She had laid this trail for her brother, but I couldn’t help feeling that it had also been laid for me.
“We don’t know that it was the Fidei Defensor,” Eli said. “For all we know, the only connections between them and the Lumen Dei are a crazy old lady and a dead language.”
“But remember how the letter ended?” said Adriane, who remembered everything. “ ‘Yours in eternal fealty and defense of the faith.’ No way is that a coincidence.”
“No, I bet you’re right,” Max said. We had filled him and Adriane in on Janika’s cryptic warnings and the potential existence of a new player in this surreal game. “That’s what fundamentalists do, right? Slit your throat as soon as you start asking the wrong questions.”
“Fundamentalism has nothing to do with what the Fidei were about,” Eli said.
“A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe,” Max said. “And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else. If the cassock fits …”
Adriane cleared her throat. “Before you two reenact the Clash of Civilizations, maybe someone can tell me what this means?” She tapped the strange word, written in letters three lines high, at the bottom of the page. Her usually perfect nails were ragged, the manicured red paint scratched and peeled, so on first glance it appeared her cuticles were oozing blood. “It’s not Greek.”
“It’s Hebrew.” That much I could tell from those long-ago sleepy holiday mornings at my grandmother’s synagogue, but no more. Several lines followed the word:
GSV ULIVRTMVI SLOWH GSV PVB.
NZHGVI LU GSV HGZIH, SRH GIRFNKS
DROO GLDVI LEVI GSV VNKRIV.
URMW SRN RM GSV KOZXV GSZG
UVVOH ORPV SLNV.
DSVIV DV SZEV MVEVI YVVM
GLTVGSVI, YFG DSVM R ZN GSVIV, BLF
ZIV DRGS NV.
It had to be another code, and was the key.
“Atbash,” Max said.
“Gesundheit.” Adriane smiled.
Max didn’t. “Atbash,” he said again. “That’s what it says.”
“You read Hebrew?” I asked. “You’re a Methodist.”
“Episcopalian, actually. But I told you my parents were religious. Hebrew was the first language of God, so …”
“So you know Hebrew because of God?” Adriane said. I caught her eyeing the exit.
“When you move around a lot, it makes sense that going to church would be the only thing that feels like home,” I said quickly. “It’s not like he still wants to be a priest or something.”
Eli raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Still’?”
Max didn’t have to say anything. I could tell, from his wounded expression, that I’d done wrong. Again.
“No one told me we had a man of God among us,” Eli said. “Potential MOG, at least. What changed your mind?”
“Leave him alone,” I said.
Max cleared his throat. “You can stop answering for me,” he said.
“I was just trying to help—”
“Please, don’t.” It was the please that hurt. So polite, like I was anybody. Nobody. “Nothing changed my mind. I was a kid, and then I grew up. Figured out that the world doesn’t need more people to just sit around and pray.”
“Ah, so you decided you were going to change the world. Save the world.” I didn’t know why Eli kept pushing.
“So what if I did?”
“Totally explains why you’re majoring in … history. Am I to assume this world-changing plan of yours includes a time machine?”
“Shut up, Eli,” Adriane said. “You’re being a dick.”
I noticed Max didn’t tell her to stop helping.
“No, I want to know. What does our resident holy man think of our current endeavor? You don’t think your God might have a problem with you tracking down his private number?”
Max had to know Eli was mocking him. I suspected he didn’t care. Unlike almost every other guy I knew, he’d never been afraid of his own sincerity, no matter how ridiculous it occasionally made him look.
“I think the Lumen Dei, if it existed, would be a miracle,” Max said. “War. Hunger. Poverty. You could end them all.”
“If God had that kind of power, you’d think he would have gotten around to doing that himself,” Adriane said.
“It’s not just about the power. It’s the knowledge. The ultimate answer. Think about it: If you could prove, once and for all, that God existed? If every single person on earth knew exactly where they stood, and what their lives were for? You want to know why I could never be a priest? The real reason?” he said, turning back to Eli. “Faith.” He made the word sound pornographic. “If something is true, you shouldn’t have to believe in it. You should be able to know.”
There was an odd tension in the room. Adriane laughed nervously. “All I know,” she said, “is that if we actually manage to find this thing, or build it, or whatever, we can keep ourselves from going to prison, and, bonus, hopefully stop the crazies from murdering us in our sleep. Not to mention how much we could make off of selling it. It’s like Antiques Roadshow on steroids.”
I gave her a pity laugh. The boys ignored her. “Some might say this is exactly what’s wrong with something like the Lumen Dei,” Eli said. “Because people are idiots.”
“She’s not an idiot,” Max said.
“Chivalrous. But I was referring to you. Selling it to the highest bidder is bad enough, but you want to talk disaster? Hand over power like that to some lunatic with a God complex who’s determined to create heaven on earth. After all the millions of people who’ve been killed in the name of God, you want to—”
“Killed because they were fighting about God,” Max said. “They fight because they have to resort to faith. If there were one truth, one single answer, there’d be no more fighting.”
“Some people would call you dangerously naive,” Eli said. “And would point out that knowledge can be dangerous.”
“So’s ignorance,” I said. “It’s always better to know than not know.”
“Pollution,” he shot back. “Gunpowder. Nuclear weapons. Knowing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And just because you know how to build something doesn’t mean it should be built. Ever heard of the tree of knowledge? The apple? Some people would say the fact that we’re too stupid to learn from our mistakes is just proof that we’re too stupid not to make another one. And this would be a big one.”
“So because we’re not perfect, we should all go back to living in caves?” I said, incredulous. “You think that’d be better?”
“We’d be naked,” Adriane pointed out. “If you’ve ever been to a nude beach, you would know it’s definitely not better.”
“You think there wasn’t war before there were bombs and guns?” I asked him. “Like cavemen didn’t bash each other’s heads in with giant rocks.”
“Some people might say killing people with rocks is significantly less efficient,” Eli pointed out. “It’s hard to wipe out a species one head bashing at a time.”
“Some people,” I said. “Right. What about you? What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Who cares what I think?”
“Excellent point,” Adriane said, waving the letter and its mysterious cipher at us. “How about we get back to something that actually matters.”
“I care,” I said. If Max had to expose himself, let Eli do it, too.
He hesitated. “I think you can’t argue with history,” he said finally. “And I think that if God wanted us to know him, he would show himself. I think faith has an inherent value. There’s power in belief—in choosing to believe.”
Adriane blew a sharp pfft through her teeth. “And if God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings, right? Which makes us all sinners for using airplanes and air conditioners and microwaves and all the other crap God forgot to make himself—oh, and sorry, ugly girls, no makeup, because clearly God doesn’t want you to be pretty.”
“She has
a point,” Max said. “For all you know, God does want us to know him, but only when we prove we’re worthy by figuring out how to do it. Maybe the Lumen Dei is that proof.”
I snorted.
I didn’t mean to, but there it was. Presumably Max thought I was laughing at him, and maybe I was, because I was laughing at all of it, at the machine, at the argument, and most of all at God—at his God, he’d made that clear. Maybe I deserved the look he gave me.
“Something to share with the rest of the class?” Eli asked.
I shook my head and rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. I’m sorry, it meant. It used to be, we understood each other perfectly without talking, and when we did talk, we talked about everything. We understood that, too. Now, it seemed, we didn’t talk: We apologized.
“Say it,” Max said, rigid beneath my touch.
Fine.
“It’s irrelevant, all of this,” I said. Though they weren’t the ones I needed to convince. “The Lumen Dei, even if we manage to track down all the pieces and put it together, is just a very old piece of junk. You can’t get definite proof of something that doesn’t exist.”
“ ‘Something’—that would be God, I take it?” Eli asked.
“That would be God. And you know what? If there is a God, and it’s that same God who’s so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can’t get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some. You think there’s a reason people need faith? Like there’s a reason for anything else that happens? Right. Is there a reason Chris needed to die? Or that—” I swallowed it. “Or all the other crap your God pulls? He wants me to worship him, let him explain himself. Let him answer for what he’s done. Let him explain to me what’s so great about the world and why I should be so grateful for my wonderful, magnificent life.”
Adriane pulled a wad of tissue out of her pocket and held it out to me.
“What?” I said.
“You’re crying.”
“No, I’m not.” But I wiped my eyes, and they were wet.
I didn’t take the tissue.
“Atbash. Hebrew. Great. So how does that help us?” My voice cracked, but they were polite enough to ignore it.
“It’s an ancient biblical substitution code,” Max said, ignoring it best of all. He scavenged a pen and a blank piece of paper. “You just substitute the first letter for the last letter, and the second for the second to last, et cetera. So aleph for tav, bet for shin—in English, you’d sub in A for Z, B for Y, you get the idea. Simple.”
I hunched over the page, swapping out the letters, piecing together the real message, taking longer than I needed. The silence was a relief.
GSV ULIVRTMVI SLOWH GSV PVB.
NZHGVI LU GSV HGZIH, SRH GIRFNKS
DROO GLDVI LEVI GSV VNKRIV.
URMW SRN RM GSV KOZXV GSZG
UVVOH ORPV SLNV.
DSVIV DV SZEV MVEVI YVVM
GLTVGSVI, YFG DSVM R ZN GSVIV, BLF
ZIV DRGS NV.
Finally, in English once again:
The foreigner holds the key. Master of the stars, his triumph will tower over the Empire. Find him in the place that feels like home. Where we have never been together, but when I am there, you are with me.
“Poetic,” Adriane said.
“And obvious.” Max leapt to his feet. “The astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall tower. The Orloj. You know the little mechanical figures that dance when it chimes the hour? One of them is a Turk. The foreigner holds the key. That has to be it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Something felt off. “She says she and her brother have never been there together—but they grew up in Prague. So what are the odds of that?”
“You have a better idea?”
I shook my head.
Eli sighed. “Guess I should put my Spider-Man costume back on.”
“You know what?” said Max. “You two didn’t sleep at all last night—why don’t you stay here. Adriane and I can handle this.”
She raised her eyebrows. “We can?”
“Yeah. We can. Nora can stay here and rest. With him.” He said it like I should be grateful, but it felt like penance.
“He’s fine with that,” Eli said.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We should stay together.”
“Why?” Max asked.
So I let them go.
32
They’d been gone an hour when Eli pounded on my door. I ignored it and redoubled my fruitless efforts to sleep.
“I need to show you something!” he shouted.
I let him keep at it for another minute or two before finally opening the door. “Go away.”
“Put your shoes on. I need to show you something.”
“Pass.”
“So when you show up at my door in the middle of the night, I’m supposed to go with you, no questions asked, but you can’t come downstairs with me for five minutes, in the middle of the afternoon?”
In the deserted lobby, he showed me the Wikipedia page for the astronomical clock, highlighting the crucial line: “The Orloj suffered heavy damage on May 7 and especially May 8, 1945 …. The hall and nearby buildings burned along with the wooden sculptures on the Orloj and the calendar dial face.” The clock now hanging in Old Town Square was almost a complete reconstruction of the original.
“So that’s the end of it,” I said. My stomach was doing strange, fluttery things. Relief, fear, these would have been reasonable reactions, but this wasn’t either. I felt like Elizabeth had let us down. Or vice versa. “Whatever she hid there, it’s long gone.”
“Except you don’t think she hid anything there,” Eli said. “And neither do I.”
“You heard Max. What else could it be?”
“Unlike Max, I also hear you,” he said. “The clock doesn’t fit. And I’ve been thinking: master of the stars. It could be a foreign astronomer, right? And in the last letter she was about to set out on a pilgrimage to see—”
“Kepler!” we said together.
“You see?” he said. “It’s perfect.”
“Yeah. I see.”
“So why aren’t we smiling? Tell me this isn’t about the rude American boy.”
At that, I couldn’t help myself, but even the hint of a smile felt like a betrayal. “This isn’t about Max,” I said. “Explain to me how it’s supposed to be good news that she left the next piece with a guy who’s been dead for five hundred years. What are we supposed to do, track down his great-great-great-to-the-power-of-infinity-grandson and ask whether he’s found anything interesting in his attic?”
“You don’t really think she’d have trusted him with this, do you? Think: Is there anyone she’d have trusted, other than her brother?”
“Why are you asking me like I’m inside her head?”
Did she trust anyone else? Thomas, of course, but by the time she buried her treasures, Thomas was long gone. There was no one else. Still, something about the clue had been bugging me, something familiar about the phrasing. A place that felt like home, surrounded by people she trusted, where she could imagine her brother by her side.…
“Sorry,” he said. “You just seem, I don’t know. In tune with her, I guess. Did you ever wonder whether—What?”
“What do you mean, what? Did I ever wonder whether …?”
“No. Just now, you thought of something.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Same thing that made me sure you wouldn’t ditch me on the way to Prague. Your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?”
“Let’s just say you should stay away from the poker table.”
“I get that a lot. And you know what people usually find out?”
“They think they can read you, but they’re wrong?” Eli said. T
he self-satisfied grin was disgusting.
“I’m going back to my room.” But I didn’t go anywhere. Because he’d guessed right.
“Say it.”
“The place that feels like home, where she feels like her brother is with her,” I said. “She talked about it in one of her first letters. There was some library at a monastery, up on the hill overlooking the city. Stratton. Strawhill. Something. Her refuge.”
“Strahov?”
“That’s it.”
“Then that has to be it!” Eli, suddenly jittery with energy, switched off the computer. “They’re famous for their library—you think she hid something in it? In a book? Something by Kepler?”
His excitement was contagious. Especially when I told him about how I’d found Elizabeth’s very first hidden message, sewn into the binding of the Petrarch book. This really could be it.
He was already at the door when he noticed I wasn’t behind him. “What are you waiting for?”
“We are waiting for them to get back.” It was the last thing I wanted to do. We were so close; Elizabeth had been waiting for so long.
“Why, just because he threw a little temper tantrum?”
“He was right,” I said reluctantly. “I shouldn’t have disappeared. We’re in this together.”
“And that’s why he went off with your best friend and left you here with me. You may be miscalculating your wes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I did. Max was still mad about the night before; he was punishing me.
Or.
I was trying not to think about the two of them together that night, walking through the moonlight, Adriane sobbing in Max’s arms, Max stroking her back, whispering in her ear, telling her she was safe, he was there, everything was going to be okay.
I was trying not to think about the things between them that I wasn’t allowed to understand.
“Should I use smaller words? They don’t want you around.”
Adriane didn’t seem to care that I’d broken my promise, that when she’d needed me, I had been gone—gone long enough to reawaken her fear, to make her think she’d lost someone else. She wasn’t angry, and she had a right to be. Max, on the other hand, did not.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 27