Vivienne Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The glowing fragment told Thorne where to come, and the library's wooden walls would not stop him. Vivienne looked at the four of them in the candlelight. Luna, pale and silent. Esther, white-knuckled. Marcus by the door. They had no gun, no wall, no plan. Only the forbidden library and the night pressing on its arched windows. "We can't run," Marcus said. "He'll read the song in the dark. Finds us anywhere." He set the fragment on the table. The symbols pulsed like a slow heartbeat. Vivienne stared at the paper. The crawling marks blurred her eyes, as they always did. Then she understood. "The song is a leash," she said. "It points to whoever holds the fragment. Not to us. To this." Esther caught it first. "Then we move the leash." Vivienne grabbed the fragment. The paper felt warm, awake. "Marcus. The archive. The university across the fields." Her plan came out fast. "We hide the fragment there, deep in the stacks of silenced names. Then we leave. Thorne follows the song to an empty building. We go the other way." "He'll know it's a trick," Marcus said. "Not before he searches it," Vivienne said. "That buys us the night." Luna gripped Vivienne's wrist. Her mouth shaped a word. No sound. But her eyes went to the fragment, then to the door, and she nodded hard. Go. They went. Marcus led them out the back, across the black fields. The scarecrows stood on their poles, arms out, watching. Vivienne held the fragment against her chest. It grew hotter the longer she carried it, as if it knew it was being used. The archive doors hung open. Inside, shelves climbed into shadow, packed with ledgers of the dead-voiced. Vivienne pushed the fragment behind a row of old record books, far back where the candlelight died. The glow leaked through the shelf like coals. "Now we go," she whispered. They slipped out and circled wide into the dark. Behind them, a figure crossed the fields toward the archive. Short, broad, moving with no hurry. Green eyes caught the moon. He wore a dead man's century on his face and a star-shaped buckle at his belt. Aldous Thorne. He walked straight past the four of them crouched in the wheat, drawn by the song, blind to the singers. He entered the archive. The doors shut. Vivienne let out her breath. It had worked. Thorne was locked in a building full of his victims' names, hunting a scrap of paper. But she had given him the fragment. The only copy of the song. Without it, she could not study what the melody truly did. And Thorne now held, in his own hands, the one thing he had crossed a century to reclaim. "We've seen his face," Marcus said quietly. "We know the man now." "And he has the song," Vivienne said. "We have to take it back before he finishes it."