“The symbol for the first transfinite ordinal number,” said Zofia.
Enrique had no idea what that meant. “Perhaps, but also—”
“A lowercase omega.”
“Yes, precisely!” said Enrique, excitedly. “It also represents—”
“The first and the last, the beginning and the end,” recited Zofia.“That’s what you said last year the first time you noticed the symbol. You said ‘in other words, the power of God.’ Yes?”
Enrique blinked at her, and she shrugged.
“What? I was listening to you,” she said.
Enrique merely stared at her. She’d listened. That small sentence held a strange and unfamiliar warmth. Zofia opened the tome, pressing her pale hand to the hollow where the pages ofThe Divine Lyricswould have been.
“It looks more like a box than a book,” she said.
Enrique studied the cavity, tracing the inside of the spine. As a book, it should have held thread or some other sign that the pages had once been bound together, but it was smooth.
“If it was always hollow andheldsomething… then what if this symbol is what links it all together?” he asked, pointing to the lemniscate on the surface.
“Like a book inside of a book?” asked Zofia.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” said Enrique.
Whatever they were looking for had to bear the same symbol. Together, they turned and faced the piles of treasure heaped onto the tables.
Now, they just had to start searching.
28
ZOFIA
Two hours before midnight…
Zofia did not count the passage of hours as she and Enrique worked. But she did not have to count to hear how the sounds outside the library grew louder in anticipation of the Midnight Auction. All thosepeople. It made her shudder. Zofia had hated being outside to welcome the Order of Babel. She didn’t like everyone pressed close together, and she did not like that her height forced her to be eye level with the back of people’s heads.
What she liked now was the stillness and the set tasks before them: pick up an object; look for the lemniscate symbol; move on when it wasn’t there. At least she was doing something. Before, when she found out that there was noDivine Lyrics, she could not speak. Tears ran down her face. But it was not sorrow. She had felt this way once before, when her family had taken a trip to one of the lakes in summertime. She had swum too far, happy that underwater, she couldn’t hear the loudness of the other children. But somewhere in the lake, her foot caught on a net, and she could not keep her head above the surface for longer than a few seconds at a time. By chance, Hela had seen her struggling and called out to their father who had rushed into the lake and saved her.
Zofia never forgot how it felt—kicking out her legs, hitting the water with her hands, spitting out lake water, and gulping down air. She never forgot the frustration of powerlessness, the awareness that her movements made no difference, and that the water—vast and dark—did not care.
That was how she felt realizing Laila would die.
Nothing she did had made a difference, thought Zofia as she put down one object. But maybe this time, she hoped, reaching for a different artifact. There were 212 objects left to examine, and in each unexamined object, Zofia reached for the comfort of numbers, for the knowledge that no matter how small the chance, discovering a lemniscate symbol was not out of the statistical realm of probability.
Beside her, Enrique worked in semi-silence. He hummed to himself, and though Zofia normally preferred silence, she found the background hum an agreeable constant. Enrique talked to himself too, and Zofia realized that just as she found comfort in numbers, he found solace in conversation.
By now, they had tackled two of the seven tables with no results. When Zofia moved to a different table, Enrique shook his head.
“Save that one for later.”
“Why?”
Enrique gestured to a different table. Zofia scanned the contents. Among them were a small notebook with a golden varnish;a collection of gleaming feathers in a jar; a harp; a string of jade beads carved with the faces of beasts; and a pair of scales. It was no different from the other tables littered with similar objects. It possessed no greater likelihood of hiding a lemniscate symbol.
“Do you smell that, phoenix?”
Zofia sniffed the air. She smelled metal and smoke. She moved closer to where he was standing and caught a whiff of something else… something sweet, like apple peels thrown into a fire.
