I brought the pear slices over to the couch, very aware of the space between us as I sat. “If a word was pronounced the same way millennia ago as now, we could match our version to Language X’sand extrapolate which Language X characters phonetically correspond to ours. So we’re looking at ancient cities, stuff like that.” I snagged a library book I’d left on the coffee table, flipping to a map of the world from three thousand years ago. “Not tons of places have been around that long, but Aolong has, and Tzorybium. If the scrolls mention a noun we still use and match it, it could be a game changer.” I sighed. “Of course, we’d have to be able to match them in the first place.”
“Huh.” He leaned forward, his shoulder almost brushing mine. If I tilted slightly to the right, we would touch. “You need a word that’s…distinctive. So you can recognize it.”
I munched on the crisp pear. As I licked the juice off my fingers, I caught Daziel watching and looked away, flushing. “Exactly. But what’s distinctive?”
Daziel looked as intrigued as I’d been a few hours ago, but his brain was still fresh tonight. “You’ve made a list of unchanged proper nouns?”
“That’s what we started, yeah.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Are any of them…different? Unique?”
“How do you mean?” I rubbed my forehead. More than anything, I wanted to lean against Daziel’s shoulder and havehimrub my head. Why was it so hard to figure out if he liked me? This was driving me mad. I’d thought he might, but hadn’t I obviously shown my own interest, going to his game? If he knew I liked him, and he also liked me, why wouldn’t he do something? “My brain hurts so much.”
He took a pear slice. “Hyphenated? Like ‘Ena-Cinnai.’ ”
Leah had told me going to his game wasn’t the clear indicator I thought. I supposed I could say something, but if he rejected mewe’d be trapped in these tiny rooms and it could ruin our entire friendship, and there’d be no way I could focus on the scrolls. “ ‘Ena-Cinnai’ isn’t old enough.”
“I mean something that looks different. Something you could recognize without needing to know the characters themselves. By recognizing a pattern. Something with fourO’s in a row or whatever.”
A pattern. I racked my brain, willing to entertain this because it wasn’t like I had any better ideas, and I needed some distraction from my yearning to press my body against his. I thought through the proper nouns we’d written down so far. The tribes. Ancient royalty. A few ancient places. The Great Beasts.
Wait.
My stomach hollowed out, and my head felt light.
“Ziz,” I whispered. Two sounds but three letters—because it was two letters, one repeated. “ ‘Ziz’ is a palindrome,” I breathed, the realization hitting me with blunt force, leaving me shaking with excitement. “If we have a three-character palindrome…”
You didn’t need to understand a language to recognize a palindrome.
I broke out in sweat, then shook my head. “It’s wildly unlikely one of the scrolls would mention the Ziz.”
Daziel shrugged. “Okay.”
“But…on the off chance…or if there’sanotherpalindrome in there we could match to a proper noun…”
He laughed. “You’re dying to run to the Keep and check right now, aren’t you?”
“I mean, yeah!”
“It’s past nine bells.”
“Please,” I begged, more to be funny than anything else. Making Daziel laugh always lit a delighted spark within me.
He grinned, his eyes gleaming with silver amusement, and sure enough, it sent a thrill through me. “I’m surprised you haven’t left yet.”
If I’d been a more spontaneous person, I would have pressed my lips to his right then. But while Daziel had called me impulsive, it turned out that only applied to my physical safety, not my heart’s.
So I channeled my energy into dashing to the Keep. We ran into Yael and Stefan leaving a pub on our way there, bundled up in sweaters beneath their blazers and hats pulled over their ears. Yael looked surprised, but no more so than me to see the two of them together. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“The Keep,” I said. “It’s probably nothing, but…”
They both went on alert. “But what?” Stefan asked.
“The name ‘Ziz’—it’s a palindrome. We could recognize a palindrome in Language X.”
I watched as the realization hit them, the hope they desperately tried to temper. “It’s super unlikely the Ziz is mentioned,” Stefan finally said.
“Super unlikely,” I agreed.
