Map of Fates (The Conspiracy of Us 2)

We stopped to let a line of tourists pass on an intersecting wooden walkway. “A fate map is the developmental history of a cell. Which is important to us first because of the line in the mandate: ‘Their fates mapped together.’”

I glanced at Stellan.

“And second, because Olympias—”

From ahead of me, Stellan sighed.

“Who’s Olympias?” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Alexander the Great’s mother,” Stellan answered. “Elodie could tell you an encyclopedia’s worth of facts about her.”

“She’s only one of the most fascinating women in history,” Elodie retorted. “People said she was a witch, but really she was just very advanced for her time, scientifically. She and Aristotle. They’re the reason the Circle has purple eyes, you know. She linked them together genetically in a way that’s unheard of even now.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Genetics have always been important to the Circle, from the start. And genetics have a lot to do with blood.”

I raised my eyebrows. Of course blood was important to the Circle. Rule by blood. I’d never really thought to consider, though, whether that meant blood as in violence, or blood as in bloodline. I assumed both. “So?”

“So, ‘a union forged in blood.’ That doesn’t sound like a social construct like marriage, does it?”

It didn’t—that was what I’d been saying all along. Marriage as the end-all of the mandate didn’t make sense. And Napoleon had written in his diary that they’re wrong about the mandate. “What else do you think it might mean?”

“My prevailing theory,” Elodie dragged it out, like she was enjoying having an audience, “and one I know some of the Circle share, is that the union has nothing to do with the actual marriage, and more to do with what the marriage can produce. As in,” she said, turning to look over her shoulder at me, “a child.”

A strangled noise came from my throat. Stellan paused in the middle of a step, and I was careful to avert my eyes before he looked my direction. If I couldn’t stop obsessing about having to marry him now, what would the idea that we were supposed to make a baby do?

I swallowed. “I thought you said you had ideas about our clues. Getting me pregnant wouldn’t help us find the second bracelet, or the tomb.”

Elodie stubbed out her cigarette with her boot as we stepped off the wooden walkway at the other end of the Piazza San Marco. “You’re right—a child likely has more to do with uniting two bloodlines than it does with Napoleon’s quest. But you’ve also been looking for ways to unlock the bracelets, right? What I’m proposing is that maybe your clues, in addition to sending you on the hunt for the second bracelet, have to do with that, too. Like if a word related to blood, or DNA, or a child could be the password?”

I slipped the bracelet off my arm, rotating the rows of letters. One step closer to unlocking the secret through a union forged in blood, the clue had read. “How do you say blood in French?” I asked.

“Sang,” Jack answered. “Four letters.”

The password had five. The rest of the way to the museum, we listed off various words related to Elodie’s theory. Baby. Child. Fate. Union. Most of them didn’t have five-letter translations, and the few that did didn’t work.

“It’s a good idea, though,” Stellan admitted. “One we should look into more.”

“See?” Elodie said. “You’re lucky I thought to watch your phone.”

Stellan snorted.

“For now,” Jack reminded us as we approached the entrance to the Museo Correr, in the Napoleonic Wing, “we still have a second bracelet to search for.”

The museum staff was already closing up and didn’t want to let us in. Stellan leaned in close to the window and said something beseeching, and I was about to tell him his charms probably wouldn’t work on the burly museum guard sitting there when he passed a handful of euros across the counter. That worked.

We hurried inside. “He’s only giving us ten minutes, but there aren’t many rooms here,” Stellan said. “Split up.”

Jack and Elodie took off in one direction, and Stellan and I took a room with gleaming marble floors and a soaring ceiling covered in frescoes. I walked through quickly, scanning the walls.

“Do you trust her now?” Stellan said from the other side of the room.

“I don’t know if trust is the right word, but I’m willing to listen to her theories.” I skirted a painting of wood nymphs, then finished looking through the room. Nothing. I stopped, hands on my hips. “What if La Serenissima didn’t even mean Venice?” I said, voicing the worry that had started to creep in even before we came out tonight. “We could be at a dead end.”

“Let’s at least finish searching this place before we jump to any conclusions.”

We made our way into the next room. “What do we do if it’s not here?” I said.

“We—” Stellan stopped, looking over my shoulder.

“What?”

He pointed. “The symbol from your necklace.”

I wheeled around. Sure enough, the symbol was carved into the wall above my head, and above it was a bas-relief of three women. Between them was an inscription in French.

I ran out into the next room and called for Jack and Elodie. We gathered around Stellan, who was standing, hands in his pockets, reading the inscription. Jack and Elodie joined him.

“Can someone please translate for the girl who doesn’t speak French?” I asked.

“It says, Where Alexander once sought counsel, the spirits of the priestesses guard one twin, but only through the union shall it open,” Stellan said. “Yet another clue, leading somewhere else.”