There were nine of them on the step by the time Rurik got downstairs and there were more coming up Marrow, and the ones in front had already worked out that the handle turned for some of them and not for others.
That was the part he had not been ready for.
A young woman in chapter-house grey got the door open on her first try and came through it sideways with her eyes enormous.
The man directly behind her, older, heavier, with the braid on his sleeve that meant something Rurik did not yet know how to read, put his hand on the same handle three seconds later and it did not move.
He tried again.
He put his shoulder into it.
He stepped back and looked at the frame.
Through the glass, Rurik could see his mouth working.
“Can you let him in?” Rurik said.
“No,” Mira said.
“Can I let him in?”
“You could open the door.
He would not come through it.” She had the rule sheet out again, flat on the counter, weighted at one corner with the stapler.
“It is not a lock.”
“Then what is it.”
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“That’s not an answer.”
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The young woman in grey had made it as far as the middle of the ground floor and stopped there, turning slowly, and Rurik went and started his opening and got four words into it before she said, “Is it true there’s a machine that makes cold?”
“There’s a few, actually—”
“Brother Ansel said the light comes off the ceiling.”
“It does.”
“He said there were four thousand books and I told him he was lying,” she said.
“I said it to his face.
In front of people.”
“He wasn’t lying.”
“I can see that,” she said.
“I’m going to have to apologise to him, and he is going to be insufferable about it.”
Outside, the man with the braid had got hold of one of the others and was directing him to try the handle, and that one got it open immediately, and went through, and the door shut, and the man with the braid stood on the step with his hand still out.
He was there a long while.
Rurik watched him through the glass and did not enjoy it.
“He’s going to think we’re choosing,” he said.
“He would be correct.” This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“I’m not choosing.”
“You are not,” Mira agreed.
“That will not be the version he tells.”
By the middle of the afternoon there were nineteen people inside the building and a further six on the step who could not get in, and the ones inside had spread across all three floors and every one of them was touching something.
Rurik had never had nineteen people in the building.
He had never had nine.
On his best day, which had been the Saturday in October when the college kids came through on their way to a convention, he had run twelve, and he had talked about that Saturday for weeks afterward to people who did not care.
He stood behind his counter with a cloth in his hand and listened to the noise of the ground floor.
It was a specific noise.
He had heard it before in other people’s places, and he had built a room designed to make it, and he had never heard it in his own room.
“You have not moved in some time,” Mira said, from the second step of the stairs, where she had been sitting with a volume open on her knee for most of an hour.
“No.”
“Is there a fault.”
“No, Mira.”
She turned a page.
“There is a man on the second floor,” she said, “attempting to put a coin into the screen.”