chapter fifty-two

If he had seen the students of Bi Sheng as a threat, he would have acted without hesitation.

"Gutenberg is a tyrant," Harrison said. "His army has manipulated this world from the shadows for centuries."

"If we ruled the world, I guarantee you they never would have cancelled

Firefly," I countered.

He sighed. "Make your jokes while you can. Thanks to you, Gutenberg's army will soon fall."

I was no longer listening. I stared at the book in Guan Feng's lap as I made the connection. I forgot about Harrison, the metal millipede around my neck, everything except that ancient text and what it represented. "When I grabbed that book, you shouted a name. Bi Wei."

Guan Feng's eyes widened, and she tightened her grip on the book as if I would somehow snap through my bonds, rip it from her grasp, and plunge my hand into the pages to seize its magic.

"Holy shit," I breathed. "That's where they went, isn't it? When Gutenberg's automatons attacked, they preserved themselves in their books."

Automatons worked similarly, trapping ghosts…souls…whatever you wanted to call them. A single phrase etched in metal bound the mind to the wooden body. But I had entered an automaton and touched the mind trapped inside. There had been precious little left of her humanity.

The books were different. I had guessed Guan Feng's book to be several hundred years older than Gutenberg. "The books had to have been prepared long before the attack. Passed down and guarded for emergencies, like magical escape pods. They fled into those books, and you've protected them ever since."

"Gutenberg wanted to destroy us," Guan Feng said. "He failed."

How long could you survive like that before the madness took you? Before despair turned to hunger, to resentment and hatred toward everything you had lost. Until all that remained was the need to devour whatever you touched.

"You couldn't save all of the books, could you?" I asked. Her silence was answer enough. I turned to Harrison. Despite the summer heat, I suddenly felt cold. "You said you found them. Are you sure?"

He frowned. "What are you talking about?"

I thought back to what Jeneta had said about the insects, about the devourers who had attacked her thoughts. The queen was telepathic, and telepathy went in two directions. "How do you know they didn't find you?"

"You know what's worse than going over the Mackinac Bridge in my little convertible?" I spoke softly, with as little movement of the neck or mouth as possible. Harrison hadn't been pleased about losing control of our earlier conversation, and he had expressed his annoyance by perforating the skin beneath my jawbone.

"Going over the bridge in the back of a pickup?" Lena guessed.

I closed my eyes as we moved onto the metal grating in the center lanes, where wind rushed up from below and the only thing keeping us from plunging into the Great Lakes was a stretch of glorified screens.

I understood the engineering well enough to recognize that we were perfectly safe. Unfortunately, intellect had a hard time making itself heard over my gut, which was currently insisting we were all about to plunge to our deaths.

She twined her fingers with mine. "Captured by a murderer with a metal worm around your neck, and you're worried about heights."

"Did you know the middle of this bridge can sway more than thirty feet in high winds?" In truth, I was almost grateful for the distraction. I had spent the past hours thinking about Guan Feng's book and the devourers, trying to understand our true enemy. There were too many gaps, too much I didn't know.

The first pages of her book were block printed. In theory, if enough copies of the text had been made, that could create the magical resonance you needed for libriomancy. But the rest of the book had been copied by hand.

Was this an unfinished work? If the original wood blocks had been lost, someone might have tried to finish it manually, but not even the most careful scribe could have achieved the perfection of the printing press.

Ask yourself the real question, coward. If the students of Bi Sheng fled into their books, and some of them were lost to madness, does that mean the Porters created the devourers?

The timeline didn't fit. Gutenberg had shared documented encounters with the devourers from centuries before his time, meaning they had come into existence before Gutenberg was ever born. I supposed those documents could have been faked, but why?

The voice I heard at the church—Bi Wei's voice—hadn't been a devourer. She was frightened and angry, not crazed. Her power had sapped our magic. She hadn't destroyed us.

I banged my head against the side of the truck, then twisted to watch Guan Feng, who had been reading for at least two hours. Was that how she communicated with Bi Wei? Her eyes scanned slowly up and down the text, completely focused.

"Libriomancy only works if thousands of people have read the same book," I said quietly.

Lena shifted her weight, resting her head on my shoulder. "So I've heard." "What happens if one person reads the same book thousands of times?"

"I imagine they'd get extremely bored."

"Depends on the book. Remind me to give you a copy of Good Omens

when we get home."

Back in the sixties, a libriomancer named Ghalib al-Mun'im had collaborated with the Bibliothèque nationale de France to develop a list of the most commonly reread titles, books that were checked out again and again by the same patrons. The Porters had learned to estimate the strength of a book's potential magic based on the number of readers. Al-Mun'im wanted to build on their work to measure the impact of rereading.

According to his findings, those frequently reread books were less powerful than books read an equal number of times by unique individuals. I remembered his math being rather fuzzy in several spots, but he had suggested that if the Porters wanted to increase the power of books, encouraging more people to read a wider variety would be roughly five times as effective as pushing them to reread their favorites.