Chapter 15 — "You're Next" (Scrawled in My Notebook)

I didn't write this. But it's in my handwriting.

The colophon breathed.

Its edges cycled through parchment, vellum, something warmer. The text was in a language I understood without knowing—the way you understand the grammar of a dream while you're inside it.

By order of the Librarians of Babel, this story is hereby condemned to—

The Mayor's fingers caught the edge of it.

"GIVE THAT BACK!"

Dad held him off while Mom said, urgently, from where the chains were dissolving into clauses of legal text: "The printer's mark. Now, Mira."

At the bottom of the page: a small pointing hand. ☞

The words came without my deciding to speak them, rising up from wherever the First Draft had gone inside me:

"As above, so below. As written, so unwritten."

The upside-down library flipped.

Gravity reasserted itself in a completely different direction, and we fell through:

A warehouse of discarded characters—people who had been written out of Pigeon Hollow, standing patient and half-transparent, waiting to be remembered.

A river of white-out with faces screaming silently beneath its surface.

And then the heart of the Press.

It wasn't a machine.

It was a book.

Bound in something I recognised as skin—the skin of every story that had been consumed here. Its spine was a column of human teeth, ivory-white and grinding. It pulsed in a rhythm that matched my own heartbeat, and with each pulse it printed another page of lies into the fabric of the town above us.

The Mayor dissolved into ink that slithered toward it. "I'll be the protagonist now!"

Miss Wicker's index-form drifted to the cover and became its table of contents.

Mom took my hand. "The contract's inside it. The original, the one they used to bind everyone. Burn it and the story ends."

Dad's silhouette pushed me gently forward. "Do it, Mira. Before—"

The book screamed open.

Inside: a contract signed in blood.

My blood.

Dated the day I was born.