When Worlds Collide

Miriam Osei had been a librarian for twenty-two years, and in that time she had developed an instinct for when a book was in the wrong place. Not mishelved — that happened daily and was merely annoying. Wrong in a deeper sense, as though the book itself knew it did not belong and was radiating a faint distress signal that only someone who had spent two decades listening to the silence between pages could detect. On the morning the boundaries broke, every book in the Westfield Public Library was in the wrong place.

She noticed it when she opened the doors at nine. The mystery section had migrated overnight to where science fiction should have been. The romance novels had rearranged themselves by emotional intensity rather than author surname. And in the children's section, a book she had never cataloged sat prominently on the display table, its cover showing a knight in armor standing on the bridge of a spaceship, which was wrong in at least two genres simultaneously.

She opened it. The first page read: "This is not a story. This is a warning. The walls between narratives are failing, and what leaks through from one story to another will not be content to stay on the page." As Miriam read, the temperature in the library dropped, the fluorescent lights flickered, and from the biography section came a sound that should not have been possible — the clash of swords, followed bysomeone shouting in a language that belonged in the fantasy section, three aisles over and, until this morning, in an entirely different reality.