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walls of the tunnel behind the bookcase in Oliver and Celia’s apartment. The edges of the parchment were black where the fire had touched them.
    â€œI believe this is a piece of—”
    â€œThe Lost Tablets of Alexandria!” Dr. Navel interrupted, gasping, and no longer looking at his children. Suddenly, the room went silent and all heads turned toward him. “From the Lost Library itself.”
    â€œAnd there’s another thing,” said Choden Thordup, turning the document over to reveal the back. It was covered in small, neat letters, written in light blue ink.
    When he saw it, Dr. Navel gasped and dropped his sherry glass to the floor, where it shattered.

6
    WE WITNESS A WAGER

    DR. NAVEL TOOK the plastic folder from the mountain climber and studied it carefully, as the whole room got quiet.
    â€œThis is my wife’s handwriting,” he said. Oliver and Celia looked at each other, stunned. For a second, they forgot all about the plot to destroy their father.
    â€œI do not know the language on the paper,” explained Choden Thordup. “But the image at the top of the page is clearly the seal of Alexander the Great. Your wife, thankfully, wrote in English on the back.”
    â€œMom?” Oliver mouthed at Celia, who just shook her head with confusion. They had both seen their father get excited about clues before. He’d dragged them all over the world looking for their mother, and it never led to anything but long flights, animal attacks, missed television, lizard bites and disappointment. Celia just couldn’t get too excited about some old piece of paper. And Oliver got his hopes up way too easily. Sometimes Celia felt like she was three years older than her brother, rather than three minutes and forty-two seconds.
    â€œThe language is ancient Greek,” Dr. Navel pointed out, and Celia managed to see strange letters and weird symbols curling around each other.
    For years, she’d heard her father say the phrase “it’s all Greek to me” when he didn’t understand something, and now she knew what he meant. The symbols didn’t look like any letters Celia knew. She couldn’t understand them at all.
    â€œâ€˜Mega biblion, mega kakon,’” Dr. Navel read out loud.
    Ancient Greek, we should note, wasn’t “all Greek” to Dr. Navel. He understood it perfectly, as any decent explorer would.
    â€œBig books, big evil!” said Dr. Navel. “A statement by the famous Callimachus.”
    â€œWho is Callimachus?” Oliver asked, and his sister glared at him. Her brother was already distracted from the point of coming to the ceremony—to warn their father and to get cable.
    â€œHe was a scholar at the Library of Alexandria,” Dr. Navel said. “He invented the first classification system in the world. He organized all the knowledge in the library—which was written on these tablets. The Lost Tablets are the catalog of the Great Library—a complete account of all its wonders. They were created back before the library was lost.”
    â€œThat doesn’t look like a tablet,” Oliver said.
    â€œWell, they called them tablets,” Dr. Navel answered, “but they really used parchment to write them. It wouldn’t have been practical to carve new tablets for every book and scroll. The library was far too big. It held all the knowledge in the world.”
    â€œUgh,” Celia groaned. “We have to hear about librarians now? This is worse than school! Worse than afternoon public television! Dad, we have to warn you about—”
    â€œCallimachus had a feud with the other scholars in Alexandria,” Dr. Navel continued, thinking out loud and not hearing a word his daughter was trying to say. “Some said he was part of a secret society that was trying to take over the library and seal it off from the world, but no proof has ever been found.”
    â€œWhy was he a