The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman Page B

library hush in the MER, but it was fairly noisy, especially in the carved staging cage where we three pages were working. The radiators hissed like lovesick lizards, the dumbwaiters chimed when they arrived, and the pneums came thumping and banging into their baskets like baby meteorites, while all around us the windows shimmered and glowed. I kept staring at them and losing track of my work.
    Sarah, a plump blond page, sat on a swivel stool by a long, knotted row of pneumatic pipes, at least a dozen of them. Whenever a pneum fell into the basket at her elbow, she would pop it into one of the pipes, scooting up and down the row on her wheeled stool to find the right pipe—each one led to a different stack. She worked so fast it made me dizzy to watch her. I was glad I didn’t have her job.
    It was fascinating to see the patrons in person. I remembered some of their names from the call slips I’d run in the stacks downstairs. They all wore white cotton gloves, which made them look strangely formal.
    The man from Dark on Monday Productions came to claim another doublet. He was shorter than I’d imagined.
    In the back of the room, under the winter windows, a couple of homeless-looking people had settled in. One of them had half a dozen shopping bags and was dozing, head down at the table.
    “Is sleeping allowed?” I asked Ms. Callender.
    She glanced over. “It’s fine—that’s just Grace Farr. Sometimes people come in to get warm in the winter. You can let them sleep unless they’re snoring and bothering the other patrons. If you have any trouble, ask Anjali for help—or send me a pneum. I’ll be downstairs on Stack 6. But you won’t have trouble with Grace. She’s a friend.”
    “That’s good,” I said. I was glad they had a place to get warm.
    After half an hour, Anjali sent me out with a cart to collect the items the patrons had finished with. The rumbling woke the sleeping patron—Grace Farr—as I went past her. She looked up at me and I recognized her pale gray eyes. She was the woman with the shopping cart, the one I’d given my sneakers to! “Hello,” I said, startled.
    “Hello again.” She winked. Then she put her head back down on the table, and I continued my rounds.
    My favorite patrons were a pair of elderly men in threadbare but well-pressed suits. They requested a magnificent eighteenth-century Russian chess set, carved from walrus ivory, and took it to a corner table under the autumn windows, where they spent the rest of my shift playing an intense game.
    One patron, a short man with a neatly cropped beard, was doing some sort of work with globes. He requested half a dozen and lined them up in the middle of one of the long tables under a lamp, where he twirled them this way and that, peering at the continents through a magnifying glass and taking notes. He seemed at home in the MER. He would stop to exchange a word or two with the chess players on his way to retrieve a new globe. He kept looking over at Anjali.
    “What’s with the globes? Is that guy a cartographer?” I asked her.
    “He’s an antiques dealer. He kind of gives me the creeps, the way he’s always staring at me.”
    “Yeah, I noticed that too. Creepy. What’s he doing with the globes?”
    “Probably trying to figure out whether some antique globe he’s trying to sell is real, or where it’s from, or what to charge for it,” Anjali said.
    The man kept looking over in our direction with a little thoughtful frown. Not quite like he was admiring Anjali the way guys so often did—more like he was evaluating a painting he was thinking about buying.

    After I’d been working for an hour or so, a patron came to pick up a pair of boots that looked a lot like the ones Marc had borrowed the day his feet got wet. In fact, they looked so similar I thought they must be the same ones. I checked the call number, expecting it to be from Stack 2, Textiles and Garb, but it started with I *GC, a designation I hadn’t seen