“Let’s go,” Yael said, and started running.
Gidon was alone in the scroll room, still working, when the four of us burst in. He startled, looking a bit like an upright grasshopper. “What’s going on?”
“Ziz,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t you people take breaks?” Daziel asked, looking at the two cups of coffee next to Gidon’s desk. “Gidon, did you even have dinner?”
“It’s a palindrome.” I strode to the reference binder containing the thirty-five hundred words in the scrolls. I could probably modify a spell to sort them by character length, but I didn’t have the patience. Instead, I started paging through, scanning for three-character words.
Gidon’s mouth parted with understanding.
My cohort crowded around me, our heads almost knocking as we scanned Yael’s neat handwriting. We wanted a short palindrome. We wanted—
Gidon let out a strange sound, half a laugh and half a sob. He jutted his finger halfway down the first column on the third page. “There. A palindrome. A three-character palindrome.”
Stefan grasped Yael’s shoulder, squeezing tight, and she didn’t seem to mind; she was beaming too. “Ziz,” he said, and then we were all saying it, staring at the letters we hadn’t been able to pronounce before, that we had eked meaning out of. Now we couldunderstandtwo of the letters, something we’d never been able to do. We could pull sound from characters silenced for thousands of years.
“Ziz,” we said, like a chorus of insects. We were laughing and cheering, and I caught a few suspiciously gleaming eyes.“Ziz.”
Beside each word in the binder, a number showed how often it occurred. “Ziz” showed up fifteen times, a startling frequency for an uncommon word. Also, unexpectedly, an asterisk marked it as a word included in one of the scrolls’ headings.
“Here,” Daziel said, pointing. We gathered to look at the heading he indicated, and we let out another round of congratulatory hollers.
We should have known we were being too loud, especially given the closeness of Professor Altschuler’s office. Yet we couldn’t help ourselves, lost in excitement, unable to stifle our happiness about connecting a few scant dots.
So we shouldn’t have been surprised when someone else entered the room, though I didn’t think any of us noticed him until he spoke—and not for the first time, if the volume of his voice was any indication.
“What,” Professor Altschuler said, staring at us, and now finally we quieted and stared back, “is going on?”
I flinched, my heart thudding. I felt like I’d been caught robbing a museum or plagiarizing a paper. But no, we’d done somethinggood. “We’ve found a word. Well. We can’t confirm it. But a guess. A three-letter palindrome we think might be ‘Ziz.’ ”
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if Professor Altschuler had heard me. He stood very, very still, and then he drifted over to the scroll. Gidon pointed out the palindrome in the heading.
The professor closed his eyes. A look of almost ecstatic relief crossed his face, smoothing lines away and making him look much younger. “Then we haveZandI,” he breathed. His hand flexed, as though he didn’t know what to do with the energy within him. I realized, for maybe the first time, Altschuler cared about this the way my cohort did—he too longed to unearth hidden secrets, to bring the unknown to light.
“Next we need other words that might containZandI,” Yael said. “We should start looking—”
“Not now,” Professor Altschuler said. “It’s nine thirty on a Saturday, and I have places to be. We’ll return to this tomorrow.” He gestured for us to leave the room before him.
“But, Professor—”
“We’re on a roll—”
“We’re not tired, I promise—”
“Out,” Professor Altschuler said firmly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Banished, we stood outside the scroll room, buzzing with energy and stumped on what to do next. Then I started laughing. “Do you think he’s afraid we’re going to steal his discovery?”
Stefan let out a hoot and shot me a look of appreciation. “Honestly, yes.”
“What are we going to do now?” Gidon looked like he might tear his hair out.
“Easy,” Stefan said. “We’re going to fucking celebrate.”
Sixteen
