“You believe this machine really exists?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t matter—they believe it.” He shuddered. “And whether it exists or not, they’re crazy. They attacked the Hoff. They killed Chris. And they …”
“What?” Eli said. “They stole your lunch money? They gave you a wedgie? What makes you so special that they just left you alone?”
“They didn’t,” Max said, so softly that only I could hear him. He dropped his head. “They were waiting for me when I got to Chris’s house. Three of them. Chris was already—” He swallowed hard. “Adriane, you were there, too, but … blank. You didn’t answer me. It was like you didn’t even see me. They were arguing with each other, about Chris. They weren’t supposed to kill him, at least not before they got what they wanted—someone messed up. And when they saw me … I ran.”
“You left her there,” I said. “Alone and helpless. With a house full of psycho killers.”
“I didn’t think,” he said. “I just ran. But they caught up with me.”
“Maybe that’s why they left me alive,” Adriane said slowly. She was pale, but calm. “They might have stuck around and killed me if you hadn’t run. Maybe that saved us both.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Eli said.
“They knocked me out,” Max said. “When I woke up, I was in Prague—not that I knew it. They kept me in a basement.” He glared at Eli. “I wasn’t special. They needed one of us alive so they could get what they needed.”
I put my hand on his back, but he stiffened, and I took it away. “What did they need?” I asked, gently as I could.
“Some kind of map,” he said. “The key to where the pieces of the Lumen Dei are hidden. They were convinced Chris was hiding it somewhere. I have no idea why. I tried to tell them I didn’t know anything, I kept telling them and telling them, but they wouldn’t believe me. And then it occurred to me that if they did believe me … they wouldn’t need me at all anymore.”
“Then, let me guess: They miraculously came to their senses and let you go,” Eli said.
“I escaped,” Max said.
“You.” Eli looked him up and down. “Fought off a bunch of zealots with butcher knives.”
Max was a couple inches taller than Eli, but what he had in height he lacked in bulk. Never date a guy who can fit into your jeans, Adriane often warned me—failing to mention that it was because I might someday need him to save me from a secret society of murdering Renaissance Faire rejects. Max had always been thin, but he’d never been weak. And though he was now thinner than ever, he had never looked stronger.
“Yeah. Me.”
Eli looked away first.
There was something different about Max. Something harder, in his voice, and in his eyes. I wanted to believe it would fade away now that he was safe—now that it was over. But I knew that wasn’t how it worked.
And I knew it wasn’t over.
I let the boys argue about the logistics of Max’s escape: Eli trying to pick holes in the story; Max trying, I could tell by the tension in his facial muscles, not to lunge across the room and knock Eli through the rickety door. It got heated, and then it got petty, and I relished it because when they stopped, there would be no more excuses not to say it, the thing that I had tried so hard not to know.
But eventually my final excuse ran out. So I said it; I made it real.
“I think I have the map.”
16
Winters know the shadows in that word.
Unless the dark law too should seek the thief
And the good law obtain your city
For those outside the word.
Throughout our epoch, He that is below
Ignorantly deserves an abject prayer
O my guardian spirit
O when the unmixed nectar of the faithless lives with you.
My law is a tepid standard
Thus I surrendered the hound to the dark
Revive your soul at my house
The sun will foretell all things in this way.
It was the part of Elizabeth’s letter that had never made any sense, and so I’d ignored it. As I’d ignored the line just above it:
Three by three is where you’ll find me.
Nonsense words, paired with a number. Like Max’s coded postcard—like a stegotext. It would explain why the Hledači had come after Chris and the Hoff, why they had taken Max, why they were so convinced we all knew something that none of us knew.
I showed them the letter.
Adriane recoiled. “Is that blood? And you’ve been carrying that around with you all this time? Tell me that’s not Chris’s—” But she could see on my face that it was, and backed away.
“You told me you gave this to Chris,” Max said. “That he was going to return it for you.”
“I did. He was. But when I found him—” I couldn’t tell Adriane the truth, that it had been her stiff fingers wrapped around the parchment, that it had been Chris’s last bequest to her I’d taken for my own. “He had it in his hand.”
“Someone want to fill me in?” Adriane said. “Why would Chris have this? Why would you?”
As I explained, she went very still.
“So you decided to take it?” Adriane said when I reached the night of the murder. “Because stealing it worked so well for you the first time around? Brilliant.”
“I imagine she wasn’t thinking very clearly,” Eli said. “And it doesn’t sound like you were much help.”
“Leave her alone,” I told him. No more excuses. “She’s right. This is my fault. What happened to Chris. If I hadn’t taken the letter. If I hadn’t given it to him. I did this.”
“No. They did this,” Max said quickly.
“You couldn’t have known,” Eli said.
“This is not your fault,” Max said.
“You didn’t ask for this,” Eli said.
“We don’t even know if you’re right,” Max said.
“You weren’t the one holding the knife,” Eli said.
Adriane said nothing.
But I could tell from her face. She finally got it. That we weren’t crazy. That the past was relevant to our present. That the Hledači and the Lumen Dei and Chris were all tied together, somehow. That it was all because of me.
That I was to blame.
“We can’t change what happened,” Max said. “But if this is really the map the Hledači are looking for, it means we can beat them. If we could find the Lumen Dei ourselves, before they do, we’ll have leverage—we can force them to clear my name and leave us all alone.”
Eli snorted. “Right, or instead of negotiating with potentially imaginary killers, we could get the hell out of the country and go to the cops.”
“Like anyone would believe this—especially coming from me,” Max said.
Eli smirked. “But it all sounds so convincing.”
“Eli’s right,” I said. I didn’t look at Max; it felt too much like a betrayal. “This is too big. We came here to find you, Max. And you’re here, you’re safe—we have to get out before anything else happens.”
“You mean like angry guys in hoods trying to slit our throats and throw us into a river?” Adriane said. “I think the anything-else ship has sailed. What’s next, ninjas?”
“Not if we leave first,” I said.
“You mean if we run away,” she said. “From what you started.”
“Adriane—”
“If we go to the cops and they don’t believe us, they throw Max in jail, what then? What happens when these guys come back for more?”
“We can’t go back,” Max said. “None of us can.”
“You don’t get to decide that by yourself,” I told him. But Chris’s killers were still out there. Even if we could go back and somehow be sure they wouldn’t follow … then what? They washed off the blood and lived happily ever after, while we went home and tried not to fall into the gaping hole they’d left in our lives.
“You don’t kno
w everything,” Max said. “Not yet.”
“Everything” apparently had to be shown instead of told, and he trooped us down to the dusty nineties-era computer in the lobby that offered molasses-speed Internet access to guests. Max typed our names into the search field, and then we all waited an eternity for the page to load.
The top result was a newspaper article.
The top ten results were all newspaper articles.
GIRLS GONE WILD,
GONE MISSING
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KIDS TODAY?
KILLER CHICKS FLY COOP
I clicked on the most boring one.
MURDER SUSPECTS FLEE
COUNTRY
Chapman, Mass.—Two teenagers wanted for the murder of a close friend have disappeared while on a school trip to Paris. Nora Kane and Adriane Ames, Chapman Preparatory School seniors who police say conspired with Max Lewis to murder 18-year-old Christopher Moore, were last seen on a school trip to Paris. It is believed that within hours of arriving in France, they slipped away from chaperones and crossed the border to Germany.
Local police originally concluded that Lewis (possibly an alias) acted alone in last month’s brutal murder, but according to departmental sources, new evidence has come to light that implicates Kane and Ames in the crime. Lewis has not been seen since the night of the murder, and it is now suspected that the three are together. Warrants have been issued for their arrest, and local authorities are coordinating with Interpol to track them down.
Parents of both girls will say only that they are concerned for their daughters’ welfare and pray for their safety. On the subject of their daughters’ involvement in Moore’s death, they had no comment.
I read it over and over again, the sentences losing coherence and melting into a jumble of letters, like a word you keep repeating until it becomes nothing but a string of nonsense syllables.
Warrants have been issued for their arrest. Coordinating with Interpol. Brutal murder.
Words that couldn’t mean what they meant, that couldn’t possibly pertain to my life.
And yet. New evidence had indeed come to light that implicated me in the crime. I had it in my pocket. Max could reassure me all he wanted, but I knew what I knew.
“I have to talk to my parents,” I said.
Max grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand gently away from the keyboard. I let him move for me; I was frozen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s them. The Hledači. They framed you, just like they framed me. They’re playing us.”
“ ‘No comment’?” Adriane grabbed the mouse and started scanning the other articles. “They couldn’t even be bothered to defend me? Probably just bitter I screwed up their vacation. I bet that ‘no comment’ came from poolside.”
“You see why we can’t go back,” Max said. “They’d pick us up the second we stepped into an airport.”
“I have to talk to my parents,” I said again.
“We can fix this,” Max told me. “Now that we have the map. We have something they want. We can use it.”
Eli pressed a cell phone into my hand. “It works in Europe,” he said. “But they’ll probably try to trace it. Talk fast.”
I offered the phone to Adriane, who shook her head. “I’ve got no comment for them, either.” If you didn’t know her, hadn’t seen her bowing and scraping to her parents—the only people who could make her swallow hard and say yes to anything—if you didn’t notice her fingers, clenching and flexing and clenching again, you could almost believe that she didn’t care.
I crossed the lobby, nestled myself into a corner with my face nearly pressed to the wall, and dialed the familiar number.
“I’m sorry,” I said when my mother picked up the phone.
“Nora? Where are you? What happened?”
“I didn’t mean to worry you.”
She screamed for my father, then kept asking me where I was, if I was safe, what was going on, too many questions for me to answer. When the line clicked with my father picking up his receiver, she fell silent.
For a moment, we were all silent.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“We’re your parents,” my mother said. “Whatever you’ve done, we forgive you. We can deal with this. But you have to come home.”
I didn’t answer.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “Not again.”
There was another click, and then my father and I were alone. I leaned into the wall and touched my forehead to the cool stone.
“Te diligo,” my father said.
I love you. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d said it. There was something about saying things in a language that wasn’t your own, something that eased hard words out of your mouth. Because in a way, they didn’t seem as real. They didn’t count.
And meanwhile, my mother thought I’d done something unforgivable she needed to forgive.
I hung up.
17
In the dark.
In his arms.
The drip of the sink.
The patter of the rain.
The smell of him, fresh and earthy.
The heat of his skin, the whisper of his breathing, the thump of his heart.
His arm thrown over my chest, our fingers twined.
His body molded around mine.
In his bed.
In his shadow.
I slept.
18
I woke up in the dark, confused, for a moment, about where I was and why. The dim red digits of the ancient clock blinked accusingly: 3:47. I was alone in bed.
He was just a silhouette in the dark room, hunched over my bag. The contents rustled as he picked through them.
“Max?”
He turned.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
I sat up and flicked on a light, squinting against the sudden brightness. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m up. What is it?”
“I was hoping you had some aspirin,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“It’s okay. But I don’t have any.”
He came back to bed and turned out the light. My eyes had adjusted to it, and now the night seemed pitch black. “Lie down,” he whispered. “Sleep.”
I lay down beside him. This time I curled my body around his, and rubbed my hand up and down his arm and back. The rooms were cheap enough that Eli and Adriane had each taken one of their own, leaving us to each other. Adriane hadn’t said much before retreating to her room, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. But when I asked if she wanted to go home, she shook her head. “Not without you,” she’d said, careful to keep her gaze on Max or the floor, anywhere but on me. “Not until we finish this.” I heard: Not until we finish what you started.
“Headache?” I asked Max, and kissed the back of his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said softly.
“What doesn’t matter?”
“They were good.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “They knew how not to break anything. How not to cause permanent damage, unless they wanted to. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
“The Hledači?” Saying the strange word aloud, in the dark, felt dangerous, like a summoning spell.
“It’s worse when I try to sleep,” he said. “Aspirin helps.”
I buried my face in his neck. “What did they do to you?”
He rolled away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.” He sat up, then climbed out of bed. “I need to get out of here. Take a walk or something.”
“I’ll come with you.”
He shook his head.
“It’s four a.m.,” I said.
“Which is why you should go back to sleep.”
“And you should, too. What if—?” We’d just been attacked by a troupe of masked avengers, and apparently a crazed and murderous secret society
was trying to hunt us down—did I really need to spell out the reasons that wandering around, alone, in the middle of the night wasn’t the best of ideas?
He pressed his hand to my forehead, like he was checking for fever. “I won’t even go outside, okay? I’ll go pace the lobby or something. I’m no safer up here than I would be down there—if they know where to find us, it’s over no matter what.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
He kissed me, lightly, then pulled on a sweatshirt. “I just need to wear myself out a little. Get out of my own head. Then I’ll come back to bed.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
So I let him go. But I couldn’t sleep without him. Especially not with all the added fuel for my nightmares, images of Max in a basement, hooded figures gathering around him, wielding knives, fists, whatever it was people who knew exactly what they were doing did when they wanted to hurt you without leaving a mark.
No permanent damage.
We’d had a fight, right before we fell asleep. Lying there in his arms, I’d told him everything that had happened to me, starting from that frozen moment in Chris’s house, kneeling by Chris’s body. But when it came his turn to pick up the story—to go back to that night and everything that came after, he had nothing.
“It’s not important,” he’d said. “We’re together now, that’s all that matters.”
We both knew it wasn’t. But maybe the question was too big, the answer too hard. So I started smaller. I asked him about the letter I’d found in his room, the one that named the enemy. Hledači.
I felt him shrug. That wasn’t important, either, he said. Just something he’d found, something interesting he was planning to show to the Hoff. Not a big deal; not relevant.
“That’s because you don’t read Czech,” I told him. “Eli translated it for me—”
“You showed it to him?”
“What’s the difference? You said it was nothing.”