence. They had placed their own very shortsighed and personal fears, their desire for power, above any other authority in the world. Like Nell's grandfather, they would burn out. Die, and leave a trail of bodies and outstanding debts in their wake.

Donnie hadn't enjoyed the book, but there had been Kit. A young boy who had tried with everything in his power to protect and save his friend. To take her away from the toxic situation she was in. He remembered it in feelings, more than in concepts. This hope, that things could be different. That there were people in a world outside of Donnie and Ridley's suffering. That a good amount of what was imprisoning Donnie, tying him to the British Library, was imaginary. Something he could change, if he wanted to.

He felt sick. His hands were clammy, and he kept his eyes downcast as he ordered hot tea and some raisin toast. He was weightless, falling, and everything was too personal. Surely someone would see him, with that book, his shaking hands, and see right through him.

If he had thought that reading was going to help, at all, he'd surely been wrong. But it was better, that the waiter made light conversation and lingered – people trying to earn their tips was a bafflingly invasive practice – and that Donnie had a social contract to fulfil. He was sitting at a cafe, so he had to speak to someone, ask for something. Eat and drink, slowly but not too slow. Calculate the tip. Pay.

By the time he was ready to leave, he felt steadier. He frowned at the book, began to walk away. He reached the curb of the pavement before he felt it, a tug in his gut. The knowledge that there were all kinds of reasons that Yomiko may have given him that book, and that there was a message from that version of himself before the death and the brain damage, that he shouldn't be allowed to forget.

He ran back, and found the waiter standing, smiling, holding the book out. "Thought you'd be back for this," he said. He had short, frizzing hair and an easy grin. "Here ya go."

Donnie smiled politely, and nodded in thanks, and was thumbing the cover open one-handed before it had even left the waiter's hands. He walked, and read, and let the book lead him back to his hotel room, and all of the other things about himself that he needed to know.