I gripped the table with my good hand and squeezed my eyes shut in the hope that would control the dizziness. “Something’s wrong with one of the other named Neutralities. It’s under attack.”
“Which one?” Judy demanded.
“I don’t know. It could even be both.” I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and dropped it when the dizziness struck again, making me feel like the room was spinning like a top. “I think we’re under attack, too!”
Judy put a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and had to squeeze them shut immediately because Judy looked like she was tilted almost horizontally. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Can’t you feel it?” I thought I might throw up if the movement didn’t stop.
“Feel what?”
He flees. The guardians fall. We stand. The oracle’s voice reverberated through me. I risked a peek and saw the room had stopped spinning.
“What was that?” I said.
“Helena, I told you, I didn’t feel anything.”
“I was talking to the oracle.” I crouched to retrieve my phone. The room stayed still. Quickly, I called Lucia and got her voicemail. “One of the other named Neutralities is under attack,” I said. “I don’t know which.” I shoved my phone into my pocket and ran, ignoring Judy’s questions, through the stacks and into the oracle. I hurried through the narrow aisles, sidling past the bookcases, until I reached the oracle’s heart, a spot where four tall bookcases stood facing each other in a square. The oracle pressed down on me like a giant thumb, and for once I didn’t mind.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Something’s happening.”
They strike. The guardians fall. Stand strong.
“Are we under attack, too?”
We stand. He flees. Listen.
Dizziness hit me again, but faintly, like a memory. I rested my bandaged hand on one of the shelves and closed my eyes again, breathing slowly and letting my sense of the oracle wrap around me like a warm wool blanket, not quite soft enough to be truly comfortable. As I did so, the oracle bore down on me more heavily, making me feel like I was going to burst with its presence. But it stopped short of the point at which I would have to assume its body as I’d done twice before. I hugged it to me and waited.
Every inch of my exposed flesh tingled with goose pimples, and I felt as if I could see through my skin. I gradually became aware of the store surrounding me and remembered how it had felt to be the oracle, how all the books and shelves and walls had been a part of me, and in my imagination I felt that way again. I felt rooted to the floor, strong and immovable, and breathed in the scent of leather and old paper that I realized was the oracle’s true scent.
Faintly, I heard cries of panic in a language too garbled to identify. They grew louder, as if a fight had broken out somewhere nearby and was drawing closer. The smell of old paper mingled with the smell of smoke—no, incense, a dark, rich odor that filled my lungs and spread through my body.
Then new sounds arose, terrible, skin-crawling, hissing squeals that came from nothing earthly. As the noise, too, drew closer, I cringed, wishing I could hide from the things that made it. Footsteps echoed through the oracle, the sound of someone running across marble, not linoleum. The person was coming my way. Without opening my eyes, I reached for the runner, found a handful of cloth, and dragged the person toward me.
Whoever it was stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into one of the bookcases. Immediately my sense of the store vanished, and with it the keening, hissing squeal. I opened my eyes. Claude Gauthier sprawled at my feet, breathing heavily, his hair and clothing disordered.
I gaped. “Claude! How—”
He flees. We stand. Here, and there, and here.
“Helena,” Claude gasped. “Where are we? Is this Abernathy’s?”
I ignored him for the moment. “You did this before, with the other oracle,” I said. “But that was because the two of you shared the same oracular space. How did you reach across a continent and an ocean to bring Claude here?”
The oracle was silent, though I still felt its presence. Claude got to his feet and dusted himself off. His eyes were wild, and he was still breathing heavily. “Is it the oracle to whom you speak?” he said in a low voice, like he was afraid of interrupting me.
I nodded and held up a finger, asking him to wait. “Is that too hard a question?” I asked. “Um…can you tell me if we’re in danger?”
The guardians fall. Four are gone, two remain. He flees. Here, and there, and here.
“The Athenaeum is gone,” I said, and looked at Claude. He nodded. I didn’t think he’d heard the oracle speak through my thoughts. “How did we save Claude?”
Again the oracle was silent. Then it said, We are one. We are apart.
“I…think this may be too complicated for you to explain to me. We made a connection with the Athenaeum? Could you always do that?”
We are apart. If we touch, we end.
“And the Athenaeum was already lost, so—” A horrible thought struck me. “Can the invaders use that connection to come here? That would bypass the wards, I’m sure.”
We are apart.
“All right.” I looked at Claude, who was watching me without betraying any of the confusion he might justifiably have felt, what with me talking to the air like that. “I don’t know how it worked, but I’m glad. They would have killed you.”
“They nearly did,” Claude agreed. He looked around with interest. “I have not seen the store ever. It is extraordinary.”
I let out a deep breath. “We need to call Lucia. She’ll want to know what happened.”
My phone rang the instant we left the oracle, as if it had been impatiently waiting for me to emerge into a place that had cell reception. “Which Neutrality?” Lucia demanded.
“The Athenaeum. It’s lost. The oracle…I don’t know how it happened, but it brought Claude Gauthier to Abernathy’s before the invaders got him.”
“That’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve heard all week. We can discuss it later. How did they break through the wards?”
“Um…why don’t you talk to Claude?” I handed Claude the phone.
As he spoke to Lucia, Judy came through the stacks. She looked pissed. “Why does no one ever tell me what the hell is going on?” she exclaimed. “And where did Claude come from?”
“Switzerland,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.” I described the events of the last few minutes. Judy’s expression went from angry to thoughtful. “I think the oracle was able to overlap with the Athenaeum, or something,” I finished. “Which means it probably can’t do it again, if the Athenaeum is destroyed.”
“That sounds dangerous,” Judy said. “But what a relief that he wasn’t killed.”
“Yeah.”
Claude abruptly handed me back my phone. Lucia said, “From what Gauthier tells me, Abernathy’s isn’t in immediate danger. The protections on the store aren’t stone wards, so they’re not vulnerable to the attack the invaders just pulled on the Athenaeum. I’m sending enforcers to watch the neighborhood in case they try an attack on one of you directly.”