Then how had I gotten to the Borges book? Tracing it back, I realized that Finn was right. The clues that led me to the book hadn’t come from him. They’d come from my own dreams. Theblazing sun appearing repeatedly had been my subconscious trying to direct me to it, but I hadn’t listened until my dreaming mind procured a masked Isabelle to literally point me to the book.
I should have realized why the clue it contained, the coordinates, had seemed so different from the others. It seemed different because itwasdifferent. Finn didn’t leave it for me to find.
“Oh god.” Swallowing over a lump in my throat, I looked around the room. “I think I left this clue for myself.”
Finn leaned forward. “When?”
“Before I left. It wouldn’t have taken much. Just a key stowed in the apiary. The key that led me to the relic.”
“But there is no relic!” snapped Dorian. “There’s no blog post and no relic.”
“But there is,” I said, taking it out of my pocket.
“What the hell?” whispered Dorian, leaning in to get a closer look.
“This atrocious thing is the relic from your blog post?” asked Lexi.
“That’s impossible, though,” said Finn. “We told you, we never left a blog post.”
“No,” I said, smiling. “But I did.”
Lexi slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh shit.”
With mixed emotion, I set the artifact on the table. “The problem is, I don’t know what it means.”
We all stared at it, and I could sense a wave of excitement coming from Finn, his eyes alight with the possibilities this puzzle presented.
“Okay,” said Aspen. “So you left the blog post yourself, butthen you locked the path that led to the relic until after you’d gotten your identity back?”
“I think so, yes.”
“But why lock that path?”
Finn was pacing now, and behind his eyes, I could see he was making connections. “Whatever this means, it’s something you couldn’t comprehend until you knew you were Isabelle again.”
I picked it up and shook it, and again there was that rattling sound. “Have any of you ever seen it before?”
They shook their heads, but then Lexi nodded. “I think I maybe remember you with it. I think you said you’d gotten it in town.”
“So this isn’t an ancient artifact?” I rattled it again.
“Honestly,” said Lexi, “I have no idea what it is.”
I looked closely at the excessively large eyeholes in the figures. They were just large enough to roll something up and slip it inside. I looked over at Finn. He kept saying that there were certain things I couldn’t know ahead of time because they might break me. But what if instead, I broke something else? I stared at the relic for a moment, its ludicrously shaped figures, its poor craftmanship, and then, with force, I smashed it against the coffee table, breaking it into shards of thick clay.
“Jesus!” Aspen screamed, and Dorian jumped back, shielding his face, but I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted. Combing through it, I found what I was looking for—a tiny piece of paper rolled up like a scroll.
Unfurling it, I smiled. Aspen was right. It showed nine images, and accompanying each one were two Latin words, Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature:
