(Max's POV)
Inside, the library was awesome. None of us had ever been inside one, and we were staring like the out-of-town yokels we were.
"May I help you?" A young guy was standing behind a polished wooden counter. He looked faintly disapproving, but not like he wanted to rip our lungs out, so I figured he wasn't an Eraser.
"Yes." I stepped forward, looking as serious and professional as a fourteen-year-old mutant who had never been in a library can look. "I was hoping to find information about a certain institute that I think is in New York." I smiled at him, putting real warmth into it, and he blinked. "Unfortunately, I don't know the whole name or where in New York it is. Is there a computer I could use to search? Or some sort of database?"
He glanced over all of us. Angel stepped up next to me and put her hand in mine. She smiled sweetly at the guy, looking, well, angelic.
"Fourth floor," the guy said after a pause. "There are computers in a room off the main reading room. They're free, but you have to sign in."
"Thank you so much," I said, smiling again. Then we hustled to the elevators.
The Gasman punched number four.
"Well, aren't you the charmer?" Fang muttered, not looking at me.
"What?" I asked, startled, but he didn't say anything. We rode upward, hating being in a small enclosed space. Sweat was breaking out on my brow by the time the doors slid open on the fourth floor, and we leapt out as if the elevator had been pressurized.
We immediately found a bank of computers with instructions on how to surf the Net. All we had to do was sign in at the desk. I signed "Ella Martinez" with a flourish, and the clerk smiled at me.
That was the last cheerful thing that happened for the next hour and a half. Fang and I searched in every way we could think of and found a million institutes of one kind or another, in Manhattan and throughout New York state, but none of them seemed promising. My favourite? The Institute for Realizing Your Pet's Inner Potential. Anyone who can explain that to me, drop a line.
Angel was lying under the desk at our feet, murmuring quietly to herself. Nudge and the Gasman were playing hangman on a piece of scrap paper. Violence occasionally broke out, since neither of them could spell their way out of a paper bag.
Iggy was sitting motionless in a chair, and I knew he was listening to every whisper, every scraped chair, every rustle of fabric in the room, creating an invisible map of what was happening all around him. And Cookie was sitting on his lap, playing with few hair ties that she found. Damn that kid was Cute.
I typed in another search command, then watched in dismay as the computer screen blurred and crashed. A string of orange words, fail, fail, fail, scrolled across the screen before it finally went black and winked out.
"It's almost closing time, anyway," Fang said.
"Can we sleep here?" Iggy said softly. "It's so quiet. I like it in here."
"Uh, I don't think so," I said, looking around. I hadn't realized that most people had left-we were the only ones in the room. Except for a guard, in uniform, who had just spotted us. She started walking toward us, and something about her, her tightly controlled pace, made my inner alarms go off.
"Let's split," I muttered, pulling Iggy out of his chair.
We skittered out of there, found the stairs, and raced down as fast as we could. I was expecting Erasers at any moment. But we burst out into the dim late-afternoon light and ran down the stone steps without anyone following us.