Alastair Vance's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Alastair Vance had inherited a ledger he could not read. He sat in the director's car of his museum, a converted Victorian train, and pressed the worn book flat under the lamp. The board wanted to close his museum. He wanted to know what it guarded. But the answer lived in pages torn out long ago. Only stubs remained, ragged against the spine. Whoever built this place had written down its true purpose, then scattered the proof. He ran a finger down the columns that survived. Acquisition dates. Sums. A note about a case in storage, third from the left, holding a clockwork model with forty-seven moving parts. His mentor had shown him that model once, in silence. Vance had never understood why. The ledger hinted the two were connected, but the sentence broke off where a page had been ripped free. He needed someone who tracked missing pages for a living. He walked to the Archimedes Library and found the Chief Librarian on a ladder, reshelving a book she clearly did not trust to anyone else. "Emmeline," he said. "I need your eyes." She climbed down without hurry. Emmeline Inkwell had logged the library's most dangerous volume missing three times and hunted it down each time. If anyone understood a book that refused to stay whole, it was her. She took the ledger, turned to the ragged stubs, and went still. "These weren't lost," she said softly. "They were cut. See the angle? A blade, not age." She traced a torn edge. "'The truest page is the one you are not shown.' Someone wanted you blind to this." "Can you find them?" "I can find where one went." She pressed the stub to the light. Faint ink had bled through onto the facing page. She read the ghost of it aloud. "A registry number. Our intake number. This page was copied into my collection." Vance followed her between the shelves. She pulled a slim intake file and opened it. Inside lay a single loose page, its torn edge a perfect match to a stub in his ledger. Vance laid the two together. They fit like a broken cup rejoined. He read the recovered lines. The museum was not built to display its clockwork pieces. It was built to keep one of them locked away. The astronomical model in storage was named on the page. Beside it, a warning: never wind it fully. "You've been trying to catalogue that model for months," Emmeline said. She had gone quiet again. "I have." Vance's mouth was dry. He had fought the board to put the thing on display. "My mentor stood before it and said nothing. I thought that was awe." The page named four more stubs still missing, scattered across the city. And it named the one who cut them. Vance closed the ledger. He now knew what he guarded. He did not yet know how to stop wanting to reveal it.