“Cases that require getting close to a target require particular finesse. People tend to open up to others they view as similar to them. They’re most vulnerable in times of stress, fear, arrogance, or emotional insecurity. Some of the easiest places to get information are, as such, rallies, high schools, college campuses, and bars.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

School. If one word could sum up the entirety of an experience that evoked terror, boredom, and existential crises in so many people, it would be that one. The bus lulled Silver to sleep, and the school building itself was no more unique than any of the houses on her cookie-cutter street. Only the sign in front, replete with blue and red ribbons and sporting a large, brightly colored macaw as the school mascot, added color to the gray walls. The school was old despite fresh paint and repaired floor tiles that were, every few feet, a much lighter shade of white than the floor around them. Silver fancied that the old and new tiles formed a certain inconspicuous pattern when viewed by an adept observer, underlying a conspiracy of sorts set up by the janitorial staff.

Life was generally more exciting in her head than in reality.

She expected the day to go quickly – particularly since most of the seniors had a severe case of senioritis already – right up until she actually sat down for the day. That was the moment Mrs. Hillary Madison, biology teacher and advisor for Silver’s homeroom period, dropped the news that someone was transferring into their class.

Dropped really was the right word. In appearance, Mrs. Madison was a thin, willowy woman. Her arms and legs appeared long given her relatively short frame, the result being that she looked a bit like the plants that she constantly labored over. Her request list remained full year after year merely because her class was considered the easiest to pass. Homework was fieldwork, class work was fieldwork, and if someone bombed a test, it did not reflect in his or her grade so long as they made sure to turn in a weekly journal listing what variety of birds they had seen that week – which was to say, if they did some fieldwork. On this particular day, Mrs. Madison stood with her blonde hair tied up into a bun pierced by two neon orange chopsticks, and cheerfully slammed a gigantic textbook down on her desk before saying, “Look at this textbook. Look at it! This is the textbook they use in the Biology class in Arlington. I don’t believe in textbooks like this. Fieldwork is the only true way to learn about the natural world. Experimentation. Observation! That is science.”

Startled by the sound of the heavy book hitting the desk, most everyone was staring at her throughout her outburst.

“Today we have a new student who has already been through almost this entire book, but never stepped foot outdoors to observe the natural world. That means today we will have a field day. Hope you brought your things. Okay, the office said he’s on his way right—”

The door swung open. Silver would have hesitated in the doorway a moment, maybe given the teacher a chance to tell her she was in the wrong room, but their new student did no such thing. He strode straight in with a glance at all of them, confident in a way that immediately put her off. If not for the still, hard light of his eyes – nearly the same bronze shade as his sandy blonde hair – she would have thought he was just plain arrogant. As it was, she merely found herself joined by the rest of the class in staring at the newcomer.

“Here he is!” Mrs. Madison recovered after several moments of chatter that Silver entirely tuned out, “this is the new student. His name is Bek Trent, and he’s transferring here from Arlington.”

Bek Trent. His gaze was cold, hard, almost detached as Mrs. Madison had them introduce themselves. Silver found it unnerving. When Mrs. Madison came to her name, a guarded interest flickered behind his eyes before he took the only open seat in the classroom, right behind her.

And from that moment, the day proved to be one of the longest she could remember, possibly even longer than the one day in sophomore year when she had caught the flu and braved her finals anyway. Field work left her mud-stained after she slid into a puddle on the football field, embarrassingly gross with no change of clothes. In English class, she nearly knocked over an entire shelf of books when Bek tried to talk to her, and this shortly after the teacher assigned her least favorite of assignments – family lineage, of which her family seemed to have none. In calculus, her teacher asked if there was something wrong when she glanced over her shoulder for the fifteenth time – the new guy was seated behind her yet again, and she was sure his eyes were on the back of her head.

At first, she was fine with it – new students should stick together, right? This Trent kid had it even worse than her, since about all he was going to do at his new school was graduate. She assumed he was simply doing as she would have done; attempting to blend by watching the people around him to figure out what was going on.

But by the end of her third class, Silver was not so sure. There was something about Bek Trent that irked her, and more so as the day wore on. No one else seemed to find him even remotely creepy. If anything, this made her feel guilty, because Silver suspected what bothered her might be how easily he seemed to fit into the class, chatting and smiling a slow smile that did not seem genuine to her at all. He was far from the center of attention, but any attention he did receive seemed natural. Despite the fact that she was sure she felt his stare time and again, Silver could not catch him in the act. He could not, of course, do anything during class. It was weird.

So, she kept herself busy by repeating in her mind again and again the age-old mantra, I just have to graduate. As the day ticked by, she tried to lose herself in drawing whatever fantastical beasts had filled her dreams from the night before, and promising herself that if he doesn’t stop staring at me I’ll throw this pencil at him…

Lunch saved her from violence.

Shortly, she had pushed through the throngs of moving students to hurry out the double doors to a row of cracked and splintered picnic tables set to the side of the courtyard, just beyond the reach of an outdoor basketball court. Ignoring the swooping lines of initials carved time and again into the wood, she went to set her lunch on the table and eyed the sky critically. A drizzling rain had started right after biology class and was finally letting up again. The sky stretched endlessly overhead, a solid gray mass of roiling clouds scuttling slowly in whichever direction the wind carried them. There was an icy edge to that wind, and she pulled the collar of her thin jacket further up her neck as she slid onto the bench.

Her lunch was out in seconds and she was savoring her first bite of peanut butter and jelly when someone sat down next to her. She knew it was the new kid without looking. He had most likely decided to sit next to her since she was, as usual, completely alone; most people were not willing to eat outside with the threat of rain still hovering overhead.

Silver glared at Bek sidelong as he pulled out a homemade lunch and arrayed it in a rigidly orderly way in front of him. She had pegged him as the school-lunch type, though she was not entirely sure why. When he said nothing to her, and the silence became awkward, she relented. She got up and moved to a picnic table several feet closer to the basketball court. The message she had sent was pretty clear, if not downright rude, but within a few minutes he was back. This time he sat across from her.

Neither of them said anything. He just stared at her for a minute while he chewed on what looked like taco salad.

“Food’s always better with company,” he observed after the silence had again become sufficiently awkward, “By the way, my name’s Bek Trent. It’s nice to meet you…” He was clearly waiting for her name, although she strongly sensed that he remembered it from earlier.

“Silver,” she hesitated for a second about giving him her last name before remembering that nearly anyone he asked would be more than willing to tell him, “Alurian. I’m sure it’s a pleasure.” I just can’t tell how, she thought.

“Maybe only for me,” he replied, and she thought she saw the slightest hint of a grin on his face before he turned his gaze away from her, to the cafeteria where the other students would be eating. That grin, unlike the others she had seen on him so far, had been genuine.

After that, he ate without a word. Silver glared, shrugged, and gulped down her sandwich, hoping he would leave her alone when she went elsewhere. For the most part, he gulped just as fast as she did, but he did not follow when she got up and began to wander towards the outer edges of the school building.

Finally free of his scrutinizing gaze – and after looking back several times to verify it – she walked silently along the curving asphalt until she reached a dirt path and followed it up to the school football field. There she could sit in the bleachers and watch everything in the school at once. The air was always bitingly cold on the top tier, and the metal rail icy enough to make her hands burn when she gripped it, but everyone in the school would be within her view. That place was the top of her world, and it was where Silver often wandered to stare at the gray sky and the students milling aimlessly beneath it, daydreaming about creatures and stories and people that existed only within her imagination. Most anyone who knew her would probably agree that she was frighteningly good at coming up with stories… and frighteningly good at ignoring reality.

On the torn-up football field, seagulls hopped about in endless pursuit of food. They called friendly greetings to each other and to her, begging for the stale bread that they knew she always carried. Smiling mischievously, Silver bounced it to them. In moments, she was watching as they hopped away, calling what might have been thanks over their wings. She certainly liked to think that it was thanks.

After watching them go, she stared a moment longer at the now silent stretch of gritty track and muddy grass. The football field melted into the track and the baseball field, neither of which was more than a large patch of dirt made functional by chalk lines. The school, like so much else in Washington, was nearly surrounded by trees, except on one side where the brush hid a house and busy main road. They might as well have been in the middle of nowhere. They were in the middle of nowhere.

She liked it.

On the far side of the football field were the bleachers that had been occupying her thoughts, cold metal beams dully gleaming with the same radiant sheen of silver-gray as the sky. Silver climbed to the highest bench and leaned heavily on the railing. The school stretched out before her.

It drives me crazy coming here every day, she thought, watching a chickadee wheel and twist above her head, other than slowly dying in this place and watching the earth rot beneath my feet, it feels like there’s something else I should be doing, somewhere else I should be. Every moment I’m here I spend just waiting, just wondering…

She sighed at the stupidity of her own teenage melodrama, though she thought it was good that she at least recognized it for what it was. The alternative was taking herself far too seriously. Somehow, Silver doubted she was the only one who secretly yearned for adventure; no one could appreciate a moment of relative safety without comparing it to a moment when they feared that death was bearing down on them, and since death had not yet borne down on her with any considerable force, she assumed she was just plain spoiled. College might save her – it was hard to believe she would be starting in just a few months.

“Silver?” She startled back away from the edge of the railing, whirling to stare at the new guy. He stood at the bottom of the bleachers. It was a miracle she failed to fall and smash her face into the railing. Klutz that she was, it was something she would do.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” Bek said, taking a step back and putting his hands up in mock surprise. It probably was not meant to look like mock surprise, but it looked like it to her. She frowned at him, but said nothing.

“I’m not sure what I did to freak you out so much, but I was going to ask about that family history assignment we got today,” he continued.

“What about it?” she asked, averting her gaze back over the edge of the bleachers. Out of the corner of her eye, she assessed it, wondering how likely it was she could jump and outrun him if she had to. It seemed like a stupid thought, but she liked being prepared.

“Want to hit the library together? I know quite a bit about researching family lineage, and I know the public library here well.”

“I thought you were from out of town?” Silver pointed out.

“My mom lives here,” Bek said. She could feel his eyes on her, questioning. Ignore him, the voice in her head whispered fiercely.

Their current assignment was not the first such assignment she had gotten. Every time she asked her parents questions about their family lineage, their discussions were vague and offhand. No one had ever looked into it, and their parents were long gone. It hardly mattered to her except when teachers graded her on her knowledge of her family’s past. Of course, that meant she was free to come up with something interesting for her final real paper of high school. Maybe her great, great, so-many-greats-in-the-middle grandfather should be a Viking, or a leader of Vikings – pillaging seemed like it could be interesting, though the raping part was a bit of a turn off.

“You’ve done family lineage research before?” she asked carefully. She had expected to see Bek’s expression change, maybe for him to be a bit smug that he had drawn some interest out of her. There was, however, no change.

“Yeah. I had this assignment recently at my old school. Must be a senior year thing.”

Despite herself, she was perturbed, and that bothered her. “I don’t need your help,” she stated flatly, despite how much the words made her cringe. She expected him to shrug and walk away, or show some hint of being upset. Instead, the grin came again, a flash and then gone.

“Oh? The world isn’t as black and white as you think, Silver. I know you don’t have much information about your family’s history. And I know why. You can make something up if you want, but wouldn’t you prefer to have the facts?”

Tilting her head slightly, she fixed her gaze on him. “What?”

His expression had not changed, but the look in his eyes put her on edge. For a long moment, she stared at him in silence. To her surprise, he blinked, and looked away.

“I recognized your name. I’ve seen it before. I even remember where. I bet I could help you find some real information for your paper,” Bek said without looking at her.

“What makes you think I care?” He looked vaguely surprised for an instant.

“We all need to know where we come from,” he said.

“You say ‘we’ like we’re a package deal.” He met her gaze once more, but seemed surprised to find she had never stopped watching him. “What makes you say the world isn’t black and white? It seems to me like it is, at least in the moment. You my long-lost brother or something?”

He smiled unnervingly and she knew, once more, it was far from a real smile. “If you really want to know the answer to that, you’ll come, won’t you?”

“Come?”

“To the library. At four.”

“I don’t think so.”

He gave no answer, just shrugged and started back across the field. “Lunch is almost over,” he called back to her.

He was right. Silver sighed with relief as he vanished around the bend in the path back down to the school. Bek was absolutely right that she wanted the facts. All of them. It escaped her, however, how he could have known that she did not have them, unless it was simply a very lucky guess.

She was not the type to believe in lucky guesses.

That, she tried to convince herself, was the reason she stood in front of the library three hours later. It was an unseasonably cool day, dark for a late spring evening even by Washington standards. A few spluttering drops of icy rain splattered the pavement, a stark departure from the sun that had shone down on the placid waters of the lake only hours before. It might have been the shift in the weather that that put her on edge, or the hint of malice in the shadows of the trees where usually she found tranquility and peace. Whatever the cause, she drew her coat tighter around herself and shivered in the face of the old brick building.

It was a building that had seen better times, probably a hundred years before, when it had been large enough to service the hundred families or so that lived outside the cities. Its bricks were old and cracked over slate-gray foundations, its roof a black-shingled sheet of moss and lichen that sluiced water into the mud below. The result was a series of cloudy potholes in the parking lot that appeared shallow and were anything but; more than once, Silver had seen people unsuspectingly sink up to their shins in the murky water. It was no wonder her sister had turned her down when she asked if anyone wanted to come along – the library was not exactly a hot hangout spot.

Hesitating a moment over whether she should wait outdoors or in, Silver blinked up at the upper story windows. A few icy pellets of almost-hail in her eyes decided things for her, and she headed inside.

The building had been modernized when the library first opened, as much to make it more appealing to modern teenagers as for the safety of its inhabitants. The heavy oak shelves that lined the walls were new, as were the water-beaded windows and the few occupied computers along one far wall. Elsewhere there remained stark reminders of the building’s age, like a chandelier that hung over a table near the entrance, and a few black candle holders on the walls that had been modified to fit lantern-like lights. They gave the aisles by the walls a dim, street-like quality.

The newer computers had not been extended to the librarian, who perched on a narrow stool behind the checkout desk with eyes squinted at a machine that was at least a decade old. She was thin, her hair graying, though thick strands of it still showed its old raven black. Most notable, aside from her perfect navy suit, was that Bek stood in front of her.

After standing uncertainly in the entryway for a moment, Silver made her way over. The librarian looked up from the computer to fix her with a stern stare, for some reason giving Silver the distinct impression that she disapproved of Bek’s choice of company, before ponderously rising to her feet.

“I have the book you’re after,” the librarian stated to Bek.

“We’re working on this project together,” Bek said pointedly, gesturing Silver closer.

The librarian’s gaze swept over Silver as well when she added, “This way, please,” and skirted slowly around the desk to tap toward a door labeled, “Employees Only.” Behind it was a steep and shallow set of hardwood stairs that looked perilous even to a teenager. Silver hesitated to follow, eventually doing so only when Bek turned to stare at her, one eyebrow raised as if to say, “what exactly do you think I’m going to do to you?” Somehow, the librarian made it to the top without incident; Silver tripped twice and discovered the banister rails were not meant to support actual weight.

On the second floor, the shelves were nearly as long as the library was wide, and nearly everything was lit by flickering lamplights ensconced in iron sockets. The middle shelves were left so dark it seemed doubtful anyone could read the spines of its tightly packed volumes, and yet it was there that the librarian headed. With a stare that said more clearly than words to stay put, she vanished from view.

Released momentarily from the old woman’s scrutiny, Silver took the opportunity to walk up and down the exterior rows of dusty shelves, eyeing books torn or peeling, others in near mint condition, and still more stained, crumpled, or burned. She was a lover of books. In fact, she had whiled away too much of her childhood on them, to the point that the smell of yellowing paper and ink brought back more memories of her younger years than nearly anything else.

Absorbed in her thoughts, it was a moment before she realized she had stopped in front of one of the second story windows. It was clearly one of the originals, the glass warped and yellowing at the edges, and its center inlaid with a flaming red lizard coiled around towards its own tail. In the circle of murky light it cast lay a stack of books, several with nothing to identify them, and a few with words in some unusual languages she did not understand. She stared until one in particular caught her eye. It was a pale silver color, unlabeled, bound in something that looked suspiciously like reptile hide.

Casting a quick glance at Bek, who was clearly watching the librarian down the dark aisles at the center of the room, Silver reached to grab the book off the stack. As soon as her fingers touched the cover, however, she bit back a startled cry and pulled away. The book was as smooth as glass, and soft as well-tanned leather, but it burned like dry ice. Staring down at her fingers, she was amazed to see burns at the ends of her fingers, already starting to peel.

After that, she was afraid to touch any of the other mysterious books on the second floor of the library. Whatever the stains were on many of them, she guessed they were not the sorts of things she should be touching bare-handed. When the librarian returned, clutching a book in one hand, and glared upon seeing Silver at the other end of the room, she was vaguely relieved to be headed back downstairs to the checkout desk. There the librarian scanned the book and waited expectantly for a library card. Bek indicated the book was for Silver, who said she did not have a card and then looked away nervously when the librarian squinted unhappily in her direction. Finally, the librarian agreed to check out the book on Bek’s account. Of course, he had come for a book as well, one which evidently needed special treatment. It was stored in a locked drawer of the librarian’s desk – a leather-bound book with a small, metal bound clasp that made Silver wonder if it was someone’s diary.

“This one you had better take good care of, young man,” the librarian said, handing it to him before pushing the other book across the desk to Silver. “You as well, young lady. There will be most unusual consequences otherwise.”

She appeared prepared to say more, but Bek had grabbed the book meant for Silver and flipped it open somewhere towards the middle to slip a checkout receipt between the covers. “Thanks,” he directed at the librarian, before handing Silver the book and pointing at one of the open tables behind them. “I’m not even going to try to invite you over to study, so how about we grab that desk for a bit?”

“Sure, why not,” Silver relented a bit in her assessment of him, and carefully laid out the book to take a look at it. It was actually a beautiful piece of work; the cover appeared to be made of a very thin and surprisingly sturdy sheet of solid wood, embossed with a great silver diamond that branched into an interesting array of strange and magnificent silver symbols. Within the diamond were the words, The Book of Lineage, written in a flowing script so perfect she was certain it was machine-printed, and above that a silver tree. At the base of the cover were the words, Third Edition, Cifa, Translated by Purius Morno.

“So, what makes this book better than a computer?” she asked, looking expectantly at Bek. He had the other book in his hands, and a look on his face that suggested there was very little he wanted more than to start reading it. In response to her question, however, he slipped it into his bookbag and flipped her book open.

“Computers are slow when you don’t know what questions to ask,” he observed, “and there is still a lot of information that just isn’t online.”

“Yeah, but this book doesn’t look that old, and I don’t know why it would specifically have info about my family in it. You said you had seen my family name in it before?”

“Well, let’s see,” Bek said, picking up the book for a minute and turning it away from her. She stared at him quizzically while he flipped through the pages. After a moment, he thunked it back down in front of her with a smug smile. “And there you are.”

“Are you kidding?” Silver said, staring at her own name in fine, midnight blue ink. There were other names above it, her parents and then her grandparents, who she knew only in name. A brother her father had never mentioned, her uncle. And then there were more, a great tree of names, all of them strange, foreign, unfamiliar names. Alicia Amorian, Juria Surenta, and Rorin Flaurace, Galaecia… “There’s no way my name could be in here. I mean, all these other people, sure. Maybe even my grandparents. But my parents? Me? How is this possible?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Bek said, leaning over to scrutinize the names in the tree with an intensity that surprised her.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. If it helps you sleep at night, the book is updated constantly.”

“By who?”

Bek fixed her with a look of impatience. “Seriously? By who? The people who update books for a living, clearly. I don’t know who writes the books that show up at the bookstore either, and I don’t usually care.”

“Fine, then what’s after…” she stopped, staring at the page, “some of the ink is faded.” Even as she said as much, she knew it was not quite the truth. The ink was not faded. It was fading. Fainter and fainter, until finally the ink seemed to be absorbed by the page. Only her name was slowly disappearing, so that she was no longer Silver Alurian, but Silver and a blank, empty space, and then gradually nothing at all. The same happened for her brother and sister, her parents and their siblings, creeping backwards through the tree until their names had vanished from the page. Then before her eyes ink appeared like a great well at the bottom of the page, creeping upwards until abruptly Bek slammed the book shut.

“Hey, you okay?”

She stared at the cover of the closed book in disbelief, sucking in a sharp breath when she realized her lungs were starved for air. Bek continued to talk, tugging the book out of her line of vision.

“Seriously, Silver, are you okay? You’re white as a sheet right now. I thought you were going to pass out.”

“Did you see the ink?” she asked, turning to stare into his concerned face. His brows were furrowed, a deep frown where earlier he had laughed at her, mocked her. She swallowed, and laughed nervously. “Sorry.”

“I think you should go home for tonight,” he stood abruptly, snatching up her backpack before she could protest and zipping it closed. “Did you drive here?”

“Yeah.” He stared at her dubiously for a minute, and she felt the heat rising in her cheeks when she thought he was going to refuse to let her drive home. Whatever happened to her, she was not getting into a car with him. But he did not. He simply glanced out the window, flipped his own bookbag closed, and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow. You look like you’ll make it home just fine.”

Unsure what to say to that, she just sat and watched his retreating back until he was out the library door. Only when she lifted her backpack to follow in his footsteps did she realize he had taken the Book of Lineage with him. After what had happened, it was probably for the best, or so she reasoned with herself. She wrestled with similar thoughts all the way home, until finally she had convinced herself that he had taken it to force her to talk with him again, knowing that it had the most information about her family that she had ever seen. Not life-changing information, maybe, but useful for homework, and maybe cooler than her made-up Viking ancestors.