By Harris Coverley

It was a dark realm, but not completely so. The shelves went on for illusory miles. They towered as ancient monoliths of wood harvested from forests vanquished, of trees now extinct or scant. Vines of a thousand lianas had broken through the high transom windows, splintering their came glasswork to invade from above, wrapping themselves about the hanging signage of the shelves and obscuring their declarations. Many a book had been ruffled by vine and by time. There were even pockets of dried and dead soil where volumes had once been lined. But a library it was still.

Illia had hiked for two hours after the HAVP had touched down by the fragmenting roadside, the pilot refusing to hover on further. She had gone through the jungle using the old map, and reached the grand stone structure on the coast, at the very end of the continent. The soaring doors had opened awkwardly for her, but at least they had been unbarred. Upon the front desk was a propped up notice, unreadable for a layer of dust. Illia wiped it with her hand, but the dust did not sweep off and away, instead smearing into half-illumined patches of purple-grey, glowing with impunity. She could however just make out the scrawling of a long deceased librarian: Back in five minutes.

Illia clapped the grime from her hands. She breathed in the musk of old paper, tempered by the salt of the neighbouring ocean. It was brown gold in her nostrils, in her lungs, then in her blood.

One day, she grasped, even this place would crumble with its catalogue into those waters — but for this day…!

She rushed into the body of the library and pulled a book off of a shelf at random that was not too desiccated. It was a collection of verse by some half-forgotten poet, Taylor something or other, and from an arbitrary page Illia drank in its words, so alien and yet so intimate, reading by a crack of light from above.

It was here, she thought, that a reader could be at liberty…

The feeling did not last: at the third stanza it struck.

“Are you looking for stable long-term investments?” the ad began to ramble before it showed itself. A blue and white streak ran across the pages recto to verso. A gormless leering face of bleached teeth and platinum curls. “SaveBuddy has got your back…”

“NO!” Illia screamed and dropped the book. It hit a table top as to close it shut, and the ad was cut off. Panting and sniffling, she slowly opened the book to her page, but the ad re-started where it had left off: “Millions of users are —”

She flung it to the floor. The book was not at fault though. It was unviolated — she had checked it.

Illia scanned around.

There it was! Something on a top shelf, amongst the filth of ages.

A holoprojector! It had to be!

In a fury she climbed the creaking ridges.

It had to die! It had to!

Nearly at the apex, her fingers grazed it…

It was but just another volume! A book on ornithology!

“Where…?” she gasped, but at that very moment Illia lost her footing. She tumbled, books coming after her.

Beneath a pile, the edges of hardbacks cutting into skin and flesh, both arms pinned. A book of statistics of a disremembered sport known as “rugby” had fallen open beside her head. An ad commenced to blare athwart its print: “There’s a lot of talk about so-called ‘new gods’ these days…”

Illia beared it until the skip button came up. She managed to nudge it with her nose. The ad played on as it failed to respond.

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