Map of Fates (9 page)

I still couldn't believe she'd been spying on us for weeks. I nodded.

“I'd already been working on the other clues, trying to see angles you hadn't. When you got that clue, I thought of something. Do you remember when I told you about the idea of fate mapping, in the biological sense?”

I nodded. We'd talked about it while she was getting me ready
for the wedding to Luc. I'd assumed it was her way of cluing me in to the fact that she was helping me escape. “What does it mean again?”

We stopped to let a line of tourists pass on an intersecting wooden walkway. “A fate map is the developmental history of a cell. Which is important to
us
first because of the line in the mandate: ‘Their fates mapped together.'”

I glanced at Stellan.

“And second, because Olympias—”

From ahead of me, Stellan sighed.

“Who's Olympias?” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.

“Alexander the Great's mother,” Stellan answered. “Elodie could tell you an encyclopedia's worth of facts about her.”

“She's only one of the most fascinating women in history,” Elodie retorted. “People said she was a witch, but really she was just very advanced for her time, scientifically. She and Aristotle. They're the reason the Circle has purple eyes, you know. She linked them together genetically in a way that's unheard of even now.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Genetics have always been important to the Circle, from the start. And genetics have a lot to do with blood.”

I raised my eyebrows. Of course blood was important to the Circle.
Rule by blood.
I'd never really thought to consider, though, whether that meant blood as in violence, or blood as in bloodline. I assumed both. “So?”

“So, ‘a union forged in blood.' That doesn't sound like a social construct like marriage, does it?”

It didn't—that was what I'd been saying all along. Marriage as the end-all of the mandate didn't make sense. And Napoleon had written in his diary that
they're wrong about the mandate.
“What else do you think it might mean?”

“My prevailing theory,” Elodie dragged it out, like she was enjoying having an audience, “and one I know some of the Circle share, is that the union has nothing to do with the actual marriage, and more to do with what the marriage can produce. As in,” she said, turning to look over her shoulder at me, “a child.”

A strangled noise came from my throat. Stellan paused in the middle of a step, and I was careful to avert my eyes before he looked my direction. If I couldn't stop obsessing about having to marry him now, what would the idea that we were supposed to
make a baby
do?

I swallowed. “I thought you said you had ideas about our clues. Getting me pregnant wouldn't help us find the second bracelet, or the tomb.”

Elodie stubbed out her cigarette with her boot as we stepped off the wooden walkway at the other end of the Piazza San Marco. “You're right—a child likely has more to do with uniting two bloodlines than it does with Napoleon's quest. But you've also been looking for ways to
unlock
the bracelets, right? What I'm proposing is that maybe your clues, in addition to sending you on the hunt for the second bracelet, have to do with that, too. Like if a word related to blood, or DNA, or a child could be the password?”

I slipped the bracelet off my arm, rotating the rows of letters.
One step closer to unlocking the secret through a union forged in blood,
the clue had read. “How do you say blood in French?” I asked.

“
Sang,
” Jack answered. “Four letters.”

The password had five. The rest of the way to the museum, we listed off various words related to Elodie's theory. Baby. Child. Fate. Union. Most of them didn't have five-letter translations, and the few that did didn't work.

“It's a good idea, though,” Stellan admitted. “One we should look into more.”

“See?” Elodie said. “You're lucky I thought to watch your phone.”

Stellan snorted.

“For now,” Jack reminded us as we approached the entrance to the Museo Correr, in the Napoleonic Wing, “we still have a second bracelet to search for.”

The museum staff was already closing up and didn't want to let us in. Stellan leaned in close to the window and said something beseeching, and I was about to tell him his charms probably wouldn't work on the burly museum guard sitting there when he passed a handful of euros across the counter.
That
worked.

We hurried inside. “He's only giving us ten minutes, but there aren't many rooms here,” Stellan said. “Split up.”

Jack and Elodie took off in one direction, and Stellan and I took a room with gleaming marble floors and a soaring ceiling covered in frescoes. I walked through quickly, scanning the walls.

“Do you trust her now?” Stellan said from the other side of the room.

“I don't know if trust is the right word, but I'm willing to listen to her theories.” I skirted a painting of wood nymphs, then finished looking through the room. Nothing. I stopped, hands on my hips. “What if
La Serenissima
didn't even mean Venice?” I said, voicing the worry that had started to creep in even before we came out tonight. “We could be at a dead end.”

“Let's at least finish searching this place before we jump to any conclusions.”

We made our way into the next room. “What do we do if it's not here?” I said.

“We—” Stellan stopped, looking over my shoulder.

“What?”

He pointed. “The symbol from your necklace.”

I wheeled around. Sure enough, the symbol was carved into the wall above my head, and above it was a bas-relief of three women. Between them was an inscription in French.

I ran out into the next room and called for Jack and Elodie. We gathered around Stellan, who was standing, hands in his pockets, reading the inscription. Jack and Elodie joined him.

“Can someone please translate for the girl who doesn't speak French?” I asked.

“It says,
Where Alexander once sought counsel, the spirits of the priestesses guard one twin, but only through the union shall it open,
” Stellan said. “Yet another clue, leading somewhere else.”

“But it says ‘one twin,'” I said hopefully. “Maybe this one is actually pointing to the next bracelet.”

Elodie was staring at the carving with narrowed eyes. “‘Only through the union' . . . ,” she said to herself. “‘Union forged in blood.'” The three of us looked at her, but she just bit her lip and paced across the room, muttering to herself. “Fate mapping. Fates mapped together. Fates.” She looked up, her eyes wide. “
Fates.
”

I snapped a quick photo of the carving with my phone. “What about fates?”

“You said the clue in India was near a carving of the Moirai, right? The Greek Fates?” she said.

I nodded. I hadn't realized who the three women in the bas-relief were at first, but we'd seen it later while looking at the photo Jack had taken.

“And this one is, too.” Elodie smiled triumphantly. “The bracelet will be in a place that's important to Alexander that also has to do with the Greek Fates. This clue says ‘spirits of the priestesses.' It's obvious. It's at the world's most famous oracle—Delphi.”

“
H
ow are we going to convince the Saxons to let me go to Greece?” I said to Jack. We stopped under the portico surrounding the Piazza San Marco. A cheerful, brightly lit cafe called to us, the smell of the slabs of pizza in the window wafting through the open doors. “We can't wait until after all these visits are over. We have less than eight days left.” And when the visits were over, I'd be expected to choose someone.

“Tell them you need a break,” Elodie said. “Tell them you're going to a resort. Colette's there right now, on her yacht. We can stay with her.”

Colette LeGrand. She was a Dauphin cousin and also one of the world's most famous actresses. It was her boyfriend, Liam, who had been one of the Order's first victims.

“I don't think telling them I'm going to a resort will work,” I said.

Elodie wrinkled her nose. “You're not thinking of telling them the
truth,
are you?”

I looked at Jack. “We haven't exactly told them everything.”

“Because you'd give it all to the Order in exchange for your
mother.” Elodie leaned against one of the arches, surveying the square. The tourist traffic had thinned out for the night, so it was even easier to see the reflections of the buildings in the mirror surface of the water. Elodie turned to Jack. “And you're okay with that?”

He didn't answer, but his mouth pressed into a hard line. He had never liked the idea much, but he knew it was what I had to do.

“I guess we should go,” I said, changing the subject.

“Sneaking back into the hotel will be harder than getting out was,” Jack said. I'd just been thinking the same thing.

“The Dauphins have a staff apartment here,” Stellan said. He handed me the bracelet with a small shake of his head. He'd been twisting it absently, trying new passwords.

“How nice for you,” Jack muttered.

“Obviously what I meant was that you can stay there with us,” Stellan said patiently. “There are plenty of beds at the apartment.”

“And plenty of cameras.” I slipped the bracelet on my arm as we headed back into the labyrinth of narrow streets. “That'd be really smart to let the Dauphins see us, with you.” I turned to Elodie. “How are you even here, anyway? They think Stellan's spying on the Saxons—”

“And so am I,” Elodie said. “In case you hadn't noticed, you're the most important thing going on in the Circle at the moment.”

The light dimmed as we walked deeper between tall buildings and the sidewalk narrowed. Our feet, damp now, squished on the cobblestones.

“The only cameras at the apartment are at the door,” Stellan continued. “So you'll hide your face until we get inside. If they care enough to be watching right now, which they don't, they'll just think . . . well, let's just say I've brought girls back there before.”

Of course he had.

“So you can sneak me in,” I continued. “But—” I shot a look at Jack.

Stellan followed my gaze. “Elodie's staying there, too. Or maybe they'll think I'm having an especially wild night.” He gave an exaggerated wink. “The Dauphins have more important things to worry about right now, I promise. I was just trying to be nice, but by all means, have fun sneaking back into your gilded cage.”

It only took a quick consultation with Jack to decide on the Dauphins' apartment. It would be much easier to get back in in the morning in the rush of tourists checking out. We stopped in front of a four-story building, its facade a crumbling but colorful fresco, and Stellan punched in a door code.

I pulled the collar of Jack's coat up and hunched my face down into it, and Jack ducked his head, and we followed Stellan and Elodie into a hallway that was well lit but still so damp that I wondered if anything in this city ever really dried.

We got to a door on the third floor, and Elodie paused outside. “There's one more thing I probably should have told you—”

Before she could finish, the door flew open. Luc Dauphin stood in the doorway, with messy hair and red-rimmed eyes.

Stellan cursed. “Elodie, what is wrong with you—”

Luc cut him off with a stream of chatter in French that, as far as I could tell from the looks passing between Stellan and Elodie, was something along the lines of
it was my idea to come and she couldn't stop me.

“Okay, everybody inside.” Jack bundled us in and locked the door.

“It's horrible.” Luc scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Eli Abraham and Takumi Mikado both. It's—oh,
cherie.
” He cut off and swept me up in a hug so tight he pulled me right off the ground. He set me back down and planted a loud kiss on each of my cheeks.
“You had to be there. I'm so sorry. I was going to—” He gestured behind him to where a sumptuous buffet of desserts was set up. “I wanted to apologize, and I know you like pistachio ice cream”—he nodded to Jack—“and I thought I might be able to say
I'm sorry my family tried to arrange our marriage against your will
with dessert, but then
this
happened. And now . . .” He sighed dramatically and led me into the living room. “And now my party is a wake.”

He stepped out of the way, and I stopped dead. In the center of the darkened living room was what I could only call a shrine.

Between when he heard the news and now, Luc must have raided every newsstand in Venice, and half the religious paraphernalia shops. He'd arranged Virgin Mary statues, crosses, and flickering candles with unidentifiable saints painted on the front in an elaborate diorama around a collage of magazine photos of Eli and Takumi. Eli kissing a Brazilian supermodel. Takumi shirtless on a beach. In the center was the cover of Sunday Six's most recent album.

Luc fell into a chair set in front of the shrine and made an awkward sign of the cross over his chest. We all stared. Somehow all that came out of my mouth was, “Are you even Catholic?”

“No.” Luc sighed again. “But it seemed appropriate,
non
? And it was all I could find on short notice. When in Rome.”

“When in Venice, actually,” Elodie murmured.

My mouth was still hanging open. “I'm sorry,” Jack said low in my ear. “He doesn't mean to be disrespectful—”

“And this is the only jacket I have with me dark enough to be appropriate for mourning.” Luc plucked at the shoulder of his blazer, purple velvet with a subtle floral pattern, if you could really call anything about it subtle. “But I think they both would have liked it. I only met Eli once, and Takumi a few times, but I felt like we had a connection.”

Luc picked up a bottle of wine he already had open on the shrine and took a swig, then passed it back to us. Elodie shrugged and took a drink.

I rubbed my forehead. I'd seen them both die. It was horrible for everyone. But still, it felt weird. “Even if the Order coerced him, Eli
murdered
somebody,” I said. “Isn't it strange to look at him as if he were as much of a victim as Takumi?”

They all looked at me, a grim set to each of their mouths. “You don't understand the Order,” Stellan said. “They do terrible things. Eli had younger siblings. Maybe the Order threatened them. He obviously felt like he had no choice.”

“But to
kill
someone—”

“Aren't
you
planning to give up the thing that could stop these murders to save your mom?” Elodie cut in. “How is it so different?”

“I—” I suddenly felt sick. I studied the shrine again, the happy, smiling faces of two people I'd seen die just hours ago. The lump in my throat that maybe should have been there all night was rising.

I pulled out my phone. In a few seconds, I had pulled up a photo of Dev Rajesh. I leaned the phone against a candle on the shrine. “He was a victim, too.”

Elodie set down the bottle of wine and found a picture of Liam Blackstone to go next to Dev. On Jack's phone, Malik Emir. Stellan rested a hand on Luc's shoulder, and I knew they were thinking about Luc's baby sister.

“And to the rest of them, all our brothers killed by the Order,” Luc said quietly.

Jack took out his wallet and pulled out the photo of him and Mr. Emerson on Mont Blanc, the photo Mr. Emerson had left as a clue. He set it in the shrine, too, then squeezed my hand.

“There's a tradition I know of,” Elodie said. “You open a window to let the spirits of the dead out, like smoke.”

I released a shaky breath.

“You're not forgetting them, but you're allowing them—and yourself—to move on.”

I felt my nails digging into my palms. We were still in the middle of this. I wasn't sure any moving on could happen right now.

But Luc ran across the room and opened the balcony door. He grabbed a package of incense and lit one of the sticks in a candle flame and waved the smoke back and forth across the shrine. The smoke thickened as we passed the bottle of wine between the five of us. It was sweet, syrupy. I kept one eye on the smoke, but none of it was drifting out the open door at all.

• • •

An hour later, we were down almost two bottles of wine. A few of the candles had burned out, but the rest flickered over the photos. Cream rugs covered the hardwood floors in the apartment, and there was a small kitchen and two overstuffed leather couches that all five of us lounged on now. I stayed a careful distance from Jack on one couch, while Elodie's legs sprawled across Stellan's lap on the other.

Luc sat on the furry rug at Stellan and Elodie's feet, and he set to opening another bottle of wine, clumsily. I got the feeling he'd already had a little to drink before we arrived. “Is it horrible to say this is fun?” he said. “It's like a—what is the American word? Slumber party? A very tragic slumber party.”

We should have been using the time to plan our trip to Greece, but I realized I was glad we weren't. “Fun” might not have been the right word, but it really
was
like a slumber party in the cozy apartment, and after the exhaustion and frustration about the clue that
wasn't a clue and all the literal and figurative blood on my hands, I needed that right now. I think we all did.

Elodie leaned over to grab the wine from Luc, and Stellan pushed off the couch and went into the other room.

I stretched and got up, too, and made my way across the room to the small balcony. Jack followed. He stopped me at the French doors and peered outside. “Seems safe.”

I looked out over the piazza below, where a steady rain was now falling, making the cobblestones shiny in the lone streetlight. The piazza was a rectangle, enclosed on three sides by buildings with barred windows and planter boxes, and bordered by a canal on the fourth. It was chilly out, and I shivered even though I was still wearing Jack's coat.

“You okay?” Jack said.

I hugged my arms around myself and nodded.

“Do you really think Greece is a good idea?” he said.

I looked up sharply. “Of course. Eight days, remember? Do you
not
think it's a good idea?”

“I don't like being so far away from Saxon security. Especially after the attack today.” Jack paused. “The Saxons want the tomb as much as we do. If we told them the truth, they could at least send guards.”

I was shaking my head before he'd even finished speaking. “You know why we can't tell them. They'd never let me give what we find to the Order.”

I leaned on the railing. We were sheltered from the rain by the building's overhang, but the occasional breeze sent a drop or two our way. My shoulders stiffened when Jack leaned beside me.

“I know. I understand.” He took a deep breath. “It's just—you've got to understand my point of view, too. The way you feel about
doing everything you can to keep your mom safe? That's how I feel about you. I know I'm not supposed to,” he continued. “I know we're not . . . But you can't imagine what it felt like today to see him raise that gun in your direction.”

I swallowed. “I really don't think they're going to hurt
me
—”

“And I think you need to take into account the opinions of people who don't have an emotional stake in this like you do.”

I pushed back from the railing. “You just admitted you
do
have an emotional stake in it.”

Jack turned. Earlier I had been so relieved for us to be back together, and needed the comfort of
us
so much, that I couldn't not kiss him. I knew he felt it too—he'd just
admitted
he still felt it as much as I did. But this—this suddenly not being on the same page when I had thought we were—was a different kind of tension entirely, and one I wasn't used to.

“Avery—” he said.

“You can't
always
be perfectly cautious. We can figure out ways to be safer, but we're going to Greece. And we're not telling the Saxons.”