Chapter 11: Petra Finds Something in the Archive She Was Not Supposed to Find

The ledger smelled of a specific kind of damage — not rot, exactly, but the grey exhaustion of paper that has been wet and dried and wet again over the course of more winters than anyone still living could account for. Petra set it on the table in the library's back room with both hands, the way one sets down something fragile, though what she was actually being careful of was not the ledger itself but the quality of silence that had arrived with it, and which felt like the kind of silence that might be startled into something worse.

"I need you to look at something," she said.

Maren looked up from her notes — she had been annotating the county historical survey Petra's mother had pulled three weeks ago without yet knowing why she was pulling it — and registered Petra's expression, which was the most complicated expression she had seen on Petra's face, and she had seen Petra navigate a school corridor with a fire alarm going and her shoelace untied.