Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

supposed to be some sort of bodyguard?” I asked, furiously working to find a seat belt. There didn’t appear to be one.
    “Yeah,” Bastille said. “So?”
    “So, shouldn’t you avoid killing me in a car wreck?”
    Bastille frowned, spinning the wheel and taking a corner at a ridiculous speed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    I sighed, settling into my seat, telling myself that the car probably had some sort of mystical device to protect its occupants. (I was wrong, of course. Both Oculator powers and silimatic technology have to do with glass, and I seriously doubt that an air bag made of – or filled with – glass would be all that effective. Amusing, perhaps, but not effective.)
    “Hey,” I said. “How old are you?”
    “Thirteen,” Bastille replied.
    “Should you be driving, then?” I asked.
    “I don’t see why not.”
    “You’re too young,” I said.
    “Says who?”
    “Says the law.”
    I could see Bastille narrow her eyes, and her hands gripped the wheel even tighter. “Maybe Librarian law,” she muttered.
    This, I thought, is probably not a topic to pursue further. “So,” I said, trying something different. “What is your Talent?”
    Bastille gritted her teeth, glaring out through the windshield.
    “Well?” I asked.
    “You don’t have to rub it in, Smedry.”
    Great. “You… don’t have a Talent, then?”
    “Of course not,” she said. “I’m a Crystin.”
    “A what?” I asked.
    Bastille turned – an action that made me rather uncomfortable, as I thought she should have kept watching the road – and gave me the kind of look that implied that I had just said something very, very stupid. (And, indeed, I had said something very stupid. Fortunately, I made up for it by doing something rather clever – as you will see shortly.)
    Bastille turned her eyes back on the road just in time to avoid running over a man dressed like a large slice of pizza. “So you’re really him , then? The one old Smedry keeps talking about?”
    This intrigued me. “He’s mentioned me to you?”
    Bastille nodded. “Twice a year or so we have to come back to this area and see where you’ve moved. Old Smedry always manages to lose me before he actually gets to your house – he claims I’ll stand out or something. Tell me, did you really knock down one of your foster parents’ houses?”
    I shifted uncomfortably. “That rumor is exaggerated,” I said. “It was just a storage shed.”
    Bastille nodded, eyes narrowing, as if for some reason she had a grudge against sheds to go along with her apparent psychopathic dislike of Librarians.
    “So…” I said slowly. “How does a thirteen-year-old girl become a knight anyway?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bastille asked, taking a screeching corner.
    And here’s where I proved my cleverness: I remained silent.
    Bastille seemed to relax a bit. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good with people. They annoy me. That’s probably why I ended up in a job that lets me beat them up.”
    Is that supposed to be comforting? I wondered.
    “Plus,” she said, “you’re a Smedry – and Smedrys are trouble. They’re reckless, and they don’t like to think about the consequences of their actions. That means trouble for me. See, my job is to keep you alive. It’s like… sometimes you Smedrys try to get yourselves killed just so I’ll get in trouble.”
    “I’ll try my best to avoid something like that,” I said honestly. Thought her comment did spark a thought in my head. Now that I had begun to accept the things happening around me, I was actually beginning to think of Grandpa Smedry as – well – my grandfather. And that meant… My parents, I thought. They might actually be involved in this. They might actually have sent me that bag of sands.
    They would have been Smedrys too, of course. So, were they some of the ones that “got themselves killed,” as Bastille so nicely put it? Or, like all these other relatives I was suddenly learning I had, were my parents still around somewhere?
    That was a depressing thought. A lot of us foster children don’t like to consider ourselves orphans. It’s an outdated term, in my opinion. It brings to mind images of scrawny, dirty-faced thieves living on the street and getting meals from good-hearted nuns. I wasn’t an orphan – I had lots of parents. I just never stayed with any of them all that long.
    I’d rarely bothered to consider my real parents,