Free Sorceress by Claudia Gray Page A

decades that are print-only. Those are the only existing copies. If they’re lost in the flood, they’re lost forever!”
    “Come the apocalypse nobody’s going to care about—”
    “Screw the apocalypse. The One Beneath is not going to win, okay? We’re going to stop Him.”
    Her words were empty and she knew it. Maybe they’d win; maybe they wouldn’t; she wasn’t going to be the deciding factor either way. But when Asa smiled at her, Verlaine felt as though what she’d said wasn’t so empty after all. “You amaze me,” he said. “Your bravery—but surely there are tests enough for your courage. Saving some moldy old newspapers isn’t worth endangering yourself.”
    Verlaine shook her head. “They’re not ‘moldy old newspapers.’ They’re records of how people lived, who they loved, and how they died. Everything that’s human and normal and right about Captive’s Sound—that’s what’s in the Guardian . That’s what we have to save. Besides, if there’s anything in Elizabeth’s history that’s going to trip her up? That’s where it’s going to be. Now, are you with me or not?”
    “I am,” Asa said.
    She put the car in drive.
    Whenever Asa found himself helping Verlaine, Nadia, or Mateo, he felt the strain of his bonds. Literally: It was asthough he could sense the One Beneath’s hold on his soul like straps across his chest, biting through his skin, making it harder for him to draw breath.
    Once, when Verlaine’s life had been in danger, he had deliberately worked against the will of the One Beneath. The price had been a brief time back in the furnaces of the demonic realm, suffering torments that still gave him nightmares. Worst of all, Asa knew the day would come when he would be ordered to hurt Verlaine, and he would not have the power to defy.
    But this task, this moment: This was something he could do for her.
    They parked a couple of blocks off the town square, because the police had already sealed off one of the streets. Together Asa and Verlaine ran toward the Guardian offices, leaving umbrellas and raincoats behind; they were about to get so wet a few raindrops couldn’t make any difference. Although the puddles on either side of the streets were so wide they nearly met in the middle, the square itself didn’t seem to be flooded. Waterlogged, sure—but not flooded.
    As soon as Verlaine unlocked the front door of the Guardian , she cried out in dismay. The entire front half of the main room was about three inches deep in water that had flowed in from the street.
    “We move the archives to the higher shelves?” Asa said, getting ready to do some heavy lifting.
    Verlaine shook her head. “First we have to get everything we can out of the basement.”
    “This place has a basement?”
    “It’s little, and it’s old, and most of the records there are more recent, but if there’s this much water up here, how bad must it be down there?” She ran toward the back, her Converse sloshing through deeper water, and opened a door. “Oh, no!”
    Asa went to her, or tried to; already Verlaine’s footsteps were thumping down metal stairs. He got to the doorway to see her almost to the bottom of a spiral staircase, which led to a basement room that had to be at least a foot deep in water.
    Only one bare bulb in the stairwell burned, dimly illuminating the scene below. Verlaine sloshed down into the water, the skirt of her red-and-white dress darkening as it got splashed. Around her, various file cabinets stood, swaying slightly in the current. One of them had already tipped against the wall. What worried Asa the most was that water continued flowing into the room. The level of flooding was going to rise, and quickly.
    Verlaine remained undaunted. “Come carry some files!” she shouted up at him. “The ones in the lower drawers—it’s too late already—but we can get a lot of the rest out if we work fast.”
    Asa felt the straps holding him back again—putting his mortal life