The Progeny (26 page)

I search “Glagolitic script,” filter for images, and locate a chart of characters.

“Write this down. Z . . . B . . . G.” I search out each one, comparing boxy consonants, archaic vowels. “E . . . A . . . D. The last one’s not on there.”

He makes a face. “Zbgead something? Not Zagreb . . .”

“Are you reading up or down?”

“Down. Up spells something daegbz.”

“The same characters also stand for numbers.” I search through the chart. “Try 9 . . . 2 . . . 4 . . . 6 . . . 1 . . . 5.” I glance up at him. “That mean anything to you?”

“924615 . . .” he says. “924 . . .”

For a minute I think he actually pales in the black light’s purple glow.

“What?”

“I just . . .” He nods toward the key dangling from my neck. “Claudia said that was Shakespeare. I never saw you read Shakespeare.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think,” I murmur. Why do I feel like there’s something he’s not saying?

“Better than you do. Let me read that?”

I hold the key up, and he searches the phrase on the phone.

“Measure for Measure,”
he says. I pull my shirt back over my head. But something’s bothering me, scratching at the back of my mind.

I squint at him as he reads: “A story of ‘morality and mercy.’ Sounds eerily familiar,” he mutters, and then hesitates. “It’s set in Vienna.”

“Vienna.”

“Austria. As in a few hours away.”

“We’re in Europe. Everything’s a few hours away. It’s practically New England.”

He frowns.

“I’m joking. Not really.”

“Who uses keys anymore? Old-school banks, maybe. But why would you need a key if you have a code? What if this key’s more about what’s on it than what it does?”

“So it’s telling me where to go, not how to unlock something.”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, if this is what you picked to remind you where it is—”

“I’m an idiot. Because anyone could have figured out the same thing. Seriously, a Google search? That’s my level of encryption?”

He gives a wry smile. “You have to admit, this does sound like your humor. ‘Some rise by sin, some by virtue fall.’ A jab at the Scions and claim to Bathory’s innocence in a single line.”

“Just in case it landed in the wrong pair of hands?” Apparently I’ve had my mouthing-off problem for a while.

“Audra,” he says slowly, “you
could
potentially find what Nikola’s after.”

I cross my arms around myself, not sure how I feel about that. And suddenly I have a very unwelcome thought.

And if you’re with me, then so could you.

I had thought my reservations about him settled. Literally put to bed.

“We don’t know what the other symbol is,” I say.

“Yet. Maybe Claudia or Piotrek has seen it somewhere.”

I’m quiet.

“Audra . . .” He takes my hand. “I’m with you, whatever you decide. Wherever you go.” He kisses my fingers. But there’s strange conflict in his eyes.

“Just do me a favor,” I say.

“Anything. You know that.”

“If, by some chance, you really are with me for a different reason . . . take the key. You have the code now. Don’t hurt anyone. Just go and do what you have to do and leave us alone.”

He looks as though I’ve struck him. And I hate myself for what I just said, but I can’t help it. Because I can’t stand the thought of one more life on my conscience—all because I chose to trust the one person I really want to believe more than anyone.

“What does it take to prove myself to you?” he says, his voice breaking. “That I’m not after what everyone else is, even though I’m the most logical person to want it?”

“I don’t know,” I say and wish that I did. He takes me by the shoulders and kisses me—roughly, with rising desperation, fingers encircling my arms. I welcome it, wanting it to expel every fear inside my mind. Instead, tears squeeze out the corners of my eyes.

“I
love
you, Audra,” he whispers. “Don’t you get it?”

I love you, too.

And that’s what scares me.

I pull away and leave him there, return silently to bed.

A minute later, he steps out of the bathroom and quietly puts the lightbulb away. But I know I’ve hurt him. I know it, and I can’t help it.

And I know, too, that Ana’s not asleep.

30

I
lay in my bunk a long time, trying to make sense of the symbols, the letters or numbers they represent. Pounding against the empty storehouse of my memory for anything to do with Vienna, Shakespeare, sin and virtue, even rearranging the words and then the letters of the cryptic line on the key.

Why did I go to the trouble of having those symbols permanently tattooed on my body? To put them in a place that only a lover—near a black light, no less—would see? Something meant to be revealed under the right circumstances—Claudia’s flat, the dark strobe at court. Something there, if I needed it, its discovery contingent on my return, but invisible under normal conditions.

The pants in the spare closet were mine. Did I also put the black light in that lamp?

A fail-safe. Like the numbers in the tao cross and the key I left Ivan for safekeeping, assuming we’d both be alive.

In the end I decided that the fact Nikola wants it so desperately is reason enough for me to deem it Bad. That we stand a better chance of surviving in some remote district of Mongolia or Siberia—assuming we can finagle a border crossing—than anywhere having to do with the Bathorys.

But what of those we leave behind? Four lives have already been lost. For all I know, Nino’s might already be the fifth. No wonder I erased mine to bury it all.

Sometime midmorning, I spot movement on the ladder of the bunk beds across the room. Ana steps from the last rung without a sound, a blond-haired wraith in a white T-shirt.

“Can’t sleep?” I whisper. She looks up, dully.

It kills me to see the stars gone from her eyes.

“Come on,” I say, holding back the covers as though she were twelve. She climbs in beside me and cries against my shoulder until it’s wet, clutching me like I’m the last strong thing to hold on to in a storm.

My mind is disobedient in sleep. The last symbol, the one nothing at all like the boxy Glagolitic characters and set apart by a small space from the others, is littered through my dreams.

*  *  *

“A
udra, get up.”

I open my eyes on Claudia, in a blunt-cut black wig, bangs hanging down to her shades. “We have a problem.”

“What?”

“Ana’s missing.”

I rub my eyes. “What do you mean missing—” I stop at the sight of a leggy, olive-skinned brunette with shoulder-length dreads sitting on one of the low bunks against the wall. She’s clad entirely in purple, from her dress to her tights and knee-high boots, an open laptop at her side.

“Who’s that?” I demand.

“That’s Jester,” she says.

I stare, dumbfounded.
That’s Jester?

The new arrival gets up and comes over. There’s something different about one of her legs—the angle of her knee is slightly off—and only when she’s kissing my cheeks in greeting do I realize it’s prosthetic.

“How’d you find us?”

“I tracked Claudia’s phone,” Jester says. Her accent is unmistakably French. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“Tracking a phone?”

“No! That Tibor has declared war against Nikola and thrown his lot in with you. He sends his regards, by the way,” she says, dropping several German passports on the bed beside me.

“What do you mean Ana’s missing?” I say, staring at them.

“She said she was going for coffee, but that was hours ago. Piotrek’s looking for her.”

Across the room, Luka’s scratching a pencil over the pad on the desk. A few seconds later he holds it up. It’s covered with imprints from the sheet above. The last symbol from my back, drawn again and again and again.

“The top page is missing.” He strides over and pulls the neck of my shirt aside. Instinctively, I reach for the key. But I already know it’s missing.

“She took the copy of the symbols and their translations from my backpack,” Luka says grimly.

“What symbols?” Claudia says.

In my anger, which is only a thin disguise for the fear turning my fingertips to ice, I round on Claudia. “I go to sleep for what—three hours? And crazy Tibor declares some war against Nikola,
she
shows up with a laptop as though none of this is bad enough that we need a digital trail, too, and Ana goes missing with a drawing of the symbols on my back. What genius felt the need to draw them over and over anyway before she ran off with my key?” I demand. “How many different ways can we try to get ourselves killed?”

“Audra—” Luka says, gesturing at me.

I glance down at myself, and then at the pencil in my hand.

My sleepwalking activities have returned. That, and I’m such an ass.

“What symbols?” Claudia says, as Jester’s laptop chirps.

I go into the bathroom to splash water on my face as Jester practically sprints across the room.

“I found her,” she calls out. In the mirror I see Luka and Claudia sit down on either side of her to stare at the screen. Claudia covers her mouth with a hand.

What now?
I don’t think I can take any more of sucking so bad at being on the lam.

“She’s in Budapest.”

I stride out to the bed and sit next to Luka. “How do you know?” There, on the screen, is camera footage of a woman coming up out of a subway station in a pair of shades and what looks like one of Claudia’s wigs. Her face is covered with electronic dots, an image of her on a window to the right.

“How did you get this?”

“Jester has certain skills,” Claudia says. A minute later she’s on the phone with Piotrek speaking in clipped Croatian.

Jester’s a
hacker
?

“Where’s she going?” Luka says.

“She’s on the Buda side near the Danube,” Jester says with obvious dismay. “No, no—”

“No what?”

“Gellert Hill. She’s going underground,” Jester says, typing frantically.

“Then we can find her.”

“We’re about to lose her.”

“You just said you know where she is!”

“There’s a whole world under the Buda Hills! A church, bunkers, a complete World War Two hospital. Hundreds of cave systems, some kilometers long! Why do you think tracking Nikola is so difficult? Even the city doesn’t know everything that’s there. The Budapest princes have intentionally kept entire systems secret for centuries, going so far as to steal the city’s survey of the caves beneath Castle Hill in the late eighteen hundreds. As far as anyone knows, it disappeared and has never been found.”

“You think Nikola has the survey,” I say.

“Undoubtedly. It is the reason the Budapest court is the safest and most famous in the world. It has been the safe haven of the Progeny who found their way to it for years.”

“So Ana’s looking for Nikola,” I say. With the key and a copy of the symbols on my back. “But you’re saying she may never find him. That she may never see the light of day again!”

“Unless he reached out to her first. Look.” She points to the screen. “These are not the movements of a girl wandering aimlessly. She knows where she is going.”

And as I watch the specter on the screen, she’s right; I’ve never seen Ana so resolute.

“Why would she look for Nikola?” Claudia says.

“To exchange information for Nino.” I get to my feet, fingers digging into my hair.

“She’ll be underground in minutes,” Jester says. “I can try to trigger a fire or smoke alarm near the church, but then they’ll know something is up. They’ll be that much harder to find.”

“No,” I say, getting up. “Let her go.”

“She’s got your key!” Claudia says.

“Her fake key,” Luka says quietly.

But that’s not all Nikola will have if she reaches him.

He’ll have Ana, too.

I squeeze my eyes shut, fists pressed to my head.

It won’t stop. It will never stop. Who will be next? Claudia? Piotrek? Or will they go straight for Luka?

Claudia was more right than she knew that first night when she said it would have been better if I’d stayed dead. At the time, at least, she had been talking about the Scions—not our own blood.

Piotrek returns and listens, grim-faced, to Claudia’s rapid account in Croatian. Luka asks if there’s someone in Budapest close enough to intercept Ana, but she has since disappeared.

I get up, grab my jacket. “Let’s go,” I say.

Luka, watching me all this time, closes up our bags.

“She could be anywhere underground by the time we get to Budapest,” Claudia says.

“Not Budapest,” I say, shouldering my backpack. “Vienna.”

Because the only way I’m going to have anything to bargain with is to get to it first.

We skirt down the back stairs to the first floor. Just outside the common room Piotrek slows and nearly stops altogether. The television in the corner drones on to no one. Two girls at the center table sit engrossed in conversation, the guy in the corner oblivious to all but his laptop. Luka veers toward me without slowing.

“Move. Don’t stop,” he says, taking me by the elbow.

Too late. Even after he walks me swiftly out the side door to the car, the television screen is embedded in my memory.

Filled with a picture of me.

31

S
itting in the back of the Skoda, I might be in shock.

“What did it say?” I ask, my voice steadier than I feel. I can picture every letter of the caption, but it’s in German.

“They found Nino’s body. You’re wanted for his murder,” Piotrek says. In the backseat, Luka reaches for my hand.

I close my eyes.

Did Nino bleed out on the floor of that trailer, or did they kill him? Did he die alone—or at Nikola’s hands?

I try to block the images, but they play out with brutal detail, nearly as though I had witnessed them.

What will happen to Ana now?

“They’re calling you a serial killer,” Piotrek says. “Saying you killed a man in Croatia last week.”

Beside me, Claudia stares out the window in silence. I wonder if she’s thinking how close to the truth it is, calling me a murderer. It doesn’t matter that I never drew blood, could not have possibly inflicted that kind of damage on a man Nino’s size. He and Ivan both are dead because of me.