I wouldn’t encounter the Saboteurs again until nearly four centuries later. I had taken Anne-Marie down to the library, for I had hidden my book in a dusty corner where I knew no one looked. I handed it to her, and she began reading it immediately. Within minutes, the lights went out, and the same feeling I had had when I first encountered the Saboteurs returned. Anne-Marie flicked on a flashlight, and I saw a dark fleeting mist approach us. Images of the swirling shadows, the damp cave, and the World of the Damned flashed through my mind, and before Anne-Marie saw the black shadows herself, I grabbed her hand and raced up the thirteen flights of stairs. I didn’t answer her questions, nor give myself time to think, about why or how the Saboteurs had suddenly reappeared. I held Anne-Marie’s arm tightly as she clutched my book under her other arm and continued to run, even as pockets of blackness hit our faces, obscuring our view every other step. I swung my arm at them and shouted, but I never let go of Anne-Marie.
We made it out of the library and crossed through the main atrium of Stauros Hall. Only when we arrived in the courtyard did we stop to rest.
I had escorted her back to Mizu that very morning, but when I went to see her the following evening, she wasn’t there. By the next day, the school officials had declared that she was missing. Had she gone back to the library? She wasn’t so stupid.
A thousand possibilities raced through my mind, the same ones too many times. In the following years, when I worried that I might lose my mind thinking about what had happened to Anne-Marie, I forced myself to turn away from the time I lost her and to the moment when she had come into my world. Over and over, I relived the night I first met her.