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“Where do we think we are?”

“Probably a pocket plane,” Jack said.

“I don’t think so.” Adam tested the floor with his foot. “It’s too solid. It feels like we’re home. I think we’re on earth.”

The temperature was just shy of cold. Daff hugged herself. Jack offered her his coat. More of the globes lined the ceiling. They stretched out over a massive room, lending it a golden glow.

“It’s empty,” Daff said. “Just . . . empty.”

She was right. Aside from the lights, it was just a massive, brass box of a room.

They wandered in.

“I’m not getting anything,” Adam said. “At least magically speaking.”

“Where are the books?” Daff asked. “Where are the librarians?”

“Maybe they’re all dead,” he suggested. “Or fled like the scholar.”

“That would explain why no one ever wrote me back,” Jack said dourly.

Daff’s expression went very sad and it was like the sun had gone behind a cloud.

Adam inhaled. He could taste machine oil.

“That door is mechanical,” Adam said, looking back at it.

“Who isn’t?” Jack joked.

“No, you’re electronic,” Adam gently corrected. “I met some gnomes once. Before the Watchtower of the East was your school, it was their home. They weren’t immortal, so they built a clockwork jailer to do their work for them over the centuries. The scholar said the library didn’t care. She implied that it was unfeeling. Maybe we’re looking at something like that.”

“I think you’re right,” Jack said. He knelt to rap the floor. “It’s a machine, the whole place—no, a computer.”

“Like you?” Daff asked.

“Not at all. Like Adam said, it’s not electronic. It’s more like the Antikythera mechanism.” When they blinked at him, he pushed his glasses up with a finger and grinned. “It’s an ancient Greek device to track astronomical events. It was millennia before its time.”

From the look on Daffodil’s face, Adam guessed that she found Jack’s recitation of facts pretty hot. It wasn’t Vic in a tank top, but whatever worked for them.

“Who built it?”

“I have no idea.”

“So where’s the keyboard?” Daff asked. “If it’s a computer then it has to have another input, not just a door and a drawer.”

“She’s right,” Jack said. “Every machine with users has some kind of interface.”

Adam could imagine the scholar laughing at their bumbling.

He walked back to the door and checked the outside. The drawer was sealed, its seams with the wall almost undetectable.

“Let me try something.”

He looked for a handle or some kind of a pull and finding none, he touched it. At the brush of his hand it began to swing closed. Adam scurried to be on the inside before it shut.

“If that locks, we won’t be able to get back to the school,” Daff said.

“Let’s hope there’s another exit in here somewhere.” Jack took her hand.