Out of the Black - Lee Doty [47]
A few students were scattered across the low maze of cubicles and desks, working alone at research stations built for two. Ping guessed the tutors were off-duty at this time of night on the weekend. In the center of the common area were four empty cubicles labeled with the names of the Departments with a tutoring presence on the floor. Around the edges of the room were about eight presentation rooms; seven of them were empty.
The windows of the occupied presentation room were polarized and the door was shut. As he walked across the room, Ping stopped next to one of the students, a wiry black girl of about thirty with close-cropped hair like Alexander's cop girlfriend. She wore ill-fitting slacker apparel, and there was a stuffed backpack near her feet on the floor. "S'cuse me. Did you see who's in the presentation room?" Ping asked with his most unconcerned voice.
She looked up from her terminal with an amused expression. "Depends whose askin'."
Ping fished for his badge. "This is official bu..."
"Whoa,ick-draw!" She said playfully.
Ping stopped with his hand on his badge- her voice sounded familiar. He stared into her face, his brows knit with the scrutiny. Behind the acne-scarred complexion, ignoring the slight asymmetries of her face, he could just make out Rae. She must have noticed his eyes widen in surprise because she laughed. He stared slack jawed for a blink- she was almost completely unrecognizable. The beauty that had before been so evident now could only be glimpsed in the sparkle of her eyes, in the subtle arc of her smile. He managed to get his mouth closed finally. "What, no fake glasses and rubber nose?"
She nodded, smiling. "I know. It's pretty disorienting at first."
"What is?"
"Come on, we can't talk here. Your Fed pals have already been here- they tossed Alex's cube about an hour ago."
"Ah! My good pals! You talk to them long? Charming bunch."
Smiling, she collected her belongings into the already stuffed bag and stood. "Didn't talk to them at all. C'mon."
Ping followed her back out the door and into the stairwell. They ascended to the eighth floor, an archive reserved for storing historical books and paintings. Of course everything there had been scanned and was available in the library's online archives, but there were still some books and other items that were kept in hard copy for aesthetic or historical reasons.
Undisturbed darkness pooled behind the door's glass, turning the door into an obsidian mirror. As Rae moved forward, approaching her reflection in the dark glass, the door opened and darkness fled before the flicker of automatic lights. They were the first people on the floor.
The lights illuminated a wide central access aisle with a cluster of information kiosks surrounded by aisles of compressed shelving. The shelves were on tracks that allowed them to move to create aisles between them at the touch of panels on each end.
"It's kinda' funny," Rae said as the moved down the wide central isle, "This is the only place in the library you can find real books."
Like many library archives, this one was outfitted in the style of libraries of ages past. Ping surmised that the intricately patterned carpet, believable but veneered paneling and faux wood shelving was an attempt to achieve an atmosphere of knowledge steeped in the mystique of age.
Rae didn't stop until they reached the wall on the far side of the room. They stood in the box canyon made by the wall in front of them and the compressed shelving on both sides. Ping glanced around, "I'm assuming we're not lost."
Rae gave him a smile that was a window into the beauty she'd radiated this morning. "You'd be wrong about that detective." She raised her eyebrows and touched the access key on the end of the last row of shelves on their right. With a low hum, the six stacked shelves shifted away from the wall, leaving an aisle between the wall and the first movable shelf. "If we're not lost, no one is." The soft clunk as the shelves halted seemed