by Yvonne Woon
“This is no map,” he said. “Where did you find this?”
His words startled me. How did he know about the map?
When I refused to respond, he stepped closer to me, so that no one else would hear. I could smell the coffee on his breath. “Where is the map?”
I inched away. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My grandfather grasped my arm. “Of course you do. Did Mr. Berlin take it and give it to the Liberum? Or have you hidden it from me?”
I winced as he searched my pockets, but all he found were the bits of cloth that Dante had left behind. He studied them, frowning, then let them flutter to the ground.
“I know they attacked you at the inn,” he said. “We just came from there. They had some interesting things to tell us.”
I wanted to pick up the scraps of cloth, but I held myself back. “They came in the middle of the night,” I said.
“And yet you survived,” he said. “Which means they were coming for something else. Maybe a certain map that you had dug up from the bottom of a lake?”
He must have been able to read the guilt on my face, for he clenched his jaw as though I had answered his question, then approached the elders. They huddled together for what felt like ages, their voices hushed. While they spoke, I thought I saw the pale figure of a girl peek through the trees in the distance, just in front of the birch cabin. She had a fair complexion, with long hair the color of straw. She looked almost exactly like the girl I had seen flash in front of the window at the last point on the map. The canary weathervane shifted with the wind. When I looked back at the girl, she was gone.
My grandfather turned to the rest of the Monitors of the Lower Court. “The Liberum are closer than ever,” he announced. “As I suspected, the Undead that we’ve been tracking, Dante Berlin, has joined forces with them, and has given them what they have been searching for all these years—the Cartesian Map.”
A murmur rose over the junior Monitors.
“The actual Cartesian Map?” one of them said. “The map that leads to the Netherworld?” another chimed in. “How?” another said. “Is it real?”
“Whether or not it is authentic has yet to be determined,” my grandfather continued. “But what is more important is that the Liberum believe it to be genuine. They are following it now, and are after what they have always sought—eternal life. The Liberum have already apprehended Pruneaux, and attacked the Mädchen Inn. We cannot let them do any more damage.”
My grandfather looked down at his feet. “I believe that we are standing very close to the second point on the map. The Liberum have already been here; their vacancy is ahead of us.” He turned to the mountains in the distance. “I can sense their hollowness heading toward those mountains,” he said. The elders of the High Court nodded in agreement.
I gazed at them, puzzled. I hadn’t felt the presence of the Undead since early this morning. I closed my eyes, trying to tease out the slightest hint of their emptiness in the cold air, but could sense nothing.
“If we hurry, we may be able to catch them before they reach the next stop,” my grandfather continued. “Then, we will put them to rest.” His eyes rested on me, as if to emphasize that Dante would be included.
The elders of the High Court led the way, escorting us through the thicket. They were human, just like we were, though something about the way they moved, so steadily and swiftly, made them seem like a force that had blown in from another world. Even in their charcoal coats, they blended into the landscape effortlessly, slipping through the trees like a gray fog, striding through the snowy fields like a murder of crows. When they gathered, they stood upright and rigid, whispering in tones so low that I wondered if they were speaking at all. They seemed to communicate through a code of narrowed eyes, tilted heads, and glances over the shoulder, their gaze always vigilant.
“What do we do now?” Anya whispered to me.
My mind raced. I couldn’t run for it, because my grandfather now had the box. But if I stayed, I was at his mercy. “We find a way to steal back the box.”
“We’ll have to do it quickly,” Anya said. “What if they’re planning on sending us home?”
“My grandfather wants to find Dante,” I whispered. “Having us here is the best way to do it. He knows that.”
“Having you here,” Anya corrected.
Up ahead, a fleet of charcoal cars lined the side of the road, the same deep color as the suits and overcoats of the Monitors. The sight of them stunned me. It was as if the Monitors had replicated themselves in their vehicles: a vast slick of gray creeping over the landscape. The sun reflected off the hoods in a brilliant glare, each chrome ornament like the sharp tip of a Spade.
My grandfather placed his hand on my shoulder. “Renée.”
I stopped walking. Had he been listening this entire time? I searched the wrinkles in his face for some hint of reproach, but found none.
“I would like it very much if you joined me in my car. And Ms. Pinsky,” he continued, referring to Anya. “Would you please accompany my colleague in the car behind us?”
“There isn’t enough room for her in ours?” I said.
“I’m afraid there isn’t.”
He motioned to the third car in the line. One of the junior Monitors escorted Anya to the car behind mine.
I opened the door and was about to step inside when I saw my grandfather grasp Theo’s arm, tighter than necessary, and pull him aside. I watched them, curious, as they exchanged a few harsh words.
Our driver was busy loading gear into the trunk. Sliding across the seat, I slipped out the opposite door and crept behind the other cars until I was close enough to see their feet beneath the bumper.
“What happened with Dante Berlin?” my grandfather pressed.
I half expected Theo to tell my grandfather everything, but instead he paused. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t be slick with me,” my grandfather warned. “I saw what you did with your Spade, and I’m choosing to ignore it for your benefit.”
“And I saw what you did, all those years ago,” Theo countered.
In the glossy paint on the car I could see the reflection of the clouds passing overhead. What was Theo talking about? What had he seen my grandfather do? Cautiously, I peered over the hood of the trunk.
My grandfather clenched his fist as if he were going to hit him. “You saw nothing. You know nothing. Remember that. Now, Dante Berlin was with you. What happened when the Liberum attacked? Was he aware of it? Was he working for them?”
“Why do you want to find him so badly?”
“Because he is a murderer,” my grandfather said. “Not only is he an Undead, and one incredibly close to final decay, but a dangerous one at that. Only a year and a half ago, he took the soul of Gottfried Academy’s headmistress, and then attempted to take my granddaughter’s soul as well. It was a near-miracle that she survived.”
Murderer? I gripped the side of the car, trying my hardest to keep my mouth shut. It was true, the headmistress had died that night, though Dante had been the one trying to save her. But it didn’t matter how many times I’d tried to explain that to my grandfather; he only saw what he wanted to.
“Furthermore, I believe that he has information on the Liberum. And now, he has taken an unnatural interest in my granddaughter. Despite everything he’s done, he has managed to convince her of his innocence. I don’t know why or how, though I plan on burying him before he kills her for good.”
Theo studied him. “If Dante were going to kill Renée, he would have done it by now. If I know that, then you must. So tell me, why do you actually want to find him?”
I stared at Theo’s shoes, the same tattered sneakers he’d been wearing at the inn, when he’d held me back while the Undead had surrounded Dante. Maybe Theo wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe he had been trying to help.
My grandfather stiffened. “I was right to have taken away your Spade,” he said. “You may have been talented
at sensing death, but you were not a Monitor then, nor are you now, nor will you ever be. Now get out of my sight.”
My grandfather gestured to a thick-shouldered Monitor waiting by the curb. He opened the door to Anya’s car, and motioned to Theo to step inside.
Theo hesitated, as if trying to decide whether he should run.
“I wouldn’t,” my grandfather said, reading his mind. I watched one sneaker, then the other disappear as Theo climbed into the car. The frayed end of one of his shoelaces got caught in the door, though he didn’t seem to notice or care. I smiled.
When the door clicked shut, I snuck back to my car and slid into the backseat. The car welcomed me with perfect, temperature-controlled warmth. Its interior was upholstered entirely in smooth gray leather. The driver glanced at me from the rearview mirror. I half expected to see the cheerful blue eyes of Dustin, my grandfather’s estate manager, but these eyes were foreign to me. My grandfather slipped into the seat beside me and shut the door, sealing us in as if we were sitting in a hermetic chamber. I didn’t hear the engine start, or realize we were driving until the landscape outside began to move past us. From the comfort of the car, the snowy countryside almost looked artificial, nothing more than a photographic backdrop we were quickly leaving behind.
We wound through the farmland, which rose into rolling foothills and forests dotted with lakes and evergreens. The sun drooped in the sky. I searched the horizon for Dante’s presence. I could just make out a cool wisp of vacancy slipping away toward the mountains. Or was it just a chill?
“Where are we?” I asked my grandfather. He was busy perusing Pruneaux’s notebook, which he had confiscated from Theo’s bag.
Without looking up, he said, “Bavaria.”
In the front seat, the driver had turned on the radio. Wagner spilled out of the speakers, one of my grandfather’s favorite composers. But instead of settling into his seat, as he always used to do when he listened to opera, he winced. “Please turn that off,” he said.
My eyes lingered on him, surprised. I wondered if he had gone to the first point on the map, like we had, and was suffering from the same effects.
As night closed in around us, I saw from the rearview mirror that one of the cars behind us was pulling off the road. The end of a shoelace was still dangling out the side door.
“Anya and Theo’s car just turned off the road,” I said to my grandfather. He had since put down the notebook, and was now jotting something down on a pad.
When he didn’t answer, I continued. “Maybe something’s wrong. We should stop.”
My grandfather turned the page and continued writing, as if he hadn’t heard me.
I could just make out Theo’s hand pressing against the backseat window, as if he were trying to escape. I watched through the window while the car disappeared down a side street. “What’s going on?” I said. “Where are they going?”
My grandfather didn’t even bother to look. “Never mind them.”
“What are you doing with them?” I cried. “Why did you have us ride in separate cars? There’s plenty of room in this one.”
When he didn’t answer, I leaned over and tried to grab the notebook from his hands. He must have sensed me coming, because he grasped my wrist.
“Answer me!” I demanded, trying to squirm out of his grip. His palms were thick and creased like leather. They held tight, twisting my skin until it burned.
My grandfather let go and watched me while I rubbed the red skin on my wrist. He lowered his glasses. Without them he looked old and exhausted, yet as unpitying as he had on the day he walked back into my life.
“You’re with me now,” he said, his voice stern. “Better to not look back.”
How could I do that when everything I had was in the past? I paused, then made for the door handle, but my grandfather saw that coming, too.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s locked.”
His words only sharpened my anger. I tried to unroll the windows, and when that didn’t work, I pounded my hands against the glass. “Let me out!” I said. “I want to go where my friends are going. I want to know what you’re doing to them.”
My grandfather threw his pad aside. “Calm down!” he said. The driver glanced back at us. “I am a Monitor of the High Court, not some low-level hooligan. I have not done anything to your friends other than send them home, where they should have stayed in the first place. And to be honest, I think it is an incredibly selfish and cowardly decision on your part to have ever let them come along with you on this haphazard adventure in the first place. Now shape up. It’s far past time you start behaving like the Monitor that you are.”
Sent them home? I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t a Monitor—not at heart, at least. That I never wanted to be one. That I cared about my friends, and that I hadn’t asked them to come with me; that Monsieur had invited them and they had accepted. But I realized then that I still didn’t know why. Why had Theo wanted to come along, and why had Anya? The only answer I had was from her tarot reading, which intimated that her mother was dying of an illness.
My grandfather picked up his pad. “I want you to tell me everything you know about this strange black box, and the map that you so foolishly let the Liberum take from you. Where you found them, what the map said, and most importantly, to whom you have shown them.”
I clenched my jaw and said nothing.
My grandfather sighed. “If this is about some sort of loyalty to your friends, then you ought to know that Theodore Healy is a delinquent and a thief. He is loyal to no one but himself. He does not do things out of the kindness of his heart. And he is not your friend. Do not be misled by his affable personality. When it comes time for him to choose between him and you, he will always choose himself, even if the consequences of such a choice are dire.”
I remembered Anya’s tarot reading. You will leave your path and walk on another. You will have to choose to return or go back. The lives of those around you will be sealed with your decision. Could that refer to this very moment? Would Theo choose to come back?
“As for your friend Anya Pinsky, she is a nice girl, but flighty and gullible. She conflates Monitoring with magic, choice with fate. More likely than not, she came along because she wanted to help you. She didn’t understand the kind of undertaking you were dragging her into. Frankly, I believe it is highly selfish of you to have let her come in the first place.”
I wanted to tell him how wrong he was, but wondered if there was truth to his words. “She isn’t here for no reason,” I said. “Someone in her family is sick. Her mother.”
My grandfather scoffed. “No one in her family is sick. I saw them a few weeks ago. Both of her parents are just fine, though I doubt they’re doing as well now that their only child is missing.”
Her mother wasn’t ill? I tried to hide my surprise by looking at my hands. So why was she here?
“Did she tell you that?” my grandfather asked, raising an eyebrow. “An eccentric girl, she is.”
But Anya hadn’t told us that; she’d denied it. Perhaps she had another reason for coming along, though now I would never find out.
“Now back to the map,” my grandfather said. “Tell me about it.”
I glared at him. Let him think what he wanted to. I was the one who had the real power here. I knew about the chest and the map etched inside. My grandfather hadn’t helped me find it, nor had he helped me get here.
“Fine. You don’t have to speak. But you’re with me now. And you are a Monitor. Eventually, you’ll have to accept that.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence, our heads swaying with the motion of the car as it climbed up a winding road. It was icy and flanked by forests thick with evergreens. High at its top stood a stalwart gray castle, its stones almost the same shade as the cars and coats of the Monitors, as if they cast a shadow in their likeness everywhere they went. It was perched high on top of the hill, where even from the car I could see all around us for miles. So this was how
the Monitors traveled. They moved through the world in plain sight, making sure they always took the high road, so that when people like Dante and I crept through darkness, it was their shadows we were hiding beneath.
A young woman greeted us at the front desk. She was beautiful, with a soft figure and high rosy cheeks that were flushed from the mountain air.
“Mr. Winters?” she said. “Welcome. Dinner is waiting for you in the main dining room.”
She led us toward a stately room off the back of the lobby. Before we entered, my grandfather pulled me aside and introduced me to two junior Monitors. The first was a man approaching middle age, his face set in a permanent frown. The other was a woman, thin and mousy, though her eyes betrayed a harshness that her gentle features hid.
“Mr. Harbes,” my grandfather said, “and Ms. Vine will be keeping watch over you from now until we return to the States. You are to do as they say, or risk being sent home.”
After my grandfather left us alone, the Monitors peered down at me, neither of them happy about their new task. They escorted me toward the dining hall, muttering to each other over my head. Before we entered, I spotted my grandfather, almost completely hidden behind a pillar near the entrance, where he spoke softly into a cell phone, his back turned. As we passed him, I bent down and quickly pulled the laces loose on my boot.
“What are you doing?” Ms. Vine asked.
“I’m tying my boot,” I said, and lowering my head, I tried to hear what my grandfather was saying.
“Are you at the school?” my grandfather asked. “Did you find the boy?” I could tell from the impatient tone of his voice that he was talking to Dustin, his estate manager. But who was he talking about? The school, the boy. Was he asking Dustin if he had gone to Gottfried, and found Noah?
My grandfather clenched his jaw as he listened. He didn’t like the answer. “That is not optimal,” he said, his hand on his hip. “Well, keep looking. The mansion will be fine without you.”