Silence reigned for a painfully long time, and then Toby reached into his bag for the postcard. He walked slowly up to the timeline, grabbed a magnet, and stuck the postcard to the whiteboard with a thud, right over Calla’s name and Zella’s.
Right over the wordWatcher.
“Hannah is dead.” Toby said that like it was not up for debate. “Avery’s mother lived by the adageDo no harm. I am telling you right here and right now that Hannah Rooney didn’t escape her family and their criminal enterprise to walk right into another, and sheneverwould have left Avery. Not if there was a breath left in her lungs.”
“Not even to protect you?” Jameson countered. “Not even if Hannah was dying and they offered her a chance to live? She needed a transplant. Who’s to say the Gilded Blade, with all its influence and all itsconnections, couldn’t have somehow arranged for that to happen? It’s beenfive years, Toby.”
“I know exactly how long it’s been.” Toby didn’t raise his voice, but his expression was one of a man screaming. “Just like I know that it’s entirely possible that writing me that postcard was the last thing she ever did. She wanted me to know what the Crucible was called. That’s the reason that postcard is on the board. Theonlyreason.”
Toby turned and left without another word. Jameson stared after him for a second or two, then went back to staring at the whiteboards and thinking about far too many things at the same time.
About the Crucible, which could last a week or a year and had to besurvived. About Avery.
Always Avery.
There has to be something.Jameson slowed his breathing. He willed the sounds of the room to fall away, willed the world to melt away, everything except the board and the part of his own mind that had been trained to look for patterns and possibility and hidden meaning.
The constellation Lyra.
Vega. Aquila.
The ring box.
Deep in the hollows of his mind, Jameson could hear his grandfather quizzing him:What do you see?It was rarer these days for Jameson to find himself haunted by the memory of that question, but heknewthat there was a method of some sort buried in all this madness. The awareness of that was like an itch beneath his skin, like the distant sound of a slowly creaking door.
What does all of this mean?
What’s the pattern?
What’s the trick?
How do the pieces fit?
Jameson took a step back. Then another. And another. Sometimes, the key to solving a puzzle was taking the wide view, the long view, so he just kept walking backward until he could take in all of the writing on all of the whiteboards at once.
What wasn’t he seeing?
The gnawing feeling that the answer was somehowright therebuilt in his mind like a brutal wave, gaining momentum as it went. He stared and stared and stared at the boards, absorbing everything on them whole.Watcher, Hand, Judge. Lily, Omega, Monoceros.
That second set of terms had been new to Jameson when Grayson and Lyra had put them up on the board—all except forlily, which he’d heard from Gigi before he’d left for Prague.
The Monoceros is the Judge.
The Judge is Alice.
Alice is the Monoceros. Purity of wisdom. And Monoceros is a constellation.
Constellations and stars. Lyra, Aquila, Vega…
Vega had been one of the Kyrie. Aquila was a maternal last name. And Alice had encoded Lyra’s name on a poem that was written before Lyra had ever been born.
Why her?Jameson found himself silently addressing that question to his grandmother.Why was Lyra’s uncle so sure that you would come forher?
Her name in your ring box.
Her name on that poem.
The constellation Lyra—notLyrabutLie-ra.