Emmeline Inkwell had written a novel, and no one knew. She kept it locked in a leather file beneath her desk at the Archimedes Library. Three hundred pages, hand-stitched, hidden under ledgers and dust. For twenty years she had guarded other people's books. Now she wanted her own name on a spine. But a publisher had sent word that morning, and the word stopped her cold. They would print the book. First they needed cover art. They needed the face of her heroine. Emmeline could not picture that face. She had written the woman across three hundred pages. She knew her voice, her limp, her stubborn courage. But when Emmeline closed her eyes, the face blurred. An illustrator could not draw a smudge. Without a cover, the book would not print. Without the book, her name stayed hidden under the desk where she had buried it. So she carried the file across the reading room to the one person who caught faces before they escaped. Aura Prisma sat by the tall windows, sketchbook open, drawing a pigeon that had wandered in. The old Spanish artist was Emmeline's friend, and the fastest hand she knew. Aura once painted a whole door on her own arm to keep it from vanishing. "I need a face I cannot see," Emmeline said. She set the file on the table and opened it. "My heroine. She lives in here. But she will not hold still in my head." Aura did not reach for the pages. She reached for Emmeline's hands. "Ay, no, no. You are looking at a painting through fog, querida. Stop looking at the fog. Tell me one true thing she did." Emmeline swallowed. "She walked into a room no one else would enter. Because it was hers to guard, and no one else wanted it." Aura's pencil began to move. "And her chin? When she said that?" "Up. Always up." "The eyes. Tired?" "Tired," Emmeline said. "But they don't look away." Aura drew fast, muttering colors no one had named. She turned the sketchbook around. The woman on the page had a lifted chin and steady, tired eyes. She wore a librarian's collar. Her hair sat up in a clockwork twist. Emmeline stared. "That's not my heroine," she whispered. "That's me." "Sí," Aura said gently. "You wrote her from your own mirror and never noticed. The face was under the desk the whole time, hija. With the book." Emmeline pressed a hand to her mouth. Her heroine had her face. Which meant the cover would carry her face. The whole city would see the Chief Librarian on a novel written in secret. She closed the file slowly. The book could print now. But the moment it did, everyone would know the quiet librarian had a hidden life. And someone in this city, she suspected, would rather that life stayed hidden.