Livira and her team enter the immense, light-soaked stacks and confront aisles of indexes. Arpix explains that the library’s power and independence rest on control of its evolving catalogues; each head librarian alters the system, leaving layers of conflicting codes and an uncatalogued frontier only the head librarian can navigate.

They narrow their search for Reflections on Solitude by language (Relquian), likely subject (poetry/philosophy), and author (Arqnaxis Lox), while Meelan maps indexes. Discussion reveals that only one copy of any book exists, that assistants can confirm existence but rarely help, and that old mechanical “helpers” and past guardians are dangerous and unreliable.

Arpix forbids wandering, citing trainees who’ve died of thirst, and stations himself to block Livira. After an hour of enforced indexing, Livira’s impatience boils over. She climbs a ladder, lies about seeing the target book, and escapes onto the shelf-tops, crawling away from the others through a vertigo-inducing expanse.

Finding a ladder across a six-foot gap, Livira commits to a jump, slams into the rungs, and bloodies her nose but manages a careful descent. She places a book as a breadcrumb, chooses a direction, and heads deeper alone—accepting the danger and potential expulsion over the futility of the index maze.