The Book of Blood and Shadow (21 page)

“Adriane …”

“I’ll do your calculus homework for you. For the rest of the year.”

“I can do my own.”

“But I can do it better.”

I didn’t smile. “I can’t go to Paris, Adriane. If you don’t want to talk about why, then fine, we won’t. But you can’t bribe me into it, or joke me into it, and you know it.”

“Fine.”

“Really?” That was a new one.

“Fine—if you promise you’ll think about it.”

That was more like it.

“Just promise,” she added, “and I won’t bug you about it anymore.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I won’t bug you for at least twenty-four hours.”

“I missed you,” I said.

“I probably missed you, too,” she said. “I just don’t remember.”

25

It should have been a night for celebrating. But Adriane spent it in a glorified mental institution, and I spent it where I spent every night: at my desk, Latin dictionary by my side, postcard in front of me, translation notebook abandoned in disgust, words melting together into useless soup.

There was a soft knock at the bedroom door. “Nora?” My
father. He hadn’t been in my room since the night after the murder, when my parents had escorted me from the police station to my bed, tucking me in for possibly the first time ever. Before that, he hadn’t been there in years.

I slipped the postcard into the notebook. “Come in.”

He perched on the side of the desk. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I waited.

He tapped the dictionary. It was a heavy, leather-bound Oxford edition, with gilded pages and an extensive list of original sources. He’d given it to me for my eleventh birthday. It would be humiliating to admit exactly how excited I was, but suffice it to say, there’d been squealing. “Glad to see you’re keeping up with your translating,” he said.

I shrugged. “Homework.”

I wondered if he missed those afternoons we’d spent in his office puzzling through that translation of Lucretius we’d never quite finished. At some point three days a week had become two, then one. I don’t know what came first: the day his door stopped opening for me or the day I didn’t bother to knock because Chris and Adriane had offered me a better option. I wondered whether he was still working on the Lucretius, whether he’d finished without me.

I doubted it.

He smiled. It looked funny on his face, the smile, like it knew it didn’t belong and didn’t plan on staying long. “Can I see?”

If I said no, he might get suspicious. Also, I was desperate. I gave him the notebook.

He raised his eyebrows. “Homework?”

“It’s like a puzzle. We’re supposed to figure out what it means.”

He ran his finger across my scribbled and crossed-out translations. “Where’s the original?”

I flipped back to a page where I’d written out the full text of the postcard. He nodded, silently mouthing Max’s words.

“Maybe that school’s worth the money after all,” he said.

“I go there for free,” I reminded him.

Ignoring me, he grabbed a pencil and began tapping different letters, counting quietly under his breath. “I wouldn’t expect them to be teaching steganography at this level. It’s impressive.”

“Steganography?” The word sounded familiar, like something the Hoff had once told us about, back when, as general policy, I ignored everything he said.

“Your teacher probably just called them ciphers, or codes, though that’s not quite accurate, as generally a code relies on the
meaning
in the message, substituting certain words or phrases for prearranged others, while a cipher will replace each individual letter with another letter or symbol, using some kind of algorithm.” He was slipping into teacher mode. His eyes were still fixed on the page. “But steganography depends on disguising the fact that it’s a cipher, or indeed that there is even a message at all. The message hides in plain sight, as if written in invisible ink. Which, incidentally, would qualify as a stegotext. Didn’t your teacher explain all this to you?”

“It’s, like, an extra-credit challenge,” I said quickly. “She’s not actually teaching this unit until next week.”

“Ah, in that case, I don’t want to give away the game.”

“But what did you mean by plain sight?” Nothing, and certainly not the prospect of encroaching on some random high school teacher’s homework rules, could divert my father once he slipped into lecture mode.

The smile returned. “There are a variety of traditional cipher techniques,” he explained. “The Caesar Shift, the Atbash—different eras generally had their own favorite forms of spycraft,
but given that this appears written in plain text, as opposed to a substitution or transposition cipher, my best guess is you’re dealing with a stegotext, probably one where the message is buried amid decoy letters.”

“And I would translate that by …?”

“You simply need to know, or guess, the numerical key. If the key were six, then you’d find your message by counting out every sixth letter and disregarding the rest. You understand.”

“Right, but how am I supposed to figure out the key?”

“Trial and error,” he suggested. “Or the number is sometimes embedded in context clues. Not that you have any here, I suppose.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve got some time, if you want to try to work it through together.”

“That would be nice, but …” But I couldn’t. “I shouldn’t. It’s homework, you know? I should probably figure it out myself.” I pretended not to notice him deflate.

“Of course.”

“But thanks. That was really helpful.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “
Pater ex machina
. Anytime. Well.” He cleared his throat again. “I should leave you to it.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I mean, I’m done with all my other homework, so …”

He was already backing out the door. “No, no. Schoolwork’s important, even at a time like this. I’m glad you remember that.” Somewhere, a door slammed. Mom was home. “I’ve got work to do myself,” he said quickly. He closed my door behind him, and a few moments later, I heard the telltale thud of him disappearing behind door number three.

Pater ex machina
. A cheap trick by which the invisible briefly and inexplicably made itself visible, only to change everything—and then, without warning, vanished all over again. That sounded about right.

26

Context clues.

One statue. One illegible postmark, one demonic symbol.

One word that meant anything:
reus
.

One word with four letters.

And that was the key.

After weeks of desperate but useless attempts to translate the message, the final step was almost ridiculously easy. I could count to four:

C
AST
O
REM
N
ON P
V
TO D
E
VM I
N
CVR
I
A.
NA
M
SVM
E
GO A
C
TVS
V
EHE
M
ENS
A
VLA.
D
EMV
S
EI M
E
LA O
P
POR
T
UNE.
J
AM
E
M
ERS
V
M JA
M
SIT
V
IND
I
CI P
A
EAN
E
I.
PR
I
MVM
A
LIE
N
ATV
S
EST
C
OR M
I
HI. O
C
ITE
O
PE E
L
ISO
L
ICU
I
T FA
S
. SIC
S
INT
E
XEM
P
LA
E
T
SIM
E
GO I
M
AGO
D
ESS
E
. NON
C
RIM
I
NIS
M
EVM
O
PVS
A
T IN
P
AVO
R
E RE
I
SVM.
L
ACR
I
MAE
S
VNT;
A
D VN
D
AS M
I
TTE,
V
BI
A
V
ET F
A
S.

It should never have taken me so long to see it. A truth that appeared only when all the meaningless nonsense was stripped away—it was the only way Max knew how to speak.

CONVENIMECVMADSEPTJMVM VIAE
IANSCICOLLISSEPTEMDECIMOAPRILIS
ADIVVA

I guessed at the spacing; I substituted
I
for
J, U
for
V
, and vice versa, as the Latin allowed; I found it.

I found him.

CONVENI MECUM AD SEPTIMUM VIAE
IANSCI COLLIS SEPTEMDECIMO APRILIS
ADIUVA

Meet me Jansky Hill Road seven. Seventeen April
.

Google confirmed the impossible. Jansky Hill was Jánský vršek, a street in Prague, only blocks from the palace once home to Rudolf II of Austria, the sixteenth-century Holy Roman emperor.

I called Adriane and told her we were going to Paris. I didn’t tell her that we wouldn’t be staying—that, instead, we would be risking expulsion by sneaking away from the chaperones, hopping a train to the Czech Republic, and finding our way to a dark corner of a foreign city, where we would wait for something to happen. I’d tell her when we were on the plane, when there’d be minimal time for either of us to have second thoughts, though I knew I was the only one who’d be having second thoughts. I’d convince my parents, if they put up a
pro forma
fight about my going to Paris, that distance would assuage my trauma, and with an ocean between me and that night, maybe I could finally start to forget it. They would know better than to believe me—but they would also know better than to argue.

The Hoff, who had known about the
Hledači
and tried so hard to tell me, had made me promise:
Don’t go
. But he was a sick old man with poison in his brain, and he couldn’t have known what was about to happen, or what I would have to do.

I had to go. I had to do something; second thoughts or not, I would do this.

Because there was one final Latin word in Max’s message, one I didn’t need a dictionary to understand.

Adiuva
.

Help
.

PART III

Master of the Still Stars

O gentle Faustus, leave this damned art
This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell
,
And quite bereave thee of salvation
.
Though thou hast now offended like a man
,
Do not persevere in it like a devil
.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe

1

The senior class was already drunk. Not on liquor, maybe, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t Gatorade that Brett Craig and his “boyz” were chugging with such unbridled glee; Adriane had taught me long ago that all you needed was a little food coloring to turn vodka the appropriate shade of radioactive piss. Nor was it just the frat boys in training. It was the Prep preps, their leather suitcases stuffed with shoes, their wallets with Daddy’s credit cards; it was the parking-lot potheads, nervously eyeing the airport security officials and their steel-collared canines; it was the jocks, eager for their binge of food, wine, and sleep, a long-awaited caesura between the last four years of training seasons and the next; and it was even the APers—my ostensible karass—their collegiate fates sealed, their number-two pencils in the trash, their permanent records finally open for besmirching. All of them, high on the fumes of their imagined exploits. The Air France gate and the promise that lay on the far side of our seven-hour flight had managed the miracle no amount of homecoming rallies, unity dances, or spirit weeks ever could: The class, with all its disparate, territorial, and occasionally warring factions, had been fused into a homogeneous, undifferentiated One. And then there was me. “I’m going to grab some water for the flight.”