The Librarian

Prologue

Here's the thing about a secret: most people think that the hardest part is not telling anyone.

They're wrong. The hardest part is the Victorian outfit.

My name is Jake Calloway. I'm fourteen years old. I have no superpower.

 And yet, every single night, without fail, I am yanked out of whatever dream I was having and deposited into an infinite magical library where I am required to wear a fitted waistcoat, dress slacks with actual suspenders, a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a masquerade mask that covers the top half of my face.

I didn't choose this. I want that on the record.

You already know about the Library. Everyone does. It's the place you go when your power shows up, sometime between sixth and eighth grade, you fall asleep in your bed and wake up somewhere impossible. Shelves so tall it makes you dizzy. Warm amber light coming from literally nowhere. Your book waiting for you like it's been expecting you this whole time. You find it, you read it, you understand what you are now. Then you wake up, go tell your friends, and your whole life rearranges itself.

One night. That's all anyone gets.

I've been going every night since second grade.

I don't fully remember when it started. What I remember is that for a long time it was just me wandering around an infinite library in my pajamas, figuring things out. Then I turned twelve, and The Library apparently decided I had been doing a good enough job that it was time to make things official, and I woke up one night in a full Victorian ensemble with a half-mask on my face and absolutely no explanation.

I stood there for about thirty seconds.

Then I said, out loud, to no on in particular: "Okay."

Because what else are you going to say.

Here's how the time works, because people always want to know the logistic of everything: every minute asleep in the real world is two minutes in The Library. I figured that out in fifth grade when I slept twelve hours on a snow day and timed myself on a watch I specifically kept there for this purpose. Twelve hours in bed. Twenty-four hours on the clock in the Library. I wrote it down, stared at it for a while, and then hid the notebook under a loose floorboard in my closet, because that felt like important information to not leave lying around.

What this means practically is that I have a lot of time there. Like, a lot a lot. Enough time to learn every corner of an infinite building. Not infinite like most people think, just insanely large. Enough time to develop opinions about the filing system. Enough time to turn the office space above the main floor into something that is technically a bedroom now, with a cot and a lamp and a rug I dragged up a spiral staircase myself and a small shelf of regular books because I needed something in there that wasn't about superpowers.

I'm proud of that room. I did that.

The office is up a spiral staircase behind the reference section, by the way. The filling cabinets up there organize themselves and I have learned, through a particularly painful experience, not to interfere with the process.

Oh. Right. I should mention the other thing.

The Library gives me access to everything. All the books. All of them. I can open any one I want, read it, understand that person's power as well as they do. Which is, I mean, it's a lot. I know things about people's abilities that they haven't figured out yet. I know Olivia Marsh has a secondary aspect to her fire resistance that she hasn't discovered. I know Derek Cho's superstrength has a hard limit he's never hit. I know these things because I read their books, which I realize sounds invasive, and I though about it, and I've mostly decided that the Librarian probably has clearance.

But the thing I try not to think about, and fail constantly, is the part that comes after the last page.

I could close a book. The permanent way. The power would just be gone. The person would wake up ordinary and never know why.

I've never done it. I'm not going to do it. It's not on the table.

It's just that the table is right there, and I know exactly what's on it.

Anyway. That's my situation. Tomorrow is the first day of freshman year at Harwick High, where I'll walk in as a just another kid without a power, which is technically true, and absolutely nobody will know that I spent the last night in a masquerade mask helping a very startled eighth grader from Ohio understand that she can now communicate with birds.

She seemed happy about it, for what its worth.

I should get some sleep.