Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

that he couldn’t hurt me. And when he realized that…”
    “He ran away,” I said slowly.
    “Information. The Librarians control the information in this city – in this whole country. They control what gets read, what gets seen, and what gets learned. Because of that, they have power. Well, we’re going to break that power, you and I. But first, we need those sands.”
    “Grandpa,” I said. “You have to have some kind of idea what the sands do. You came to get them from me, after all. Didn’t you have a plan to use them?”
    “Pestering Pullmans, of course I did! I was going to smelt them into Lenses, just like the Librarians are probably doing now. Your father, lad – he was a sandhunter. He spent all his time searching out new and powerful types of sand, gathering the grains together, crafting Lenses like nobody had seen before. The Sands of Rashid were he crowning achievement. His greatest discovery.” Grandpa Smedry’s voice grew even quieter. “He was convinced they had something to do with where the Smedry family gained its Talents in the first place. The Sands of Rashid are a key, somehow, to understanding the power and origin or our entire family. Can you understand, perhaps, why the Librarians might want them?”
    I nodded slowly. “The Talents.”
    “Indeed, lad. The Talents. If they could find a way to arm their agents with Talents like ours, then the Free Kingdoms could very well be doomed. Smedry powers are a large part of what has kept the Librarians at bay for so long. But we’re losing. The land you call Australia was lost to us only a few decades back – absorbed and added to the Hushlands. Now Sing’s homeland has almost fallen. They’ve already taken some of the outlying Mokian islands – the places you call Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa – and added them to the Hushlands. I fear it will only be a few years before Mokia itself falls.”
    He paused, then shook his head, looking just a little bit distant as he continued. “Either the Free Kingdoms are going to fall – and everything will become Hushlands – or we’re going to find a way to break the Librarians’ power. The Smedry Talents, and the secrets these sands will reveal, are key to the next stage of the war. Things are changing… things have to change. We can’t just keep fighting and losing ground. That’s why your father spent so much of his life gathering those sands. He felt it was time to go on the offensive.”
    I felt a stab of anxiety, a question surfacing that I wasn’t certain I wanted to know the answer to. Finally, I couldn’t keep it down. “Is he still alive, Grandpa?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, looking back at me. “I honestly don’t know.”
    The comment hung in the air. Grandpa Smedry placed a hand on my shoulder. “Alive or not, Attica Smedry was a great man, Alcatraz. An amazing man. And he, like you, was no warrior. We are Oculators. Our weapon is information . Keep your eyes, and your mind, open. You’ll do just fine.”
    I nodded slowly.
    “Good lad, good lad. Ah, here’s Quentin.”
    The short, tuxedo-wearing man slipped quickly out of the library’s front doors. “Five Librarians in the main lobby,” he said quietly. “Three behind the checkout desk, two in the stacks. Their patterns are right on schedule with what we’ve seen from them before. The entrance to the employee corridors is on the far south side. It isn’t guarded right now, though a Librarian passes to check on it every few minutes or so.”
    “All right, then,” Grandpa Smedry said. “In we go!”

Chapter 7
    I seem to recall that last year a Free Kingdoms biographer wrote an article claiming I had spent my childhood performing a “deep infiltration” of Library lands. I guess in his mind, playing video games counted as a “deep infiltration.”
    I hope you Free Kingdomers aren’t too put out to discover that dragons didn’t come and bow to me at my birth. I wasn’t tutored by the spirits of my dead Smedry ancestors, nor did I kill my first Librarian by slitting his throat with his own library card.
    This is the real me, the troubled boy who grew into an even more troubled young man. Now, I’m not a terrible person. I’m just not a particularly nice one either. If you’d been tied to altars, nearly eaten by walking romance novels, and thrown off a glass pillar taller than Mt. Everest, you might have turned out a little like me yourself.
    Sing tripped.
    Now, I’ve seen a lot of people trip in my