The Last Page Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the chancellor’s house. They faced the library directly.
    Caliph responded without agitation. “Do you really think he will be watching? He knows I’m too smart to risk getting caught. Besides,” he jingled the ring of keys, “we can go anywhere in the library! Think of the private book collections!”
    Sena looked at them. Each had been wired with stiff white paper and labeled with the names of various rooms.
    “I know you’ve had a brush with the chancellor and can’t afford another office visit. But I can. He’s never going to expel me.” Caliph looked at her directly. “He can’t afford to expel me.”
    “Yella byn, 2 Caliph! Are you telling me you made a deal with him?”
    For a moment his dark eyes burrowed into her face. Finally he said, “No one’s going to bother us.”
    Her stomach soured. She felt queasy-sick inside, but he had not done this extraordinary thing to generate pity. He had done it with the single goal of moving their relationship beyond the reach of the school motto, facilitating something stable and private. She decided not to dwell on the horror of the caning. Instead, she gave him what he wanted, a smile.
    “Can I at least get in by myself?”
    “This isn’t about picking locks. This is about keeping quiet. Staying hidden.”
    She played along. “Ooh—an esoteric society. Just the two of us?” Her knuckles rapped an imaginary door. “Will there be secret knocks?”
    Caliph grinned despite his obvious pain.
    He had taught her how to execute on a plan regardless of personal cost.
    Since then, there had been wine, books and plenty of sex. The library had remained bearable even as Kam faded into Thay, Shem and Oak, reducing the wooded campus to lifeless brown and frosty white.
    Sometimes they used the fireplaces. Sometimes they just listened to the coal boiler in the basement, indigestion flushing through its pipes. The night watchman scheduled to check up on Caliph twice a night never came.
    Her stomach warmed. Maybe it was love.
    But it wasn’t Caliph that elicited her strongest emotions. That still came from the scrap of paper she had found in Githum Hall, burning like a cruestone in her brain. Its black sparkle steered her toward a course of actions on which she was now utterly resolved.
    Caliph wouldn’t understand even if she had been able to tell him. He had steeped himself in the modern cauldron of business and government. For him, holomorphy was quaint. And besides, the recipe was clear. She couldn’t tell him.
    He’ll be fine,
she thought.
I need this. He has a whole country waiting for him. I just need him to open the book . . .
    Breath sweetened through a filter of wanton bouquets, Sena tossed her flower-flavored chewing gum like the pin from a grenade. It landed in the dark, forgotten behind spider-infested bundles of spare pipe while the chemical reaction it had induced continued to swell.
    Sena let it go. Her mouth opened; her pelvis flexed forward.
    Even in the beginning, despite no history of his own, Caliph had been better than Tynan, better than several sophomoric fumblings she had endured for the sake of release. Tonight, they drew it out, seeming to understand the potential finality of this encounter.
    Caliph’s breathing changed and Sena shifted her rhythm, calculating their trajectory, applying tension to the spring.
    It was her private metaphor: the catapult. The sudden pitch in her stomach that signaled her body going numb. Like being launched into the air at the circus and floating . . . floating . . .
    After that came the zoetrope. Warmth washing through her like sheetlightning. She had discovered it with Caliph. The pleasant spinning, her senses so overstimulated that her body stuttered like pictures in a little moving wheel, arching backward in a series of staccato animations.
    Catapult then zoetrope. Only with Caliph.
    “So soon—?” She uncoiled the playful whisper directly into his ear. “A little unexpected, huh?” She breathed