A sign on the door read LIBRARY OPENS 8:00 A.M. CLOSES 9:00 P.M.

Malcolm must have made a mistake. He’d left her outside a deserted library.

She checked the parking lot. He was gone. The lot was empty except for one black SUV parked at the back of the lot, far enough away that she couldn’t see inside it. It could be a WitSec car. Or it could belong to anyone, watching her.

Don’t, she told herself. She couldn’t freak herself out continuously. She had to trust that Malcolm wouldn’t make a mistake with her safety. He and Aunt Nicki had deemed this place safe. She had to trust that and trust them.

Deliberately, Eve turned back to the library door—and saw a face, ghostly, in the glass. Every muscle in her body froze.

“You know, on average, we can remember seven items in short-term memory for thirty seconds,” a voice said behind her. Zach. It was his voice, and it was his reflection in the glass door. He was holding a paper bag, and he was smiling cheerfully at her reflection. Her body slowly unfroze.

“Oh?” she said.

“Of course, that doesn’t make sense,” Zach said. “If I had eight friends in a room, I wouldn’t automatically forget the eighth one. So I’m thinking that it must only be true in an experiment; like, show a guy twenty objects for one second and he’ll remember seven of them thirty seconds later. Anyway, point is that this is always your eighth item.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a snarl of keys. He jingled it. “You forgot your key again, didn’t you?”

She forced her lips to smile. “Guess I did.”

“Mmm,” he said, as if he understood. She wondered if he could understand. She must have seen him every day since her last clear memory. They must have talked. But about what?

“Shall we go in?” he asked.

“Oh. All right.” She continued to stare at him, as if by committing his face to memory she could elicit other memories. He shifted uncomfortably under her stare.

“Okay. Um, excuse me.” He reached around her and stuck his key in the lock. Close, she felt his breath on her cheek. He blushed, and the red spread across his cheeks to his ears. She wondered if she’d ever kissed him. Why did I think that? she wondered. She felt her face heat up, as if she were blushing too, and she stepped quickly out of his way.

The door slid open.

She followed him inside, and the door slid shut behind them, erasing the sounds of outside that she hadn’t even noticed: cars on the road, wind in the trees, a lawnmower hum in the distance. In the lobby, the clock ticked extra loud in the silence.

The lobby was coated in shadows. Bookshelves blocked the thin light from the windows, and the circulation desk created its own pool of darkness. Eve wondered why it was okay with Malcolm for her to enter an empty building with a boy she barely knew (or thought she barely knew)—especially a public building with shadows that could hide anyone. Before she’d entered the house on Hall Avenue, Malcolm had checked every room. He always watched the street as she got into his car. Yet he had simply dropped her off here.

She tried to tell herself that meant this place was safe.

She still didn’t like the shadows or the silence.

“You get the lights, and I’ll switch on the computers, okay?” Zach didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead, he headed for a bin beside the door. It was positioned beneath a slot in the wall, and it overflowed with books.

She didn’t know where the light switches were. She couldn’t ask. Instead, she chose a direction and walked toward that wall, hoping she’d see the switches before Zach noticed that she was aimless. At least she could remember what a light switch was. Zach rolled the book bin toward the circulation desk. A few books toppled off the top, and he bent to pick them up—buying her time to spot a bank of light switches by the corner. She lunged for them and flicked them on. Yellowish light spread across the lobby. The shadows faded somewhat, washed away, and she exhaled in relief.

With the lights on, Zach ducked behind the desk and turned on the computers. One after another, they hummed to life. She watched him, glad he hadn’t asked her to do that, trying to memorize which buttons he pushed in case she had to do it later. As if he’d felt her watching him, Zach raised his head. “You okay? You seem … quiet today. Not that you aren’t usually the antigarrulous type. And that was an impressively convoluted sentence, if I do say so myself.”

“Very impressive,” she agreed.

“Like the New York pretzel of sentences. Or croissant. And now I’m hungry.” Finished with the computers, he set the paper bag that she’d seen him carrying on the desk, and he pulled out a bagel with flecks of pepper, onion, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. “Your bagel, my lady.” It rained seeds on the desk. His was plain.

She picked up the bread—“bagel,” he’d called it. With all the seeds, it looked like a feast for a bird. But she must have eaten one before. He was acting as if this was their routine. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him split his bagel in half, spread cream cheese on both halves, and then close them back together like a sandwich. She mimicked him and then took a bite. The seeds stuck to her teeth.

“Despite legends to the contrary,” Zach said, “bagels have nothing to do with the shape of the King of Poland’s stirrups.”

Eve heard a soft thump. “Did you hear that?” she asked. The bagel suddenly tasted like cardboard in her mouth. She quit chewing and listened. She’d thought the sound had come from Patti Langley’s office. But her door was shut, the light was off, and the sound didn’t repeat.

“Hear what?” Zach asked. “The agony of a dozen legends, condemned to history’s ‘false’ list, crying out at once? Also false: Twinkies having an infinite shelf life, and Caesar salad having anything to do with Julius Caesar.”

She stared at the office door until she’d convinced herself she’d imagined the noise.

Finishing his bagel, Zach swept the crumbs into the bag. She handed him her partially eaten bagel. “I’d say you eat like a bird, but birds eat half their weight in food every day,” he said.

“Just not hungry today.”

“Too many factoids sour your appetite? Sorry. It’s just that you …” He trailed off. “Right. Okay. We should process the returns.”

After disposing of the bag, Zach set himself up at one of the computers. He typed a few keystrokes and then began to scan the items from the bin. Mimicking him, Eve stationed herself at a nearby computer, and her fingers froze over the keyboard. She didn’t know what to type. In fact, she had no memory of ever having used a computer, though she knew she had spent many hours watching Malcolm and Aunt Nicki use theirs. A screen blinked, demanding a user name and password.

She glanced at Zach. He continued to pluck books out of the bin and scan them with a handheld scanner. Every few books, he’d type numbers into the computer. Lie, Malcolm had said. She’d have to lie with actions as well as words, she realized. “I’ll pass you the books,” Eve offered. “It’ll go faster that way.” She scooted around him and picked books out of the bin.

“Uh, okay. Good idea.”

They worked side by side as the clock ticked closer to 8:00 a.m.

At a few minutes to eight, the library door slid open, and Eve jumped. Waving at them, a man strode into the lobby. “Good morning, Zach. Eve.” He headed for the Children’s Room without slowing. A librarian. She forced herself to breathe normally.

“Eve, you sure you’re okay?” Zach asked. “You seem jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof, which I have never personally witnessed but must be spectacular, at least for the observer if not for the cat.”

“Fine.” She plastered a smile on her face and did her best to keep it there as other librarians drifted in. All of them greeted Zach and Eve by name. Eve knew none of them. After each hello, she pretended to be absorbed in her task and hoped no one would try to talk to her. Soon patrons began to arrive. Eve dug through the books in the bin until it was empty and all the books were sorted onto carts. At last, she looked up.