“… find him,” he finished, wide-eyed, then looked around them. His gaze fixed on Laila. “Istilldon’t understand why you broke it!”
Laila frowned and color rushed to her face. “He took a knife to Zofia and then Enrique, and I thought he… he…”
Hypnos’s eyebrows shot up. “How could you believe Séverin wanted us all dead?”
“Because he lost his mind and his current plan is to turn into a god?” said Enrique.
He winced, touching his ear. Earlier, Laila had ripped part of her dress to fashion him a bandage that wrapped around his whole head. The bleeding had stopped, but Zofia noticed that Enrique looked paler. He was in pain. Zofia did not know how to help him, and it made her feel frustrated.
“But if the matriarch mentioned a map, then maybe she’ll know where it is,” said Enrique.
Hypnos’s mouth tugged downwards, and his shoulders fell.
“She went down with… with the machine,” he said.
Laila gasped, covering her mouth with her hands. Enrique went silent. Zofia bowed her head. She knew she should be thinking of the matriarch—and she did feel sorrow that she had died—but her thoughts flew to Hela. Slowly, Zofia touched her heart where the sharp, jagged point of Hela’s unopened letter lay against her skin. She had received the letter a few days ago, but the script was not inHela’s hand. And if Hela could not pen a letter to her on her own, then that increased the likelihood that her sister was dead. Even the possibility of Hela’s death hurt far worse than the matriarch’s actual death. Zofia felt that familiar tightening panic in her chest. She reached for the pocket in her dress where she kept her matchbox, but it was gone. She stared around the room, trying to count things and center her thoughts—twelve icicles, six jagged edges in the ice, three shields, four drops of blood on the ground—but Hypnos and Enrique had started raising their voices.
“What are we going to do?” asked Hypnos. “Without the Mnemo bug, we won’t know where to find Séverin and then we can’t find the map!”
“We don’t need Séverin,” said Enrique coldly.
Hypnos’s head snapped up. “What?”
“You said it yourself… the matriarch’s safe house will have all the answers we need,” said Enrique.
“But the lyre…” said Hypnos, looking to Laila.
“Séverin is after godhood,” said Enrique. There was a hard set to his mouth. “With or without us, he’ll get to Plague Island. That’s where we’ll find him. There, he can play it and save Laila. That’s all we need him for. After that, we never have to lay eyes on him again.”
“But what will Séverin think?” asked Hypnos, in a small voice. “Before he left, he told me all he wanted was to protect us…”
Zofia watched as a small muscle in Enrique’s jaw tightened. He looked to the ice for a moment, and then back to Hypnos. Enrique’s brows were pressed down into a flat line, which signified that he was angry.
“The only thing we need protecting from is him,” said Enrique.
Protect. Zofia remembered Enrique breaking down the etymology of the word. It came from Latin.Pro: “in front.”Tegere:“to cover.”Covered in front. To protect was to cover. To hide. Zofia moved her hand right above her heart, covering the place where the letter not written by Hela lay. When Zofia evaluated the possible outcomes, she knew the letter could only be a formal announcement of her sister’s death. Hela had been sick for months. Hela had almost died already. Zofia had failed to protect her sister… but she still had a chance with Laila.
Slowly, Zofia forced herself to listen to the others’ conversation. There was talk of secret Tezcat routes that would lead them to Venice, and how the members of the Order of Babel were still paralyzed from Eva’s blood Forging, which left them only a handful of hours to leave or risk getting caught. Zofia could hardly bring herself to listen.
Instead, she stared at the ring on Laila’s hand: ten days.
She had ten days to protect Laila. If Zofia could do that for her friend, then maybe she could make herself open the letter and learn Hela’s fate for certain. Until then, she would keep the letter covered. If she did not look, then she did not have to know, and if she did not know then perhaps there was a chance… a statistical impossibility, but a weighted number nonetheless, that Hela was not dead. Zofia reached for the safety of those numbers:tendays to find a solution for Laila,tendays in which she might hope Hela was still alive.
Hope, Zofia realized, was the only protection she had left.
4
LAILA
Laila picked her way through the shadows of a narrow brick alley, pulling tight the cloth that covered her face and hair. Around her, stray cats mewled and hissed, tumbling in the piles of trash. Wherever they were—she had lost track of the Tezcat route after the seventh switch—it was early afternoon, and a wind off the sea carried the stench of dead fish. In front of her, Hypnos laid his hand against a dirtied brick. Zofia stood beside him, holding up a Tezcat pendant she had torn off from her necklace. It was the only tool they had with them. Enrique’s research, Zofia’s laboratory, Laila’s costumes… all of it had been left behind in the Sleeping Palace.
The pendant glowed brightly, indicating a hidden entrance.
“This should be the last Tezcat route,” said Hypnos, forcing a smile to his face. “The matriarch said from here, the passage would open up right beside the Rialto Bridge. Is that not wonderful?”
“That is not how I would define ‘wonderful,’” said Zofia.
Her blond hair had come undone and haloed her whole head,while her blue gown looked scorched. Next to her, Enrique gingerly touched the bloodstained bandage around his ear, and just then, a fat cockroach scuttled across Laila’s mud-crusted slippers. Laila recoiled.
