Mara could recite the first page of any of eight million books. She could not tell the driver where she had put crate seventeen.
The driver, who had a schedule and a bad knee, leaned on his handcart. “Is it a large crate?”
“The same size as all the others.”
“That narrows it to sixteen.”
“Seventeen, if I find it.”
Behind him, the library smelled of dust and fresh tape. Tomorrow the roofers would strip the old wing. The books had to leave today, before the dust sheets went up and the shelves came down. The regional storehouse had one truck and one clear bay. Mara had been promised space for forty crates, provided she could produce a list of what was in each.
Most of the books were easy to list. Her memory implant held scans of everything the old national network had collected before the years of outages. Its AI index could put a line of text on the inside of her vision faster than she could speak it. People had called her the Ascended Librarian when the implant was new. She had liked it for six months, then spent eleven years asking them to use her name.
Crate seventeen was supposed to hold the local shelf: thin books printed in town, handmade magazines, stapled stories, a cookbook compiled by the night market. The network had never bothered to scan them. Mara had marked the crate with a strip of yellow cloth so the movers would see it. Now sixteen numbered crates sat in the loading room, and the yellow cloth was nowhere.
“Can I take the first load?” the driver asked.
“Please.”
He wheeled out the fiction sets. Mara opened her list. For each crate she could name every title, edition, and page count. For number seventeen, she had written local shelf, inspect by hand. It was the only entry without a tidy answer.
Her assistant Jae arrived with two mugs of tea and a roll of tape stuck to his elbow. He had worked at the library since he was twelve, first as a volunteer who hid in the comics corner, then as the person who could fix a warped shelf without asking a machine for permission.
“The yellow cloth was here last night,” he said. “I tied it myself.”
“Did it walk?”
“You tell me. Your head has the catalogue.”
“Not that catalogue.”
They checked the reading room, the children’s corner, and the stairwell. Mara opened cupboards she had not opened in years. A jar of buttons fell out of one; she caught it against her chest, scattering three buttons across the floor. Jae found a Christmas card from a mayor who had resigned before either of them was born. Neither found the crate.
At the back desk, a child named Bo was returning a book on paper boats. The cover had been repaired with cloth from an old apron. Bo watched Mara search beneath the desk.
“Are you looking for the books with the yellow rag?” he asked.
Mara straightened so quickly she struck her head on the drawer. “Yes.”
“Mr. Pell took them to the sorting room. He said they were extras.”
Mr. Pell had been hired for the move. He was new to the library and excellent at carrying heavy things. By the time Mara and Jae reached the sorting room, he had put the local books on a pallet marked DUPLICATES—RETURN FOR PULP. The yellow cloth lay beneath it, dragged loose by a wheel.
“No offence,” he said when Mara objected, “but you have four copies of one book. I counted.”
He held up a green pamphlet called The Night Market Sings. Its cover had been printed on a machine that ran out of green ink halfway through the job.
“Four copies,” Mara said. “Four different years. The children wrote new verses each time.”
“I didn’t open them. The title was the same.”
She wanted to tell him what it felt like to spend a decade being mistaken for a complete answer. Instead she said, “Neither did I, when I made the list.”
They cut the pallet wrap. There were twenty-two slim volumes, nine loose bundles, and a box of index cards. Mara had told the movers to keep them together, but she had not checked whether the crate was actually sealed. She could feel Jae waiting for her to say this aloud. She did.
The driver appeared in the doorway. “I’ve got room for one more pallet on this trip. After lunch, I can take another. If this is the important one, decide what comes off.”
Mara looked at her list. The next pallet held three complete sets of the same old travel novels. She had included them because she knew their publication history, and because their spines looked reassuring in a row. Each novel was already in her implant; one paper set would remain at the library while the wing was repaired.
“Swap two sets for this,” she said.
Jae helped the driver move the books. Mr. Pell fetched clean boxes, and Bo, who had no reason to be anywhere near a loading pallet, carried index cards to the desk. He made two trips rather than bend a corner.
They had until noon to make a list for the local shelf. Mara took the pamphlets. Jae took the handmade magazines. Bo read titles from the index cards. The three of them called out dates, names, and missing pages over the sound of the roofers measuring the ceiling next door.
On the fifth pamphlet, Mara found a story by a woman named Estelle Quill. A fishing boat argued with a lighthouse about who got to call themselves useful. It was eight pages long. Mara had never heard of Estelle Quill.
“My aunt,” Jae said. “She wrote that when the ferry stopped running.”
“Did she write anything else?”
“A letter to the ferry company. Much funnier. They didn’t reply.”
The implant showed nothing when Mara thought Estelle Quill. For once the blank was a fact she could use. She wrote one known copy on the new list. Jae corrected her: three copies, one with a different ending. Mr. Pell, sorting alongside them now, found the third under a stack of programs. Mara added three versions.
At noon, the driver called time. The boxes were ready, the list was messy but legible, and the yellow cloth was tied around the handles of the first one. He loaded them ahead of the duplicate travel sets. The latter would wait for the afternoon trip if there was room.
“You can recall those novels, can’t you?” he asked Mara, nodding at the sets left behind.
“I can recall their words. They’re still worth keeping. We have one set here, and we’ll see what the storehouse can take after the roof work.”
He accepted this without making her give a speech. He drove away while Bo waved the paper-boat book at him like a flag.
Mara returned to the desk. In her vision, eight million titles stood ready in perfect alphabetical order. On the paper list in front of her, Estelle Quill’s boat argued with a lighthouse in three different ways. Mara put the list in a folder marked LOCAL WORK—CHECK PHYSICAL COPIES. She wrote a second label for the shelf where the books would come back when the roof was done.
Jae looked over her shoulder. “Will that fit on the shelf?”
“It’s a long label.”
“We have tape.”
He still had the roll stuck to his elbow. Mara peeled it off before he could lose it too.
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