"Your parents came from books, but not you?" My mind raced over the idea. So far, I’d just been assuming that everyone I met had come from a book, somewhat like I had even if the stories themselves had been vastly different.
Jonathan shook his head. "All librarians are second generation at least. The theory behind it is a little absurd, but it is supposed to ensure that we aren't secretly tainted by political affiliations given to us by our authors. So, in theory, those of us born in the After are more well-rounded characters than people like you, prosaics or otherwise. Librarians will have come from magical lineages, but not directly from books themselves."
"That's got to be at least a little insulting to everyone else," I said, before I could stop myself. But at least Jonathan had said that he thought the idea was absurd.
"Oh, absolutely. Some see the concept as outdated, but librarians do enjoy their traditions, if nothing else. And books of course, but while we may have had the opportunity to shape ourselves right from the beginning, that doesn't change the fact that over the course of years, or even decades, those of you who come from books aren’t so different, not after you’ve started lives here for yourselves. So far, I've seen that the end result turns out about the same either way, but I'm in the minority on that opinion."
I shrugged, not sure I had nearly enough information to contribute my own two cents to this ongoing debate. And for the time being, I had other things to worry about. It wasn't like becoming a librarian had been on my to-do list. Still, it was a little strange to think that I would never get the opportunity. Or that others, who had been here for a hundred years or more would still be limited by their origin story.
"Well," Jonathan said, clapping his hands together almost silently, "on that note, I'll get out of your hair. Any idea what you're going to do with your time today?"
"I thought I might try picking up a few books at random and just reading through them, see if anything catches my attention. I’m working under the theory that the more I read, the better of an understanding I'll have of the After." I didn't bother mentioning that I was borrowing the idea from someone I met the day before, and Jonathan nodded his approval.
"Good, good. Make the most of your time here. And if you have any questions, be sure to flag down your nearest librarian. They certainly have plenty to do, but any one of them will be happy to hit pause on their work in order to talk books for a little while."
As far as plans went, it wasn't exactly what I'd been hoping for. I wanted out. But if I was going to be stuck here, I had every intention of using the time to learn as much as I could, as fast as I could. Like it or not, the After was my home, and I was all kinds of done with feeling like a stranger to my new world.
Unfortunately for me, I had a few more hoops to jump through before I could get to learning everything and everything. The councilors had scheduled a physical for me with someone named Doctor Maiz, who was set to meet me in an unused office near the front of the Archive.
I had to ask three different people for directions before I found where I was supposed to be, all the while, hanging on to the mug of coffee I’d grabbed from the cafeteria, which had been spelled to stay warm until it was empty. Now, if only I could find a coffee mug that was never empty and I’d be all set.
I found the door I was looking for slightly ajar. Pushing it open and peering inside, I found a tall black woman sitting on a swivel chair, flipping through a binder. She looked up as I entered, her loose brown curls bopping slightly with the motion. She looked to be about twenty years my senior, with a stern expression and tired eyes.
"Are you Doctor Maiz?" I asked. "I might be a little lost."
"Kadie?" she asked, her voice raspy and warm. I nodded, smiling a little. "You’re in the right place."
It would have been hard to say if I was more relieved about finding the right place, or anxious about not knowing what was coming next. No matter how hard I tried to think about it, I didn’t have any experience with doctors. It made sense that the book I had come from hadn’t had any need for me to visit a doctor, but that left a giant question mark in my mind where a pretty normal life experience probably should have been.
Still, knowing more about my own body was never going to be a bad thing, so I was willing to play along.
"Please, have a seat." The doctor said when I still hadn’t moved, tilting her head toward a waist-high bench. "The councilors have filled me in on your situation, so you’re free to speak freely here. We just want to learn more about you."
Yeah, that wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Feeling stiff and awkward as I moved, I did as I was asked, looking around the room for any hints about what exactly they’d be looking to examine my body for. For the briefest of instants, the doctor's brown eyes locked on my own, showing the strangest mixture of curiosity and sadness.
Not for the first time, I wished the Archive also held a collection of non-fiction that I could use as reference for stuff like this. But no, of course those books were housed elsewhere, in yet another place I wasn’t allowed to go. But maybe the doctor herself would unveil some new information for me. That alone would have to be enough of an incentive to get me through whatever the councilors had planned for me.
"Roll up your sleeve please," Doctor Maiz said once I was settled, bringing over a tray of equipment I didn’t recognize and placing it beside me. "Have you ever had blood taken before?"
Feeling a little nauseous, I shook my head.
"There’s nothing to worry about. This is all standard practice. You've certainly got everyone buzzing around here."
"It won’t hurt?"
"Not much." Well, that wasn’t all that reassuring. The doctor picked up a sterile syringe and a few clear tubes from the tray before starting to piece together a complicated contraption that I could only assume was meant to physically remove my blood from my body, which didn’t exactly sound like the best idea to me.
After tying a plastic ribbon around my arm, she seemed to be ready. But I definitely wasn’t. "Okay, Kadie. I’m going to need you to relax a little." The needle she was holding was now hovering perilously close to my skin.
"Easier said than done," I said through gritted teeth. But the doctor didn’t seem to be the type to chat and make me feel better. I squeezed my eyes shut as the needle pierced my skin.
"Okay, that’s going to need a few minutes," said the doctor, her voice interrupting my building panic.
I forced myself to exhale and open my eyes, but made a point of looking anywhere other than at my arm.
"What will that show us?"
"I believe the councilors are looking for any physical anomalies," said Doctor Maiz. "And it won’t hurt to have more of your physical details on file, blood type and the like. The librarians certainly live for data." Maybe it was just me, but the doctor's voice sounded the tiniest bit wistful.
"Are you one of them? A librarian I mean."
At that, my new doctor finally looked back over at me, the corners of her mouth pulling downward a little. "No. I’m not. But I’ve worked closely with them in the past, and they know I can be trusted with more… delicate matters."
That sounded just a tiny bit ominous. "But you are a doctor, right? Like a real one."
"That’s what they tell me. I was a medic in the story I came from, but I went to medical school after… in my thirties. A little late, certainly, but I still know my way around the human body. Also, the elven body."
In the time it took me to consider her answer, I'd already come up with a new question.
"So do I have a blood type then? How does that work? Do you? If we weren’t ever born, how does any of that work?" I hesitated a little, wondering if I was coming on too strong. "Sorry, but there’s still so much I don’t know."
"No, that’s a great question!" Doctor Maiz was fully beaming at me by then. It was safe to say that my doctor was just as interested in data as the librarians were. But she at least had the decency to work with me to get it. "Everyone who
arrives in the After from one particular book will have the same blood type, which as far as we know, means that it’s something you inherited from your author."
"Huh," I said, accidentally catching a glimpse of the bright red fluid filling the tube coming out of my arm. But that actually was pretty cool. "Uh." I fumbled, too startled by what I’d seen to be able to form another question, or anything else to take my mind off what was happening to my body. "Quick! Distract me. Tell me something else. Anything."
For the next few minutes, the doctor was an unstoppable fountain of information, filling me in on all kinds of useful things, which while they might never specifically come in handy, felt like the kind of information that everyone around me probably already had. All the while my blood was seeping out of me into a baggie, and I tried not to think about it.
Tried and failed, but I really did try.
But it turned out that a blood type wasn’t the only thing I had gotten directly from my creator. All the general information that made it possible for me to be a walking, talking human, had also come from whoever she’d been—or, maybe my author had been a he? Math, the ability to read, basic knowledge about how the world worked. Librarians had been studying incoming characters for years and had determined that while personality traits and memories were tied to the individual, all the filler stuff that no one ever thought about, but everyone needed, was shared between characters.
It was actually kind of neat, and it went a long way toward keeping me distracted until my blood extraction was finally complete, and the doctor had popped a ball of gauze and a bandage onto my arm.
"Alright, are we done here?" I said, hopping off the bench and already hoping I’d never need to deal with doctors ever again.
Unfortunately, Doctor Maiz shook her head, grimacing a little. "Not even close. I still have to check your reflexes and your vision, examine your scar… and well, I’ve got a whole list. You’re stuck with me for a while. But I promise to talk you through everything. And I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have."
Shoulders slumping, I hopped right back up onto the bench. "You've got yourself a deal."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The one week anniversary of living at the Archive found Devon and I working with Grayson in one of the offices nestled in the west tower of the building. I wasn’t sure how we’d managed to draw the short straw on being corralled into becoming the hired help, but secretly I was grateful to have something new to do.
"I thought you were supposed to be running around the city, enforcing the laws or something," I said in a huff as I dropped yet another box onto the rickety old table that sat in the center of the room. A cloud of dust unfurled into the air, tickling my nose as I started unpacking decades old file folders. Behind me, Devon was shifting boxes around, creating an organizational system I couldn’t begin to understand.
"Don't worry," Grayson said, without looking up from the papers he was flipping through, "the city is well taken care of. It's been a long time since I've had the chance to get my hands dirty with some good old fashioned research."
"And what is it we're looking for exactly?"
It was then Grayson finally glanced up at me, his brown eyes focusing in on my mouth as I spoke. "City records," he said. "Specifically, how recently it was that new arrivals showed up in the capital cities."
"I thought you said that never happened."
"Not in our modern history, no. But the world hasn't always been as big as it is now. At first, there were only the capital cities – Sanctum, Asylum, Haven, Oasis. And everyone who was coming in from the regions those cities represented would arrive at one of these cities first since there was no variation, no opportunities to go where a character would best fit. Then the world continued to grow as needed, it still does. But the records being kept weren't as thorough back then, and while we've meant to back everything up digitally, it has yet to be a priority. We're behind on everything else, why not this?"
I shrugged, noncommittally. Not for the first time, I wished someone had taken the time to make a pamphlet, explaining the basics of the After to new arrivals. It was just one more thing for my to-do list.
Grayson mimicked my movement. "It probably won't get us anywhere, but it's one of a few ideas at this point, so we're going to keep going to see what we can come up with."
I looked down at the top piece of paper on the stack in my hands. "1890s," I said. It was the record of a girl named Delilah Jones. She'd arrived in Sanctum in eighteen ninety-two. She had been the housemaid of an English Lord, and the victim of a crime of passion. The paper said she had no known family, no friends. Her character had seemingly existed in something of a void. I wondered what had happened to her. I flipped through to the next person whose life story I held, trying not to linger too long on any one piece until I found something useful.
"Eliza told me that time passes differently here, that aging isn’t always the same as what I’m used to. But do people just get old and die?" I thought of Jonathan, with his endlessly youthful face. "Or, do people here just live forever?"
"Long story short… It's different for everyone. Think of aging as the natural progression of your story rather than a predictable force." He paused for a second to pick up a new stack of paper. "Eliza wasn't kidding when she said that things work differently here. My parents were both in their early twenties when they first arrived in the After. They both came from fantasy worlds, my mother getting here a few years earlier and then working as a courier in one of the larger elven kingdoms. By the time the two of them met, years later, they both looked the same as they had when they arrived. They were together for about a decade before my sister and I were born. But the way my dad tells it, as soon as I was born, things started changing for both of them as well. They aged as I aged. And then once I was full-grown, I stopped aging. I think they still aged for a few years after that, until my sister graduated university, but it’s too hard to say for sure. But, I've been this way," he said, splaying his arms wide, "for most of my life. And my parents still look to be in their mid-forties.
"Still, I know of some places that are mostly home to prosaics, where time passes predictably for those who live there. People arrive at whatever age they were when their story finished, and they live their lives. They get older year by year, and then eventually they die of old age. Some come back and begin again, other souls never return to the After. We don't know whether they end up back in their origin story in the end, or if it's something else entirely."
"Wow," I said, my mouth hanging open a little. "So how old are you?"
Grayson chuckled under his breath and shook his head. "I'm sure I read somewhere that that's considered a rude question in prosaic worlds."
"I think that only applies to women."
"Of course you do. And honestly, I couldn't answer your question even if I wanted to. Parts of the After track time differently, and in different regions time moves differently entirely. I am what I am."
"Where did you grow up?" I asked next, finding I was genuinely curious. I kept hearing about how many different places I could find in the After. Cities like the ones I'd known, suburbia, countryside. Post-apocalyptic wastelands like the one Harper had lived in before. Where she was again. But for all the talk of how the world I'd come from had lacked magic, I had yet to hear much about the places here that were built by it. I had to think that somewhere out there were magical cities, and dwarven mines. Cities based on Chinese myths, or ruled by Greek gods. Aliens.
"I was born in a town to the West of here, but we moved around a lot when I was young. My parents always wanted me to be a librarian because they couldn't, so they gave me the broadest experience possible of the world, so I'd understand the importance of it all."
Behind me, Devon let out a frustrated cough. I turned around to see him still in the corner, moving boxes around, glowering at them in frustration.
"Joining the Archive was my wish as much as theirs by the time I pledged. No matter where we li
ved, I was always nose deep in a book. At least, until recently, I would've bet good money that I’d read more of the books in this place than most of my colleagues. Maybe not Marissa, but it would be close."
"And yet somehow you ended up leading the protectorate?" I still had trouble imagining this tall, strong man as a bookworm. But I found I liked the image.
"It was what the Archive needed," Grayson said. "And I was the one best suited for the job. It took a long time to convince me to take it, but after the original protectorate was lost, Marissa and I had a long discussion. She'd been my mentor years before, and this was what was being asked of me. I wanted to do my part. I still get to spend more time surrounded by books than I'd ever thought possible. And the work I do benefits the Archive in the end, even if it wouldn’t be my first choice. I'm good at my job, and I get results. Maybe this won't be my role forever, but for now I'm happy enough."
I wanted to argue that maybe happy enough wasn’t happy at all, but who was I to judge this guy’s life? He certainly seemed more fulfilled than I’d ever been.
The two of us worked in silence for a while after that, with me moving on to another box with records that went back farther than Delilah Jones. That meant handing off my finished box to Devon who didn't look all that thrilled to have yet another rejected box to organize. In theory, he was taking whatever Grayson and I found unhelpful and was sorting the files so that when the time finally came to put these records somewhere other than in a dusty old attic, the work would be easier.
"Sorry," I said under my breath, handing him the box I'd been working through.
To my surprise, Devon smiled back, broad, and genuine. "No worries. It beats another day of trying to force myself to get into reading a book. And I like to be busy, to pass the time. Plus, if somehow this helps them, helps us, then I guess I can't complain."
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