The Last Dragon Chronicles: Fire World: Fire World Read Online Free Page B

no sense whatsoever of climbing.
    “Fed up yet?”
    He whipped round. There she was. Leaning against a doorway, grinning.
    “I thought I’d be kind,” she said, looking at her fingernails. “It takes for ever if you don’t know what you’re doing.

    The   librarium  is   kind  of… spatiallyarranged. I’ll teach you if you’re going tobe here for a while. Did you find abathroom?”
    David shook his head.
    “Clothing closet?” she asked a little hopefully, clearly not happy with the trousers, shirt and tie he was wearing.
    “Just books,” David said. “Hundreds of them.”
    “Two million, four hundred and eightytwo thousand and sixty-three to be precise.” She grinned like a katt.
    David nodded. It was a tall, tall building. “What do you do here?”
    “Store books,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my job to put them in order. I’ll show you.” She stepped into the room, picked up a book from a heap on the floor and

    examined its spine. “We do them by author. Duncan,” she read out. “This can go before… ” she scanned the shelves, “… Essinger.” She reached up on tiptoes and attempted to push the book into a space too small for it. So she created a space instead. “This Ringrose shouldn’t be here,” she said, and pulled the book before the Essinger out of its slot, replacing it with her Duncan. The Ringrose she simply dropped onto the floor. “I’ll do that one another time. I wonder if Mr Henry is going to ask you to order them, too. You do know your alph, don’t you?” And circling David with her hands behind her back she chanted, “A B C D E F—”
    “G,” David said.
    He looked up and saw the firebird prick

    its ears. Along its iridescent neck, several of its feathers shimmered blood-red and
    orange.
    Rosa came to a halt in front of David.
    Her pupils dilated as she tilted her headand looked into his eyes. “Why were yousent here?”
    “To have an adventure,” David said, desperately wanting to add, in thought,   You heard what my father said outside   . But he obeyed the librarium rules and felt that the building had warmed to him because of it.
    None of this was lost on Rosa. “You
    sense it, don’t you?” A hint of excitement glittered in her eyes. She looked to her right, drawing David’s attention to a shelf just above eye level, one of the few that still had a little space on it. Its books had

    tilted sideways. Only one, at the open end, was standing upright and free. But only for a moment. David saw it wobble, then lean and fall against the book beside it. Nothing had touched it, and he had certainly not imagineered it, and there was not enough wind in the room to cause it. “How… ?” he asked. But by then Rosa had switched her gaze again, beyond him, to the open window.
    “Hhh!” she gasped. “Rain!”
    She was there in two secs. Her feet picked out the spaces between the books so fast that she crossed the floor like a
    ghost.
    “Come and look!” she beckoned him, bouncing on her toes.
    David joined her. They were at least twelve floors up, looking west of the

    taxicar route but still seeing nothing more than green grass and daisies. A rainbow was arcing through the cloudy sky.
    “They love this,” she said.
    “The flowers?”
    “Mmm.”
    And though it was hard to tell from this height, David thought he could sense them stretching their stems and widening their petals. Their colours had changed. From yellow to pink, from white to pale blue. Here and there, orange. He put his hand through the window and turned it, enjoying the caress of the raindrops on his skin. “The rain brings everything together,” she whispered.
    David glanced at her, not sure what she meant. “What made the book fall over?”
    he asked.

    She turned to him and placed her handon his heart. As the wetness seeped intohis shirt she said, “Before we had fain,before we were able to imagineer, webuilt