“Thesymbols,” said Séverin.
Zofia gestured at the last symbol on the pattern she’d identified.
Enrique rubbed his thumb along his lower lip.
“There’s other repeating ones as well,” he mused. “Like letters. If I switched out a symbol with a vowel it might reveal a message. Let’s tryA?” Enrique stepped back, then shook his head. “Never mind. How aboutE?”
Zofia tilted her head, her blue eyes alight as she studied the pattern.
“AssumingEis the correct vowel for the stand-in, you can work backwards… It’s all building on each other, like a grid…”
“Alphabet made from a grid?” wondered Enrique.
Laila watched Zofia stand, go to the board, bicker with Enrique, and then construct a loose grid…
Enrique let out a whoop of joy.
“Now we just have to line up the symbols with the letters. Zofia, you take the set from the leviathan. I’ll take the original.”
“What do we do?” asked Hypnos, leaning forward eagerly.
“Bask in their brilliance,” said Laila, sighing.
Hypnos pouted in her direction, then moved to sit beside her. He reached for her hand, turning it this way and that.
“How do you do it,ma chère?”
Laila stilled. Had someone told him what she could do? Panic wound through her. Hypnos knew nothing of her secret. She didn’t think Hypnos would view her any differently than the others, but she didn’t entirely trust he could keep such knowledge to himself.
“Do?” she repeated.
“Yes, you know, in the sense that… and I mean no offense… but you contribute perhaps as much as I do in these meetings, do you not?” he asked. “There’s the arrangement of food and such, but I tried to do that as well and was met with very pitiful success. How do you…”
He trailed off, and Laila knew the word he wouldn’t utter:belong. Though Hypnos didn’t realize it, as he turned her hand, a part of her couldn’t help but to reach out with her own senses. She remembered what Hypnos had said in the music room of the Moscow teahouse. Of how music had filled his loneliness, and even in so small a thing as the cuffed edge of his shirtsleeve, Laila thought she could hear that loneliness clattering through her. It felt like icy rain sliding down her neck, like staring into a room full of warmth and missing the door to enter it each time.
“Give it time,” said Laila, squeezing his hand. “I think most would place more value on knowing who you are… rather than who you’re with.”
Laila tensed, not knowing if he would find offense at her last comment. Everyone knew that he was involved with Enrique, but to whatdegree? Hypnos’s affection had always struck her as casual, despite its sincerity. What he had with Enrique hadn’t seemed serious until Enrique had emerged unconscious from the Tezcat. At that instant, Hypnos had insisted upon tending to him. And yet, Laila noticed how his gaze went to Séverin far more than it did to Enrique; how his hand on Enrique’s shoulder looked less affection and more like he was anchoring himself to a place in the room. Hypnos turned a couple of shades darker, and his gaze darted almost guiltily to Enrique.
“Knowing me,” repeated Hypnos. “Are you calling me a cipher, Mademoiselle?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Someone has to,” he said loftily. “How to crack a cipher, one wonders. Perhaps with names? Perhaps you might even tell me yours?”
Laila fixed him with an annoyed look. “Laila.”
“And surely, I was born aHypnos,” he said, smirking. And then, after a moment, he let go of her hand. “Then again, the names we are born with can end up meaning so little. The names we give ourselves, well, perhaps that’s the truth of us.”
“And in truth, you wanted to be the god of sleep?”
Hypnos’s smirk softened.
“I wanted to be a person I saw only in my dreams, and I named myself for that realm,” he said quietly. “And you?”
Laila thought back to the day she’d plucked her name from one of her father’s volumes of poetry.
Laila.
