Page 7 of The Alien in the Archive (Galactic Librarians #1)

7

THORNE

S he doesn’t run.

She should.

But…she’s too stubborn for that.

I can feel the conflicting emotions going to war in her mind—fear of the unknown, exhilaration at the prospect of exploring that unknown. She’s not the type to balk at things she doesn’t understand; in fact, I think she’s more likely to fling herself into danger purely for the sake of sating her curiosity.

She’s hungry too…just in a different way.

And it’s that curiosity that keeps her rooted in place, even as every instinct tells her to leave.

“Sit,” I gesture to a worn leather chair across from the one surrounded by my books. I keep my voice low, soft—the same tone I would use to calm a skittish animal. “You came all this way, didn’t you? Let’s not waste the opportunity.”

She hesitates, her eyes flicking from me to the chair and back again. Her bag is still slung over one shoulder, her fingers gripping the strap tightly…but I don’t think she wa nts to run. She’s made up her mind about that. Instead, this seems more like nervous energy.

She’s too excited to sit down.

Finally, with a deep breath, she moves toward the chair. She sits down cautiously, perched on the edge, foot tapping a quick rhythm against the floor. I don’t try to suppress my amusement; even with her fledgling telepathy, she’ll be able to sense it.

“Good,” I say, settling into my chair. The stolen furniture creaks faintly beneath my weight, the only sound in the room, save for Page’s breathing and erratic movement. To my surprise, Ashlan pads over to our guest and hops into her lap without invitation, curling up and beginning to purr. Page scratches him behind the ears as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. She doesn’t care about the lumivix, only her research.

But she’s not saying anything.

She’s waiting for permission.

“I imagine you have questions.” I lean back, steepling my fingers.

She doesn’t answer right away, her gaze flicking down to Ashlan, then around the room, then back to me. “Who are you?” she finally asks, voice steady.

“Thorne Valtheris,” I reply, my name a weapon I haven’t used in centuries—once known and respected across the galaxy, now a long-forgotten memory. “Former Magister of the Boreal Academy, turned dissident, turned fugitive, turned…well, whatever this is.” I gesture around the room. “Just Thorne now, I suppose.”

She sorts through the information, catalogues, and files it away. “You were a teacher?”

“Yes, before my people shut down our universities and academies,” I tell her.

“So you’re…you must be very old. ”

“I’ve been around a while.”

“Meaning…?”

“Four or five millennia,” I shrug. “It’s easy to lose count after that long.”

Her jaw drops, grey eyes sparkling. I’m not sure if she’s even noticed, but that grey…it’s unnatural. I can see the Elixir mingling with her blood, swirling silver in those eyes.

“I have so many questions,” she says.

“Ask away.” I huff out a laugh. “I don’t have anything else planned for today.”

Her foot keeps up that steady rhythm— tap tap tap against the floor—as she splays her hands out on her knees and draws circles on them. The way she lives fully in her body excites me; she’s fidgeting to help her collect her thoughts, her mind moving too fast for her body to keep up. There’s so much intellect in that beautiful mind that it’s like her body is a vessel too small to contain it.

She’s remarkable.

“Okay,” she says, finally deciding where she wants to start. “I have to know—the Lost Expeditions. They were real?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“You’ve got to give me more than that,” she mutters, then rakes a hand through her short brown hair. “What do I want to know…ah—give me a brief history? Do you mind if I take notes?”

I actually smile then, the expression twisting my mouth in ways that are unfamiliar after so long. “Go ahead.”

She grins and reaches for her bag—the commotion disturbs Ashlan, who hops down from Page’s lap and disappears into the stacks—then she pulls out a purple notebook and pen. The supplies look deeply out of place in my corner of the Archive, where everything is dusty and old. She opens the notebook to a page of blank white paper with faint blue lines, then she glances up at me .

“I’m ready,” she says.

I lounge back in my chair, crossing my ankle over my knee, feeling downright academic and nostalgic. “Alright…the Lost Expeditions, then. Early on, after we—the Borean Empire, then the Borean Republic—had given interstellar travel technology to the Skoll in exchange for their service as mercenaries, a few broke away from their people. They feared we were manipulating them; they were, of course, correct?—”

“I want to circle back to that at some point,” she says, scribbling something in her notebook. “A lot of your histories were lost.”

“Not lost; destroyed,” I tell her. “We kept our past and our secrets carefully guarded. An empire can only appear eternal if it doesn’t have a history.”

“Right,” she mumbles, frantically taking notes. “Okay…keep going.”

I slow my pace down, giving her time to write. “At this point, we still had a somewhat equitable relationship with the Skoll. Before we started using large amounts of Elixir, we had no way of matching most other species in the galaxy in terms of physical strength. We needed them. So they were able to freely traverse space…and they discovered an Elixir wellspring on Earth.”

Page inhales sharply, looking up at me. “ Avalon .”

“No,” I chuckle. “That was the third wellspring the Skoll discovered. The first was Kshira Sagara, in what your people later called India. The second was Atlantis. And there were five others, all kept by creatures even we never fully understood.”

“What kind of creatures?” she asks.

“The Skoll called them witches, though I believe the term was later applied to the humans who served them,” I tell her. “Many-armed and many-eyed beings who once dwelled wherever Elixir flowed. They were one of the first species my people eradicated.”

Her pen freezes mid-word.

Page stares at me, her eyes wide and glimmering at the impact of those words. She’s silent for a moment, her fidgeting grinding to a halt.

“You…eradicated them?”

“Yes,” I reply. “The witches were powerful, connected to Elixir in ways even my people couldn’t fully comprehend. They stood between the Borean Empire and control of the wellsprings. To us, their existence was inconvenient.”

“So you wiped them out,” she says flatly, fingers tightening around her pen.

I nod. “We used the Skoll. They were our instruments of war. That was always their purpose to us, and they were more than happy to do it once we’d made them believe the witches were abominations. We gave them a target, then fired.”

Her frown deepens, mind racing. I can feel her thoughts brushing faintly against mine, unintentional but undeniable, searching for a sign of regret. She doesn’t yet realize the strength of her abilities, how much she’s broadcasting to someone like me. Anger, disgust, an almost overwhelming sense of loss ripple through her…

…and there’s that curiosity. Deep, gnawing, unshakeable.

“Did you participate?” she asks.

“Hm.” I let a fang glide over my lower lip, thinking. “Not directly. I ignored it, for the most part, kept teaching and learning. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t complicit.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

My lips twist in a bitter smile. “For the same reason anyone doesn’t speak out when they see atrocities carried out in their name. Because I was comfortable and didn’t want to disrupt my work. ”

“But you said you later became a dissident.”

“I thought you wanted to know about the Lost Expeditions.”

I can see the push and pull play out on her face, academic curiosity colliding with personal interest. Her fascination with me is disturbingly appealing, and I resist the urge to indulge it.

“Sorry,” she says. “This is all just…it’s incredible. You know so much.”

“The one and only perk of being an ancient fugitive who lives in a dusty old library.”

She lets out a soft laugh, shaking her head. “You’re funny.”

I’m caught off guard by her words, how easy it is to get comfortable with her. “Thank you,” I say.

“So…the expeditions?”

“Right…” I settle back into my chair. “Anyway…the first Skoll explorers arrived as a warrior expedition to Kshira Sagara, intent on slaying the Witch who guarded it. What they found was an entire settlement of humans—all who had ingested Elixir and become acolytes of the Witch.”

“And they had powers?” Page says. “Powers like mine.”

“Yes. The humans were clever, adaptive, dangerous. Their societies were far more advanced than any of us had imagined. We were unable to destroy the settlement around the wellspring, but they—and we—learned.”

“What were the Boreans doing this whole time?” she asks. “Like…you knew, right?”

I sigh. “We were watching. Waiting. The Skoll were useful tools, but we knew their independence would one day become a threat. The expeditions to Earth were a test, both for them and for your kind. We wanted to see what the Elixir would do to your species, and we learned that your people were capable of using Elixir the same way that we do—which made the destruction of your wellsprings far more important.”

“You…” she trails off, shakes her head. “You erased our history. It’s sick.”

“Empires are sick,” I shrug. “They thrive on domination, on destruction—something you should understand well, being from Earth. The Borean Empire was no different. We consumed everything in our path, because we believed it was our right, and because we truly believed if we didn’t take resources, someone else would.”

“I don’t understand,” she interjects. “If you knew about Earth all that time, then why did you wait until the twenty-first century to invade? That’s a long time to wait.”

“Because the Skoll, too, were smarter than we thought,” I tell her. “The Lost Expeditions went to war with Borean forces to protect human settlements. They fell in love with and found mates amongst the humans…and they stayed there to protect Earth.”

“But you knew.”

I nod. “It was my first act of resistance. Obscuring Earth’s history from my own people, so they could live in peace.”

Page stares at me, her pen frozen above her notebook. For the first time since she sat down, she isn’t scribbling or fidgeting.

She just…stares.

“ You hid Earth from your own empire,” she says slowly, like she’s trying to wrap her head around the weight of it.

“Yes,” I reply simply, though the truth of it is anything but. “It wasn’t easy. The Boreal Academy didn’t take kindly to gaps in our records. But I wasn’t the only one, there were others who saw Earth as more than just another resource to be exploited. We erased what we could, buried what we couldn’t, and made sure that when the time came for the Empire to expand, Earth would be forgotten. ”

Her lips part, but no words come out. She leans back in her chair, her silver-grey eyes searching mine, the weight of the revelation settling over her. I can feel the emotions swirling in her mind—shock, disbelief.

“You helped us,” she says finally, her voice quiet.

“I delayed the inevitable,” I correct, my tone sharp. “Earth was still invaded, Page. The Magisterium’s reach was vast, and even the deepest shadows can only hide a secret for so long. When they rediscovered your planet thousands of years later, there was nothing I could do to stop them.”

“But you tried,” she presses. “You risked everything to give us a chance.”

“I risked very little and did the bare minimum,” I tell her. “Don’t mistake me for a hero.”

She doesn’t seem satisfied with that, her mind reaching toward mine for another embrace. I shut it down, blocking her out.

“I have a question for you, too,” I tell her.

“That only seems fair.”

I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees and steepling my fingers. “How did you come by your gifts?” I ask. “As far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any humans like you for a long, long time. Were you born with them or…”

Her face falls and she looks away, fingers curling around her notebook. The fidgeting starts again. “I was born in Pemberton, Massachusetts,” she says. “My parents worked in the Elixir refinery there—they were biologists, trying to clean things up once the Convergence was over. They died in an industrial accident, and I was exposed to high levels of Elixir…I’ve always figured that’s how it happened. There could be hundreds of us at this point.”

I don’t know how to respond. She’s just as remarkable as she is tragic.

I look up at the skylight, a tiny window where only the smallest scrap of sunlight creeps in. It’s already dusk, the sun crawling into bed. “You should probably get going,” I tell her. “Wouldn’t want to arouse suspicion by disappearing into the archive overnight.”

She looks like she has a thousand more questions, but she relents and begins to put her supplies away. I catch sight of Ashlan watching her from the shadows of the stacks, antennae glowing softly, and she glances over at him with a sudden laugh.

“Huh,” she muses. “It all makes sense now.”

“What does?”

“That flare of light, the night you were…I don’t know, lurking,” she says. “It was your pet, right?”

“He’s more of a housemate,” I grumble.

That gets another laugh out of her, light and refreshing as she slings her bag over her shoulder. “What’s his name?”

“I call him Ashlan—after a Borean hero from a long time ago,” I say. “And yes, he gets a little protective.”

She kneels and reaches out her hand, and Ashlan comes closer to rub his cheek against her knuckles. Page stands up, then, and meets my eyes. “Can I come back?” she asks. “Tomorrow—I’ve already hit dead ends in the archive, and I’ve already learned more from you than I could from any book. Plus…I need help.”

“With what?”

“My mind reading,” she says. “It’s been getting more and more overwhelming. I can’t control it.”

“Understood,” I nod. “And I can try to teach you. I’m a bit rusty, but we’ll find a way.”

She smiles. “Great. See you around, Thorne.”

“Until next time, Page.”

I watch as she disappears back through the bookshelf, and I rise to close it behind her. The silence rushes in around me, heavier than before .

Ashlan follows me back to my chair, where I reach for another book—one on human history this time, on empires. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to focus. The silence is just too loud.

For the first time in years—decades, centuries —I feel alone. Truly, painfully alone.

And I hate how much I want her to come back.