Edmund grabs his wrist. "What are you doing? Lake's going to be fine, mals avoid him, they don't avoid us. We're behind shields. Stay behind the shields. Protect me if you must."

"Fuck you. Come with me and I'll protect you but I'm not staying behind the shields like some kind of fucking damsel. Come along or don't."

He wrenches his arm free and storms away into the stacks.

Lacking options, Edmund guesses he will follow! Naked!

When they go around the corner Scorpius is there ahead of them!

...........rather farther ahead than he should by rights be. Unless he sprinted while they weren't looking then slowed down. And unless, uh, the stacks got stretched longer than they usually are. Which they... probably did actually.

Lex continues storming ahead. He can't run, not without his boots - he's not an idiot. He has to keep an eye on the floor. Which gives the shelves plenty of time to stretch. Which gives Scorpius plenty of time to get farther and farther away, because this fucking place hates him.

They can all hear what Scorpius was hearing, now. Faint screams. Great.

Lex snaps at Edmund, "Keep your eyes on the shelves."

"I'm barefoot. I'm keeping an eye on the floor."

"I'm already doing that, you twit, keep an eye on the shelves so they can't keep us walking through the stacks forever!"

"Fuck. Fine but if my feet get digested I'm blaming you."

Edmund stares at the shelves, not paying enough attention to the words on the spines to read anything but recording the look of each section in his mind so he can tell that they're walking past new shelves every time. Which they almost certainly weren't a few seconds ago. Lex was right again, dammit.

The school is definitely trying to stall. For some reason. Scorpius is out of sight now, and while some of the shrieks involve the fact that he's barging into the main library reading room naked, most of them are about whatever's attacking kids there.

Right there. In plain view. In the library. This shouldn't happen. The library is meant to be safe, or at least safer than this, not just because of numbers but because it has no ceiling and because of the open space and good illumination and plain old because people believe it should be safer. Less safe in the stacks, where the floating lights get darker if you're not paying attention until they wink out and you're forced to spend your own mana to light the way and by then who knows where you are.

Less safe in the stacks, where... even as Edmund is looking, even as they are in fact walking past new shelves every time, these new shelves are probably shelves that weren't there when they came this way last. There is more space between books that used to be right next to each other, the Scholomance grabbing books out of the Void to fill in that space. Flashes of red and violet light appear at the distant end of the aisle—Scorpius has probably joined the fray—and the school is still fetching more and more books, in the dark, when they're not looking, to try to keep Lex and Edmund away.

"- Lex we need to swap places. I don't know this section and we need someone who knows what's supposed to be here. I can take a digester if I have to."

Lex lets Edmund slip past him and starts counting spines. "Fuck you, that's never been here before - you can't fool me you son of a bitch - god, the labels on these are ancient, the school's pulling shit out of absolutely - hello?"

Lex actually stops walking for half a second.

Edmund reaches behind and grabs his hand. "We are not getting separated."

"No, it's -"

Lex takes Edmund's hand and points at one of the books that just appeared.

It's—gold. Probably gold? Gilded. A thin volume, almost entirely hidden between two heaped stacks of palm-leaf manuscripts, on a high shelf.

No label at all.

No label at all, which means it's been freshly pulled from the Void, never having been seen in these shelves before. A book that had probably wandered off only a decade after being copied and only just now deigned to exist again.

Edmund snatches it off the shelf and holds it close. "Now move," he says. "We're not treasure-hunting."

They move.

The aisle does start to move somewhat quicker, after that. The school probably doesn't want to hand them any more prizes like that, they're costly, but it can't literally create books out of thin air so it has to find something. It seems to have decided that whatever the reason it had to keep the two away from the main fight is not worth keeping them here where they might find more treasures.

They move, and despite the darkened aisle they are now close enough that they can properly see the distance to the main incantations aisle. And the screams are louder, too, and other noises can be heard: a high-pitched birdlike shrill, and a lower snarl, and a sound like wind through leaves that can only have come out of a manifestation-class mal. And that's when they can hear Scorpius call, "Tebow, put down a slickshield!" which is only useful against ooze-class mals, who by and large make no sound at all. That makes at least four mals in the library, all at once.

"It's a fucking graduation party."

Edmund turns just as a flash of red illuminates the aisle. He stops.

"Lex."

Lex does not like that tone of voice. "What."

"Turn around."

Lex turns around.

Somehow, he already knows what he's going to see.

The only thing worse than everything else.

The library air vents are in the aisles, set in the floor. They catch the light when you're walking, even the faint light from distant spell lights.

There isn't one behind them. Not a visible one. Not the faint sound of the wind passing through it, the tinny echo from the vents that pretended they made physical sense to provide students with the feeling that they should have air. The aisle lights there are out completely, but the flashes from the fight should show it.

They don't.

What they show instead is the only thing worse than everything else. Half a dozen human eyes watching both of them, spread over the translucent slime that was just slipping its way out of the vent. The eyes shift and rotate in place, lazily, tracking Lex and Edmund at the same time, seeing and unseeing. And the mouths, so many mouths opening and closing. Some gasping for air, some panting, some still locked in an eternal unheard scream, whatever passes for the vocal cords of the people this creature has eaten long since rotted away.

"Lex. We have to run."

Lex doesn't respond.