Cara went to supper at a long table in the Institute's kitchen, a room that was so big she couldn't see all of it at once. It was down several flights of stairs from the room under the high dome—in the core of the building, as Mrs. O called it.
There was the "core" and the "shell," she'd told Cara as they came in; the core was the old part and the shell was the new, which looked like a thousand other office buildings. Like the rest of the rooms in the core, the kitchen had no windows, but there were open fireplaces at each end. And there was an actual stone floor with big gray flagstones, which made her wonder how many floors there could be beneath it. After all, a stone floor had to be heavy.
The table was lined with adults she assumed were teachers. She sat down beside Mrs. O, and someone handed her a plate with spaghetti and sauce on it, then a small bowl full of grated cheese with a delicate silver spoon. Cara was reaching for the spoon, idly wondering why the parmesan wasn't just in a green-plastic shake container like it should be, when it occurred to her that half the teachers could be reading her mind at that very instant.
Her hand went a little limp.
"So—if some of the people here are mindreaders," she said under her breath to Mrs. O, "does that mean they're reading me right now? Because with Jax..."
"No, dear, we have an amnesty," said Mrs. O, smiling. "What Mr. Sabin was talking about. Amnesty's what we call it between friends. We don't use the old ways on each other unless there's either a clear crisis or a personal understanding. That's why we didn't find out about Roger until you told us. We don't read people as a matter of course—only when we feel we have no other choice."
"In that case," said the bearded teacher with the glasses, "we erred on the other side, didn't we? Big mistake. We were so busy with Jax, we didn't bother to read you. Or we might even have caught up to Roger."
"In other words, don't worry," said the teacher with the neatly cut silver hair. "You'll have the usual amount of privacy while you're eating your spaghetti."
"Unless you do something that enrages us, that is," said the bearded teacher, jokey. "By the way, I'm Glen. Or Mr. Trujillo, if you prefer. Like the despot."
Cara went to reach for the spoon again, but the bowl of parmesan had already moved down the table. Still, she was too hungry to wait, so she started to eat without it.
"I didn't get to tell Jax this," she said slowly, twirling spaghetti on her fork as Mrs. O poured herself a glass of red wine from a fat-bottomed bottle in the middle of the table and Mr. Trujillo, across from them, forked up salad in a messy way that left white dabs of dressing on his beard. "But I have a question about something I saw? In a—I guess it was a vision?"
"Go on," said Mrs. O.
"Spill it," said Mr. Trujillo.
"So the vision was—well, I saw this man in a subway train, and it seemed to me he was following me. We were alone in the subway car. I have this ring my mother gave me, and when I looked at him and touched the ring, he opened his mouth..."
The teachers were both waiting, gazing at her.
"...and it looked like there were these flames in there."
Mr. Trujillo let his fork hand rest on the edge of the table, the lettuce sticking out and trembling a bit.
Mrs. O put her wine down and swallowed.
"A vision of a Burner," she said quietly.
Mr. Trujillo raised his napkin with his free hand and patted at his beard.
"A Burner?" asked Cara.
"They used to be called fire-eaters," said Mr. Trujillo, nodding. "They were made by the Cold, some time ago. They're part of his army. He was in England first, you know. That is, his army operated there. Birmingham, England, in the 1740s. Paul and Wyatt—"
"Birmingham?" echoed Cara.
She had no idea what he was talking about.
"It was all his work, you see...he was behind it all. The first mills, the first seeds of what would be a worldwide movement toward the massive use of coal. The poet William Blake wrote about it. Those dark Satanic mills...."
"You're being obscure, Glen," said Mrs. O. "As usual. She won't know anything about that. They probably haven't even gotten to the Industrial Revolution in her history class yet. Nor is she ready, Glen, for our...particular take on it."
"Later, in the 1850s," went on Mr. Trujillo, holding his napkin out in front of him and apparently studying the food smears upon it, "they were also linked to some people in the South who were extremists in support of slaveholding for tobacco and cotton. Who helped get the Civil War started, in fact. Although that was only a side project, basically a hobby, for the most part—"
"Glen's point is, they've been around for a long time," interrupted Mrs. O brusquely. "And that's only possible because they're not, in fact, human."
"They're like the Pouring Man, then?" said Cara. "Elementals?"
"Yes," said Mrs. O. "That's exactly right. The Burners are fire elementals."
"I thought I might have—that it might just have been one of these visions that I get," said Cara. "Like when I saw wings on you. But they weren't really physical wings. Were they?"
In the corner of the kitchen, someone clanged a pot, and it rang out in the stillness.
"Sorry to disappoint. The Burners' flames are real," said Mr. Trujillo.
The other teachers were definitely listening now. Most had even stopped eating, though some still lifted their wine glasses and sipped. It made her a bit nervous.
"The humanoid forms they take are just camouflage. They need a certain amount of heat to manifest, and they also give it off," went on Mr. Trujillo. "In a pinch they can use flammables instead of an open flame—the gas in the tanks of cars, for instance, or lighters or some kinds of alcohol...."
"They carry whole microclimates with them," said Mrs. O. "So usually you feel them before you see them."
Cara remembered the heat of the subway car. At the time she'd thought it must be what always happened, that when the train stopped maybe the air-conditioning shut down... But wait: If the Burner had been real, what did he want with her?
Another teacher spoke sharply from the end of the table—the East Indian woman. She had her hair braided up on her head and a dark red spot between her eyebrows.
"My dear, listen closely: this is important. Where did you have this vision? And when?"
"On the T," said Cara. "On my way here."
Then suddenly all the teachers were talking among themselves—or no: they were thinking at each other. It made her catch her breath: ripples like waves in the air, like the shimmer above a road in the desert heat. They were identical to the ones she'd seen flow between Jax and the leatherback sea turtle in the Aquarium back in August. All around her the air was moving, somehow—like a turbulence, a minor half-visible storm, twisting ribbons that distorted the view like a warped mirror or the patterned plastic of a shower door.
She gazed up into it, amazed. Technically the silence around the table was wearing on, but at the same time the air was bristling with energy she could almost hear—a kind of liquid back-and-forth of pulses and lulls, so that the silence seemed less like the absence of sound and more like some kind of low-level white noise. It felt almost like the ocean, with currents and rhythm and deep pulls below....
But it didn't last. After what couldn't have been more than a few seconds, all of the teachers were standing. They seemed to be deserting their meals and their half-full, richly red glasses of wine. Some of them almost seemed to glide away, Cara thought, and remembered the wings.
She felt at a loss until Mrs. O's hand on her arm guided her up from the table, up and—with the crowd in front of them and behind them, too—out the door they'd come in through.
"Was it what I said?" asked Cara, though it was half whisper and half thought.
Partly, thought Mrs. O into Cara's head.
Her thought had the high, pure sound Jax's had had—as though, in the space of Cara's brain, completely different people's voices got translated into the same kind of music. And yet, she knew it was Mrs. O. The idea "coincidence" came to her more as a feeling than as a word, a feeling or maybe a minor vision: in this case, a small mental picture of two parallel lines, which she instinctively knew meant coincidence.
We sensed their presence then, sang the mind of Mrs. O into Cara's. It sounded like a tuning fork, that resonating tone. She'd heard a tuning fork in music class one time last year. Not exactly relaxing. When the thoughts came from Jax ,it wasn't as jarring.
"Sensed it?" asked Cara.
They're coming.
"But I thought this was a sanctuary, where the bad guys couldn't get in," protested Cara.
"It is," said Mrs. O out loud. "But all fortresses can be breached. The enemy is focusing a lot of energy, as we speak, on breaking down our wards—our defenses. And sooner or later they'll succeed."
•
With Mrs. O and Mr. Trujillo alongside, Cara raced up stairways and through corridors to the bedroom where Jax lay sleeping—only now, when they pushed the door open, he was awake.
He was sitting on the edge of his canopy bed.
"Jax!" said Cara, and ran up to him.
He stayed slumped over, head bowed.
"Jax?" she asked, sitting down on the edge of the mattress beside him. "Jax? Are you OK?"
Still he didn't say anything; slowly he raised his head and turned to look at her.
His eyes, she thought. They'd changed again. Now the pupils were huge; the pupils were the whole iris. The blue of his eyes was completely gone. The irises were black—and not sharply black but a black that faded around the edges, fuzzed into the white of the eyes.
"What's wrong with him?" she asked urgently, turning to the teachers. "Why are his eyes like that?"
They were at the bedside now, too, on the other side from Cara, their hands passing over Jax's head in a strange fashion.
"Because the treatment failed," said Mr. Trujillo.
He shook his head, glancing grimly at Mrs. O.
"We're going to have to take him with us," said Mrs. O, more to him than to Cara.
Although her hands were moving over Jax, they weren't, Cara noticed, quite touching him. Jax wasn't saying anything; she couldn't imagine him speaking, the way he was now. He just stared at them emptily.
"What do you mean, take him?" asked Cara.
"When we go," said Mrs. O.
"We're going to have to go," agreed Mr. T. "The wards are still up now, but they're breaking down fairly quickly. I can feel it happening. We can rebuild them, but not fast enough."
"But—go where?"
"We're leaving—though not through the front door," said Mrs. O. Her hands fluttered, seeming to draw Jax's face forward, and then fell. "We have to abandon this place for a while."
"You have to leave, too. But you won't be coming with us," added Mr. T. "We need you to do something else. Something crucial."
"But I can't leave with Jax...like that!" said Cara. She felt on the brink of tears.
"You need to do this for him—do this so we can help him," he went on. "He's who they're here for. They were led to him."
"You mean by—by me?"
"Not your fault, Cara. Not at all," said Mrs. O quickly. "Anyone who loved him would have done the same. But he needs to be moved. Your mother's out there as their hostage, and she has something he needs if he's going to recover."
"We'll need something from her to bring him back," added Mr. T. "We have to stay out of sight and take care of him, so you're going to have to go get her. Either her or what we need from her. Whichever's possible. "
"And what do you need from her?"
"A memory."
"A memory? But how can I—"
"The memory of his birth," said Mr. T.
"Jax is adopted," said Cara.
"Yes, of course," said Mrs. O. "The memory of when she first saw him. Her earliest memory of him. She'll know, when you tell her what's happened. If you can find her, she should know how to help."
"But how am I supposed to do that? I haven't seen her for two months!"
"You have to use your own old way," said Mrs. O. "Work on your vision. It's your talent, Cara. You need to call it up."
"I don't know how!"
"We'd guide you, but there's no time. There's a book in the library here that should help," said Mr. T. "Look for the title...let's see, how did it go...yes: Learning to See. If I recall. It has an inscription on it, "Videre licet." That's on the cover, too, I think. Videre licet. Be listed in the card catalog."
As he said all this they were guiding Jax to his feet, standing him up between them. His arms hung limply; he gazed ahead, zombie-like.
"We have to take him now," said Mrs. O. "Can you feel it, Cara?"
The air in the room had gotten warmer. Cara touched her upper lip and felt a bead of perspiration.
She followed the two teachers out the door, walking behind them as they hustled Jax along the hall and rounded a corner.
"You'll need the code for the elevator," said Mr. T, and stopped walking to turn to her. "It's easy. Key in your own eight-digit birthdate, month first. You're in the system already. When you have what you need, come find us again."
"Jax is depending on you," said Mrs. O. "You can do this. But be careful. And be quick. You're safe here until the wards fail. But you don't want to be here when that happens."
"Jax? Hey. Jax?" asked Cara, leaning in to him.
She couldn't let go of the conviction that he was in there somewhere, and since he was in there, he had to respond to her...didn't he? And then, if she could just make him act like himself again, they wouldn't have to separate. She wouldn't be left alone, wouldn't have to do something hard that she had no clue about.
But he wasn't even turning to look at her as she spoke; all she could see was the back of his head. "Jax. Come on, Jax. It's me!"
She grabbed his arm and tried to turn him. The arm was rubbery, and his jaw, when she rotated him to face her, was still slack. And in his staring, impersonal eyes, their pupils huge and black, she saw what looked like an infinite void.
It was as though the pupils were so deep they went down forever, as black and silent as the vacuum of space.
It chilled her.
"Remember: Crede quod habes, et habes," said Mr. T. "Latin."
Cara opened her mouth to tell him they didn't offer Latin at her school; so could he please speak English? But before she could get it together to speak, the boy who had been Jax, along with both of the teachers, melted into the wall.
•
She was standing there awestruck, with an afterimage stamped on her mind of the three of them disappearing, when she realized she didn't have time to wonder how they'd done it. She didn't have time to think about what was going on with the other kids, in the shell of the building, or the rest of the teachers, or where exactly the Burners were.
Instead she shook off her questions and headed down through the maze of deserted corridors to the library to find the book.
It was spooky to be in there alone. Though the dome itself contained no glass, and of course there were no windows, an odd kind of light still shone down whitely from up high, as though leaking through invisible seams in the walls. It wasn't daytime anymore, but still the light beamed down with no clear source, dust motes whirling. As she made her way through the room, she was conscious of the jars in the cubbyholes, the bones in the display cases.
Was it getting hotter, she wondered? The back of her neck was clammy underneath the hair; strands stuck to the skin and made her itch.
How fast would the Burners get in?
Or would they possibly give up, if they sensed Jax had been moved away? Might they sense his absence and not be interested in coming in anymore? The Pouring Man had sensed where she and Jax were, after all. Max, too. He had found out where they were going and what they were doing, it seemed, more than once. He had known seemingly impossible things.
So maybe the fire elementals could do that, too. And maybe, hopefully, she wasn't a big enough prize for them...but she still had to hurry. She had to figure out where to go and how to get there, and the book was her only hope.
In the wing of the great room that was devoted to bookshelves, where armchairs stood with floor lamps beside them on the fraying rugs, there was a wooden cabinet she thought must hold the card catalog. She hurried over and pulled out one of the trays. But there was nothing under "Learning to See" in the L's. (The nearby titles were curious: Lean on Me: Brief Biographies of Famous Trees. Learning to Cope With H. Sapiens in 10 (Moderately) Easy Steps. Learning to Sing With Cetaceans: The Gift of Harmony. But no Learning to See.)
She opened one drawer after another hastily until she found the Vs: how did you spell it? She tried Vee— first, then Ve—. Nothing. Then Vi—. It seemed to be by subject as well as by title or author, all combined in the one cabinet. Violets, Shrinking. Violence, Electrical...
Videre licet. Could that be it? The subtitle was "Learning to See." Had Mr. T gotten it the wrong way around? There was no author's name and only a simple number; it didn't look like the Dewey Decimal. Nor was the card attached to the drawer; she could pull it right out. So she did.
It must be late by now, she realized. She didn't wear a watch, and she hadn't looked at her cell recently, which was back in her backpack in the room she'd been sharing with Jax....
Jax of the dark eyes. The eyes like the vacuum of space.
The floor lamps had to be motion sensitive, she thought, like the light outside the garage at home, because as she moved toward them they flicked on. She counted the numbers on the shelves, consulting her index card as she moved quickly along; soon she was at a tall shelf of oversize books. Some of them were two or three feet tall, it looked like; some had to lie horizontally, they were so large.
She bent down to study their dusty spines and finally made out Learning to See. A Guide. Videre licet.
She put down the card and reached for the book, which was beneath a pile of others, drawing it out carefully. It was a very large book—more than half as tall as she was, and quite a bit wider—but there wasn't enough light to read by so she carried it over to the oak table where she'd sat before with the teachers. A long reading light with a green glass shade flicked on as she placed the book flat on the table's surface and pulled out a chair.
Gingerly, because the book looked worn, she opened the book, thumb and index finger carefully holding the front cover. There was no jacket, only a faded blue cloth binding. As the cover rose, she saw it was covered in tiny eyes—tiny, faint images of eyes: there had to be thousands of them. And it must have a 3D effect sewn into the threads, she thought, because as the cover opened, the eyes seemed to open with it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology—she recalled Mrs. O saying to her in this same room—is indistinguishable from magic.
The first page was blank. That wasn't unusual. But then the next page was blank, too. And the next.
Maybe she needed a stronger light, she thought; maybe the type was faded. She pushed the book closer to the green light; it seemed to her that the light brightened further.
Still she couldn't see anything on the massive pages. They looked white as a field of fresh snow.
She turned a few pages further, slowly and deliberately, and then flipped to the back of the book, just in case.
Nothing.
She sat back in the chair, discouraged. Then panicky. Her time had to be running out. And what could she do, without the book? How would she ever find out where her mother was being kept?
She touched her ring quickly, still looking at the book.
But the pages stayed blank.
She raised her eyes from the empty pages and caught sight of a painting on the wall. It was a portrait of two young ladies from olden times; they had wide ruffed collars on, those giant white lacy things you saw on the first Queen Elizabeth. They always reminded Cara of the plastic cones vets put on dogs. Worrying the ring with her fingers, she wondered what she was supposed to do next. What would happen to Jax if she failed?
They hadn't told her that. They hadn't said what would happen to him. But it couldn't be good.
How could she figure out the book?
She wasn't really looking at the painting, she realized, though she was resting her eyes on it. It was lit by a small brass light above it, the kind they had at museums, which jutted out from the wall...and then, with a shock, she knew exactly what she was seeing.
The ladies had faces she knew, faces she recognized.
One of the ladies was Jaye.
And the other was Hayley.
Back in the bedroom with the twin beds, where she'd run till she was out of breath, she dug into her pack and pulled out her phone. Sure enough, there were more texts from Hayley; she didn't stop to read them. She dialed.
"Finally," groaned Hayley, picking up after one ring. "What's up with you?"
"So this is going to seem hard. But it's really important, Hay. I need you."
"What?"
"I need you to come to where I am—like now, right now. I need your help. I'll text you directions."
"Are you kidding? You know how my mom is. She'd wig if I asked to go out into the city after dark."
Part of her wanted to run to them instead, just take the book and go to the hotel herself, away from this place with its failing defenses. But so far the book wasn't helpful—what if it was the wrong one? If it turned out to be the wrong book entirely, she'd definitely need to be here to find the right one. She knew her friends could help.
"Please, Hay. Please come. And Jaye—I need her, too. I need both of you. I really do. I'll owe you big-time, I know I will. But this is for Jax. He's really sick. He got...he got poisoned."
"Poisoned?"
"I promise, this is way bigger than the meet."
"You know what would happen if Mom found out I snuck out. I'd be grounded till freshman year in college. If she even let me go, at that point."
Cara gazed at the miniature portraits beside the bed as she listened to Hayley protest. They were amazing in the fineness of their details, she thought...and she touched her ring again to see if these pictures, too, would turn into her friends. Nothing happened. It must have to do with thinking about something, she thought, as she made contact with the ring...some kind of focus she had to have, maybe? Not just a subject she had to be thinking of, but also a problem?
When she hung up, she still didn't know whether her friends would show up.
Or whether the Burners would get here first.
•
Jax's room, she thought, for Jax's computer: that was where she had to go. If she couldn't figure out the book with the blank pages, maybe there would be a clue to finding her mother on there. She wasn't a computer whiz, but she knew more about laptops than about mysterious, blank books.
She found the part of the wall she thought she remembered was the elevator—the right angle where one of the narrow corridors turned a corner—but she didn't see any keypad. She wasn't sure she had the right place until she noticed that the light-switch plate didn't seem to fit neatly on the space behind it: there was a narrow vertical gap.
She reached out and touched it, and the plate slid to one side, exposing a modern-looking grid of numbered buttons. It took a couple of tries to get the digits of her birthdate entered; she flubbed a number once and had to start again. But on the next try the door slid open. It was perfectly silent: it didn't ding like a regular elevator.
She got in and stared at the console for a while. What floor was this? How would she get back? She looked up above the door to the strip of numbers. It read: 1, 1Ψ, 2, 2Ψ, 3, 3Ψ...she was on 8Ψ, it looked like. And Jax's room had been 822. So she hit the regular eight, and the door closed noiselessly and a split second later was sliding open again.
The fluorescents running along the ceiling shocked her eyes; she'd gotten used to the dim core, the dull gleam of low-wattage floor lamps and the torch-like sconces on the walls. The walls in the shell were bright and bland, the carpet—under the fluorescent lights—a strangely metallic gray that made her head throb dully behind the eyes. She felt like she'd suddenly been transported from ancient Greece to Walmart.
And it was definitely cooler out here.
The rest of the kids must have been moved, she thought, heading down the hall through the silence that seemed to buzz faintly. Maybe the elementals were dangerous to them, too. But the lights were still on, blazing for no one. A couple of room doors stood ajar, and through them she could see windows, once again—windows into the dark city with its spots of light that were also windows, the windows of other tall and unknown buildings.
Suddenly she felt more alone than she ever had. What if they didn't come? What would she do here, by herself?
Night had fallen.
Jax's room was more or less as they'd left it when they hustled him out, the covers on the bottom bunk still imprinted with two rounded dents where he and Cara had sat. The poisonous pen was gone, of course—the teachers must have taken it—but Jax's closed laptop sat on one of the desks, a tiny light on its side fading and brightening again.
She sat down and opened it; the screen lit up and prompted her for a password, which luckily she knew. Jax wasn't secretive the way Max was; he'd keyed in his password in front of her. Once she entered the word and its suffix of numbers, his email inbox popped up. She scrolled down, wishing she knew what she was looking for. Would he have bothered to hide what he found?
She saw emails from her, emails from Max—the normalcy of it was comforting, all Jax's everyday, kid emails. Finally there was a raft of messages from his geeky best friend, Kubler. She felt guilty clicking on the first one; like she was spying, until the thought of Jax's black eyes firmed up her resolve.
There it was: a mention of the source. Kubler's reply didn't say much except No way, that's so incredibly weird, but Jax's email to him, below, read I pinpointed the coordinates. It's along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Somewhere between Greenland and Norway. The volume is massive! Black smokers, is what it looks like. But what Mom's saying is, these black smokers aren't your typical geological features. These are not natural.
Black smokers? It had to be her vision. Her vision had been of the source. And Jax hadn't kept all this a total secret: Kubler knew. That meant maybe someone had intercepted these messages, as well as Jax's texts to her. The bad guys—Roger or maybe even the elementals.
She thought back to the vision she'd had in her bedroom: dark, billowing smoke. And the scene beneath the smoke—snatches of light, apparently under the ocean floor. It seemed impossible, light under the ocean floor. Unless there was a subterranean volcano, maybe? She knew they existed, volcanoes beneath the sea. Could what she had seen be lava?
But Jax had written: "These are not natural." Quickly she googled "black smoker" and read black smokers, or sea vents, are hydrothermal vents occurring on the ocean floor. They resemble dark chimney-like structures....
So normally black smokers were natural. But these, according to Jax, were not. Did that mean the vents on the ocean floor were manmade? Made by the Cold?
Then, from her pack, her phone made a text alert sound. She fished it out and looked. It was from Jaye.
We're here, it said. So come get us.
In the lobby downstairs there was no one at the reception desk. The lights were on and the phone console at the desk was blinking; beside it lay a half-eaten sandwich with a piece of baloney sticking out. The night guard must have taken a bathroom break. Cara looked around warily, half expecting to see frightening men with flames leaping in their mouths.
But all she saw was Hayley and Jaye, standing near the revolving doors and looking a little stunned.
"No way were we getting on the T. We took a cab," said Hayley. "I had to sneak the money from my mom's purse. So you better pay me back. I'm in serious, serious crap already because of this. OK?"
"OK," said Cara gratefully. "Come on."
Hayley kept talking as they followed her to the elevators.
"You're lucky, by the way," she said. "That Zee totally took the heat off you. She did a disappearing act herself! Only there wasn't anyone covering for her."
"Really? Zee?"
Cara was puzzled. It didn't seem like Zee.
"Please. She was clearly pining for Max, after one night away," scoffed Hayley as Cara punched the button and the doors closed in front of them. "I bet they're shacked up in a sketchy motel as we speak. Catching some bedbugs to take home."
"Anyway," said Jaye softly (Cara thought she was trying to blunt Hayley's meanness). "It was kind of a coincidence. Two people going off campus at the same time. But then, with Zee being older, and I guess she doesn't have a stellar attendance record anyway, they're not as worried about her. Plus, Mrs. M wasn't in charge of Zee, or she'd have really freaked."
The number eight lit up, and the doors dinged open.
"This is the smart-kid think tank?" asked Hayley. "It doesn't look like much."
"Oh, it gets weirder," said Cara. "Don't worry."
She led them down the bright empty halls to the other elevator, the hidden one. There was a keypad here too, beneath a switch plate again; again she slid it open and keyed in her birthday.
"Cool," said Hayley when the wall opened noiselessly.
They stepped in, and before they were even settled the door reopened. They were inside the core.
"Way different," said Jaye as they walked through the narrow hall. On the walls the sconces glowed dimly.
"It's hot in here," said Hayley irritably.
"It is hot," agreed Jaye. "So is this—does this place have something to do with—"
"I had to tell her," interrupted Hayley, turning to Cara guiltily. "Otherwise she wouldn't have come with me!"
"You told her—" started Cara.
"I told her about August," said Hayley. "The pouring dude. How he reached out from the mirror. And the other Cara and Jax when we were in the boat. The shapeshifting or whatever. All the bizarro stuff that happened."
"I still think you're pulling my leg," said Jaye. "And if this turns out to be a prank, I'm going to be really hurt that you guys were playing with me."
Before Cara could answer, they were at the door to the huge room beneath the dome.
"Wow," breathed Hayley. "This place is wild."
"What is it?" asked Jaye as they stood on the threshold.
The heavy curtains were held back now and they could see the dome and the two wings of the room reaching out to the sides—the one with all the artifacts, on the left, and the one with all the books, on the right. There were some dim lights among the chairs and tables, but overall it was shadowy. The crannies and alcoves that were nestled into the dusty walls receded into darkness.
"You know what this reminds me of?" asked Jaye. "It's like the cathedrals my family went to in France last spring break. On that vacation where I decided I wanted to be an architect? If you look at those cathedrals from above, they have the shape of a cross. Like this room! That dome is what they call an apse, those two wings are the transept, and the big open part there is the nave. I really loved those old churches. I swear. This room is just like a church."
Cara looked around the room. Now that Jaye mentioned it, she thought her friend must be right. The raised platform where Jax had lain would be where the altar was.
Only this church was deeply imbedded in an office building.
"It didn't occur to me," she said, nodding slowly.
"But I don't understand," went on Jaye. "When I say old...I mean, you don't see places like this in the U.S. At all. It's basically medieval. Gothic, I think."
"There's a bunch of other stuff I could show you," said Cara. "But we need to get going. There's a task I have, to help Jax. Come on."
She led them to the library wing, one half of what Jaye called the transept. The large, flat book was still on the table, light reflecting off its white pages.
"I'm supposed to read this book," she said. "At least, I think this is the book I'm supposed to read. I'm guessing it has instructions or something, like the prophecy from this summer. The problem is, it's completely blank! And then I...well, I asked a question. And..."
Her fingers went to her ring, and she looked up at the Elizabethan portrait on the wall. Jaye's and Hayley's faces weren't there anymore; it was just two prim-looking women in funny collars now. Beneath the painting was a plaque that read Ladies of the Court.
"Anyway, the answer was you guys," she said after a moment. "I think you're supposed to help me read the book."
Hayley stared at her.
"You called us out in Boston in the middle of the night to read a book?" she said. "Are you serious?"
"I have to, or I won't know how to get to my mother," said Cara quietly. "It's—just like it was in August. I need her again. And if I can't find her, I won't be able to help Jax."
"You said he was poisoned?" asked Hayley. "So is he like in the hospital now? And where is everyone? How come this place is so empty?"
"Long story," said Cara. "Later, promise."
She leaned over the book, and the other two followed suit. Jaye touched the corner of one of the huge pages, then turned it gingerly. They saw the next page was blank, too. Hayley grabbed some pages at the end and opened the book there: still nothing.
"So what exactly are we supposed to do?"
"Maybe we need to hold a light to it. Remember when we were little, how there was this way you could do invisible ink using lemon juice?" asked Jaye. "You could write with the juice, and it didn't show up on the paper. But then the writing would turn brown when you held it up to a light bulb, and you could read it?"
"Uh, I never did that," said Hayley.
"Too busy with Fashionista Barbie," said Jaye. "Here, I'll hold this side."
They maneuvered the book in close to the green reading lamp and tried their best to peer over at the page.
Nothing.
Hayley peeled off her jacket and plunked it down on the table; Cara pushed up her sleeves. Was it getting even hotter, she wondered? Were they coming?
"I guess it might have to do with my ring," she said.
"That good-luck ring?" asked Hayley.
"Maybe I have to ask a question again, but with the two of you here. I see these pictures, if I touch the ring. Sometimes. I don't quite know how it works. My mom called them visions."
She touched the ring and leaned toward the book, sandwiched closely between her friends. She thought: How do we read you?
And it seemed to her that she was just beginning to notice something shift on the white page, almost like one of those fractals rearranging itself, when Jaye shrieked.
Cara looked up—Hayley was grabbing at her—to see fire. It was leaping on the hotplate in the corner, where Mrs. O had boiled the water for her tea; an actual fire was burning there, crinkling the tablecloth, sparks and pieces of burning fabric fluttering toward the floor.
It was a small fire, at least, and Cara thought maybe she could put it out. She'd put out a fire once before when Jax, age eight, decided to conduct combustion experiments with household cleaning products. So she rushed over, looking for something to use and thinking randomly of a TV show where a man set on fire had been rolled up in a rug to quench the flames; she grabbed the corner of the Persian rug beneath her feet and pulled it up, then brought it down clumsily on the burning tabletop.
As soon as she had it on top of the flames, though, the rug got heavy in her hands. The rug seemed lumpy. Heavier and heavier, and then suddenly there was movement, the rug was resisting her, and the fire leapt up instead of subsiding as she thought it should. Vaguely aware of her friends screaming behind her, she had to jump back—because the rug was hot, and the rug had something inside it.
She dropped it, her hands hurting, but was barely aware of the pain because now she was looking at the man from the subway, rising out of the lumps in the rug, and he opened his mouth and his mouth was flames.