“Stay back,” I yelled.

The medieval men were inching closer from all sides.

“STAY BACK. ALL OF YOU.”

I pressed the crowbar against the spinning metal, just slightly-a stream of sparks shot out. The gear slowed almost imperceptibly, but the second it did, the room filled with unbearable screaming from the masked figures below me. Bernini’s face rippled with pain. He let out a terrible squealing noise as if I were twisting a knife between his ribs. The screams came from all around me, hundreds of voices. Stop, Bernini cried.

I pulled the crowbar back, horrified.

For a moment he just stood there, catching his breath. He coughed a few times, a wounded, rattling cough. Then he looked at me with those penetrating eyes. I thought of the first day of school. He looked fragile, and above all else, tired.

“Let her go,” I said to him.

“If I do,” Bernini said quietly, “you will hurt the machine.”

“If you don’t, I’ll destroy it.”

“No,” he said, “you won’t. You’d have nothing left to bargain with.”

“So what? You’ll all be dead.”

He shook his head. “Not fast enough to save her.”

The executioner leaned into Sarah and pulled up slightly against her neck with the knife.

“So you see,” Bernini said. “We have a stalemate.”

For once, I was a step ahead of him.

“Not exactly,” I said.

I raised the crowbar, ready to press it forward and slow the gears again.

Bernini raised his eyebrows, unsurprised.

So calm. Like he knew what I was thinking before I did.

“You’ll torture us, then?” he asked mildly.

I nodded. “If you make me.”

“We won’t let her go, Jeremy. You know we can’t. You’d only be torturing us for sport.”

I hated this man! How could he be so sure I was bluffing?

“We’ll see about that,” I heard myself say.

To my own shock, I shoved the crowbar forward and slowed the wheel.

Bernini’s head jerked back and his eyes rolled up. He cried out. His torso twisted and he fell forward on his knees. His arms locked in rotation, one inward, one outward. Veins popped up along his skin.

Shrieks, from around the room-hundreds of terrible cries.

I felt a wave of horror. And at the same time, I felt powerful. I loved her. They wanted to murder her. Was I wrong to do this? Was I wrong to stop?

I pulled the crowbar off the wheel and the screams stopped instantly. The pain was unnatural, and it vanished with unnatural speed.

“Let her go,” I cried, my voice breaking.

Bernini stared at me, half-collapsed, on his elbows.

For the first time ever, I saw him look surprised.

“I didn’t… think…” he gasped, wiping a sleeve across his mouth, “… you… had it… in… you…”

I was going to shatter. There was nothing left.

I was an empty vessel.

I looked at Sarah, and she mouthed, “I love you.”

Bernini sighed.

“I think, Jeremy,” he said, “that you deserve to know the truth.”

39

“It must have hurt,” Bernini said, “when you didn’t make the cut. I’m sorry about that. Your friends had the physical presence of presidents. Prime ministers. Very valuable. You… You do not. Not quite.”

I thought of the mirrored ballroom. How they watched us.

“And their minds, Jeremy. Supple. Capable of abstraction. John less than the others, but that was mostly laziness. Riding on his looks. He had the capacity to hold one of us. He would have survived the transfer.” Bernini shook a finger at me. “You would have gone insane.”

I felt a mix of rage and shame.

“But we’re past that, now,” Bernini said. “There is a way out of this, for both of us. But you must open your mind. Can you do that? Can you indulge your old law professor one last hypothetical? I mean to say, before you put that crowbar through my heart?”

There was a flash of the old Bernini-the hint of a smile.

“I’m done with your games.”

Bernini shook his head.

“This time, I promise you, it’s no game.”

He rose slowly. His eyes twinkled. Suddenly, he was the professor again.

“Suppose, Jeremy, that we weren’t down here in this unfortunate place.” His eyes danced around the cathedral. “Suppose instead you are the night watchman about a thousand yards that way, in the largest library in the world.” He gave that wry grin. “Imagine it. Four thousand years of knowledge. Original Shakespeare folios. Handwritten notes on nuclear theory by Rittenberg and Kingsley. Priceless. Just last year, Professor D’Martino found a lost book on rainforest herbs and deduced a new treatment for Parkinson’s. Somewhere in there is a cure for cancer. A framework for peace.

“You might guess security is tight for such a building. There’s a fire system, of course, but who would spray water on a priceless collection? So, instead, they spray a chemical that will douse flames without harming paper. Ingenious, really.”

He raised a long finger.

“You might also know that there is a noble tradition in the College of completing four tasks before graduation. Forgive me here, I’m only the messenger. First, of course, is affixing a pat of butter to the ceiling of the freshman dining hall. It’s said that a young Richard Lymann constructed a catapult for the task. Second is running nude through the freshman yard. Third, regrettably, is urinating on the statue of our beloved founder. And fourth, of course, is to have…” (here he blushed a little, although he never lost the glimmer in his eyes) “er… relations… in the stacks of the library.

“Now, say that one evening, a couple has slipped past you and remained in the stacks after closing, determined to cross number four off their list. Yet a fire has broken out and is spreading quickly through the building. You have only to push a button to release the chemical spray and end the destruction. The problem, however, is that the chemicals are quite toxic and will surely kill the amorous couple.”

He cleared his throat and folded his hands over his knee.

“What do you do, Jeremy? And this time, I’m afraid, none of the above is not an option.”

He thought I couldn’t commit? He was wrong.

“I would not push the button,” I said.

Bernini raised his eyebrows, as if to say: What did I expect? He looked at me and shook his head.

“You already pushed the button, Jeremy.”

“What are you talking about?”

But I knew. In my mind, I couldn’t block the image of the crowbar sending out sparks. The screams from the crowd.

“I would not push the button,” I repeated. “They’re just books.”

“I see. And what if they weren’t… just books? Tell me, Jeremy, how long would it take you to read all those books? One lifetime? Two? Ten?” His voice grew louder. “And not just to read them, but to understand them? To practice what you’ve learned? To test your cures? To perfect your peace talks?”

Suddenly, he was filled with an anger I didn’t know he was capable of.

“You have no idea what’s at stake,” he snapped at me. “You think this is about cheating death? I long for death. I wish I had the luxury. I’ve seen every manner of human cruelty. Witch burnings. Lynchings. Pogroms. Gulags. Child armies. Genocides. My eyes are tired.”

Bernini spat on the ground.

“The universe is biased toward evil. Simple thermodynamics. It is always easier to destroy than to build. The Romans built a republic. How fragile! They slipped, and the world plunged into one thousand years of darkness. One thousand years! Can you imagine that? A thousand years of oppression-kings and religious tyrants and castes and slavery. One thousand years of pestilence, poverty, superstition…

“Ah! But then came the Renaissance. Enlightenment! Freedom and equality escaped from the shadows and swept the world. But some of us didn’t forget… We didn’t forget how fragile it all is…

“You think good can survive without cost? The people who ended slavery are in this room. The people who defeated Nazism and Communism. In this room. Drawing on our wisdom. Our fortune. Our carefully cultivated power. Imagine this mind in that body.” He pointed at John. “We have spent centuries perfecting the means to fight evil. For the first time in history, good has an advantage.”