Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

THE STRANGEST CLERK IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

I AM LOOKING through a pair of white Stormtrooper binoculars. I am looking at that same tiny gray symbol, two hands spread open like a book, etched into darker gray stone. I’m perched on a bench on Fifth Avenue, my back to Central Park, flanked by a newspaper dispenser and a falafel cart. We’re in New York City. I borrowed the binoculars from Mat before we left. He warned me not to lose them.

“What do you see?” Kat asks.

“Nothing yet.” There are small windows set high up on the walls, all guarded by heavy bars. It’s a boring little fortress.

The Unbroken Spine. It sounds like a band of assassins, not a bunch of book lovers. What’s going on in that building? Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work. Do you have to pay money to be a member of the Unbroken Spine? You probably have to pay a lot of money. There are probably expensive cruises. I’m worried about Penumbra. He’s in so deep that he can’t even see how strange it all is.

It’s early in the morning. We came straight from the airport. Neel visits Manhattan all the time for business and I used to take the train down from Providence, but Kat is a New York neophyte. She gawked at the city’s predawn glitter as our plane curled down into JFK, her fingertips on the window’s clear plastic, and she breathed, “I didn’t realize it was so skinny.”

Now we are sitting quietly on a bench in the skinny city. The sky is getting light, but we’re cloaked in shadows, breakfasting on perfectly imperfect bagels and black coffee, trying to look normal. The air smells wet, like it’s going to rain, and there’s a cold wind whipping up the street. Neel is sketching on a little notepad, drawing curvy babes with curvy swords. Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.

“It’s official,” she says, not looking up. “They’re announcing the new Product Management today.” She keeps refreshing and refreshing and refreshing; I think her battery is going to die before noon.

I alternate pages of The Guide to Central Park Birds (purchased at the JFK bookstore) with furtive glances through Mat’s binoculars.

Here’s what I see:

As the pitch of the city rises and traffic starts to pick up on Fifth Avenue, a lone figure comes trotting up the opposite sidewalk. It’s a man, middle-aged, with a fuzz of brown hair that’s blowing in the wind. I fiddle with the focus on the binoculars. He has a round nose and fleshy cheeks that are glowing pink in the cold. He’s wearing dark pants and a tweedy jacket that fit him perfectly; they’ve been tailored to the swell of his belly and the slope of his shoulders. He bounces a little as he walks.

My spider-sense is operational, because sure enough, Round Nose stops at the Unbroken Spine’s front door, wiggles a key in the lock, and steps gingerly inside. Twin lamps in small sconces on either side of the door come to life.

I tap Kat’s shoulder and point to the glowing lamps. Neel narrows his eyes. Penumbra’s train will pull into Penn Station at 12:01 p.m. and until then, we watch and we wait.

Following Round Nose, a thin but steady trickle of incredibly normal-looking New Yorkers passes through the dark doorway. There’s a girl in a white blouse and a black pencil skirt; a middle-aged man in a drab green sweater; a guy with a shaved head who looks like he would fit in at Anatomix. Can these all be members of the Unbroken Spine? It doesn’t feel right.

Neel whispers, “Maybe they target a different demographic here. Younger. Sneakier.”

There are many more New Yorkers who don’t pass through the dark doorway, of course. The sidewalks on both sides of Fifth Avenue are full of them, a flux of humanity, tall and short, young and old, cool and uncool. Clots of pedestrians drift past us and block my view. Kat is agog.

“It’s so small but there are so many people,” she says, watching the human flow. “They’re … it’s like fish. Or birds or ants, I don’t know. Some superorganism.”

Neel cuts in: “Where did you grow up?”

“Palo Alto,” she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home.

Neel nods knowingly. “The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.”

“I don’t know about that,” Kat says, narrowing her eyes. “I’m pretty good with complexity.”

“See, I know what you’re thinking,” Neel says, shaking his head. “You’re thinking it’s just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules”—Kat is nodding—“and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?”

“Exactly. I mean, sure, I don’t know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial—”

“Wrong,” Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. “You can’t do it. Even if you know the rules — and by the way, there are no rules — but even if there were, you can’t model it. You know why?”

My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen.

Kat frowns. “Why?”

“You don’t have enough memory.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer’s big enough. Not even your what’s-it-called—”

“The Big Box.”

“That’s the one. It’s not big enough. This box”—Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond—“is bigger.”

The snaking crowd surges forward.

Neel gets bored and walks down the street to the Met, where he intends to snap reference photos of marble breasts from antiquity. Kat composes short urgent messages to Googlers with her thumbs, chasing down rumors of the new PM.

At 11:03 a.m., a stooped figure in a long coat totters up the street. My spider-sense tingles again; I believe I can now detect a certain strain of weirdness with lab-grade precision. The stooped totterer has a face like an old barn owl, with a furry black Cossack’s hat pulled down over wiry eyebrows that stick out into space. Sure enough: he ducks into the dark doorway.

At 12:17 p.m., it’s finally beginning to rain. We’re shielded beneath tall trees, but Fifth Avenue is quickly darkening.

At 12:29 p.m., a taxi stops in front of the Unbroken Spine, and out steps a tall man in a peacoat, pulling it close around his neck as he leans down to pay the driver. It’s Penumbra, and it’s surreal to see him here, framed by dark trees and pale stone. I’ve never even imagined him anywhere other than the inside of his bookstore. They’re a package deal; you can’t have one without the other. But here he is, standing in the middle of the street in Manhattan, fiddling with his wallet.

I hop up and sprint across Fifth Avenue, dodging slow-moving cars. The taxi pulls away like a yellow curtain, and, ta-da! There I am. First Penumbra’s face is blank, then his eyes narrow, then he smiles, and then he tips his head back and barks a loud laugh. He keeps laughing, so then I start laughing, too. We stand there for a moment, just laughing at each other. I’m also panting a bit.

“My boy!” Penumbra says. “You might just be the strangest clerk this fellowship has seen in five hundred years. Come, come.” He ushers me up onto the sidewalk, still laughing. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to stop you,” I say. It sounds strangely serious. “You don’t have to—” I’m huffing and puffing. “You don’t have to go in there. You don’t have to get your book burned. Or whatever.”

“Who told you about burning?” Penumbra says quietly, raising an eyebrow.

“Well,” I say, “Tyndall heard it from Imbert.” Pause. “Who heard it from, uh, Monsef.”

“They are wrong,” Penumbra says sharply. “I have not come here to talk of punishment.” He spits it out: punishment, as if it’s something far beneath him. “No. I have come to make my case.”

“Your case?”

“Computers, my boy,” he says. “They hold the key for us. I have suspected it for some time, but never had proof that they could be a boon to our work. You have provided it! If computers can help you solve the Founder’s Puzzle, they can do much more for this fellowship.” He makes a thin fist and shakes it: “I have come prepared to tell the First Reader that we must make use of them. We must!”

Penumbra’s voice has the timbre of an entrepreneur pitching his startup.

“You mean Corvina,” I say. “The First Reader is Corvina.”

Penumbra nods. “You cannot follow me here”—he waves his hand back toward the dark doorway—“but I would speak to you after I am finished. We will have to consider what equipment to purchase … which companies to work with. I will need your help, my boy.” He lifts his gaze to look over my shoulder. “And you are not alone, are you?”

I look back across Fifth Avenue, where Kat and Neel are standing, watching us and waiting. Kat waves.

“She works at Google,” I say. “She helped.”

“Good,” Penumbra says, nodding. “That is very good. But tell me: How did you find this place?”

I grin when I tell him: “Computers.”

He shakes his head. Then he tucks a hand into his peacoat and pulls out a skinny black Kindle, still activated, showing sharp words against a pale background.

“You got one,” I say, smiling.

“Oh, more than one, my boy,” Penumbra says, and produces another e-reader — it’s a Nook. Then another one, a Sony. Another one, marked KOBO. Really? Who has a Kobo? And did Penumbra just cross the country carrying four e-readers?

“I had a bit of catching up to do,” he explains, balancing them in a stack. “But you know, this one”—he produces a final device, this one super-slim and clad in blue—“was my favorite of the bunch.”

There’s no logo. “What is that?”

“This?” He flips the mystery e-reader around in his fingers. “My student Greg — you do not know him, not yet. He lent it to me for the journey.” His voice grows conspiratorial. “He said it was a prototype.”

The anonymous e-reader is amazing: thin and light, with a skin that’s not plastic but cloth, like a hardcover book. How did Penumbra get his hands on a prototype? Who does my boss know in Silicon Valley?

“It is a remarkable device,” he says, balancing it with the rest and patting the stack. “This is all quite remarkable.” He pauses, then looks up at me. “Thank you, my boy. It is because of you that I am here.”

That makes me smile. Go get ’em, Mr. Penumbra. “Where do we meet you?”

“The Dolphin and Anchor,” he says. “Bring your friends. You can find it on your own — am I right? Use your computers.” He winks, then turns and pushes through the dark doorway into the secret library of the Unbroken Spine.

Kat’s phone guides us to our destination. The sky is opening up, so we run most of the way.

When we find it, the Dolphin and Anchor is the perfect refuge, all dark heavy wood and low brassy light. We sit at a round table next to a window flecked with raindrops. Our waiter arrives, and he, too, is perfect: tall and barrel-chested, with a thick red beard and a disposition that warms us all up. We order mugs of beer; he brings those along with a plate of bread and cheese. “Strength in the storm,” he says with a wink.

“What if Mr. P doesn’t show?” Neel says.

“He’ll show,” I say. “This isn’t what I expected. He’s got a plan. I mean — he brought e-readers.”

Kat smiles at that but she doesn’t look up. She’s glued to her phone again. She’s like a candidate on election day.

There’s a stack of books on the table and a metal cup with pointy pencils that smell fresh and sharp. In the stack, there are copies of Moby-Dick, Ulysses, The Invisible Man—this is a bar for bibliophiles.

There’s a pale beer stain on the back cover of The Invisible Man, and inside, the margins are mobbed with pencil marks. It’s so dense you can barely see the paper behind it — there are dozens of different people’s marginalia jostling for space here. I flip through the book; it’s jam-packed. Some of the notes are about the text, but more are directed at one another. The margins tend to devolve into arguments, but there are other interactions, too. Some are inscrutable: just numbers back and forth. There’s encrypted graffiti:

6HV8SQ was here

I nurse my beer and nibble the cheese and try to follow the conversations through the pages.

Then Kat gives a quiet sigh. I look up across the table, and see her face crumpled into a deep frown. She sets her phone down on the table and covers it with one of the Dolphin and Anchor’s thick blue napkins.

“What is it?”

“They emailed out the new PM.” She shakes her head. “Not this time.” Then she forces a smile and reaches to pick a battered book from the stack. “It’s no big deal,” she says, flipping pages, making herself busy. “It’s like winning the lottery anyway. It was a long shot.”

I’m not an entrepreneur, not a business guy, but in that moment I want nothing more than to start a company and grow it to Google size, just so I can put Kat Potente in charge.

There’s a gust of wet wind. I look up from The Invisible Man to see Penumbra framed in the doorway, the tufts of hair over his ears matted down, turned a shade darker by the rain. His teeth are gritted.

Neel jumps up to usher him toward the table. Kat takes his coat. Penumbra is shivering and saying quietly, “Thank you, dear girl, thank you.” He walks stiffly to the table, gripping chair backs for support.

“Mr. P, good to meet you,” Neel says, extending a hand. “Love your store.” Penumbra gives it a solid shake. Kat waves hello.

“So these are your friends,” Penumbra says. “It is good to meet you, both of you.” He sits and exhales sharply. “I have not sat across from such young faces in this place since — well, since my own face was so young.”

I’m desperate to know what happened in the library.

“Where to begin?” he says. He wipes the dome of his head with one of the napkins. He’s frowning, agitated. “I told Corvina what has happened. I told him about the logbook, about your ingenuity.”

He’s calling it ingenuity; that’s a good sign. Our red-bearded waiter arrives bearing another mug of beer and sets it down in front of Penumbra, who waves a hand and says, “Charge this to the Festina Lente Company, Timothy. All of it.”

He’s in his element. He speaks again: “Corvina’s conservatism has deepened, though I barely thought such a thing was possible. He has done so much damage. I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Corvina says California has infected me.” He spits it out: infected. “Ridiculous. I told him what you did, my boy — I told him what was possible. But he will not budge.”

Penumbra lifts his beer to his lips and takes a long sip. Then he looks from Kat to Neel to me, and he speaks again, slowly:

“My friends, I have a proposal for you. But you will need to understand something of this fellowship first. You have followed me to its home, but you do not know anything of its purpose — or have your computers told you that, too?”

Well, I know it involves libraries and novices and people getting bound and books getting burned, but none of it makes any sense. Kat and Neel only know what they’ve seen on my laptop screen: a sequence of lights making their way through the shelves of a strange bookstore. When you search for “unbroken spine,” Google replies: Did you mean: unicorn sprinkle? So the correct answer is: “No. Nothing.”

“Then we will do two things,” Penumbra says, nodding. “First, I will tell you just a little of our history. Then, to understand, you must see the Reading Room. There, my proposal will become clear, and I dearly hope you will accept it.”

Of course we’ll accept it. That’s what you do on a quest. You listen to the old wizard’s problem and then you promise to help him.

Penumbra steeples his fingers. “Do you know the name Aldus Manutius?”

Kat and Neel shake their heads, but I nod yes. Maybe art school was good for something after all: “Manutius was one of the first publishers,” I say, “right after Gutenberg. His books are still famous. They’re beautiful.” I’ve seen slides.

“Yes.” Penumbra nods. “It was the end of the fifteenth century. Aldus Manutius gathered scribes and scholars at his printing house in Venice, and there he manufactured the first editions of the classics. Sophocles, Aristotle, and Plato. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.”

I chime in, “Yeah, he printed them using a brand-new typeface, made by a designer named Griffo Gerritszoon. It was awesome. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and it’s still basically the most famous typeface ever. Every Mac comes preinstalled with Gerritszoon.” But not Gerritszoon Display. That, you have to steal.

Penumbra nods. “This much is well known to historians and, it appears”—he raises an eyebrow—“to bookstore clerks. It might also be of interest to know that Griffo Gerritszoon’s work is the wellspring of our fellowship’s wealth. Even today, when publishers buy that typeface, they buy it from us.” He goes sotto voce: “And we do not sell it cheap.”

I feel the sharp snap of connection: FLC Type Foundry is the Festina Lente Company. Penumbra’s cult runs on egregious licensing fees.

“But here is the crux of it,” he says. “Aldus Manutius was more than a publisher. He was a philosopher and a teacher. He was the first of us. He was the founder of the Unbroken Spine.”

Okay, they definitely did not teach that in my typography course.

“Manutius believed there were deep truths hidden in the writing of the ancients — among them, the answer to our greatest question.”

There’s a pregnant pause. I clear my throat. “What’s … our greatest question?”

Kat breathes: “How do you live forever?”

Penumbra turns and levels his gaze on her. His eyes are big and bright and he nods yes. “When Aldus Manutius died,” he says quietly, “his friends and students filled his tomb with books — copies of everything he had ever printed.”

The wind outside blows hard against the door and makes it rattle.

“They did this because the tomb was empty. When Aldus Manutius died, no body remained.”

So Penumbra’s cult has a messiah.

“He left behind a book he called CODEX VITAE — book of life. The book was encrypted, and Manutius gave the key to only one person: his great friend and partner, Griffo Gerritszoon.”

Amendment: his cult has a messiah and a first disciple. But at least the disciple is a designer. That’s cool. And codex vitae … I’ve heard that before. But Rosemary Lapin said the books on the Waybacklist were codex vitae. I’m confused—

“We, the students of Manutius, have worked for centuries to unlock his codex vitae. We believe it contains all the secrets he discovered in his study of the ancients — first among them, the secret to eternal life.”

Rain spatters on the window. Penumbra takes a deep breath.

“We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived … will live again.”

A messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this.

“How many members are we talking about here?” Neel asks.

“Not so many,” Penumbra says, scooting his chair back and lifting himself up, “that they cannot still fit in a single chamber. Come, my friends. The Reading Room awaits.”

CODEX VITAE

WE WALK THROUGH THE RAIN, all sharing a broad black umbrella borrowed from the Dolphin and Anchor. Neel holds it up above us — the warrior always holds the umbrella — with Penumbra in the middle and Kat and I hugging in close on either side of him. Penumbra doesn’t take up much space.

We come to the dark doorway. This place could not possibly be more different from the bookstore in San Francisco: where Penumbra’s has a wall of windows and warm light spilling out from inside, this place has blank stone and two dim lamps. Penumbra’s invites you inside. This place says: Nah, you’re probably better off out there.

Kat pulls the door open. I’m the last one through, and I give her wrist a squeeze as I step inside.

I am unprepared for the banality that confronts us. I was expecting gargoyles. Instead, two low couches and a square glass table form a small waiting area. Gossip magazines fan out across the table. Directly ahead, there’s a narrow front desk, and behind it sits the young man with the shaved head who I saw on the sidewalk this morning. He’s wearing a blue cardigan. Above him, on the wall, square sans-serif capitals announce:

F L C

“We are back to see Mr. Deckle,” Penumbra says to the receptionist, who barely looks up. There’s a door of frosted glass and Penumbra leads us through it. I’m still holding my breath for gargoyles, but no: it’s a gray-green still life, a cool savanna of wide monitors and low dividers and curving black desk chairs. It’s an office. It looks just like NewBagel.

Fluorescent lights buzz behind ceiling panels. Desks are set up in clusters, and they are manned by the people I saw through the Stormtrooper binoculars this morning. Most of them are wearing headphones; none of them look up from their monitors. Over slumped shoulders, I see a spreadsheet and an inbox and a Facebook page.

I’m confused. This place seems to have plenty of computers.

We weave a path through the pods. All the totems of office ennui have been erected here: the instant coffee machine, the humming half-sized refrigerator, the huge multipurpose laser printer flashing PAPER JAM in red. There’s a whiteboard showing faded generations of brainstorms. Right now, in bright blue strokes, it says:

I keep expecting someone to look up and notice our little procession, but they all seem intent on their work. The quiet clatter of keys sounds just like the rain outside. There’s a chuckle from the far corner; I look over, and it’s the man in the green sweater, smirking into his screen. He’s eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. I think he’s watching a video.

There are private offices and conference rooms around the perimeter, all with frosted glass doors and tiny nameplates. The one we’re vectoring for is at the farthest end of the room and the nameplate reads:

Penumbra clasps a thin hand around the knob, raps once on the glass, and pushes the door open.

The office is tiny, but totally different from the space outside. My eyes stretch to adjust to the new color balance: here, the walls are dark and rich, papered in whirls of gold on green. Here, the floor is made of wood; it springs and whines under my shoes, and Penumbra’s heels make light clicks as he moves to close the door behind us. Here, the light is different, because it comes from warm lamps, not overhead fluorescents. And when the door closes, the ambient buzz is banished, replaced by a sweet, heavy silence.

There’s a heavy desk here — perfect twin to the one in Penumbra’s store — and behind it sits the very first man I spotted on the sidewalk this morning: Round Nose. Here, he’s wearing a black robe over his street clothes. It gathers loosely in the front, where it’s clasped with a silver pin — two hands, open like a book.

Now we’re on to something.

Here, the air smells different. It smells like books. Behind the desk, behind Round Nose, they’re packed into shelves set up against the wall, reaching up to the ceiling. But this office isn’t that big. The secret library of the Unbroken Spine appears to have approximately the capacity of a regional airport bookstore.

Round Nose is smiling.

“Sir! Welcome back,” he says, standing. Penumbra raises his hands, motioning him to sit. Round Nose turns his attention to me and Kat and Neel: “Who are your friends?”

“They are unbound, Edgar,” Penumbra says quickly. He turns to us: “My students, this is Edgar Deckle. He has guarded the door to the Reading Room for — what, Edgar? Eleven years now?”

“Eleven exactly,” Deckle says, smiling. We’re all smiling, too, I realize. He and his chamber are a warm tonic after the cold sidewalk and the colder cubicles.

Penumbra looks at me, his eyes crinkling: “Edgar was a clerk in San Francisco just like you, my boy.”

I feel a little whirl of dislocation — the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected. Have I read Deckle’s slanty handwriting in the logbook? Did he work the late shift?

Deckle brightens, too, then goes mock-serious: “Piece of advice. One night, you’re going to get curious and wonder if maybe you should check out the club next door.” He pauses. “Don’t do it.”

Yes, he definitely worked the late shift.

There’s a chair set up opposite the desk — high-backed, made of polished wood — and Deckle motions for Penumbra to sit.

Neel leans in conspiratorially and jerks a thumb over his shoulder, back toward the office: “So is that all just a front?”

“Oh, no, no,” Deckle says. “The Festina Lente Company is a real business. Very real. They license the typeface Gerritszoon”—Kat, Neel, and I all nod sagely, like novices in the know—“and many more. They do other things, too. Like the new e-book project.”

“What’s that?” I ask. This operation seems a lot more savvy than Penumbra made it out to be.

“I don’t understand it completely,” Deckle says, “but somehow we identify e-book piracy for publishers.” My nostrils flare at that; I’ve heard the stories of college students sued for millions of dollars. Deckle explains: “It’s a new business. Corvina’s baby. Apparently it’s very lucrative.”

Penumbra nods. “It is thanks to the labors of those people out there that our store exists.”

Well, that’s just great. My salary is paid by font licensing fees and copyright infringement cases.

“Edgar, these three have solved the Founder’s Puzzle,” Penumbra says — Kat and Neel both raise their eyebrows at that—“and the time has come for them to see the Reading Room.” The way he says it, I can hear the capital letters.

Deckle grins. “That’s terrific. Congratulations and welcome.” He nods to a line of hooks on the wall, half of them holding regular jackets and sweaters, the other half hung with dark robes just like his. “So, change into those, for starters.”

We shrug out of our wet jackets. As we’re pulling on the robes, Deckle explains: “We need to keep things clean down below. I know they look goofy, but they’re actually very well designed. They’re cut at the sides here so you can move freely”—Deckle swings his arms back and forth—“and they have pockets inside for paper, pencil, ruler, and compass.” He pulls his robe wide to show us. “We have writing supplies down below, but you’ll have to bring your own tools.”

That’s almost cute: Don’t forget your ruler on your first day of cult! But where is “down below”?

“One last thing,” Deckle says. “Your phones.”

Penumbra holds up empty palms and wiggles his fingers, but the rest of us all surrender our dark trembling companions. Deckle drops them into a shallow wooden bin on the desk. There are three iPhones in there already, along with a black Neo and a battered beige Nokia.

Deckle stands, straightens his robe, braces himself, and gives the shelves behind the desk a sharp shove. They swivel smoothly and silently — it’s as if they’re weightless, drifting in space — and as they draw apart, they reveal a shadowed space beyond, where wide steps curl down into darkness. Deckle stretches an arm to invite us forward. “Festina lente,” he says matter-of-factly.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf. Penumbra hoists himself up and we follow him forward.

“Sir,” Deckle says to Penumbra, standing to one side of the parted shelves, “if you’re free later, I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee. There’s a lot to talk about.”

“So it shall be,” Penumbra says with a smile. He claps Deckle on the shoulder as we pass. “Thank you, Edgar.”

Penumbra leads us down onto the steps. He goes carefully, clutching the railing, a wide ribbon of wood on heavy metal brackets. Neel hovers close, ready to catch him if he stumbles. The steps are wide and made of pale stone; they curve sharply, a spiral leading us down into the earth, the way barely lit by arc lamps in old wall sconces set at wide intervals.

As we go step-by-step, I begin to hear sounds. Low murmurs; then a louder rumble; then echoing voices. The steps flatten out and there’s a frame of light up ahead. We step through. Kat gasps, and her breath comes out in a little cloud.

This is no library. This is the Batcave.

The Reading Room stretches out before us, long and low. The ceiling is crisscrossed with heavy wooden beams. Above and between them, mottled bedrock shows through, all slanted seams and jagged planes, all sparkling with some inner crystal. The beams run the whole length of the chamber, showing sharp perspective like a Cartesian grid. Where they cross, bright lamps hang down and light the space below.

The floor is also bedrock, but polished smooth like glass. Square wooden tables are set up in orderly rows, two of them side by side, all the way back to the end of the chamber. They are simple but sturdy, and each one bears a single massive book. All of the books are black, and all of them are tethered to the tables with thick chains, also black.

There are people around the tables, sitting and standing, men and women in black robes just like Deckle’s, talking, jabbering, arguing. There must be a dozen of them down here, and they make it feel like the floor of a very small stock exchange. The sounds all merge and overlap: the hiss of whispers, the scuffle of feet. The scratch of pen on paper, the squeak of chalk on slate. Coughs and sniffles. It feels more than anything else like a classroom, except the students are all adults, and I have no idea what they’re studying.

Shelves line the chamber’s long perimeter. They are made from the same wood as the beams and the tables, and they are packed with books. Those books, unlike the tomes on the tables, are colorful: red and blue and gold, cloth and leather, some ragged, some neat. They are a ward against claustrophobia; without them, it would feel like a catacomb down here, but because they line the shelves and lend the chamber color and texture, it actually feels cosseted and comfortable.

Neel makes an appreciative murmur.

“What is this place?” Kat says, rubbing her arms, shivering. The colors might be warm but the air is freezing.

“Follow me,” Penumbra says. He makes his way out onto the floor, weaving between squads of black-robes clustered around tables. I hear a snatch of conversation: “… Brito is the problem here,” a tall man with a blond beard is saying, poking down at the thick black book on the table. “He insisted all operations had to be reversible, when in fact…” I lose his voice, but pick up another one: “… too preoccupied with the page as a unit of analysis. Think of this book in a different way — it is a string of characters, correct? It has not two dimensions, but one. Therefore…” That’s the owl-faced man from the sidewalk this morning, the one with the wiry eyebrows. He’s still stooped over, still wearing his furry hat; along with his robe, it makes him look 100 percent like a warlock. He’s making sharp strokes with chalk on a small slate.

A loop of chain catches Penumbra’s foot and makes a bright clink as he shakes it off. He grimaces and mutters, “Ridiculous.”

We follow quietly behind him, a short line of black sheep. The shelves are broken in just a few places: twice by doors on either side of the long chamber, and once at the chamber’s terminus, where they give way to smooth bare rock and a wooden dais set up under a bright lamp. It’s tall and severe-looking. That must be where they do the ritual sacrifices.

As we pass, a few of the black-robes glance up and stop short; their eyes widen. “Penumbra,” they exclaim, smiling, reaching out hands. Penumbra nods and smiles back and takes each hand in turn.

He leads us to an uninhabited table close to the dais, in a soft-shadowed spot between two lamps.

“You have come to a very special place,” he says, lowering himself into a chair. We sit, too, negotiating the folds of our new robes. His voice is very quiet, barely audible above the din: “You must never speak of it, or reveal its location, to anyone.”

We all nod together. Neel whispers, “This is amazing.”

“Oh, it is not the room that is special,” Penumbra says. “It is old, certainly. But any vault is the same: a sturdy chamber, built belowground, cold and dry. Unremarkable.” He pauses. “It is the room’s contents that are remarkable indeed.”

We’ve only been in this book-lined cellar for three minutes and I’ve already forgotten that the rest of the world exists. I’ll bet this place is designed to survive a nuclear war. One of those doors must lead to the stockpile of canned beans.

“There are two treasures here,” Penumbra continues. “One is a collection of many books and the other is a single volume.” He lifts a bony hand to rest on the black-bound volume chained to our table, identical to all the others. On the cover it says, in tall silver letters: MANVTIVS.

“This is the volume,” Penumbra says. “It is the codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. It does not exist anywhere outside of this library.”

Wait: “Not even in your store?”

Penumbra shakes his head. “No novices read this book. Only the full members of this fellowship — the bound and the unbound. There are not many of us, and we read Manutius only here.”

That’s what we’re seeing all around us — all of this intense study. Although I’ve noticed more than a few of the black-robes tipping their noses our way. Maybe not so intense.

Penumbra turns in his chair and waves a hand to indicate the shelves lining the walls. “And this is the other treasure. Following in the Founder’s footsteps, every member of this fellowship produces his or her own codex vitae, or book of life. It is the task of the unbound. Fedorov, for example, who you know”—he nods to me—“is one of these. When he is finished, he will have poured everything he has learned, all his knowledge, into a book like these.”

I think of Fedorov and his snowy-white beard. Yeah, he’s probably learned some things.

“We use our logbook,” he says to me, “to be sure that Fedorov has earned his knowledge.” Penumbra cocks an eyebrow. “We must be sure he understands what he has accomplished.”

Right. They have to be sure he didn’t just feed a bunch of books into a scanner.

“When Fedorov’s codex vitae is validated by me, and then accepted by the First Reader, he will become one of the bound. And then, finally, he will make the ultimate sacrifice.”

Uh-oh: a dark ritual down at the Dais of True Evil. I knew it. I like Fedorov.

“Fedorov’s book will be encrypted, copied, and shelved,” Penumbra says flatly. “It will not be read by anyone until after his death.”

“That sucks,” Neel hisses. I narrow my eyes at him, but Penumbra smiles and raises an open hand.

“We make this sacrifice out of deep faith,” he says. “I speak now with utter seriousness. When we unlock Manutius’s codex vitae, every member of our fellowship who has followed in his footsteps — who has created his own book of life and stored it for safekeeping — will live again.”

I struggle to hold back the skepticism that wants so badly to twist across my face.

“What,” Neel asks, “like zombies?” He says it a little too loud, and some of the black-robes swivel to look our way.

Penumbra shakes his head. “The nature of immortality is a mystery,” he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear. “But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.”

I don’t believe the immortality part, but I do know the feeling that Penumbra is talking about. Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. That’s just a feeling, not a fact, but remember (I repeat): people believe weirder things than this.

“But why can’t you decode Manutius’s book?” Kat says. This is in her wheelhouse: “What happened to the key?”

“Ah,” Penumbra says. “What, indeed.” He pauses and takes a breath. Then: “Gerritszoon was as remarkable as Manutius, in his own way. He chose not to pass on the key. For five hundred years … we have discussed his decision.”

The way he says it makes me think those discussions might have involved the occasional gun or dagger.

“Without it, we have tried every method we can imagine to unlock Manutius’s codex vitae. We have used geometry. We have searched for hidden shapes. That is the origin of the Founder’s Puzzle.”

The face in the visualization — of course. I feel another little whirl of dislocation. That was Aldus Manutius staring out of my MacBook.

“We have turned to algebra, logic, linguistics, cryptography … we have counted great mathematicians among our number,” Penumbra says. “Men and women who won prizes in the world above.”

Kat is leaning in so intently she’s almost up on top of the table. This is catnip: a code to be cracked and the key to immortality, all in one. I feel a little thrill of pride: I’m the one who brought her here. Google is a disappointment today. The real action is down here with the Unbroken Spine.

“What you must understand, my friends,” Penumbra says, “is that this fellowship has operated in almost exactly the same way since its formation five hundred years ago.” He pokes a finger over to indicate the bustling black-robes: “We use chalk and slate, ink and paper.” Here, his tone shifts. “Corvina believes we must adhere to these techniques exactly. He believes that if we change anything at all, we will forfeit our prize.”

“And you,” I say — you, the man with the Mac Plus—“you disagree.”

In reply, Penumbra turns to Kat, and now his voice really is just a breath: “We come now to my proposal. If I am not mistaken, dear girl, your company has shepherded a great number of books”—he pauses, searching for words—“onto digital shelves.”

She nods and her reply is a sharp whisper: “Sixty-one percent of everything ever published.”

“But you do not have the Founder’s codex vitae,” Penumbra says. “No one does.” A pause. “Perhaps you should.”

I get it in a flash: Penumbra is proposing bibliographic burglary.

One of the black-robes shuffles past our table carrying a fat green book from the shelves. She’s tall and lean, in her forties, with sleepy eyes and black hair chopped short. Beneath her robe, I see a blue floral print. We stay quiet, waiting for her to pass.

“I believe we must break with tradition,” Penumbra continues. “I am old, and if it is possible, I would see this work completed before all that is left of me is a book on these shelves.”

Another flash: Penumbra is one of the bound, so his own codex vitae must be here, in this cave. The thought makes my head spin a little. What’s inside? What story does it tell?

Kat’s eyes are shining. “We can scan this,” she says, patting the book on the table. “And if there’s a code, we can break it. We have machines that are so powerful — you have no idea.”

There’s a murmur in the Reading Room and a ripple of awareness passes through the black-robes. They all sit up straight and make whispers and whistles of attention and warning.

At the far end of the chamber, where the wide steps come down from above, a tall figure has emerged. His robe is different from the rest; it’s more elaborate, with extra folds of black fabric around the neck and slashes of red down the sleeves. It’s hanging from his shoulders as if he’s just thrown it on; underneath, a gleaming gray suit peeks out.

He’s heading straight for us.

“Mr. Penumbra,” I whisper, “I think maybe—”

“Penumbra,” the figure intones. His voice isn’t loud, but it comes from down low and it carries through the chamber. “Penumbra,” he says again, striding fast. He’s old — not as old as Penumbra, but close. He’s much more solid, though. He doesn’t stoop or totter, and I think he might be hiding pectoral muscles under that suit. His head is shaved starkly bald and he has a dark, neat mustache. He’s Nosferatu as a Marine Corps sergeant.

And now I recognize him. This is the man from the photo with young Penumbra, the strong young man giving a thumbs-up in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is Penumbra’s boss, the one who keeps the lights on at the bookstore, the CEO of the generous Festina Lente Company. This is Corvina.

Penumbra lifts himself up out of his chair. “Please, meet three unbound of San Francisco,” he says. To us: “This is the First Reader, and our patron.” Suddenly he’s playing the solicitous subordinate. He’s acting.

Corvina appraises us coldly. His eyes are dark and glinting — there’s a fierce, chomping intelligence there. He looks straight at Neel, considering, then says, “Tell me: Which of Aristotle’s works did the Founder print first?” The question is soft but implacable, each word a bullet from a silenced pistol.

Neel’s face is blank. There’s an uncomfortable pause.

Corvina folds his arms and turns to Kat: “Well, what about you? Any idea?”

Kat’s fingers twitch like she wants to look it up on her phone.

“Ajax, you have work to do,” Corvina says, rounding on Penumbra. Still quiet. “They should be reciting the whole corpus. They should be saying it backwards in the original Greek.”

I would frown at that if my head wasn’t spinning with the revelation that Penumbra possesses a first name, and that it is—

“They are new to their work,” Ajax Penumbra says with a sigh. He’s a few inches shorter than Corvina and he’s stretching to stand up straight, wobbling slightly. He sweeps his big blue eyes around the room and makes a skeptical face. “I was hoping to inspire them with a visit here, but the chains are a bit much. I am not sure they are in keeping with the spirit—”

“We are not so careless with our books here, Ajax,” Corvina cuts in. “Here, we don’t lose them.”

“Oh, a logbook is hardly the Founder’s codex vitae, and it was not lost. You grab at any excuse—”

“Because you offer them,” Corvina says flatly. His voice is matter-of-fact, but it rings in the chamber. The Reading Room has grown silent now. None of the black-robes are talking, or moving, or possibly even breathing.

Corvina clasps his hands behind his back — a teacher’s pose. “Ajax. I’m glad you returned, because I’ve made my decision, and I wanted to tell you myself.” A pause, then a solicitous tilt of the head. “It’s time you came back to New York.”

Penumbra squints. “I have a store to run.”

“No. It cannot continue,” Corvina says, shaking his head. “Not filled with books that have nothing to do with our work. Not overflowing with people who know nothing about our responsibility.”

Well, I wouldn’t say overflowing, exactly.

Penumbra is quiet, eyes downcast, brow deeply wrinkled. His gray hair rises up around his head like a cloud of stray thoughts. If he shaved it off, he might look as sleek and impressive as Corvina. But probably not.

“Yes, I do stock other books,” Penumbra says finally. “Just as I have for decades. Just as our teacher did before me. I know you remember that. You know that half my novices come to us because—”

“Because your standards are so low,” Corvina interrupts. His gaze strafes across Kat, Neel, and me. “What good are unbound who don’t take the work seriously? They make us weaker, not stronger. They put everything at risk.”

Kat frowns. Neel’s biceps pulse.

“You’ve spent too long in the wilderness, Ajax. Come back to us. Spend what time remains among your brothers and sisters.”

Penumbra’s face is a grimace now. “There are novices in San Francisco, and unbound. Many of them.” His voice is suddenly husky, and his eyes catch mine. I see a flash of pain, and I know he’s thinking of Tyndall and Lapin and the rest, and of me and Oliver Grone, too.

“There are novices everywhere,” Corvina says, waving a hand as if to dismiss them. “The unbound will follow you here. Or they will not. But, Ajax, let me be perfectly clear. The Festina Lente Company’s support for your store has ended. You will receive nothing more from us.”

The Reading Room is utterly silent: no rustle, no clink. The black-robes are all staring down at their books, and they are all listening.

“You have a choice, my friend,” the First Reader says gently, “and I am trying to help you see it clearly. We are not so young, Ajax. If you rededicate yourself to our task, there is still time for you to do great work. If not”—his eyes angle up—“well, then you can squander what time remains out there.” He gives Penumbra a hard gaze — it’s a look of concern, but the really patronizing kind — and repeats, finally: “Come back to us.”

Then he spins away and stalks back toward the wide steps, his red-slashed robe fluttering behind him. There’s a roar of scratching and scuffling as his subjects all throw themselves into the imitation of study.

When we flee the Reading Room, Deckle asks again about coffee.

“We will need something stronger than that, my boy,” Penumbra says, attempting a smile, and almost — but not quite — succeeding. “I would very much like to speak with you tonight … Where?” Penumbra turns to me and makes it a question.

“The Northbridge,” Neel cuts in. “West Twenty-ninth and Broadway.” That’s where we’re staying, because that’s where Neel knows the owner.

We leave our robes and take our phones and wade back out through the gray-green shallows of the Festina Lente Company. As my sneakers scuff the brindled corporate floor-covering material, it occurs to me that we must be directly above the Reading Room — basically walking on its ceiling. I can’t decide how far down it is. Twenty feet? Forty?

Penumbra’s own codex vitae is down there. I didn’t see it — it was somewhere on those shelves, one spine among many — but it looms larger in my mind than the black-bound MANVTIVS. We’re scurrying away under the shadow of an ultimatum, and it seems to me that Penumbra might be leaving something precious behind.

One of the offices along the wall is larger than the others, its frosted-glass door set apart from the rest. I can see the nameplate clearly now:

So Corvina has a first name, too.

A shadow moves against the frosted glass, and I realize he’s in there. What’s he doing? Negotiating with a publisher on the phone, demanding exorbitant sums for the use of grand old Gerritszoon? Offering up the names and addresses of some pesky e-book pirates? Closing down another wonderful bookstore? Talking to his bank, canceling a certain recurring payment?

This isn’t just a cult. It’s also a corporation, and Corvina is in charge, above and below.

THE REBEL ALLIANCE

IT’S RAINING HARD in Manhattan now — a dark, noisy deluge. We have taken refuge in the hyper-boutique hotel owned by Neel’s friend Andrei, another startup CEO. It is called the Northbridge, and it’s the ultimate hacker hideout: power outlets every three feet, air so thick with Wi-Fi you can almost see it, and in the basement, a direct connection to the internet trunk line that runs beneath Wall Street. If the Dolphin and Anchor was Penumbra’s place, this is Neel’s. The concierge knows him. The valet gives him a high five.

The Northbridge lobby is the hub of the New York startup scene: anywhere two or more people are sitting together, Neel says, it’s probably a new company proofreading its articles of incorporation. Huddled together around a low table made from old magnetic-tape canisters, I guess we might qualify — not as a company, but at least as something newly incorporated. We’re a little Rebel Alliance, and Penumbra is our Obi-Wan. We all know who Corvina is.

Neel hasn’t let up on the First Reader since we emerged:

“And I don’t know what’s going on with that mustache,” he continues.

“He has worn it since the day I met him,” Penumbra says, mustering a smile. “But he was not so rigid then.”

“What was he like?” I ask.

“Like the rest of us — like me. He was curious. Uncertain. Why, I am still uncertain! — about a great many things.”

“Well, now he seems pretty … self-confident.”

Penumbra frowns. “And why not? He is the First Reader, and he likes our fellowship exactly as it is.” He bats a thin fist into the soft mass of the couch. “He will not bend. He will not experiment. He will not even let us try.”

“But they had computers at the Festina Lente Company,” I point out. In fact, they were running a whole digital counterinsurgency.

Kat nods. “Yeah, they actually sound pretty sophisticated.”

“Ah, but only above,” Penumbra says, wagging a finger. “Computers are fine for the worldly work of the Festina Lente Company — but not for the Unbroken Spine. No, never.”

“No phones,” Kat says.

“No phones. No computers. Nothing,” Penumbra says, shaking his head, “that Aldus Manutius himself would not have used. The electric lights — you would not believe the arguments we had over those lights. It took twenty years.” He harrumphs. “I am quite sure Manutius would have been delighted to possess a lightbulb or two.”

Everyone is silent.

Finally, Neel speaks: “Mr. P, you don’t have to give up. I could fund your store.”

“Let us be done with the store,” Penumbra says, waving a hand. “I love our customers, but there is a better way to serve them. I will not cling to familiar things as Corvina does. If we can carry Manutius back to California … if you, dear girl, can do what you promise … none of us will need that place.”

We sit and we scheme. In a perfect world, we agree, we would take the codex vitae to Google’s scanner and let those spider-legs walk all over it. But we can’t get the book out of the Reading Room.

“Bolt cutters,” Neel says. “We need bolt cutters.”

Penumbra shakes his head. “We must do this in secrecy. If Corvina becomes aware of it, he will pursue us, and the Festina Lente Company has tremendous resources.”

They know a lot of lawyers, too. Besides, to put Manutius at Google’s mercy, we don’t need the book in our hands. We need it on a disk. So I ask, “What if we took the scanner to the book instead?”

“It’s not portable,” Kat says, shaking her head. “I mean, you can move it around, but it’s a whole process. It took them a week to get it up and running at the Library of Congress.”

So we need something or someone else. We need a scanner custom-built for stealth. We need James Bond with a library science degree. We need— Wait. I know exactly who we need.

I grab Kat’s laptop and click over to Grumble’s book-hacking hub. I dig back through the archives — back, back, back — back to his earliest projects, the ones that kicked it all off … There it is.

I swivel the screen around for everyone to see. It shows a sharp photo of the GrumbleGear 3000: a book scanner made out of cardboard. Its pieces can be harvested from old boxes; you run them through a laser cutter to carve slots and tabs at all the right angles. You lock the pieces together to make a frame, then break them down flat when you’re done. There are two slots for cameras. It all fits into a messenger bag.

The cameras are just crappy tourist point-and-shoots, the kind you can get anywhere. It’s the frame that makes the scanner special. With one camera alone, you’d be stretching to hold the book at the right angle, fumbling with every page-turn. It would take days. But with two cameras mounted side by side on the GrumbleGear 3000, controlled by Grumble’s software, you get a two-page spread in one snap, perfectly focused, perfectly aligned. It’s high-speed but low-profile.

“It’s made from paper,” I explain, “so you can get it through a metal detector.”

“What, so you can sneak it onto a plane?” Kat asks.

“No, so you can sneak it into a library,” I say. Penumbra’s eyes widen. “Anyway, he posted the schematics. We can download them. We just need to round up the materials and find a laser cutter.”

Neel nods and waves a finger in a circle, circumscribing the lobby. “This is the nerdiest place in New York. I think we can get our hands on a laser cutter.”

Assuming we can get a GrumbleGear 3000 assembled and working, we’ll need time undisturbed in the Reading Room. Manutius’s codex vitae is huge, and scanning it will take hours.

Who will do the deed? Penumbra is too wobbly for stealth. Kat and Neel are credible accomplices, but I have other plans. As soon as the possibility of a book-scanning mission arose, I made a decision: I would do it alone.

“I want to come with you,” Neel insists. “This is the exciting part!”

“Don’t make me use your Rockets & Warlocks name,” I say, holding up a finger, “not with a girl in the room.” I make my face serious. “Neel, you have a company, with employees and customers. You have responsibilities. If you get caught, or jeez, I don’t know, arrested, that’s a problem.”

“And you don’t think getting arrested is a problem for you, Claymore Red—”

“Ah!” I cut him off. “First: I have no actual responsibilities. Second: I’m basically already a novice of the Unbroken Spine.”

“You did solve the Founder’s Puzzle.” Penumbra nods. “Edgar would vouch for you.”

“Besides,” I say, “I’m the rogue in this scenario.”

Kat raises an eyebrow and I explain quietly, “He’s the warrior, you’re the wizard, I’m the rogue. This conversation never happened.”

Neel nods once, slowly. His face is scrunched up but he’s no longer protesting. Good. I’ll go in alone, and I’ll leave not with one book, but two.

There’s a whip of cold wind from the Northbridge’s front doors and Edgar Deckle comes bounding in out of the rain, his round face framed by the hood of a plasticky purple jacket pulled tight. Penumbra waves him over. Kat’s gaze meets mine; she looks nervous. This will be a crucial meeting. If we want access to the Reading Room and to MANVTIVS, Deckle is the key, because Deckle has the key.

“Sir, I heard about the store,” he says, panting and setting himself down on the couch next to Kat. He gingerly peels back his hood. “I don’t know what to say. It’s terrible. I’ll talk to Corvina. I can convince him—”

Penumbra holds up a hand, and then he tells Deckle everything. He tells him about my logbook, about Google and the Founder’s Puzzle. He tells him about his pitch to Corvina, about the First Reader’s rejection.

“We’ll work on him,” Deckle says. “I’ll mention it from time to time, to see if—”

“No,” Penumbra cuts in. “He is beyond reason, Edgar, and I do not have the patience. I am quite a bit older than you, my boy. I believe the codex vitae can be decoded today — not in a decade, not in a hundred years, but today!”

It occurs to me that Corvina isn’t the only one with outsized confidence. Penumbra really does believe that computers can deliver the goods. Is it strange that I, the person who rekindled this project, don’t feel so sure?

Deckle’s eyes go wide. He glances around as if there might be a black-robe lurking here in the Northbridge. Not likely; I doubt anyone in this lobby has touched a physical book in years.

“You’re not serious, sir,” he whispers. “I mean, I remember, when you made me type all the titles into the Mac, you were so excited — but I never thought…” He takes a breath. “Sir, this is not how the fellowship works.”

So it was Edgar Deckle who built the bookstore’s database. I feel a surge of clerkly affection. We’ve both laid our fingers on the same short, clackety keyboard.

Penumbra shakes his head. “It only seems strange because we are stuck, my boy,” he says. “Corvina has held us frozen. The First Reader has not been true to the spirit of Manutius.” His eyes are like blue laser beams and he jabs a long finger down into the magnetic-tape table. “He was an entrepreneur, Edgar!”

Deckle is nodding, but he still looks nervous. His cheeks are pink and he’s running his knuckles through his hair. Is this how all schisms start? Huddled circles, whispered sales pitches?

“Edgar,” Penumbra says evenly, “of all my students, you are the dearest to me. We spent many years together in San Francisco, working side by side. You possess the true spirit of the Unbroken Spine, my boy.” He pauses. “Lend us the key to the Reading Room for one night. That is all I ask. Clay will not leave a trace. I promise you.”

Deckle’s expression is blank. His hair is damp and disheveled. He searches for words: “Sir. I didn’t think you — I never imagined — sir.” He is quiet. The Northbridge lobby doesn’t exist. The whole universe is Edgar Deckle’s face, and the thoughtful turn of his lips, and the signs that he might say no, or—

“Yes.” He draws himself taller. He takes a deep breath, and he says again, “Yes. Of course I’ll help you, sir.” He nods sharply, and smiles. “Of course.”

Penumbra grins. “I do know how to pick the right clerks,” he says, reaching across to slap Deckle’s shoulder. He barks a laugh. “I do know how to pick them!”

The scheme is set.

Tomorrow, Deckle will bring a spare key sealed in an envelope addressed to me and deliver it to the Northbridge concierge. Neel and I will find a way to manufacture the GrumbleGear, Kat will make her appearance at Google’s New York office, and Penumbra will meet with a handful of black-robes who are sympathetic to his cause. When night falls, I will take scanner and key and make my way to the secret library of the Unbroken Spine, where I will liberate MANVTIVS — along with one other.

But that’s all tomorrow. Right now Kat has retired to our room. Neel has docked with a group of New York startup dudes. Penumbra is sitting at the hotel bar alone, nursing a heavy tumbler of something golden, lost in thought. He cuts a strange figure in this place: older than everyone else in the lobby by several decades, the top of his head a pale beacon in the calibrated gloom.

I’m sitting alone on one of the low couches, staring at my laptop, wondering how we can get ourselves in front of a laser cutter. Neel’s friend Andrei gave us leads on two different Manhattan hacker spaces, but only one had a laser cutter, and it’s booked solid for weeks. Everybody’s making something.

It occurs to me that Mat Mittelbrand might know someone, somewhere. There’s got to be a special-effects shop in this city that possesses the tool we need. I tap out a distress signal on my phone:

Thirty-seven seconds elapse, and Mat texts back:

Of course. I’ve spent months browsing the pirate library, but never posted anything. Grumble’s site features a bustling forum where people request particular e-books and then complain about the quality of what they receive. There’s also a technical subforum where people talk about the nuts and bolts of book digitization; this is where Grumble himself appears, answering questions with brevity, precision, and all-lowercase letters. This subforum is where I’ll ask for help:

Hi everybody. I’m a silent member of the Grumblematrix, speaking up for the first time. Tonight I find myself in New York City, in need of an Epilog laser cutter (or similar) as required by the instructions for the GrumbleGear 3000. I intend to carry out a clandestine scan ASAP, and the target is one of the most important books in the history of printing. In other words: this might be bigger than Potter. Any help?

I take a breath, check three times for typos, then submit the post. I hope the Festina Lente Company’s pirate patrol isn’t reading this.

Rooms at the Northbridge are a lot like the white shipping containers on Google’s campus: long and boxy, with hookups for water, power, and internet. There are narrow beds, too, but those are clearly a reluctant concession to the frailties of wetware.

Kat is sitting cross-legged on the floor in her underwear and red T-shirt, leaning in to her laptop. I’m on the lip of the bed above her with my Kindle drawing power from her USB port — um, not a euphemism — reading The Dragon-Song Chronicles for the fourth time. She’s finally perking up again after the disappointment of the PM, and, twisted around to look at me, she says, “This is really exciting. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Aldus Manutius.” His Wikipedia entry is open on her screen. I recognize the look on her face — it’s the same one that shows up when she talks about the Singularity. “I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.”

I have to be honest: “I’m not sure books are the key to anything. I mean, come on. This is a cult. It really is.” She frowns at that. “But a lost book written by Aldus Manutius himself is still pretty important, no matter what. After this, we can get Mr. Penumbra back to California. We’ll run the store on our own. I’ve got a marketing plan.”

None of that registers with Kat. She says, “There’s a team in Mountain View — we should tell them about this. It’s called Google Forever. They work on life extension. Cancer treatment, organ regeneration, DNA repair.”

This is getting silly. “Maybe a little cryogenics on the side?”

She glances up at me defensively. “They’re taking a portfolio approach.” I run my fingers through her hair, which is still damp from the shower. She smells like citrus.

“I just don’t get it,” she says, twisting back around to look up at me. “How can you stand it that our lives are so short? They’re so short, Clay.”

To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn’t even connect to the internet back then.

“Every day you learn something amazing,” Kat says, “like, there’s a secret underground library in New York City”—she pauses and gapes for effect, and it makes me laugh—“and you realize there’s so much more that’s waiting. Eighty years isn’t enough. Or a hundred. Whatever. It’s just not.” Her voice goes a little ragged, and I realize how deep this current runs within Kat Potente.

I lean down, kiss her above the ear, and whisper: “Would you really freeze your head?”

“I would absolutely, positively freeze my head.” She looks up at me and her face is serious. “I’d freeze yours, too. And in a thousand years, you’d thank me.”

POP-UP

WHEN I WAKE UP in the morning, Kat is gone, already headed for Google’s New York office. On my laptop, there’s an email waiting — a message relayed from Grumble’s forum. The timestamp says 3:05 a.m., and it’s from — holy shit. It’s from Grumble himself. The message says simply:

bigger than potter huh? tell me what you need.

My pulse pounds in my ears. This is awesome.

Grumble lives in Berlin, but he seems to spend most of his time traveling, doing special scanning ops in London or Paris or Cairo. Maybe sometimes New York. Nobody knows his real name; nobody knows what he looks like. He might be a she, or even a collective. In my imagination, though, Grumble is a he, not much older than me. In my imagination, he works solo — shuffling into the British Library in a puffy gray parka, wearing the cardboard components of his book scanner like a bulletproof vest under his clothes — but he has allies everywhere.

Maybe we’ll meet up. Maybe we’ll become friends. Maybe I’ll become his hacker apprentice. But I have to play it cool, or he’ll probably think I’m from the FBI or, worse, the Festina Lente Company. So I write:

Okay, no. I lean on the delete key and start again:

I hit send, smack my MacBook shut, and retreat into the bathroom. I think about hacker heroes and frozen heads while I scrub shampoo into my hair under the hot industrial blast of the Northbridge’s shower, obviously designed for robots, not for men.

Neel is waiting for me in the lobby, finishing a bowl of plain oatmeal and slurping a shake made from blended kale.

“Hey,” he says, “does your room have a biometric lock?”

“No, just a card key.”

“Mine’s supposed to recognize my face, but it wouldn’t let me in.” He frowns. “I think it only works for white people.”

“You should sell your friend some better software,” I say. “Expand into the hospitality business.”

Neel rolls his eyes. “Right. I don’t think I want to expand into any more markets. Did I tell you I got an email from Homeland Security?”

I freeze. Does this have anything to do with Grumble? No, that’s ridiculous. “You mean, like, recently?”

He nods. “They want an app to help them visualize different body types under heavy clothing. Like, burkas and stuff.”

Okay, whew. “Are you going to do it?”

He grimaces. “No way. Even if it wasn’t a gross idea — which it is — I’m doing too much already.” He slurps his shake and makes a bright cylinder of green zoom up the straw.

“You like it,” I say lightly. “You love having a finger in eleven different pots.”

“Sure, fingers in pots,” he says. “Not, like, whole bodies in pots. Dude, I don’t have partners. I don’t have business development people. And I don’t even do the fun stuff anymore!” He’s talking about code — or may be boobs, I’m not sure. “Honestly, what I really want to do is, like, be a VC.”

Neel Shah, venture capitalist. We’d never have dreamed that in sixth grade.

“So why don’t you?”

“Um, I think you might overestimate how much money Anatomix throws off,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “This isn’t exactly Google over here. To be a VC, you need a lot of C. All I’ve got is a bunch of five-figure contracts with video game companies.”

“And movie studios, right?”

“Shh,” Neel hisses, casting his eyes around the lobby. “Nobody can know about those. There are some very serious documents, dude.” He pauses. “There are documents with Scarlett Johansson’s signature on them.”

We take the subway. Grumble’s next message came through after breakfast, and it said:

theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms.

It is probably the coolest message that has ever appeared in my inbox. It’s a dead-drop, and Neel and I are headed there now. We are going to supply a secret passphrase and get a special-ops book scanner in return.

The train rumbles and sways through its tunnel below the East River. The windows are all dark. Neel is lightly gripping the bar overhead and he says:

“You sure you don’t want to get into business development? You could head up the burka project.” He grins and lifts his eyebrows, and I realize he’s serious, at least about the BD part.

“I am the absolute worst person you could get to do BD for your company,” I say. “I guarantee it. You’d have to fire me. It would be awful.” I’m not kidding. Working for Neel would violate the terms of our friendship. He’d be Neel Shah, boss, or Neel Shah, business mentor — no longer Neel Shah, dungeon master.

“I wouldn’t fire you,” he says. “I’d just demote you.”

“To what, Igor’s apprentice?”

“Igor already has an apprentice. Dmitriy. He’s supersmart. You could be Dmitriy’s apprentice.”

I’m sure Dmitriy is sixteen. I don’t like the sound of this. I change course:

“Hey, what about making your own movies?” I say. “Really show off Igor’s chops. Start another Pixar.”

Neel nods at that, then he’s quiet a moment, chewing it over. Finally: “I would totally do that. If I knew a filmmaker, I would fund him in a second.” He pauses. “Or her. But if it was a her, I’d probably fund her through my foundation.”

Right: the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts. It’s a tax shelter created at the behest of Neel’s slick Silicon Valley accountant. Neel asked me to build a placeholder website to make it look more legit and it is, to date, the second-most-depressing thing I have ever designed. (The NewBagel to Old Jerusalem rebranding still holds the top slot.)

“So go find a filmmaker,” I say.

“You go find a filmmaker,” Neel shoots back. Very sixth-grade. Then something lights up in his eyes: “Actually … that’s perfect. Yes. In exchange for funding this adventure, Claymore Redhands, I ask this boon of you.” His voice goes low and dungeon master-y: “You will find me a filmmaker.”

My phone guides us to the address in Dumbo. It’s on a quiet street along the water, next to a fenced-in lot bristling with ConEdison transformers. The building is dark and narrow, even skinnier than Penumbra’s and much more run-down. It looks like there’s been a fire here recently; long black streaks rise up around the doorframe. The space would look derelict if not for two things: One, a wide vinyl sign stuck crookedly to the front that says POP-UP PIE. Two, the warm rising smell of pizza.

Inside, it’s a wreck — yes, there was definitely a fire here — but the air is dense and fragrant, full of carbohydrates. Up front, there’s a card table with a dented money box. Behind it, a gang of ruddy-cheeked teenagers is milling around a makeshift kitchen. One is spinning dough in wobbly circles above his head; another is chopping tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Three more are just standing around, talking and laughing. There’s a tall pizza oven behind them, bare banged-up metal with a wide blue racing stripe down the middle. It has wheels.

There’s music blaring from a set of plastic speakers, a crunchy warbling tune that I suspect no more than thirteen people in the world have ever heard.

“What can I get you guys?” one of the teenagers calls out above the music. Well, he might not actually be a teenager. The staff here inhabits a whiskerless in-between space; they probably go to art school. Our host is wearing a white T-shirt that shows Mickey Mouse grimacing and brandishing an AK-47.

Okay, I’d better get this right: “One Hogwarts Special,” I call back to him. Insurgent Mickey nods once. I add, “But hold the shrooms.” Pause. “The mushrooms, I mean.” Pause. “I think.” But Insurgent Mickey has already turned away from us, consulting with his colleagues.

“Did he hear you?” Neel whispers. “I can’t eat pizza. If we actually end up with a pizza, it’s going to be your responsibility to consume it. Do not let me have any. Even if I ask for some.” He pauses. “I’ll probably ask for some.”

“Tie you to the mast,” I say. “Like Odysseus.”

“Like Captain Bloodboots,” Neel says.

In The Dragon-Song Chronicles, Fernwen the scholarly dwarf convinces the crew of the Starlily to tie Captain Bloodboots to the mast after he tries to cut the singing dragon’s throat. So, yes. Like Captain Bloodboots.

Insurgent Mickey is back with a pizza box. That was fast. “That’ll be sixteen-fifty,” he says. Wait, did I do something wrong? Is this a joke? Did Grumble send us on a wild-goose chase? Neel raises his eyebrows but produces a crisp twenty-dollar bill and hands it over. In return, we receive an extra-large pizza box, with POP-UP PIE stamped across the top in runny blue ink.

The box isn’t hot.

Outside on the sidewalk, I crack it open. Inside, there are tidy stacks of heavy cardboard, all long flat shapes with slots and tabs where they fit together. It’s a GrumbleGear, all in pieces. The edges are burned black. These shapes have been made with a laser cutter.

Written in thick marker strokes on the underside of the box’s lid is a message from Grumble, whether by his own hand or his Brooklyn minion’s, I will never know:

On the way back, we stop at a gray-market electronics shop and pick out two cheap digital cameras. Then we make our way to the Northbridge through the streets of lower Manhattan, Neel carrying the pizza box, me with the cameras in a plastic bag bouncing against my knee. We have everything we need. MANVTIVS will be ours.

The city is all bright squalls of traffic and commerce. Taxis honk underneath lights turning gold; long lines of shoppers clank up and down Fifth Avenue. There are loose crowds on every street corner, laughing and smoking and selling kebabs. San Francisco is a good city, and beautiful, but it’s never this alive. I take a deep breath — the air is cool and sharp, scented with tobacco and mystery meat — and I think of Corvina’s warning to Penumbra: You can squander what time remains out there. Jeez. Immortality in a book-lined catacomb down beneath the surface of the earth, or death up here, with all this? I’ll take death and a kebab. And what about Penumbra? Somehow he seems more like a man of the world, too. I think of his bookstore, with those wide front windows. I think of his first words to me—“What do you seek in these shelves?”—delivered with a big, welcoming smile.

Corvina and Penumbra were fast friends once; I’ve seen photographic proof. Corvina must have been so different then … really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don’t get to be Corvina anymore. Now you’re Corvina 2.0—a dubious upgrade. I think of the young man in the old photo giving a thumbs-up. Is he gone forever?

“It really would be better if the filmmaker was female,” Neel is saying. “Seriously. I need to put more money into that foundation. I’ve only given one grant, and it was to my cousin Sabrina.” He pauses. “I think that might have been illegal.”

I try to imagine Neel forty years from now: bald, suit-wearing, a different person. I try to imagine Neel 2.0 or Neel Shah, business mentor — a Neel with whom I can no longer be friends — but I just can’t do it.

Back at the Northbridge, I’m surprised to find Kat and Penumbra sitting together on the low couches, deep in conversation. Kat is gesturing enthusiastically and Penumbra is smiling, nodding, his blue eyes shining.

When Kat looks up, she’s smiling. “There was another email,” she blurts. Then she pauses, but her face is alive, jumping, like she can’t contain whatever comes next: “They’re expanding the PM to a hundred and twenty-eight, and — I’m one of them.” Her micromuscles are on fire, and she almost shrieks it: “I got picked!”

My mouth hangs open a little bit. She jumps up and hugs me, and I hug her back, and we dance around in a little circle in the ultracool Northbridge lobby.

“What does that even mean?” Neel says, setting down the pizza box.

“I think it means this side project just got some executive support,” I say, and Kat throws her arms up in the air.

To celebrate Kat’s success, all four of us sidle up to the Northbridge lobby bar, which is tiled with tiny matte-black integrated circuits. We sit on tall stools and Neel buys a round of drinks. I sip something called the Blue Screen of Death, which is in fact neon-blue, with a bright LED winking inside one of the ice cubes.

“So let me get this straight — you’re one — one-twenty-eighth of Google’s CEO?” Neel says.

“Not exactly,” Kat says. “We have a CEO, but Google is way too complicated for one person to run alone, so the Product Management helps out. You know … should we enter this market, should we make that acquisition.”

“Dude!” Neel says, leaping up off his stool. “Acquire me!”

Kat laughs. “I’m not sure 3-D boobs—”

“It’s not just boobs!” Neel says. “We do the whole body. Arms, legs, deltoids, you name it.”

Kat just smiles and sips her drink. Penumbra is nursing an inch of golden scotch in a thick-bottomed tumbler. He turns to Kat.

“Dear girl,” he says. “Do you think Google will still exist in a hundred years?”

She’s quiet a moment, then nods sharply. “Yes, I do.”

“You know,” he says, “a rather famous member of the Unbroken Spine was fast friends with a young man who founded a company of similar ambition. And he said exactly the same thing.”

“Which company?” I ask. “Microsoft? Apple?” What if Steve Jobs dabbled in the fellowship? Maybe that’s why Gerritszoon comes preinstalled on every Mac …

“No, no,” Penumbra says, shaking his head. “It was Standard Oil.” He grins; he’s caught us. He swirls his glass and says, “You have found your way into a story that has been unfolding for a very long time. Some of my brothers and sisters would say that your company, dear girl, is no different from all the others that have come before. Some of them would say no one outside the Unbroken Spine has ever had anything to offer us.”

“Some of them, like Corvina,” I say flatly.

“Yes, Corvina.” Penumbra nods. “Others, too.” He looks at the three of us together — Kat and Neel and me — and he says quietly, “But I am glad to have you as my allies. I do not know if you understand how historic this work is going to be. The techniques we have developed over centuries, aided by new tools … I believe we will succeed. I believe it in my bones.”

Together, with Neel reading the instructions from my laptop and Penumbra handing me the pieces, we assemble the GrumbleGear 3000 for the first time. The components are cut from corrugated cardboard and they make a satisfying thwack when you thump them with your finger. Slotted together, they achieve a preternatural structural integrity. There’s an angled bed for a book and two long arms above it, each with a cunning socket for a camera — one for each page in a two-page spread. The cameras connect to my laptop, which is now running a program called GrumbleScan. The program, in turn, hands the images off to a hard drive, a matte-black terabyte tucked into a slender box of Bicycle playing cards. The box is a nice roguish touch from Neel.

“Who designed this thing again?” he asks, scrolling through the instructions.

“A guy named Grumble. He’s a genius.”

“I should hire him,” Neel says. “Good programmer. Great sense of spatial relationships.”

I open my Guide to Central Park Birds and set it up on the scanner. Grumble’s design isn’t much like Google’s — it has no spidery page-turning appendages, so you have to do that part yourself, and trigger the cameras, too — but it works. Flip, flash, snap. The migratory pattern of the American robin spools onto the disguised hard drive. Then I break the scanner back down into flat pieces with Kat keeping time. It takes forty-one seconds.

With this contraption in tow, I’ll return to the Reading Room just a little past midnight tonight. I’ll have the place entirely to myself. With maximum speed and stealth, I will scan not one but two books, then flee the scene. Deckle has warned me to be done and departed, leaving no trace, by first light.

THE BLACK HOLE

IT’S JUST PAST MIDNIGHT. I walk quickly up Fifth Avenue, eyeing the dark mass of Central Park across the street. The trees are black silhouettes against a blotchy gray-purple sky. Yellow taxis are the only cars on the street, despondently circling for fares. One of them flashes its brights at me; I shake my head no.

Deckle’s key goes click in the dark doorway of the Festina Lente Company, and just like that, I am inside.

There’s a dot of light blinking red in the darkness, and thanks to Deckle’s intel, I know it’s a silent alarm that signals a very private security firm. My heart beats faster. Now I have thirty-one seconds to enter the code, which I do: 1-5-1-5. That’s the year Aldus Manutius died — or, if you subscribe to the stories of the Unbroken Spine: the year he didn’t.

The front room is dark. I pull a headlamp out of my bag and wind the strap around my forehead. It was Kat who suggested a headlamp instead of a flashlight. “So you can focus on flipping the pages,” she said. The light flashes across the FLC on the wall, casting sharp shadows behind the capitals. I briefly consider some extracurricular espionage here — could I delete their database of e-book pirates? — but decide my real mission is risky enough.

I stalk through the silent expanse of the outer office, sweeping the headlamp through cubicles on either side. The refrigerator rattles and hums; the multipurpose printer blinks forlornly; screen savers twist across monitors, casting weak blue light into the room. Otherwise, nothing moves or makes a sound.

In Deckle’s office, I skip the costume change and keep my phone securely in my pocket. I give the shelves a gentle push, and I’m surprised at how easily they split and swivel back, silent and weightless. This secret way is well oiled indeed.

Beyond, it is all blackness.

Suddenly this seems like a very different undertaking. Up until this moment, I’d still been imagining the Reading Room as it was yesterday afternoon: bright, bustling, and if not welcoming then at least well lit. Now I am basically looking into a black hole. This is a cosmic entity from which no matter or energy have ever escaped, and I am about to step straight into it.

I tilt my headlamp down. This is going to take a while.

I should have asked Deckle about the light switch. Why didn’t I ask Deckle about the light switch?

My footfalls make long echoes. I’ve stepped through the passageway into the Reading Room, and it is pure pitch-black, the blackest void I have ever encountered. It’s also freezing.

I take a step forward and decide to keep my head down, not up, because when I look down, the headlamp’s light reflects on smooth rock, and when I look up, it disappears into nothing.

I want to scan these books and get out of this place. First I need to find one of the tables. There are dozens. This isn’t going to be a problem.

I start by tracing the chamber’s perimeter, trailing my fingers along the shelves, feeling the bumps of the spines as I go. My other arm is outstretched and sensing, like a mouse’s whisker.

I hope there aren’t mice in here.

There. My headlamp catches a table edge, and then I see a heavy black chain and the book that it binds. The cover bears tall silver letters that reflect brightly back at me: MANVTIVS.

From my messenger bag, I produce first my laptop and then the dismantled skeleton of the GrumbleGear. The assembly process is more difficult in the darkness, and I fumble with the slots and tabs for too long, afraid I’ll break the cardboard. The cameras come out of my bag next, and I give one of them a test snap. The flash explodes and lights up the whole chamber for a bright microsecond and immediately I regret it, because my vision is ruined, swimming with wide purple spots. I blink and wait and wonder about the mice and/or bats and/or minotaur.

MANVTIVS is truly gigantic. Even if it wasn’t chained to the table, I don’t know how somebody would get one of these books out of here. I have to wrap both arms around it in an awkward embrace to haul it up onto the scanner. I’m afraid the cardboard won’t bear the load, but physics is on my side tonight. Grumble’s design holds strong.

So I start scanning. Flip, flash, snap. The book is just like all the rest I’ve seen in the Waybacklist: a dense matrix of coded characters. Flip, flash, snap. The second page is the same as the first, and so is the third, and the seventh. I fall into a trance, turning the wide monotonous pages and taking their measure. Flip, flash, snap. The grim letters of MANVTIVS are all that exist in the universe; in between camera flashes, I see only flat buzzing darkness. I feel with my fingers to find the next page.

There’s a shake. Is someone down here? Something just made the table shake.

It shakes again. I try to say Who’s there? but it catches in my throat, which is parched, and I make a little croak instead.

Another shake. Then, before I have time to formulate a terrifying theory about the Horned Guardian of the Reading Room — obviously Edgar Deckle’s werebeast form — there’s more shaking, and the cave rumbles and roars and I have to clutch the scanner to keep it upright. In a flood of relief, I realize it’s the subway, just the subway, cruising through bedrock next door. The noise echoes back into itself and becomes a low bellow in the darkness of the cave. Finally, it passes, and I start scanning again.

Flip, flash, snap.

Many minutes pass, or maybe more than minutes, and bleakness washes over me. Maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t have any dinner, so my blood sugar is bottoming out, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m standing alone in a freezing pitch-black subterranean vault. But whatever the cause, the effect is real: I feel keenly the stupidity of this entire enterprise, this absurd cult. Book of life? This is barely a book at all. The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III is a better book than this.

Flip, flash, snap.

But of course: I can’t read it. Would I say the same thing about a book in Chinese or Korean or Hebrew? The big Torahs in Jewish temples look like this, right? Flip, flash, snap — heavy grids of inscrutable symbols. Maybe it’s my own limitation that’s getting to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t understand what I’m scanning. Flip, flash, snap. What if I could read this? What if I could glance across the page and, you know, get the joke? Or gasp at the cliff-hanger?

Flip, flash, snap.

No. Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You’re meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.

I’m cold and tired and hungry. I have no idea how much time has passed. It feels like maybe my entire life has been spent in this chamber, with the occasional dream of a sunny street. Flip flash snap, flip flash snap, flip flash snap. My hands are cold claws, curled and cramped as if I’ve been playing video games all day.

Flip, flash, snap. This is a terrible video game.

At last, I’m done.

I lace my fingers together and bend them backward, pressing them out into space. I jump up and down, trying to restore my bones and muscles to some semblance of normal hominid configuration. It doesn’t work. My knees hurt. My back is cramped. There are jets of pain shooting out of my thumbs, up into my wrists. I hope it isn’t permanent.

I shake my head. I’m feeling really dismal. I should have brought a granola bar. Suddenly I am sure that starving to death in a pitch-black cave is the very worst way to die. That makes me think of the codex vitae lining the walls, and suddenly I get the creeps. How many dead souls are sitting — waiting — on the shelves all around me?

One soul matters more than the rest. It’s time to accomplish this mission’s second objective.

Penumbra’s codex vitae is here. I’m cold, shivering, and I want to leave this place, but I came here to liberate not only Aldus Manutius, but Ajax Penumbra, too.

To be clear: I don’t believe in this. I don’t believe any of these books can confer immortality. I just clawed my way through one of them; it’s moldy paper bound in moldier leather. It’s a hunk of dead tree and dead flesh. But if Penumbra’s codex vitae is the great work of his life — if he really did pour everything he learned, all his knowledge, into one book — then, you know, I think somebody ought to make a backup.

It might be a long shot, but I’ll never have this chance again. So I start along the perimeter, doubled over, trying to read the spines sideways. One look confirms that they are not shelved alphabetically. No, of course they’re not. They’re probably grouped according to some supersecret intra-cult rank, or favorite prime number, or inseam, or something. So I just go shelf by shelf, deeper and deeper into the darkness.

The variation between books is incredible. Some are fat, some are skinny; some are tall like atlases, some squat like paperbacks. I wonder if there’s a logic to that, too; is some sort of status encoded into each book’s format? Some are bound in cloth, others in leather, and many in materials that I don’t recognize. One shines bright in the light of my headlamp; it’s clad in thin aluminum.

Thirteen shelves in, there’s still no sign of PENVMBRA, and I’m afraid I might have missed him. The headlamp casts a narrow cone of light, and I’m not seeing every spine, especially the ones down by the floor—

There’s a blank space in the shelves. No: upon closer inspection, it’s not blank, but black. It’s a blackened husk of a book, with the name still faintly visible on the spine:

It can’t be … Clark Moffat, author of The Dragon-Song Chronicles? No, it can’t.

I paw at the spine and pull it out, and as I do, the book disintegrates. The covers hold together, but a sheaf of blackened pages comes loose inside and falls onto the floor. I hiss, “Shit!” and shove what remains of the book back onto the shelf. This must be what they mean by burning. The book is ruined, just a blackened placeholder. Maybe it’s a warning.

My hands are blackened now, too, slick with soot. I clap them together and bits of MOFFAT float to the floor. Maybe it’s an ancestor or a second cousin. There’s more than one Moffat in the world.

I reach down to scoop up the charred remains and my headlamp catches a book, tall and skinny, with golden letters spaced out along the spine:

It’s him. I almost can’t bring myself to touch it. It’s right there — I found it — but suddenly it feels too intimate, like I’m about to look through Penumbra’s tax returns or his underwear drawer. What’s inside? What story does it tell?

I hook a finger into the top of the binding and angle it slowly away from the shelf. This book is beautiful. It’s taller and skinnier than its neighbors, with super-stiff binding boards. Its dimensions remind me more of an oversized children’s book than an occult diary. The cover is pale blue, exactly the color of Penumbra’s eyes, and with some of the same luminescence, too: the color shifts and glimmers in the glare of the headlamp. It’s soft under my fingers.

The remains of MOFFAT are a dark smear at my feet, and I won’t let the same thing happen to this book, no matter what. I will scan PENVMBRA.

I carry my erstwhile employer’s codex vitae back over to the GrumbleGear and — why am I so nervous? — I open to the first page. It’s the same jumble of characters as all the rest, of course. Penumbra’s codex vitae is no more readable than any of the others.

Because it’s so slender — a mere fraction of MANVTIVS — it shouldn’t take long, but I find myself flipping more slowly, trying to glean something, anything, from the pages. I relax my eyes, defocus them, so the letters become a dappling of shadows. I want so badly to see something in this mess — honestly, I want something magical to happen. But no: if I really want to read my weird old friend’s opus, I’ll need to join his cult. There are no free stories in the secret library of the Unbroken Spine.

It takes longer than it should, but at last I’m finished and the pages of PENVMBRA are safe on the hard drive. More so than with MANVTIVS, I feel like I just accomplished something important. I snap my laptop shut, shuffle over to the place where I found the book — marked by MOFFAT’s remains on the floor — and slot the glimmering blue codex vitae back into place.

I give it a pat on the spine and say, “Sleep well, Mr. Penumbra.”

Then the lights come on.

I’m blinded and stricken, blinking and panicking. What just happened? Did I set off an alarm? Did I trigger some trap laid for overreaching rogues?

I claw my phone out of my pocket and swipe madly at the screen, bringing it back to life. It’s almost eight in the morning. How did this happen? How long was I circumnavigating the shelves here? How long was I scanning PENVMBRA?

The lights are on, and now I hear a voice.

When I was a kid, I had a pet hamster. He always seemed to be afraid of absolutely everything — permanently trapped and trembling. This made hamster ownership pretty much totally unpleasant for the whole eighteen months that it lasted.

Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out. The bright lamps are like prison-yard spotlights. I can see my own hands, and I can see the pile of charred paper at my feet, and I can see the table with my laptop and the skeletal scanner set up on top of it.

I can also see the dark shape of a door directly across the chamber.

I sprint to my laptop, scoop it up, then grab the scanner, too — crushing the cardboard under my arms — and make for the door. I have no idea what it is or where it leads — to the canned beans? — but now I hear voices, plural.

My fingers are on the door handle. I hold my breath — please, please be unlocked — and I push it down. Poor tormented Fluff McFly never felt anything like the relief of that door giving way. I slide through and close it behind me.

On the other side, it’s all darkness again. I stand frozen for a moment, cradling my awkward cargo in my arms, my back pressed up against the door. I force myself to take shallow breaths; I ask my hamster-heart to please, please slow down.

There is the sound of motion and conversation behind me. The door is not set tightly into its frame of rock; it’s like one of those bathroom stalls that feels way too see-through. But it does give me the chance to set the scanner aside and flatten myself down on the cold, smooth floor and peek through the half inch of empty space beneath it:

Black-robes are flooding into the Reading Room. There are a dozen here already, and more coming down the steps. What’s going on? Did Deckle forget to check the calendar? Did he betray us? Is today the annual convention?

I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message. No such luck. My phone flashes NO SERVICE, even if I stand on tiptoe and wave it up near the ceiling.

I need to hide. I’ll find a little spot, curl up in a ball, and wait until tomorrow night to slink out. There will be the issue of hunger and thirst, and maybe going to the bathroom … but one thing at a time. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness again, and if I beam my headlamp around in a wide circle, I can make out the shape of the space around me. It’s a small, low-ceilinged chamber packed with dark shapes, all interconnected and overlapping. In the gloom, it looks like something from a science fiction movie: there are sharp-edged metal ribs and long tubes that reach up into the ceiling.

I am still feeling my way forward when there’s a soft click from the door, which sends me back into hamster mode. I scuttle forward and crouch down behind one of the dark shapes. Something pokes me in the back and wobbles there, so I reach around to steady it — it’s an iron rod, painfully cold and slippery with dust. Can I whack the black-robe with this rod? Where will I whack him? In the face? I’m not sure I can whack somebody in the face. I’m a rogue, not a warrior.

Warm light falls into the chamber, and I see a figure framed in the doorway. It is a round figure. It’s Edgar Deckle.

He shuffles through, and there’s a sloshing sound. He’s carrying a mop and bucket, which he holds awkwardly with one hand while he feels along the wall. There’s a low buzz, and the room is bathed in orange light. I grimace and squint.

Deckle makes a sharp gasp when he sees me crouched in the corner, iron rod raised like some Gothic baseball bat. His eyes go wide. “You were supposed to be gone by now!” he hisses.

I decide not to reveal that I got distracted by MOFFAT and PENVMBRA. “It was really dark,” I say.

Deckle sets aside his mop and bucket with a clack and a plop. He sighs and wipes a black sleeve across his forehead. I lower the rod. I can see now that I’m crouched next to a huge furnace; the rod is an iron poker.

I survey the scene, and it’s not science fiction anymore. I’m surrounded by printing machines. There are refugees from many eras: an old Monotype bristling with knobs and levers; a wide, heavy cylinder set on a long track; and something straight out of Gutenberg’s garage — a heavy whorled block of wood with an enormous corkscrew poking out at the top.

There are cases and cabinets. There are tools of the printing trade laid out on a wide, weathered table: fat book blocks and tall spools of heavy thread. Under the table, there are lengths of chain piled up in wide loops. The stove next to me has a wide, smiling grille, and at the top, it sprouts a fat pipe that disappears into the chamber’s ceiling.

Here, deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, I have discovered the world’s weirdest print shop.

“But you got it?” Deckle whispers.

I show him the hard drive in its Bicycle box.

“You got it,” he breathes. The shock doesn’t last long; Edgar Deckle is quickly recomposing himself. “Okay. I think we can make this work. I think — yes.” He nods to himself. “Let me just take these”—he lifts three heavy books, all identical, up off the table—“and I’ll be right back. Stay quiet.”

He balances the books against his chest and goes back the way he came, leaving the light on behind him.

I wait and inspect the print shop. The floor is beautiful: a mosaic of characters, each in its own tile, each deeply etched. The alphabet at my feet.

There’s one metal case much larger than the rest. The top has a familiar symbol: two hands, open like a book. Why do organizations need to mark everything with their insignia? It’s like a dog peeing on every tree. Google is the same way. So was NewBagel.

Using both hands, I grunt and lift the case’s lid. Inside, it’s divided into compartments — some long, some wide, some perfectly square. They all hold shallow piles of metal type: stubby little 3-D letters, the kind you line up on a printing press to make words and paragraphs and pages and books. And suddenly I know what this is.

This is Gerritszoon.

The door clicks again and I whirl to look: Deckle stands there with his hand tucked into his cloak. I am briefly gripped with the certainty that he’s been playing dumb, that he’s betrayed us after all, that he’s been sent back to kill me now. He will do Corvina’s handiwork — maybe flatten my skull with the Gutenberg press. But if he’s bent on clerkicide, he’s putting on a good show: his face is open, friendly, conspiring.

“That’s the inheritance,” Deckle says, nodding to the Gerritszoon case. “Pretty great, huh?”

He strolls over as if we’re just hanging out here, deep beneath the surface of the earth, and reaches down to run round pink fingers through the type. He picks up a tiny e and holds it up to his eye. “The most-used letter in the alphabet,” he says, turning it around, inspecting it. He frowns. “It’s really worn down.”

The subway rumbles through bedrock nearby and it makes the whole room clatter. The Gerritszoon type clinks and shifts; there’s a tiny avalanche of a’s.

“There’s not very much of it,” I say.

“It wears out,” Deckle says, tossing the e back into its compartment. “We break letters but we can’t make new ones. We lost the originals. One of the great tragedies of the fellowship.” He looks up at me. “Some people think if we change typefaces, new codex vitae won’t be valid. They think we’re stuck with Gerritszoon forever.”

“Could be worse,” I say. “It’s probably the best—”

There’s a noise from the Reading Room; a bright bell clangs and makes a long, lingering echo. Deckle’s eyes flash. “That’s him. Time to go.” He gently closes the case, reaches around to the back of his waistband, and pulls out a folded square of black fabric. It’s another robe.

“Put this on,” he says. “Stay quiet. Stay in the shadows.”

BINDING

THERE’S A CROWD of black-robes at the end of the chamber, down by the wooden dais — dozens of them. Is this everybody? They’re talking and whispering, pushing the tables and chairs back. They’re setting things up for a show.

“Guys, guys!” Deckle calls out. The black-robes part and make way for him. “Who’s got mud on their shoes? I see those prints. I just mopped yesterday.”

It’s true: the floor shines like glass, reflecting the colors on the shelves, beaming them back as pale pastels. It’s beautiful. The bell clangs again, echoing in the cave and making a harsh chorus with itself. The black-robes are forming up in front of the dais, facing a single figure, who is of course Corvina. I position myself directly behind a tall blond-haired scholar. My laptop and the crumpled carcass of the GrumbleGear are stuffed back into my bag, which is slung over my shoulder and concealed under my brand-new black robe. I pull my head down toward my shoulders. These robes should really have hoods.

The First Reader has a stack of books in front of him on the dais, and he taps them with sturdy fingers. They’re the books Deckle retrieved from the print shop moments ago.

“Brothers and sisters of the Unbroken Spine,” Corvina calls out. “Good morning. Festina lente.”

“Festina lente,” the black-robes all murmur in return.

“I have gathered you here to speak of two things,” Corvina says, “and this is the first.” He lifts one of the blue-bound books and holds it up for everyone to see. “After many years of work, your brother Zaid has presented his codex vitae.”

Corvina nods, and one of the black-robes steps forward and turns to face the crowd. The man is in his fifties, thickset under his robe. He has a face like a boxer, with a smooshed-down nose and splotchy cheeks. This must be Zaid. He’s standing straight, his hands clasped behind his back. His face is pinched; he’s trying hard for fortitude.

“Deckle has validated Zaid’s work and I have read his book,” Corvina says. “I have read it as closely as I know how.” He really is a charismatic dude — his voice has a quiet but irresistible confidence. There’s a pause, and the Reading Room is silent. Everyone is waiting for the First Reader’s judgment.

Finally, Corvina says simply, “It is masterful.”

The black-robes whoop and rush forward to embrace Zaid and shake his hands two at a time. Three scholars near me start belting out a song, which sounds like a for-he’s-a-jolly-good-fellow sort of tune, but I’m not sure because it’s in Latin. I clap my hands to fit in. Corvina raises a hand to quiet the crowd. They move back and settle down. Zaid is still standing up in front, and now he raises a hand to cover his eyes. He’s crying.

“Today, Zaid is bound,” Corvina says. “His codex vitae has been encrypted. Now it will be shelved, and the key will remain secret until his death. Just as Manutius chose Gerritszoon, Zaid has chosen a trusted brother to carry his key.” Corvina pauses. “It is Eric.”

Scattered cheers again. I know Eric. There he is in the front row, a pale face under a splotchy black beard: Corvina’s courier to the store in San Francisco. Black-robes are clapping him on the shoulders, too, and I can see him smiling, a bloom of color on his cheeks. Maybe he’s not so bad. That’s quite a responsibility, keeping Zaid’s key. Is he allowed to write it down somewhere?

“Eric will also be one of Zaid’s couriers, along with Darius,” Corvina says. “Brothers, come forward.”

Eric takes three sure steps forward. So does another black-robe, this one with golden skin like Kat’s and a tight cap of brown curls. They both unbutton their robes. Underneath, Eric is wearing his slate-gray slacks below a crisp white shirt. Darius is in jeans and a sweater.

Edgar Deckle also steps out of the crowd, carrying two wide sheets of thick brown paper. One at a time, he hoists a book from the dais, wraps it crisply, and hands the package off to a courier: first Eric, then Darius.

“Three copies,” Corvina says. “One for the library”—he lifts the blue-bound book again—“and two for safekeeping. Buenos Aires and Rome. We entrust Zaid to you, brothers. Take his codex vitae and do not sleep until you have seen it shelved.”

So I understand Eric’s visit better now. He came from here. He was carrying a fresh codex vitae, delivering it for safekeeping. And, of course, being a jerk about it.

“Zaid adds to our burden,” Corvina says gravely, “just as all the bound before him have added to it. Year by year, book by book, our responsibility grows heavier.” He swivels his gaze to take in all of the black-robes. I suck in my breath and scrunch in my shoulders and try to disappear behind the tall blond-haired scholar. “We must not falter. We must unlock the Founder’s secret, so that Zaid and all who came before him can live on.”

There’s a deep murmur from the crowd. Up in front, Zaid is no longer crying. He’s composed himself, and now his face looks proud and severe.

Corvina is silent for a moment. Then he says, “There is something else we must speak of.”

He gives a little wave with his hand and Zaid returns to the crowd. Eric and Darius head for the steps. I think for a moment about following them, but quickly reconsider. Right now my only hope is to blend in completely — to crouch in this shadow, not of normalcy, but of deep strangeness.

“I have spoken recently with Penumbra,” Corvina says. “He has friends in this fellowship. I count myself among them. So, I feel compelled to tell you about our conversation.”

There are whispers all around.

“Penumbra is responsible for a great transgression — one of the greatest imaginable. Thanks to his negligence, one of our volumes was stolen.”

Murmurs and groans.

“A logbook containing details of the Unbroken Spine, its work in San Francisco for years, unencrypted, laid out for anyone to read.”

My back is sweating under the robe and my eyes feel itchy. The hard drive in its Bicycle box is a lump of lead in my pocket. I try to appear as unconcerned and uninvolved as possible. Mostly this involves looking at my shoes.

“It was a grave mistake, and not the first that Penumbra has made.”

More groans from the black-robes. Corvina’s disappointment, his disdain, is feeding into them, circling back, amplifying. The tall dark shapes have all drawn together into one big sulking shadow. It’s a massacre of crows. I’ve already picked out a path toward the steps. I’m ready to run for it.

“Note this well,” Corvina says, his voice rising just a little. “Penumbra is one of the bound. His codex vitae sits on these shelves, just as Zaid’s will. Yet his destiny is not assured.” His voice is swift and sure, and it carries through the chamber: “Brothers and sisters, let me be clear: when a burden is this heavy and a purpose this serious, friendship is no shield. Another mistake, and Penumbra will be burned.”

There are gasps at this, followed by quick whispered exchanges. Glancing around, I see expressions of shock and surprise. The First Reader might have gone too far just then.

“Do not take your work for granted,” he says more gently, “whether you are bound or unbound. We must be disciplined. We must be determined. We cannot allow ourselves to be”—he pauses here—“distracted.” He takes a breath. He could be a presidential candidate — a good one — stumping with total conviction and sincerity. “It is the text that matters, brothers and sisters. Remember this. Everything we need is already here in the text. As long as we have that, and as long as we have our minds”—he raises a finger and taps his sleek forehead—“we don’t need anything else.”

After that, the crows take flight. Black-robes swirl around Zaid, congratulating him, asking him questions. Above his rough red cheeks, his eyes are still wet.

The Unbroken Spine is returning to its labors. Black-robes are bending down over black books and pulling the chains tight. Near the dais, Corvina confers with a middle-aged woman. She’s making broad gestures, explaining something as he gazes down and nods. Deckle is hovering just behind them. His eyes meet mine. He makes a sharp motion with his chin, and the message is clear: Go.

I keep my head down and my bag tucked in tight and I march the length of the chamber, keeping close to the shelves. But halfway to the steps, I trip on a chain and stumble down onto one knee. My palm smacks the floor and a black-robe cocks an eye at me. He’s tall, with a beard that juts out from his jaw like a bullet.

I say softly: “Festina lente.”

Then I look straight down and shuffle fast toward the steps. I take them two at a time all the way back up to the surface of planet earth.

I meet Kat, Neel, and Penumbra in the Northbridge lobby. They are sitting, waiting, on massive gray couches with coffee and breakfast set up in front of them; the scene is an oasis of sanity and modernity. Penumbra is frowning.

“My boy!” he says, rising to his feet. He looks me up and down and raises an eyebrow. I realize I’m still wearing the black robe. I shrug my bag onto the floor and peel it off. It’s smooth in my hands, shiny in the lobby’s half-light.

“You had us worried,” Penumbra says. “What took you so long?”

I explain what happened. I tell them Grumble’s scanner worked, and then I dump the contraption’s crumpled remains out onto the low table. I tell them about Zaid’s ceremony.

“A binding,” Penumbra says. “They are few and far between. Unlucky that it would happen today.” He tilts his chin. “Or lucky, perhaps. Now you know more of the patience that the Unbroken Spine demands.”

I wave down a Northbridge waiter and desperately order a bowl of oatmeal and a Blue Screen of Death. It’s still early in the morning but I need a drink.

Then I tell them what Corvina said about Penumbra.

My erstwhile employer waves a bony hand: “His words do not matter. Not anymore. What matters is what is on those pages. I cannot believe it worked. I cannot believe we have in our possession the codex vitae of Aldus Manutius!”

Kat nods, grinning. “Let’s get started,” she says. “We can OCR the book and make sure everything works.”

She hauls out her MacBook and brings it to life. I plug in the tiny hard drive and copy its contents — most of them. I drag MANVTIVS over to Kat’s laptop, but I keep PENVMBRA for myself. I’m not going to tell Penumbra, or anyone, that I scanned his book. That can wait — with luck, maybe forever. Manutius’s codex vitae is a project. Penumbra’s is just an insurance policy.

I eat my oatmeal and watch the progress bar grow. It finishes copying with a quiet plink and then Kat’s fingers fly across the keyboard. “All right,” she says. “It’s on its way. We’re going to need help back in Mountain View to actually crack the code … but we can at least kick off the Hadoop job to turn the pages into plain text. Ready?”

I smile. This is exciting. Kat’s cheeks are glowing; she’s in digital empress mode. Also, I think the Blue Screen of Death is going to my head. I hoist my blinking glass: “Long live Aldus Manutius!”

Kat thunks a finger down on her keyboard. Pictures of pages start flying to far-off computers, where they will become strings of symbols that can be copied and, soon, decoded. No chains can hold them now.

While Kat’s computer goes to work, I ask Penumbra about the burned book marked MOFFAT. Neel is listening, too.

“Was it him?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” Penumbra says. “Clark Moffat. He did his work here, in New York. But before that, my boy — he was our customer.” He grins and winks. He thinks this will impress me, and he’s right. I’m retroactively starstruck.

“But that was not a codex vitae you held,” Penumbra says, shaking his head. “Not anymore.”

Obviously. It was a book of ashes. “What happened?”

“He published it, of course.”

Wait, I’m confused: “The only books Moffat ever published were The Dragon-Song Chronicles.”

“Yes.” Penumbra nods. “His codex vitae was the third and final volume of the saga he started before he joined us. It was a tremendous profession of faith to finish this work, then surrender it to the fellowship’s shelves. He presented it to the First Reader — this was Nivean, before Corvina — and it was accepted.”

“But he took it back.”

Penumbra nods. “He could not make the sacrifice. He could not leave his final volume unpublished.”

So Moffat couldn’t remain part of the Unbroken Spine because Neel and I and countless other nerdy sixth-graders all had our minds blown by the third and final volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

“Man,” Neel says, “this explains a lot.”

He’s right. The third volume blows middle-school minds because it’s a total curveball. The tone shifts. The characters change. The plot goes off the rails and begins to obey some hidden logic. People always assumed it was because Clark Moffat started doing psychedelic drugs, but the truth is even stranger.

Penumbra frowns. “I believe Clark made a tragic mistake.”

Mistake or not, what a world-bending decision. If The Dragon-Song Chronicles were never completed, I’d never have been friends with Neel. He wouldn’t be sitting here. Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here. Maybe I’d be surfing in Costa Rica with some bizarro-universe best friend. Maybe I’d be sitting in a gray-green office.

Thank you, Clark Moffat. Thank you for your mistake.

THE DRAGON-SONG CHRONICLES, VOLUME II

BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, I find Mat and Ashley together in the kitchen, both scarfing complicated salads, both wearing stretchy bright-colored athletic gear. Mat has a carabiner clipped at his waist.

“Jannon!” he exclaims. “Have you ever been rock-climbing?”

I concede that I have not. As a rogue, I prefer athletic activities that require agility, not strength.

“See, that’s what I thought, too,” Mat says, nodding, “but it’s not strength. It’s strategy.” Ashley eyes him proudly. He continues, waving a forkful of greens, “You have to learn each course as you go — come up with a plan, try it out, adjust. Seriously, my brain is more tired than my arms right now.”

“How was New York?” Ashley asks politely.

I’m not sure how to respond. Something like: Well, the mustachioed master of the secret library is going to be pissed that I copied the entirety of his ancient codebook and delivered it to Google, but at least I got to stay at a nice hotel?

Instead, I say, “New York was good.”

“They’ve got some great climbing gyms.” She shakes her head. “Nothing out here even compares.”

“Yeah, the interior design at Frisco Rock City definitely … leaves something to be desired,” Mat says.

“That purple wall…” Ashley shudders. “I think they just bought whatever paint was on sale.”

“And a climbing wall is such an opportunity,” Mat says. He’s getting excited. “What a canvas! Three stories to cover with anything you want. Like a matte painting. There’s a guy at ILM…”

I leave them chattering happily together about all the details.

At this point, the best option is sleep, but I dozed on the plane and now I’m restless, like something in my brain is still circling the runway, refusing to come in for a landing.

I find Clark Moffat (unburned and intact) on my own short shelves. I’m still making my way through the series again slowly, and now I’m on Volume II, near the end. I flop down on my bed and try to see it with new eyes. I mean: this book was written by a man who walked the same streets as me, who looked up at the same shadowed shelves. He joined the Unbroken Spine and he left the Unbroken Spine. What did he learn along the way?

I flip to where I left off.

The heroes, a scholarly dwarf and a dethroned prince, are making their way through a deadly swamp to the Citadel of the First Wizard. I know what’s going to happen next, of course, because I’ve read this book three times before: the First Wizard is going to betray them and hand them over to the Wyrm Queen.

I always know it’s coming, and I know it needs to happen (because how else are they going to get into the Wyrm Queen’s tower and ultimately defeat her?) but it always kills me to read this part. Why can’t things just work out? Why can’t the First Wizard just give them a mug of coffee and a safe place to stay for a while?

Even with all my new knowledge, the story seems about the same as before. Moffat’s prose is fine: clear and steady, with just enough sweeping statements about destiny and dragons to keep things well inflated. The characters are appealing archetypes: Fernwen the scholarly dwarf is the everynerd, doing his best to live through the adventure. Telemach Half-Blood is the hero you wish you could be. He always has a plan, always has a solution, always has secret allies that he can call upon — pirates and sorcerers whose allegiance he earned with long-ago sacrifices. In fact, I’m just getting to the part where Telemach is going to blow the Golden Horn of Griffo to raise the dead elves of the Pinake Forest, who are all bound to him because he liberated their—

The Golden Horn of Griffo.

Huh.

Griffo, like Griffo Gerritszoon.

I open my laptop and start taking notes. The passage continues:

“The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought,” Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach’s treasure. “And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here — none that I can detect.”

Fernwen’s eyes widened at that. Hadn’t they just braved a swamp of horrors to reclaim this enchanted trumpet? And now the First Wizard claimed it carried no real power at all?

“Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.”

I don’t know what that means — but I think it means something.

From there, the plot is familiar: while Fernwen and Telemach slumber (at last) in richly furnished chambers, the First Wizard steals the horn. Then he lights a red lantern and sends it dancing aloft, a signal to the Wyrm Queen’s dark marauders in the Pinake Forest. They are busy there among the trees — hunting down old elf graves, digging up bones, grinding them to dust — but they know what that signal means. They descend on the citadel, and when Telemach Half-Blood startles awake in his chamber, he is surrounded by tall shadows. They howl and strike.

And that’s where the second book ends.

“It was amazing,” Kat says. We’re sharing a gluten-free waffle in the Gourmet Grotto and she’s telling me about the inaugural gathering of the new Product Management. She’s wearing a cream-colored blouse with a daggerlike collar; underneath, her T-shirt winks red at her throat.

“Totally amazing,” she continues. “Best meeting ever. Completely … structured. You know exactly what’s happening all the time. Everybody brings a laptop—”

“Do people even look at one another?”

“Not really. Everything that matters is on your screen. There’s an agenda that rearranges itself. There’s a back-channel chat. And there’s fact-checking! If you get up to speak, there are people cross-referencing your claims, supporting and refuting you—”

It sounds like an engineer’s Athens.

“—and the meeting is really long, like six hours, but it feels like no time, because you’re thinking so hard. You get totally wrung out. There’s so much information to absorb and it comes so fast. And they — we — make decisions really fast, too. After somebody calls for a vote, it happens live, and you have to cast yours right away, or delegate it to someone else…”

Now it sounds more like a reality show. This waffle is terrible.

“There’s an engineer named Alex, he’s a big deal, he built most of Google Maps, and I think he likes me — he delegated his vote to me once already, which is pretty crazy, I’m brand-new—”

I think I’d like to delegate my fist to Alex’s face.

“—and there are tons of designers, more designers than usual. Somebody said they tweaked the selection algorithm. I think maybe that’s why I got in, because I’m a designer and a programmer. It’s an optimal combination. Anyway.” She finally takes a breath. “I made a presentation. Which, I guess, you’re not really supposed to do at your first PM. But I asked Raj and he said it might be okay. Maybe even a good idea. Make an impression. Whatever.” Another breath. “I told them about Manutius.”

She did it.

“How it’s this amazing ancient book, totally a historical treasure, totally old knowledge, OK—”

She actually did it.

“—and then I explained how there’s this nonprofit that’s trying to break the code—”

“Nonprofit?”

“It sounds better than, like, secret society. Anyway, I said they’re trying to break the code, and of course people perked up at that, because everybody at Google likes codes—”

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

“—and I said, maybe we should spend some time on this, because it could be the start of a whole new thing, like some sort of public service code-breaking thing—”

This is a girl who knows her audience.

“—and everybody thought that sounded like a great idea. We voted on it.”

Amazing. No more sneaking around. Thanks to Kat, we now have Google’s official backing. It’s surreal. I wonder when the code-breaking will commence.

“Well, I’m supposed to organize it.” She ticks through the tasks on her fingers: “I’ll round up some volunteers. Then we’ll get the systems configured, and make sure the text all looks okay — Jad can help with that. We need to talk to Mr. Penumbra, for sure. Maybe he can come to Mountain View? Anyway. I think we can be ready in, like … two weeks. Say, two weeks from today.” She nods sharply.

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we’re penciling it in for a Friday morning.

THE ULTIMATE OK

PENUMBRA AGREES to keep the bookstore open until the bank account runs dry, so I go back to work, and I go back with a mission. I order a book distributor’s catalog. I run another Google ad campaign, a bigger one. I email the organizer of San Francisco’s big literary festival, which runs for a whole week and draws free-spending readers from as far away as Fresno. It’s a long shot, but I think we can do it. I think we can get some real customers. Maybe we don’t need the Festina Lente Company. Maybe we can turn this place into a real business.

Twenty-four hours after the start of the ad campaign, eleven lonely souls have wandered in, which is pretty exciting, because before, there was only one lonely soul — me. These new customers nod when I ask about the ads, and then four of them actually buy something. Three of those four pick up a copy of the new Murakami, which I’ve set up in a neat little stack next to a card that explains how awesome it is. The card is signed Mr. Penumbra in a simulation of his spidery script because I think that’s probably what people want to see.

Past midnight, I spot North Face from Booty’s out on the sidewalk, walking with her head down, headed for the bus stop. I run to the front door.

“Albert Einstein!” I shout, leaning out into the sidewalk.

“What?” she says. “My name is Daphne—”

“We’ve got the Einstein biography,” I say, “by Isaacson. The guy who did Steve Jobs. Still want it?”

She smiles and turns on her heels — which are very high — and that makes five books for the night, a new record.

There are new books coming in every day. When I arrive to start my shift, Oliver shows me the boxes in a pile, his eyes wide and slightly suspicious. He’s been a bit unsettled ever since I returned and told him everything I’d learned in New York.

“I thought there was something strange going on,” he said quietly, “but I always figured it was drugs.”

“Holy shit, Oliver! What?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I thought maybe some of those books were full of cocaine.”

“And you never bothered to mention this?”

“It was just a theory.”

Oliver thinks I am being too liberal with our dwindling funds: “Don’t you think we should try to make the money last as long as we can?”

“Spoken like a true preservationist,” I cluck. “Money isn’t like terra-cotta. We can make more of it if we try. We have to try.”

So now we’ve got teenage wizards. We’ve got vampire police. We’ve got a journalist’s memoir, a designer’s manifesto, a celebrity chef’s graphic novel. In a nostalgic gesture — maybe a slightly defiant one, too — we’ve got the new edition of The Dragon-Song Chronicles, all three volumes. I also ordered the old audiobook edition for Neel. He doesn’t really read books anymore, but maybe he can listen while he lifts weights.

I try to get Penumbra excited about all of this — our nightly receipts are still just double digits, but that’s a whole digit more than we used to have — but he’s preoccupied with the Great Decoding. One cold Tuesday morning, he strolls into the store with a cup of coffee in one hand and his mystery e-reader in the other, and I show him what I’ve added to the shelves:

“Stephenson, Murakami, the latest Gibson, The Information, House of Leaves, fresh editions of Moffat”—I point them out as I go. Each one has a little shelf talker, and they’re all signed Mr. Penumbra. I was worried he might feel protective of his imprimatur, but he doesn’t even notice.

“Very good, my boy,” he says with a nod, still looking down at the e-reader. He doesn’t have any idea what I just said. His shelves are getting away from him. He nods and makes a quick swipe across the e-reader’s screen, then looks up. “There will be a meeting later today,” he says. “The Googlers are visiting the store”—he makes it three syllables, Goo-gull-urz—“to meet us and discuss our techniques.” He pauses. “I believe you should attend as well.”

So that afternoon, just after lunchtime, there is a great convening of the old guard and the new at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The most senior of Penumbra’s students are present: white-bearded Fedorov and a woman named Muriel with short-cropped silver hair. I’ve never seen her before; she must visit during the day. Fedorov and Muriel are following their teacher. They’re going rogue.

There’s a contingent from Google, selected and sent over by Kat. They are Prakesh and Amy, both even younger than me, and Jad from the book scanner. He looks up and down the short shelves admiringly. Maybe I can sell him something later.

Neel is at a Google developer conference downtown — he wants to meet more of Kat’s colleagues and sow the seeds of an Anatomix acquisition — but he sent Igor, who is brand-new to these proceedings but seems to grasp everything instantly. Actually, he might be the smartest person in the store.

All together, young and old, we stand around the front desk with volumes from the Waybacklist opened wide for inspection. It’s a crash course on the centuries-old work of the Unbroken Spine.

“Dese are books,” Fedorov says, “not simply strings of letters.” He traces his fingers across the page. “So ve must celculate not only letter-vise, but also page-vise. Some of de most cemplicated encryption schemes rely on dis page-vise cemposition.”

The Googlers nod and take notes on their laptops. Amy has her iPad set up with a little keyboard.

The bell above the door tinkles, and a rangy man with black-rimmed glasses and a long ponytail comes hustling into the store. “Sorry I’m late,” he heaves, out of breath.

“Hello, Greg,” says Penumbra.

“Hey, Greg,” says Prakesh at the same time.

They look at each other, then across to Greg.

“Yep,” Greg says. “This is weird.”

It turns out that Greg — the source of Penumbra’s mystery e-reader! — is both a hardware engineer at Google and a novice in the San Francisco chapter of the Unbroken Spine. It also turns out that he is invaluable. He translates between Penumbra’s bookstore crew and the Googlers, explaining parallel processing to one group and folio sizes to the other.

Jad from the book scanner is also crucial, because he’s actually done this before. “There will be OCR errors,” he explains. “For instance, a lowercase f will come through as an s.” He types them on his laptop so we can see them side by side. “Lowercase rn looks like m. Sometimes A becomes 4, and there’s so much stuff like that. We’ll have to compensate for all those possible errors.”

Fedorov nods and interjects, “End for de optical eigenvectors of de text, as vell.”

The Googlers stare blankly at him.

“Ve must also cempensate for de optical eigenvectors,” he repeats, as if stating the obvious.

The Googlers look across to Greg. He’s staring blankly, too.

Igor raises a skinny hand and says neatly, “I tink ve could make a tree-dimensional metrix of ink-saturation values?”

Fedorov’s white beard splits into a grin.

I’m not sure what will happen when Google cracks MANVTIVS. Of course, there are things that I know will not happen: Penumbra’s passed-away brothers and sisters will not rise. They will not reappear. They will not even make spectral blue cameos, Jedi-style. Real life is not like The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

But it might still be big news. I mean, a secret book from the first great publisher, digitized, decoded, and made public? The New York Times might blog about that.

We decide we ought to invite the whole San Francisco fellowship down to Mountain View to watch it happen. Penumbra gives me the task of telling the members I know best.

I begin with Rosemary Lapin. I take the steep hike up to her hillside hobbit-hole and knock three times on her door. It opens just a crack, and a single wide Lapin-eye blinks out at me.

“Oh!” she squeaks, and opens the door the rest of the way. “It’s you! Did you — that is, have you — that is — what happened?”

She brings me in, opening windows and waving her hands in the air to clear away the smell of pot, and I tell her the tale over tea. Her eyes are wide, devouring; I can sense she wants to go immediately to the Reading Room and don one of those black robes. I tell her she might not have to. I tell her the Unbroken Spine’s great secret might be unlocked in just a few days.

Her face is blank. “Well, that’s something,” she says finally.

Honestly, I expected a little more excitement.

I tell Tyndall, and his reaction is better than Lapin’s, but I’m not sure if he’s excited about the pending revelation or if this is just how he responds to everything. Maybe if I told him that Starbucks was introducing a new latte that smelled like books he’d say the same thing:

“Fabulous! Euphoric! Essential!” His hands are up on his head, working their way into tangles of curly gray. He’s walking around his apartment — a tiny one-room studio out near the ocean, where you can hear the foghorns murmuring to one another — going in quick circles, his elbows brushing the walls and knocking framed photos into odd angles. One of them clatters to the floor, and I reach down to pick it up.

It shows a cable car at a crazy angle, completely packed with passengers, and up at the front, in a neat blue uniform, it’s Tyndall himself: younger and skinnier, with hair that’s black instead of gray. He’s wearing a broad grin, hanging half-out of the car, waving at the camera with his free arm. Tyndall the cable car conductor; yes, I can see it. He must have been—

“Magnificent!” He’s still orbiting. “Unspeakable! When? Where?”

“Friday morning, Mr. Tyndall,” I tell him. Friday morning, at the bright glowing center of the internet.

I don’t see Kat for almost two weeks. She’s busy organizing everything for the Great Decoding, and busy with other Google projects, too. The Product Management is an all-you-can-eat buffet, and she’s hungry. She hasn’t replied to any of my flirty emails, and when she texts me, her messages are two words long.

Finally, we meet on Thursday night for a desultory date over sushi. It’s cold, and she’s wearing a heavy houndstooth blazer over a thin gray sweater and a shiny blouse. There’s no sign of her red T-shirt anymore.

Kat gushes about Google’s projects, all revealed to her now. They are making a 3-D web browser. They are making a car that drives itself. They are making a sushi search engine — here she pokes a chopstick down at our dinner — to help people find fish that is sustainable and mercury-free. They are building a time machine. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

With each new mega-project she describes, I feel myself shrink smaller and smaller. How can you stay interested in anything — or anyone — for long when the whole world is your canvas?

“But what I’m really interested in,” Kat says, “is Google Forever.” Right: life extension. She nods. “They need more resources. I’m going to be their ally on the PM — really try to make their case. It might be the most important work we can do, in the long run.”

“I don’t know, the car sounds pretty awesome—”

“Maybe we’ll give them something to work with tomorrow,” Kat continues. “What if we find something crazy in this book? Like, a DNA sequence? Or the formula for some new drug?” Her eyes are shining. I have to hand it to her: she has a real imagination for immortality.

“You’re giving a medieval publisher a lot of credit,” I say.

“They figured out the circumference of the earth a thousand years before they invented printing,” she sniffs. Then she pokes a chopstick at me: “Could you figure out the circumference of the earth?”

“Well — no.” I pause for a moment. “Wait, could you?”

She nods. “Yeah, it’s actually pretty easy. The point is, they knew their stuff back then. And there’s stuff they knew that we still haven’t rediscovered. OK and TK, remember? Old knowledge. This might be the ultimate OK.”

After dinner, Kat won’t come back to the apartment with me. She says she has email to read, prototypes to review, wiki pages to edit. Did I really just lose out to a wiki on a Thursday night?

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

THE CALL

IT IS THE NIGHT before the morning on which Kat Potente has scheduled an all-out assault on the centuries-old codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. Her Googler platoon is assembled. Penumbra’s posse is invited. It’s exciting — I have to admit, it’s really exciting — but it’s also unnerving, because I have no idea what’s next for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The man himself hasn’t said a word, but I feel like Penumbra might be winding this place down. Because, I mean, sure: Who needs the burden of an old bookstore when eternal life is imminent?

We’ll see what tomorrow holds. It’s going to be a good show, whatever happens. Maybe afterward he’ll be ready to talk about the future. I still want to buy a billboard on that bus shelter.

It’s a quiet night, with only two customers so far. I browse the shelves, straightening my new acquisitions. I promote The Dragon-Song Chronicles to a higher shelf, then idly flip the first volume over in my hands. The back cover bears a small black-and-white portrait of Clark Moffat in his thirties. He has shaggy blond hair and a bushy beard, and he’s wearing a plain white T-shirt, grinning a toothy grin. Below the portrait, it says:

Something occurs to me. It’s something I’ve never done before — something I’ve never thought to do, not in all the time I’ve worked here. I’m going to search for someone in the logbooks.

It’s logbook VII I want, the one I smuggled down to Google, because it runs through the mid-eighties and early nineties. I find the raw text on my laptop and command-F a particular description: someone with shaggy blond hair and a beard.

It takes a while, trying different keywords, skimming through false positives. (There are a lot of beards in here, it turns out.) I’m looking at OCR’d text, not handwriting, so I can’t tell who wrote what here, but I know some of these must be Edgar Deckle’s notes. It would be nice if he was the one who— There.

Member number 6HV8SQ:

The novice takes possession of KINGSLAKE with thanks and good cheer. Wears a white T-shirt celebrating the bicentennial. Levi 501 jeans and heavy work boots. Voice rough with smoke; package of cigarettes, approximately half-empty, visible in pocket. Pale blond hair is longer than has ever been recorded by this clerk. Upon remark, the novice explains: “I want it wizard-length.” Monday the 23rd of September, 1:19 in the morning. Clear skies and the smell of the ocean.

That’s Clark Moffat. It’s got to be. The note is after midnight, which means the late shift, which means “this clerk” is indeed Edgar Deckle. There’s another one:

The novice is moving quickly through the Founder’s Puzzle. But even more than his speed, it is his confidence that is striking. There is none of the hesitation or frustration that has characterized other novices (this clerk included). It is as if he is playing a familiar song or dancing a familiar dance. Blue T-shirt, Levi 501s, work boots. Hair is longer still. Receives BRITO. Friday the 11th of October, 2:31 in the morning. A foghorn sounds.

It goes on. The notes are concise but the message is clear: Clark Moffat was a savant of the Unbroken Spine. Is it possible … was he the dark moss constellation in the visualization? Was he the one who raced around the Founder’s whole face in the time it took other novices to trace out an eyelash or an earlobe? There’s probably some way to link specific notes to the visualization and—

The bell tinkles and I jerk my head up out of the endless scrolling text. It’s late, and I expect to see a member of the fellowship, but instead it’s Mat Mittelbrand, hauling a black plastic case. It’s huge, bigger than he is, and it’s stuck in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, helping to pry it loose. The case’s surface is tough and knobby and it has heavy metal buckles.

“I’m here on a mission,” Mat says, breathing hard. “This is your last night, right?”

I’ve been complaining to him about Penumbra’s neglect. “Maybe,” I say. “Probably. What’s all this?”

He tips his case over on the floor, flips the buckles (they make a serious-sounding snap snap), and opens it wide. Inside, cushioned in a bed of gray foam, there’s photography gear: crystalline lights with sturdy wire shields, thick collapsible aluminum stalks, and wide coils of bright orange cable.

“We’re going to document this place,” Mat says. He sets his hands on his hips and peers appreciatively around. “It must be recorded.”

“So, what, like — a photo shoot?”

Mat shakes his head. “No, that would be selective recording. I hate selective recording. We’re going to take a picture of every surface, from every angle, under bright, even light.” He pauses. “So we can re-create it.”

My mouth hangs open.

He continues, “I’ve done photo recon on castles and mansions. This store is tiny. It’ll only take three or four thousand shots.”

Mat’s intention is completely over-the-top, obsessive, and maybe impossible. In other words: it’s perfect for this place.

“So, where’s the camera?” I ask.

On cue, the bell over the front door tinkles again, and Neel Shah comes barreling through with a monstrous Nikon hanging from his neck and a bottle of bright green kale juice in either hand. “Got some refreshments,” he says, holding them aloft.

“You two are going to be my assistants,” Mat says. He taps the black plastic case with his toe. “Start setting up.”

The bookstore is bursting with heat and light. Mat’s lamps are daisy-chained together, all plugged into the one power outlet behind the front desk. I’m pretty sure it’s going to blow a fuse, or maybe a whole street-level transformer. Booty’s neon sign might be at risk tonight.

Mat is up on one of Penumbra’s ladders. He’s using it as a makeshift dolly, with Neel pushing him slowly across the span of the store. Mat holds the Nikon steady in front of his face and fires off a shot for each of Neel’s long, even strides. The camera triggers the lights, which are set up in all the corners and behind the front desk, and they all go pop pop with every shot.

“You know,” Neel says, “we could use these shots to make a 3-D model.” He looks over at me. “I mean, another one. Yours was good.”

“No, I get it,” I say. I’m at the front desk, making a checklist of all the details we need to capture: the tall letters on the windows and their rough, crenelated edges, worn away by time. The bell and its clapper and the curling iron bracket that holds it in place. “Mine looked like Galaga.”

“We can make it interactive,” Neel says. “First-person view, totally photorealistic and explorable. You could choose the time of day. We can make the shelves cast shadows.”

“No,” Mat groans from the ladder. “Those 3-D models suck. I want to make a miniature store with miniature books.”

“And a miniature Clay?” Neel asks.

“Sure, maybe a little LEGO dude,” Mat says. He hauls himself up higher on the ladder and Neel starts pushing him back across the store. The lights go pop pop, leaving red spots in my eyes. Neel is ticking off the advantages of 3-D models as he pushes the ladder: they’re more detailed, more immersive, you can make infinite copies. Mat is groaning. Pop pop.

In all the bright noise, I almost miss the ring.

It’s just a tickle in my ear, but yes: somewhere in the bookstore, a phone is ringing. I cut through the shelves parallel to the photo shoot, with the lights still going pop pop, and emerge into the tiny break room. The sound is coming from Penumbra’s study. I push through the door marked PRIVATE and hop up the steps.

The pop pop of the lights is softer up here, and the ring ring from the phone (next to the old modem) is loud and insistent, produced by some powerful old-fashioned mechanical noisemaker. It keeps ringing, and it occurs to me that my usual strategy for strange phone calls — wait them out — might not work here.

Ring ring.

These days, the phone only carries bad news. It’s all “your student loan is past due” and “your uncle Chris is in the hospital.” If it’s anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.

Ring ring.

Okay, well, maybe it’s an inquisitive neighbor calling to ask what the commotion is all about — all the flashing lights. Maybe it’s North Face over at Booty’s checking to make sure everything’s okay. That’s sweet. I pick up the phone and announce, with relish: “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.”

“You must stop him,” a voice says, without introduction or preamble.

“Um, I think you have the wrong number.” It’s not North Face.

“I definitely do not have the wrong number. I know you. You’re the boy — you’re the clerk.”

I recognize the voice now. The quiet power. The crisp syllables. It’s Corvina.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“I’m Clay.” But then: “You probably want to talk to Penumbra directly. You should call back in the morning…”

“No,” Corvina says matter-of-factly. “Penumbra’s not the one who stole our most precious treasure.” He knows. Of course he knows. How? Another one of his crows, I suppose. Word must have gotten out here in San Francisco.

“Well, it’s really not technically stealing, I don’t think,” I say, looking down at my shoes as if he’s here in the room with me, “because, I mean, it’s probably in the public domain…” I trail off. This is not going to get me anywhere.

“Clay,” Corvina says, smooth and dark, “you must stop him.”

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe in your … religion,” I say. I would probably not be able to say this to his face. I’m clutching the black curve of the phone tight to my cheek. “So I don’t think it matters if we scan an old book. Or if we don’t. I don’t think it’s, like, of any cosmic importance whatsoever. I’m just helping my boss — my friend.”

“You’re doing exactly the opposite,” Corvina says quietly.

I don’t have any response to that.

“I know you don’t believe what we believe,” he says. “Of course you don’t. But you don’t need faith to realize that Ajax Penumbra is on the razor’s edge.” He pauses to let that sink in. “I’ve known him longer than you have, Clay — far longer. So let me tell you about him. He’s always been a dreamer, a great optimist. I understand why you’re drawn to him. All of you in California — I used to live there. I know what it’s like.”

Right. The young man in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s smiling at me across the room, giving me a big thumbs-up.

“You probably think I’m just the cold New York CEO. You probably think I’m too severe. But, Clay — sometimes discipline is the truest form of kindness.”

He’s using my first name a lot. Mostly it’s salesmen who do that.

“My friend Ajax Penumbra has tried many things in his life — many schemes — and they have always been so elaborate. He has always been just on the cusp of a breakthrough — in his own mind, at least. I’ve known him for fifty years, Clay — fifty years! And in that time, do you know how many of his schemes have succeeded?”

I don’t like where—

“None. Zero. He has maintained that store where you’re standing — barely — and accomplished absolutely nothing else of note. And this, the last and greatest of his schemes — it will not succeed, either. You just said so yourself. It is foolishness, and it will fail, and what then? I worry about him, Clay, truly — as his oldest friend.”

I know he’s using a Jedi mind trick on me right now. But it’s a really good Jedi mind trick.

“Okay,” I say, “I get it. I know Penumbra’s a little weird. Obviously. What am I supposed to do?”

“You must do what I can’t. I would delete the copy you stole. I would delete every copy. But I’m too far away, so you must help me, and you must help our friend.”

Now it sounds like he’s standing right beside me:

“You must stop Penumbra, or this final failure will destroy him.”

The phone is back in its cradle, even though I am not totally conscious of having hung up. The store is quiet; there’s no more pop pop from the front. I cast my eyes slowly around Penumbra’s study, at the wreckage of decades of digital dreams, and Corvina’s warning starts to make sense. I think of the look on Penumbra’s face as he was explaining his scheme to us in New York, and it makes even more sense. I look across at the photo again. Suddenly it’s not Corvina who’s the wayward friend — it’s Penumbra.

Neel appears at the top of the stairs.

“Mat needs your help,” he says. “You have to hold a light or something.”

“Okay, sure.” I take a sharp breath, push Corvina’s voice out of my head, and follow Neel back down into the store. We’ve raised a lot of dust, and now the lamps are making bright shapes in the air, punching through spaces in the shelves, catching feathery motes — microscopic scraps of paper, bits of Penumbra’s skin, of mine — and making them shine.

“Mat’s pretty good at this, huh?” I say, peering around at the otherworldly effect.

Neel nods. “He’s amazing.”

Mat hands me a giant sheet of glossy white poster board and tells me to hold it steady. He’s capturing the front desk up close, getting deep into the grain. The poster board is reflecting so subtly that I cannot detect its effect on the wood, but I assume it is making a crucial contribution to the brightness and evenness of the light.

Mat starts shooting again, and the big lights are just calmly beaming now, so I can hear the camera go click click. Neel is standing behind Mat, holding a light with one hand, slurping his second kale juice with the other.

As I stand holding the poster board, I think:

Corvina doesn’t really care about Penumbra. This is about control, and he’s trying to turn me into his instrument. I’m grateful for the geographical distance between us; I’d hate to experience that voice in person. Or maybe he wouldn’t bother with persuasion in person. Maybe he’d show up with a gang of black-robes. But he can’t, because we’re in California; the continent is our shield. Corvina caught on too late, so his voice is all he’s got.

Mat pushes in even closer, apparently going for molecular detail on the front desk, the place where I’ve spent so much of my life recently. I’m presented, for a moment, with a nicely framed portrait: compact curled-up Mat, sweating, holding his camera up to his eye, and big broad Neel, smiling, holding the light steady, slurping his kale juice. My friends, making something together. This requires faith, too. I can’t tell what this poster board is doing, but I trust Mat. I know it’s going to be beautiful.

Corvina’s got it wrong. Penumbra’s schemes didn’t fail because he’s a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina’s right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra’s schemes failed because he didn’t have enough help. Maybe he didn’t have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat — until now.

Corvina said: You must stop Penumbra.

No, just the opposite. We’re going to help him.

Dawn comes, and when it does, I know not to expect Penumbra. He is headed not to the store that bears his name, but to Google. In just about two hours, the project that Penumbra and his brothers and sisters have toiled over for decades, for centuries, is coming to fruition. He’s probably eating a celebratory bagel somewhere.

Here in the store, Mat packs the lights back into their gray foam sarcophagus. Neel takes the bent-up white poster board out to the trash can. I coil up the orange cables and straighten the front desk. Everything looks the same; nothing has moved. And yet, something is different. We took photos of every surface: the shelves, the desk, the door, the floor. We took photos of the books, all of them, the ones in the front and the Waybacklist, too. We didn’t capture the pages inside, of course — that would be a project of a different scale. If you’re ever playing Super Bookstore Brothers, navigating a 3-D simulacrum of Penumbra’s bookstore with pink-yellow light coming in the front windows and a foggy particle effect rising in the back, and you decide you want to actually read one of the beautifully textured books: too bad. Neel’s model might match the store’s volume but never its density.

“Breakfast?” Neel asks.

“Breakfast!” Mat agrees.

So we leave. That’s it. I turn off the lights and pull the door tight behind me. The bell makes its bright tinkle. I never did get a key.

“Let me see the photos,” Neel says, grabbing at Mat’s camera.

“Not yet, not yet,” Mat says, tucking it under his arm. “I need to grade them. This is just raw material.”

“Grade them? Like A-B-C?”

“Color grading — color correction. Translation: I need to make them look awesome.” He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you worked with movie studios, Shah.”

“He told you?” Neel spins to look at me with wide eyes: “You told him? There are documents!”

“You should stop by ILM next week,” Mat says calmly. “I’ll show you some stuff.”

They’re both far up the sidewalk now, halfway to Neel’s car, but I’m still standing at the wide front windows with their big gold type: MR. PENUMBRA’S in beautiful Gerritszoon. It’s dark inside. I press my hand onto the fellowship’s symbol — two hands, open like a book — and when I take it away, there’s an oily, five-fingered print left behind.

A REALLY BIG GUN

IT’S FINALLY TIME to break a code that has waited five hundred years.

Kat has requisitioned Google’s data visualization amphitheater with its massive screens. She’s moved tables from the lunch tent into position down in front; it looks like mission control, picnic-style.

The day is beautiful; a sharp blue sky is dotted with wispy white clouds, all commas and curlicues. Hummingbirds hover down to investigate the screens, then zip back out across the bright open lawns. There’s music in the distance; the Google brass band is practicing an algorithmically generated waltz.

Down below, Kat’s handpicked code-breaking squad is setting up. Laptops are coming out, each one encrusted with a different collection of colorful stickers and holograms, and the Googlers are plugging into power and fiber optics, flexing their fingers.

Igor is among them. His brilliance at the bookstore earned him a special invitation: today, he’s allowed to play in the Big Box. He’s leaning in to his laptop, his skinny hands a bluish blur, and two Googlers are watching wide-eyed over his shoulder.

Kat is making the rounds, conferring with Googlers one by one. She smiles and nods and pats them on the back. Today, she’s a general, and these are her troops.

Tyndall, Lapin, Imbert, and Fedorov are all here, along with the rest of the local novices. They’re sitting up on the lip of the amphitheater, all in a row along the highest stone step. More are arriving. Silver-haired Muriel is here, and so is Greg the ponytailed Googler. He’s standing with the fellowship today.

Most of the fellowship’s members are in late middle age. Some, like Lapin, look pretty old, and a few are older still. There’s an ancient man in a wheelchair, eyes lost in shadowed sockets, his cheeks pale and wrinkled like tissue paper, pushed by a young attendant in a neat suit. The man croaks a faint greeting to Fedorov, who clasps him by the hand.

Finally, there’s Penumbra. He’s holding court at the amphitheater’s edge, explaining what’s about to happen. He’s smiling and waving his arms, pointing down at the Googlers at their tables, pointing over to Kat, over to me.

I haven’t told him about the call from Corvina, and I don’t plan to. The First Reader doesn’t matter anymore. What matters are the people here in this amphitheater and the puzzle up on those screens.

“Come over here, my boy, come over here,” he says. “Meet Muriel properly.” I smile and shake her hand. She’s beautiful. Her hair is silver, almost white, but her skin is smooth, with just the lightest lace of microwrinkles around her eyes.

“Muriel runs a goat farm,” Penumbra says. “You should take your, ah, friend, you know”—he tilts his head down toward Kat—“you should take her down. The tour is wonderful.”

Muriel smiles lightly. “The spring is the best time,” she says. “That’s when we have baby goats.” To Penumbra she says, mock-scoldingly, “You’re a good ambassador, Ajax, but I wish I could get you down there more often.” She winks at him.

“Oh, the store has kept me busy,” he says, “but now, after this?” He waves his hands and opens his face wide with a little who-knows-what-could-happen frown. “After this, anything is possible.”

Wait a second — is there something going on there? There couldn’t be anything going on there.

There might be something going on there.

“Okay, quiet down, everybody. Quiet down!” Kat shouts from the front of the amphitheater. She looks up to address the crowd of scholars gathered on the stone steps: “So, I’m Kat Potente, the PM for this project. I’m glad you’re all here, but there are a few things you should know. First, you can use the Wi-Fi, but the fiber optics are for Google employees only.”

I glance across the assembled mass of the fellowship. Tyndall has a pocket watch connected to his pants with a long chain, and he’s checking the time. I don’t think this is going to be a problem.

Kat glances down at a printed-out checklist. “Second, don’t blog, tweet, or live-stream anything you see here.”

Imbert is adjusting an astrolabe. Seriously: not a problem.

“And third”—she grins—“this isn’t going to take long, so don’t get too comfortable.”

Now she shifts to address her troops: “We don’t know what kind of code we’re dealing with yet,” she says. “We need to figure that out first. So we’ll be working in parallel. We’ve got two hundred virtual machines ready and waiting in the Big Box, and your code will run in the right place automatically if you just tag it CODEX. Everybody ready?”

The Googlers all nod. One girl straps on a pair of dark goggles.

“Hit it.”

The screens leap to life, a blitzkrieg of data visualization and exploration. The text of MANVTIVS blinks bright and jagged, set in the squared-off letters favored by code and console. This isn’t a book anymore; it’s a data dump. Scatter plots and bar charts unfurl across the screens. At Kat’s command, Google’s machines crunch and recrunch the data nine hundred different ways. Nine thousand. Nothing yet.

The Googlers are looking for a message — any message — in the text. It might be a whole book, it might be a few sentences, it might be a single word. Nobody, not even the Unbroken Spine, knows what’s waiting there, or how Manutius encrypted it, and that makes this a very hard problem. Luckily, the Googlers love very hard problems.

Now they get more creative. They make crosses and spirals and galaxies of color dance across the screens. The graphs grow new dimensions — first they become cubes and pyramids and blobs, then they sprout long tentacles. My eyes swim as I try to follow along. A Latin lexicon flashes across one screen — an entire language examined in milliseconds. There are n-gram graphs and Vonnegut diagrams. Maps appear, with letter sequences somehow translated into longitudes and latitudes and plotted across the world, a dusting of dots through Siberia and the South Pacific.

Nothing.

The screens flicker and flash as Googlers try every angle. The fellowship is murmuring. Some are still smiling; others are starting to frown. When a giant chessboard appears on one screen with a pile of letters on every square, Fedorov sniffs and mutters, “Ve tried det in 1627.”

Is that why Corvina believes this project won’t succeed — because the Unbroken Spine has literally tried it all? Or is it simply because this is cheating — because old Manutius never had any bright screens or virtual machines? If you follow them, those two lines of reasoning close together like a trap, and they lead you straight down to the Reading Room, with its chalk and its chains, and nowhere else. I still don’t believe the secret to immortality is going to pop up on one of those screens, but jeez, I want Corvina to be wrong. I want Google to crack this code.

“Okay,” Kat announces, “we just got another eight hundred machines.” Her voice rises and carries across the lawn: “Go deeper. More iterations. Don’t hold back.” She walks from table to table, consulting and encouraging. She’s a good leader — I can see it in the Googlers’ faces. I think Kat Potente has found her calling.

I watch Igor bang his head against the text. First he translates each line of letters into a molecule and simulates a chemical reaction; on-screen, the solution dissolves into a gray sludge. Then he makes letters into tiny 3-D people and sets them up in a simulated city. They wander around bumping into buildings and forming crowded clumps in the street until Igor destroys it all with an earthquake. Nothing. No message.

Kat hikes up the steps, squinting into the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. “This code is tough,” she admits. “Like, crazy tough.”

Tyndall sprints around the amphitheater’s edge and leaps over Lapin, who squeaks and shields herself. He grabs Kat’s arm. “You must compensate for the phase of the moon at the time of writing! The lunar offset is essential!”

I reach over and detach his shivering claw from her sleeve. “Mr. Tyndall, don’t worry,” I say. I’ve already watched a line of half-eaten moons parade across the screens. “They know your techniques.” And Google is nothing if not thorough.

While the screens flash and blur down below, a team of Googlers wanders through the fellowship — young people with clipboards and friendly faces, asking questions like: When were you born? Where do you live? What’s your cholesterol?

I wonder who they are.

“They’re from Google Forever,” Kat says, a bit sheepishly. “Interns. I mean, it’s a good opportunity. Some of these people are so old and still so healthy.”

Lapin is describing her work at Pacific Bell to a Googler holding a skinny video camera. Tyndall is spitting into a plastic vial.

One of the interns approaches Penumbra, but he waves her away without a word. His gaze is fixed on the screens below. He’s utterly absorbed, his blue eyes wide and shining like the sky above. Unbidden, Corvina’s warning echoes in my head: And this, the last and greatest of his schemes — it will not succeed, either.

But it’s not just Penumbra’s scheme anymore. This has gotten much bigger than that. Look at all these people — look at Kat. She’s back up at the front of the amphitheater, typing furiously into her phone. She pushes it back into her pocket and squares to face her team.

“Hold up a second,” she shouts, waving her arms in the air. “Hold it!” The code-breaking roulette slowly spins to a halt. On one screen, the letters of MANVTIVS are twisting in space, all rotating at different speeds. On another, some sort of super-complicated knot is trying to untie itself.

“The PM is doing us a big favor,” Kat announces. “Whatever you’ve got running, tag it CRITICAL. We’re going to farm that code out to the whole system in about ten seconds.”

Wait — the whole system? As in, the whole system? The Big Box?

Kat is grinning. She’s an artillery officer who’s just gotten her hands on a really big gun. Now she looks up at her audience — the fellowship. She cups her hands around her mouth: “That was just the warm-up!”

There’s a countdown splashed across the screens. Giant rainbow numbers go 5 (red), 4 (green), 3 (blue), 2 (yellow) …

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything. You can’t check your email. You can’t watch any videos. You can’t get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google’s computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

Make that a really, really big gun.

The screens go blank, pure white. There’s nothing to show because too much is happening now, more than you could ever display on a bank of four screens, or forty, or four thousand. Every transformation that can be applied to this text is being applied. Every possible error is being accounted for, every optical eigenvalue is being inveigled. Every question you can ask a sequence of letters is being asked.

Three seconds later, the interrogation is complete. The amphitheater is quiet. The fellowship is holding its breath — except for the oldest, the man in the wheelchair, who’s drawing a long, rattling wheeze in through his mouth. Penumbra’s eyes are shining and expectant.

“Well? What have we got?” Kat says.

The screens are bright, and they hold the answer.

“Guys? What have we got?”

Silence from the Googlers. The screens are blank. The Big Box is empty. After all that: nothing. The amphitheater is silent. Across the lawn, one of the brass band’s snare drums goes rat-a-tat.

I find Penumbra’s face in the crowd. He looks utterly stricken, still staring down at the screens, waiting for something, anything, to appear. You can see the questions piling up on his face: What does this mean? What did they do wrong? What did I do wrong?

Down below, the Googlers are wearing sour expressions, whispering to one another. Igor is still bent over his keyboard, still trying things. Sparks of color flash and fizzle on his screen.

Kat comes slowly up the steps. She looks dejected and disheartened — worse than when she thought she’d been passed over for the PM. “Well, I guess they’re wrong,” she says, waving weakly at the fellowship. “There’s no message here. It’s just noise. We tried everything.”

“Well, not everything, right—”

She looks up hotly. “Yes, everything. Clay: we just dialed in the equivalent of, like, a million years’ worth of human effort. It came up empty.” Her face is flushed — angry, or embarrassed, or both. “There’s nothing here.”

Nothing.

What are the possibilities here? Either this code is so subtle, so complex, that the most powerful computational force in the history of the world can’t crack it — or there’s nothing here at all, and the fellowship has been wasting its time, all five hundred years of it.

I try to find Penumbra’s face again. I search the amphitheater, casting my eyes up and down the mass of the fellowship. There’s Tyndall, whispering to himself; Fedorov, sitting in a pensive lump; Rosemary Lapin, smiling faintly. And then I spot him: a tall stick figure wobbling across Google’s green lawns, almost to the stand of trees on the other side, moving fast, not looking back.

And this, the last and greatest of his schemes — it will not succeed, either.

I start to jog after him, but I’m out of shape, and how is he so fast, anyway? I huff and puff across the lawn, toward the spot where I saw him last. When I get there, he’s gone. Google’s chaotic campus rises up all around me, rainbow arrows pointing every way at once, and here the walkways curve off in five different directions. He’s gone.

It is foolishness, and it will fail, and what then?

Penumbra is gone.