Hiding Behind A Mask | Maskless Trilogy Book 1

Chapter 19 | X

The outside walls are an off-white color, standing out against the two bright white buildings beside it. One of those buildings is a hair salon, and the other is a Light Clan clothing place, but Becca isn't interested in either of those.

She walks up the small vanilla steps and up to the tall, brown door. The library is a place both clans can be in, unlike the coffee shop she'd ran into a while back.

She opens the door and the bells above it chime a soft melody. The woman behind the counter at the right of the door looks up from her old computer screen and smiles.

"Hello, Belle," the woman says, and Becca nods in acknowledgement.

Computers aren't really used anymore, and aren't very common. Librarians, along with store and restaurant managers, need it for tracking money and shipments, but no one else has one. Technology sputtered out when the oil-crisis came about, and people had to cope without the electricity they had come accustomed to. Becca doesn't know if they use it in the government offices or anything, but she's guessing they do. She doesn't know much about the government, she realizes as she thinks more about Quill. The schools only teach them about the past to make sure it's not repeated, but stray away from having the children learn about the government. She didn't even know about Quill until she was thirteen, and he's still a big mystery to her, though she's been face-to-face with him a few times.

Becca walks on, straight through the tall bookcases lined neatly across the green carpet like soldiers standing at attention. Each one is filled to the top with different books of various sizes and colors. They give of a musty smell and dust floats in the air as the few masked citizens lift them from their places and leaf through them.

On the ends of each bookcase, there is a word or two printed in bold letters, telling whoever comes in where the books they are looking for are.

Becca walks between two of the bookcases and takes a left, heading for the non-fiction sign hanging from the ceiling, letting her know where its section is. She walks around the table in the center of the two separate rows of several bookcases. There are only two of them, due to the space, but it's the largest library in the country. If Becca wanted to find anything at all about the government, it'd be here.

She makes her way to the history bookshelves, seeing that they are overflowing. This country thrives on the past, making sure that it doesn't happen again. It's pretty much all they learned about while growing up, besides don't mess up or you'll become a part of the Dark Clan, and you don't want that.

Becca works her down to the 'CLANS' shelf, where she knows she can find something about the clans and the leader.

She pulls a large book with a smiling white mask on the front and the title The In's and Out's of the Light Clan, and flips through its pages, looking for a picture of a man dressed in both dark and light colors, or the word 'leader'.

Suddenly, she sees the picture she's looking for. Sort of. It's a man in the same mask as Quill, but dark gray clothes instead of the dark, dark turquoise that Quill always wears.

The Leader, who has the option to choose three officials from each clan to be his cabinet, leads both the Light Clan and the Dark Clan. This can seem like quite a contradiction to some people...

So that's how that happens, Becca thinks to herself. He had chosen Belle and all those people that follow him around everywhere.

She reads on, but there's nothing more about the leader, even after she leafs through the rest of the pages in the heavy book.

Placing it back where it belongs, she runs her fingers over the protruding spines of the rest of the books. She pulls out another book by the same author, R. J. Jean, and flips through it. It's called The In's and Outs of the Dark Clan, a contrast to the first book. On the front, there is a large black mask with a frown and the feeling of sadness radiating from it.