Story code: ST-000158
Part 2: Trojan Horses
The thick stack of printed logs hovered just inches from Evelyn’s nose. The blinding neon yellow highlighter bled through the cheap printer paper, illuminating her personal employee identification number-*EV-409*-repeated in a perfectly vertical column. Next to her ID were the timestamps. Tuesday at 10:14 PM. Thursday at 11:30 PM. Tonight at 9:45 PM. Beside those were the library catalog codes for *The Grapes of Wrath*, *A Farewell to Arms*, and *Pride and Prejudice*.
Evelyn pressed her spine so hard against the mahogany bookshelf that the wooden edge dug painfully into her shoulder blades. She couldn’t look away from the papers.
“Three weeks,” Marcus said, his voice a low, vibrating hum that seemed to rattle the metal shelves beside them. “Three weeks of unauthorized access to the archives after hours. Did you really think the system wouldn’t flag a librarian repeatedly pulling hundreds of dusty, completely unread classics from the deepest stacks?”
Evelyn opened her mouth, but her throat was completely dry. Her right hand remained jammed inside the pocket of her knit cardigan, her sweat-slicked fingers desperately clutching the half-empty sheet of stickers.
Marcus didn’t wait for an answer. He reached out with his free hand and snatched *The Great Gatsby* right out of her rigid grip. Evelyn flinched as the rough cloth cover scraped against her knuckles. Marcus tossed the heavy stack of printed logs onto the top of her rolling cart, dismissing the evidence now that he had the physical object in his possession.
He held the Fitzgerald novel up to the harsh fluorescent lights, inspecting the spine, the cover, and the edges of the pages. “What are you doing to them, Evelyn?” he murmured, his tone shifting from bureaucratic annoyance to a cold, predatory curiosity. “Are you defacing school property? Writing little manifestos in the margins?”
He grabbed the front cover and yanked it open. The dry, aged glue of the binding gave a sickening *crack* that echoed down the empty aisle. He flipped past the endpapers, his manicured thumb sliding over the title page. He stopped.
Evelyn stopped breathing. She watched Marcus’s eyes narrow behind his polished rectangular glasses. He traced his index finger over the small, glossy square she had just adhered to the paper.
“A QR code?” Marcus whispered, his brow furrowing in deep confusion. He looked at the sticker, then back up at Evelyn, his gaze heavy with suspicion. “Placed exactly where a student’s eye goes when they open the book.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his tailored suit jacket and withdrew a sleek, silver smartphone. He unlocked it with his thumb and swiped directly to the camera app. The faint, high-pitched chime of the scanner locking onto the code cut through the heavy silence of the library.
Evelyn watched the harsh blue glow of the phone screen reflect in Marcus’s glasses. A progress bar flashed for a fraction of a second, followed immediately by the bright, unmistakable cover art of *The Bluest Eye*.
Marcus stared at his screen. He tapped the display once, scrolling down. Evelyn knew exactly what he was seeing. A fully readable, downloadable PDF of the novel the school board had voted to ban just last month, hosted on an untraceable offshore server.
Slowly, Marcus lifted his head. The color had completely drained from his face, replaced by a mottled, furious red creeping up his neck. The realization hit him, visible in the sudden, violent tightening of his jaw. He hadn’t just been opposed at the board meetings; he had been completely bypassed.
“You’re linking them,” he said, his voice barely more than a jagged whisper. He looked over at the metal cart, staring at the stack of *Moby Dick* and *A Tale of Two Cities*. “The board mandates a strict, traditional curriculum. We force the students to check out these approved, sanitized classics… and you’ve turned them into distribution hubs. You made Trojan horses out of Hemingway and Melville.”
Evelyn’s pulse roared in her ears. She looked toward the end of the aisle, calculating the distance to the emergency exit, but Marcus immediately stepped sideways, completely blocking her path with his broad shoulders.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Marcus hissed, stepping so close that the sharp, spicy scent of his cologne was suffocating. “This isn’t just insubordination, Evelyn. This is the distribution of restricted and highly inappropriate materials to minors using district property. That is a felony.”
“They’re just books, Marcus,” Evelyn finally choked out, her voice trembling despite her best efforts to keep it steady.
“They are contraband!” he snapped, slamming *The Great Gatsby* down onto the metal cart so hard the entire structure shook. “And I have the digital logs showing exactly how many you’ve pulled. Three hundred and forty-two books in the last month. Which means there are three hundred and forty-two of these little stickers hidden in this library.”
Marcus held out his open palm, his fingers twitching with rage. “Give me the rest of the sheet. The ones in your pocket. Right now.”
Evelyn pressed her arm tighter against her side, shaking her head.
Marcus let out a short, humorless laugh. He raised his phone, his thumb hovering over the keypad. “I am going to dial the police. I will have you arrested for destruction of school property and child endangerment. Your pension will be gone. Your career will be over. And then, I will personally petition the board to have the entire classic literature section incinerated to ensure we destroy every last one of your little codes.”
He took one final step forward, pinning her tightly into the corner of the shelves. “Unless,” he said, his voice dropping to a deadly, quiet register, “you hand over the stickers, give me the master list of exactly which books you’ve tagged, and walk down these aisles to peel off every single one of them tonight. You have exactly sixty seconds to decide before I make the call.”