Chapter 29: tell me, honey, what's the plan
She can't figure out exactly how they're looking at her.
At her, not at Daryl, who remains silent and unchanged behind her. It's not that they're inscrutable, these people whose animal gazes are locked on her like a target; it's that she's not certain they know exactly how they're looking at her, and she can think of four or five separate ways and four or five corresponding reasons why. What she now knows they all know, what they can almost certainly tell has been going on, everything they've learned in the last twenty-four hours, and now this. Which is a marvelous coincidence. This appears to be a world in which coincidences have a habit of happening, but even so.
She stares back at them. This isn't comfortable, whatever else it might be. "What?"
"Just opened," Rick says quietly, and glances back at the door. "Far as we can tell. Shane wandered down here a few minutes ago, saw it."
"Blinked." Shane looks genuinely bewildered, which is an expression Beth honestly never expected to see on his face. "Eyes closed, it was still closed. Opened 'em and it was open too."
"This has never happened." Michonne, low. She doesn't sound pleased. Then again, Beth isn't sure what she would even sound like if she was. "Or none of us have ever reported being present for the opening of a door. We know they open, they basically have to, but."
"Yeah, well. Seems like a lotta new things are happenin'." The open door is standing between her and a clear view of what's through it, and she paces toward Rick, eyes on it. She's not sure what she should be feeling, but what's humming beneath her breastbone is a kind of calm sharpness. A watchfulness. She wasn't afraid of this thing when it was closed, and now, open in this endless twilight, it doesn't feel any more frightening.
It feels like it felt before: as if this is exactly where and how it should be. As if it shouldn't be any other way.
And what it opens onto is one of the least frightening things she's ever seen.
She's seen it before, in fact. Or something very much like it. She's walked through it countless times and with special frequency as final exams approached. She's walked through it to meet friends, to study alone, to wander through it and think about nothing much, to use the computers before she had one, to look for ways to pass vacations, and several times to make out with Jimmy in dark corners, not because they needed dark corners to do that in but because there was something so deliciously exciting about it.
It's a short, whitewashed cinderblock hallway, faded beige carpet with a few suspicious dark stains, white tiled ceiling with slightly flickering fluorescent lighting.
At the end of the hallway are the spindly pillars of two sets of book detectors. Beyond them is shadow.
She looks around at them - five human faces and one huge wolf crouched behind them all - and fights back an absurd urge to laugh. But this is absurd. Laughter would be appropriate.
And at the same time, by now she knows not to trust any of what she's seeing.
"It's a library entrance." She swings her gaze back to it. There's no one in sight, and in fact the deep shadows that swallow the end of the hallway aren't at all inviting. This place is at once bland and anything but. "Or that's what it's supposed to look like."
"Supposed to," Rick echoes. He's regarding it with narrowed eyes. They all are. No fear there either, but she sees hands on knives, and she thinks Daryl probably hasn't changed back for a reason of his own. As he is, he already has knives. Five of them on each hand. In addition to being about eight feet tall. "Yeah. One by Carl's school. Glenn?"
Glenn steps forward, eyes half closed and sniffing the air - more than that. Once more, there's the sense that he's extending himself outward, occupying much more space than she can see. He shakes his head and shrugs, mouth twisted uneasily. "It's… I can't tell. It's like static. I don't know any more than any of you."
"Are we going through it?" Carol's tone is smoothed by her own kind of calm - hard, and in a way Rick's and Michonne's aren't. No apprehension, either. She's simply asking for information.
Glenn shrugs again. "The forest is too thick to get through, and I've been up and down the beach and I haven't found anything else. This? All of this?" He waves a hand at the shoreline. "It's not all one thing. It's just… You walk in one direction, it repeats itself over and over. You think you're walking in a straight line, but you're walking the same mile or so and resetting. You could walk forever and not get anywhere."
"It's the only way out," Shane murmurs, and releases a dry laugh. "Hell. We knew what we were gettin' into."
Carol cocks her head, and it's impossible to keep from thinking of an animal listening for something. "More Benescead?"
Rick's mouth thins into a grim line. "Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, not like it matters. Daryl." Looking over their heads, his voice taking on a faintly dry edge. "You wanna join us?"
She watches him change. As usual, she can't not, but as he does he's abandoned all of the slow, easy sensuality he always seems to adopt around her, as if the change itself is giving him pleasure - and if he knows she likes watching him, it might be doing just that. It's like she saw when she first met the rest of the cyne: the change as something routine. To be done, not to be enjoyed.
That strikes her as something of a shame.
"Your bow's up at the campsite. Get it, come back." Brisk but not sharp, and she knows then - and was already fairly certain - that whatever else is going on, whatever other complications there are, Rick isn't going to give either of them shit for this. Rick had seemed to want desperately to spare Daryl exactly that. To spare both of them. Not angry with them.
Afraid for them.
Daryl nods, wordless, and his eyes flick to hers before he turns to obey. The message is clear enough.
It's alright.
"Okay, then." Rick looks meditatively between her and the door, his fingers tapping on the butt of his gun. "I guess we don't have a whole lot in the way of choices. Although…" He pauses with his attention focused on the door and the hallway through it, his fingers gone still, and Beth doubts she's imagining the odd little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Y'know, I think this might be exactly what we want."
Silence. Then Glenn, the same strange and minute smile. "Yeah. I… Yeah."
She knows better than to bother asking.
It's not just the door, she realizes as they all range around it, the campsite cleared - not that there was much to clear - preparing in an unspoken kind of way that once again involves all of them on a level she can't touch. It's not just the door regarding which she's aware of an unexpected lack of fear in herself. It's everything. It's what they've already come through. What she's fought. How she's been hurt. It's what she's lost, the total unknowns and unknowables that are even now careening toward her.
It's Daryl. It's what's between them. It's what she's been wanting and what she finally understands.
She's not afraid of any of it. Not anymore.
Her hand settles on her knife and a warm sense of power rolls through her, and when she feels him behind her the power rolls stronger and higher.
"Glenn. You're point again." Rick scans the rest of them, head tilted. "Carol, take the rear. The rest of you, stick close. And you." He points at Beth, and she raises a brow. But there's nothing in that pointing finger besides emphasis, and she'll accept it. "You stay in the middle. Whatever happens. Unless Daryl drags you out."
She gets it. She gets it immediately. It's not just Daryl being what he is and it's not just about babysitting the human in their midst. It's not really about that at all.
She has value she didn't before. Or that they weren't aware of.
Whatever. Her asking or not asking for something doesn't appear to matter one bit these days.
"Alright." He jerks his head at the door. "Let's go."
The air changes immediately as she steps through. Everything changes. It's not the awful blinding wrench of her entire being that the entry into the Benescead was, but somehow it's all the stranger for it, because it's quiet. It's calm. She can feel every second of the crossing, and she can feel the second her body leaves the cool breezy air of the beach and enters something warmer and motionless and nearly stale. There's no one side bleeding into the other. It's a line, invisible but razor sharp, and as she crosses it she takes an involuntary breath and holds it tight, even though as far as she can tell there's no practical reason to do so.
It's just a hallway.
Of course it's not.
But for the worrisome darkness at the end, it really could be. She half turns, still moving, and looks back; rather than standing free the door is set into a wall of the same cinderblock as the rest of the hall. Above it is a red-lit sign that she's seen thousands of times before.
EXIT
Except at some point someone got clever, took a sharpie and wrote on a piece of printer paper and taped it in front of the E.
NO EXIT
"No fuckin' kidding," Daryl murmurs.
Glenn tosses a glance over his shoulder - tense, as much as the rest of him now. Tense more from the strain of trying to do whatever it is that he's doing, Beth is almost positive, but tense all the same. "I'm still not getting anything." He hesitates, slowing briefly. "I'm gonna just keep going till you tell me to stop. Alright?"
"Or something makes you stop," Shane mutters under his breath, and Michonne jabs a quick elbow into his arm, shooting him a glare.
"Can you not?"
He meets her gaze levelly, not missing a beat. "I can not."
No comment from the rest of them. The collective decision to refrain from doing so is palpable. Everything is palpable in the unnatural stillness of the air, more noticeable all the time, and it's beginning to feel like something heavy. Air with density. Air not entirely amiable where lungs are concerned.
Every carpet-muffled step is slow, measured - again, taken with what feels like the result of a collective decision. That in itself is nothing especially new, but the sense is stronger now, and while every step they've taken so far has been with every reasonable expectation that something unpleasant is waiting for them at the second footfall… This is different.
The darkness is very close.
Despite what he said, Glenn pauses again as he reaches the book detector and reaches out a cautious hand, touches the smooth metal arch at the top. The muscles of his arm are tight, ready to yank back, but there's nothing. Just his fingers, the metal, and silence except for the weirdly loud sound of their breathing. As if the walls reflect more than they should.
As if this place is bigger than it looks.
"Alright," Glenn breathes, and walks between the pillars.
And vanishes into the shadows.
Another few seconds of silence. From the dark ahead, the same. As before, Beth grounds herself in the cool of the knife handle under her palm - her skin never warms it. At least not much. To her touch, it's always cool as moonlight.
Michonne takes her own breath, grips her sword, steps through. Then Shane, and then Rick and Daryl are on either side of her, Daryl's hand on the small of her back, and while perhaps she should feel penned in…
What the hell is she going to do? Stay behind now?
"Eostre gebiergewe," Rick mutters, and - Carol's presence solid behind - they step past the bland metal and plastic and into the dark.
Which isn't dark at all.
Beth blinks. Her eyes had expected darkness, pupils widened in anticipation of it, and now the light she's surrounded by is far too bright. She rubs at them, glancing around and squinting - dark shapes that she recognizes as the cyne are hovering close, plus Daryl's hand remains strong at her back. But the rest of it…
They're standing in the largest single space she's ever seen.
It's not even a single space. Ahead of them is an enormous doorway, and beyond it a whole other chamber. The floor across which her boots scuffle is polished stone, a deep and brilliant green that seems to contain a multitude of other colors. The walls on either side of her are lined with pillars of the same stone, but that's all of the wall she can see - all of the wall proper, anyway. Because the walls themselves are obscured by row upon row of unlabeled shelves, rising a full four stories above her head and pressed against a ceiling of glass so clear that for a few seconds she's sure there's no glass at all.
Through the glass above them, three small moons cluster together in a clear, starless sky, blue that approaches black.
The shelves are packed to overflowing with books. The overflowing is literal. Stacks of them teeter on the polished floor beside shelves too full to accommodate any more. Some of them appear to have tumbled into piles that no one has yet picked up. More of them cover the top of a long desk a few yards to her right, even more around the legs and on the low chair in front.
The light itself - unsurprisingly by now - seems to have no source at all. It's bleeding out of the very air.
"Jesus," she breathes, and Rick chuckles, stepping past her and clapping a hand to Glenn's shoulder.
"It was."
Glenn turns, grinning - as much blatant relief as anything else. "It was."
"Not sure we should be relaxing yet." Michonne is scanning the room with narrow eyes, sword still drawn and gleaming in her half-gloved hands. "Just 'cause it looks like it, doesn't mean it is."
Rick strides forward, and while his caution doesn't appear to be entirely gone, Glenn's relief is clearly contagious. She can feel it in herself, loosening the knotted muscles in her back. This place isn't a bad place. Weird, but by now that's normal, and not bad. Maybe it's lying - she now knows that places can do that - but she's close to certain. "Then we find out. We go in."
"Wait." Beth reaches back and catches Daryl's arm as the whole group starts moving in the direction of the huge entryway ahead. She's not alarmed, but. "We're not in already?"
"God, no." Carol laughs softly. Her head is tipped back, face lifted to the sky, and she looks almost happy. "If they're right, not even close. Or it's-"
"Notes on the Collection of Incunabula." Glenn has halted by the desk and is holding one of the top books - slender and small, with a faded red cover - and studying the title. "The hell's incunabula?"
Rick glances back and sighs. "Put it down, Glenn."
"By some guy named Wimsey. Someone should tell him he's missing the H."
Daryl slides behind him, plucks the book out of his hands and tosses it back on the pile - not, Beth notes, completely without care. Which is something. She's not sure exactly why it pleases her, but it does. "Keep movin', little man."
Their footsteps and voices don't echo, Beth realizes as they close in on the entryway - past which the space between the green pillars narrow. The sounds rise into the air and sort of fade, as if they find their way to the books and melt into them. Or as if they themselves are lacking in reality compared to the rest of this place. As if they aren't quite here. She's about to mention it to Daryl - in part because she's not sure when she last spoke directly to him and she wants to say something - when the pillars abruptly fall away on either side and all possibility of saying anything vanishes like the sound.
They're standing at the entrance to a wide open gallery extending to either side of them. On both those sides are more shelves and piles of books - and now she can see that many of the titles on the covers and spines are not only a language other than English but written in an alphabet she's never seen before. More than one. Ahead of them is a railing of the same dark, glossy wood as the shelves. And past it…
As one they walk to it, lay their hands on it, and stare.
She's not sure how far down it is. Twenty stories? More? And up, at least as many. It's impossible to say how large the chamber truly is, because she can't see the chamber, not fully. All she can see are more galleries above and below, more shelves, and between the galleries more levels, more entrances to other chambers. In front of them are towers of shelves like skyscrapers, thick enough to contain multiple interior rooms - and in fact balconies dot them, so they must. Staircases snake around their exteriors, swinging wooden bridges extend between them, and here and there the rickety scaffolding of a caged lift climbs. The floor is lost in shadow. Above them, the three moons turn.
There shouldn't be this many books. There can't be. Beth's hands are trembling as they grip the railing; there can't be. All the books ever written in the history of Earth, all the ones that survived and all the ones lost, all gathered together in one set of shelves, surely wouldn't fill even a tenth of this place. It's a city of books, an insane Escher-space of books, and it's like the Dwolma, the thinning of the universe and a glimpse of something wonderful and terrible beyond.
For some reason she can't fathom, she wants to cry.
She gasps when Daryl lays a hand on hers - she hadn't been breathing, she realizes, and he stiffens and seems about to pull away when she turns her hand and threads her fingers through his, squeezing hard.
"Gyden," Shane breathes. "How the fuck are we supposed to even find her in here?"
"She'll find you."
Six bodies whirling - seven, counting hers - and seven sets of hands on seven weapons. Daryl's bow is raised and aimed, and Rick's gun is pointing, unwavering, at a small woman practically drowning in a black cloak and holding a lantern, her red hair standing in stark contrast to the deep, smooth olive tone of her skin. She blinks at them through glasses thick enough to turn her pale eyes bulbous and frog-like, and she laughs, a pleasantly rough sound.
"You think I didn't know you were here the second you stepped through the things at the entrance? Idiot boy, why do you think they're there?" She steps forward, adjusting her glasses and peering up at Rick with her lantern held high. She might be eighty years old, or twenty. "Were you looking for some cozy winter reading? Maybe Guns & Ammo? I have all the issues. And I do mean all of them."
Rick clears his throat. The gun still isn't wavering but he is, blinking as confusion washes over him - replaced with sharp realization. He nods back at the rest of them, and he might be fighting a thin smile. "Stand down. It's alright."
"I wish it was. I know why you've come." The woman lets out a weary sigh. It's weary enough to ache in Beth's chest as she puts away her knife, and she thinks eighty probably doesn't cover it where age is concerned. Probably doesn't come close. "Of course I do. I'm retired, but prophecy doesn't retire from you."
"That's honestly what we were hoping," Michonne says softly, sliding her sword back into its sheath with a single graceful arc of her arm. "You know we wouldn't be here unless we had no choice."
"I know that too. So you're finally here. Like you always would be. Sooner or later we all run out of choices." The woman half turns and gestures at the book-city with the lantern. There's something sardonic in it, Beth thinks. Something that wants to be a flourish and can't work up the energy to care enough. "Radmawath, Rick Grimes. I'm Pythia. Welcome to the Library of Alexandria."
