Editing City Series:Volume6e Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

When she raised her head, Hazel found herself seated in a chair. It was the kind of wooden chair she had used at school. It was damaged in places, but someone had tried to disguise that with varnish.

She looked down at herself in the chair and found she wasn’t wearing anything.

She looked around for something to wear and noticed a white tablecloth on the large square table in front of her.

“Umm.”

She held a hand to her mouth in thought, but ultimately decided to remove the tablecloth.

She wrapped it around herself and tied it above her chest.

She made sure the knot was good and tight, nodded in satisfaction, and took another look around.

This was a large room filled with the midday sun. Several full bookcases were lined up on the floor.

This was Berlin’s central library. She had fought there one night a month before, but…

“I used to come here with my friends a lot in middle school. …Oh?”

She could no longer see the chair and table from before. They had vanished.

She also heard countless sounds of flipping pages.

The dry sounds would not stop and they sent a tremor through her.

All of a sudden, there was a flood of people around her.

She looked behind her in shock and saw children and adults – men and women – standing in front of the bookcases and reading the books.

Their sudden appearance made her press her back against the nearest bookcase and hide herself.

But they didn’t move from the bookcases or even look her way.

They simply stood there reading their books.

They would pull a book from a shelf, open it, flip through the pages, close it, and return it to the shelf. Then they would pull out a book again.

“It’s always the same book as before.”

They repeated the same thing over and over, rereading the same book each time.

She commented on the endless sound of their constant rereading.

“These are the messages forming Berger’s Lives.”

She stared at them and then narrowed her eyes.

“None of the people inside him are old.”

She smiled with just her mouth at that, but then she found herself somewhere else again.

Now she saw the library counter in front of her.

A woman stood behind it. Hazel recognized her. She looked a little weird since she was younger than when Hazel had seen her, but she spoke the woman’s name to get past that weirdness.

“Eryngium.”

Eryngium wore work clothing and she simply narrowed her eyes in a smile behind the counter.

A large writing desk sat behind her. A few dictionaries and a pile of letters and other papers covered in writing sat on the desk.

The desk’s side table carried a half-eaten sandwich and a cup of coffee with no steam rising from it.

Further back, Hazel saw a desk with a large vise-like device attached. A wooden frame sat on that desk and the floor around it was littered with scraps of black and brown leather. It appeared to be a bookbinder’s desk, but no one sat there currently.

…''Where did they go?

She kept that question inside and looked to Eryngium again.

The young, slender woman gave her a smiling look and said nothing.

Hazel noticed her collar was open.

She saw two colors on the exposed skin there.

The first was a scar running from her chest to her throat. As a sword-user, Hazel immediately recognized it as a blade scar, so she must have suffered a wound that left an inch-wide scar on her throat.

…''That could have easily killed her!

Her eyes widened and she noticed the other color next to the scar.

Text was written on Eryngium’s skin in black ink. A lot of text.

Hazel gasped and looked up to find Eryngium meeting her gaze.