The Project by Brian Falkner Page A

library, their footprints were clearly visible across the gray carpet of the floor.
    “It’s just water,” Luke said. “It’ll dry before anyone comes in here tomorrow.”
    “You sure?”
    Luke wasn’t but said he was.
    There were books stacked everywhere upstairs, safe from the reach of the floodwaters. They sat in piles, with large handwritten labels giving the unit and shelf number they had been taken from.
    Luke cast his light around. There were books everywhere. It could take all night to find the one they wereafter. “This is going to take forever,” he said.
    “No, it won’t,” Tommy said. “You said you saw the book just before we were evacuated. That means it will be in one of the last piles. All we have to do is figure out where they finished stacking, and work backward from there.”
    Luke looked around. It seemed that they had started stacking deep in the interior of the library and finished at the entrance.
    “Okay, let’s start at this end,” he said. “I’ll take the left; you take the right.”
    Tommy nodded and moved toward a stack of books.
    Luke dried his hands by rubbing them on the carpet, then began with the nearest pile and scanned the spines. Some of them were blank, which didn’t help, so he moved the books off one by one, stacking them neatly so he could replace them later in the right order.
    He went through five stacks in that manner and was starting to wonder if he had dreamed seeing the book when Tommy asked, “This it?”
    Luke was squatting down. He spun around in excitement, losing his balance and reaching out to steady himself with a hand on the wall.
    It
was
it.
    It was definitely the book he had seen in the bucket brigade. The picture of the
Vitruvian Man
leaped out at him from the old gray cloth cover, just as he had remembered it.
    The words above it were brown and faded, so much so that they were almost impossible to read until Tommy shone his flashlight on them.
    Leonardo’s River
.
    Luke’s heart seemed to stop for a second. It really was it. The two-million-dollar book. The most boring book in the world.
    Tommy handed it to him, and he ran his fingers over the picture on the cover.
    “That’s the one,” he said.
    There was a sudden loud crash, echoing around over the sound of the rain.
    “What was that?” Tommy asked.
    Luke thought he might have heard footsteps. Somewhere
inside
the library.
    “Give me your bag,” he said.
    He stashed the book inside Tommy’s waterproof backpack, in among a bunch of gadgets, and sealed the top.
    There were voices now, coming up the stairs from the lower level. He could hear them indistinctly but enough to recognize that the language being spoken wasn’t English.
    “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Tommy.
    They ran as silently as they could into the interior of the library, away from the voices, flicking off their flashlights as they went.
    Luke glanced back as two dark shapes appeared at the top of the stairs. He grabbed Tommy’s coat and pulled him flat against the wall. “Don’t move,” Luke hissed.
    Two men, large and bulky, were silhouetted in scarlet by the lights coming in from outside. Another man appeared behind them, moving more slowly.
    The men all had flashlights, too, but the beams from theirs were an eerie blue.
    “Is there another way out?” Luke whispered.
    “There’s another level above us,” Tommy said. “And stairs at each end of the corridor. We could use the back stairs, go along the top corridor, and sneak down the main stairs behind them.”
    The men were still on the landing, but if they moved farther into the building, Tommy’s plan could work.
    They were shining their strange lights over the piles of books. Then, just like Luke and Tommy, they set to work; however, unlike Luke and Tommy, they just discarded the books into jumbles on the floor, kicking over piles and searching through the debris. It was clear they were looking for something, but Luke couldn’t quite believe they