CHAPTER 37
Jack was unhurt, sitting on a metal cot, his tux jacket lying beside him. I was so relieved, I almost cried. He jumped up and stared from me to Stellan, eyes bulging when Stellan demanded to see the diary. Jack pulled it out of the jacket.
Stellan glanced through it. “Okay. I need to go make an excuse so no one bothers us. Don’t try anything.”
He left, and I fell into Jack’s arms.
“Can we trust him?” Jack murmured into my hair. “He turned you in.”
“What other choice do we have? We must be missing something. And if not, we can at least get him to call the Order. Ask for more time. Something.”
I felt Jack nod, his chin moving on top of my head.
“I’m assuming they took your phone?” I said. I was sure he would have called Saxon if not.
“Yeah.”
It was colder down here. I shivered, and Jack rubbed my arms. “At least they didn’t find the diary.”
“They took my gun and my phone, but they barely looked at the book,” he said. “It’s actually lucky we got caught how we did. They didn’t suspect there was anything more to it than me taking advantage of the pretty new family member.”
I couldn’t believe the corners of my mouth inched up at that, but they did. And then they fell again, just as quickly. “What will they do to you?”
There was a pause. “That’s not our main concern right now.”
Jack pulled away and looked into my eyes. A sweet, sad smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
“Don’t look at them,” I said, twisting away. The violet felt like a betrayal. “They’re ruining everything.”
He took my face in his hands and turned it gently toward him. “But they’re the real you,” he said. “They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful, either way.”
He brushed my cheek with his thumb and I leaned into his hand, wishing we could have stayed under the covers this morning and shut out the world.
A voice that wasn’t Stellan’s echoed in the hall, and I jerked away from Jack. He shielded me, and I grabbed the diary and searched frantically for my bag, forgetting they’d taken it away. The door started to open, and I did the only thing I could think of—I shoved the book up the back of my pajama shirt, tucking it into the built-in bra so it would stay.
The door opened the rest of the way and Stellan stepped in. “I told the guard outside I was ordered to interrogate you. You may have to scream occasionally.”
I let out a breath and worked the book out from the bra’s elastic, wincing when it got caught.
Stellan watched my hand under my shirt and quirked an eyebrow. “I may have been misinformed about the purpose of this meeting. I’m not sure I’m into this kind of thing,” he said, shooting a look at Jack.
Jack glared back.
I stood up between them, clutching the diary. “Quit it, both of you,” I said. “Like you said, we only have ten minutes.” I shoved the book into Stellan’s chest.
We told him all we knew, from the bracelet, to the gargoyle, to the diary. How the lines in the diary—The One, the true ruler, the new Achilles. Superior to the false twelve—sounded like they could be about the mandate, but we didn’t know how to interpret them. How also, in the diary, Napoleon seemed worried for the Circle, because of the union and the One. We repeated all we could remember of Mr. Emerson’s message to my mom, and told him everything about the Order’s ransom and the impending deadline.
Stellan leaned against the wall, turning pages of the diary. “So what you’re saying is you dragged me away from my duties for puzzle-solving time?”
“It wasn’t exactly our choice,” I said.
To Stellan’s credit, he didn’t offer a snarky comeback. I could see him checking where we’d taken the note from the endpaper, looking closely at the words. Flipping back through the book.
While he looked, I paced the cell. Five steps across one way, my bare feet—they hadn’t given me time to put on shoes, either—slapping the concrete. Five steps back.
I stared up at the low concrete ceiling. Superior to the twelve. The Circle of Twelve. Twelve. Dozen. A dozen eggs. Twelve months. I couldn’t think of anything where one of the twelve was superior.
I fingered my locket. The symbol on it had to have something to do with the Circle. It had been with those letters from my father. I was suddenly sure there was a twelve in there somewhere. Twelve loops in the knot design, maybe.
I counted them absently, and then stopped. Counted again. My fingers froze on the necklace. There weren’t twelve spaces made by the design. There were thirteen.
I counted once more. The swirling Celtic knot pattern made twelve loops around a central loop. Altogether—“Thirteen,” I said out loud. Jack looked up questioningly, and I had a sudden flash of inspiration.
I sat next to Jack on the cot. “Let me see your tattoo.” I yanked up his sleeve. I’d counted the twelve compass points, but I hadn’t thought about the circle that connected the points. A thirteenth thing.
I crossed the room to Stellan. “Take off your shirt.” He looked at me strangely, but stripped off his top, tossing it onto the chair. I made him turn around.
I touched the twelve points on his sun tattoo, then the circle in the middle, connecting them all.
“The tattoos represent the twelve families, right?” I said to myself. “Did the families make their own symbols, or did someone else do it?”
“Aristotle assigned the symbols just after Alexander died,” Stellan said.
I tried to picture the other symbols on the spines of the books upstairs. There was an olive branch with what must be twelve leaves—and the branch would be a thirteenth thing. And a wheel, with twelve spokes—and the outer rim.
My mind turned in a different direction. Twelve plus the one extra that connected them. My brain was so fried, I’d been looking at it wrong. It didn’t say “the best of” the twelve. Superior meant separate.
A superior thirteenth thing, the one extra holding the twelve together.
“What?” Jack said, watching me.
I tried to explain my line of thinking.
“So you’re saying maybe ‘superior to the twelve’ means somebody who’s not part of the twelve?” Jack leaned back against the wall, pulling down the sleeve of his tuxedo shirt.