The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us 3)

Jack nodded grimly. “Which means this could devastate far more than just the Circle.”

I didn’t want it to, but it made sense. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t thought about it before, actually. I put my head in my hands. “Are you guys feeling okay? I know you said the virus didn’t seem to hit in the ceremony chamber, but—”

Jack and Elodie both nodded. “Fine.”

Fine. They were fine. I closed my eyes for a few seconds. My hair fell lank around my face. It smelled like smoke, and like the herb they’d thrown into the fire at the ceremony. I bottled back up the flood of emotions that had tried to overtake me in the last few hours, and sat up straight again. “Okay. So I guess this is even more important now.” I pulled the piece of metal out of my shirt. “The box was taken away when we got arrested, but I got this out first.”

Elodie snatched it and examined it under a bedside lamp. “This is ancient. It actually could be from Alexander’s time. I can’t believe you got it out of there.”

“Does it say something about his blood? Or the cure?” I asked.

“And what does Alexander’s bone have to do with unlocking it?” Jack chimed in.

“Be quiet and let me look.” Elodie waved us off.

Stellan sat next to me. I’d relaxed a little since we got here, but he hadn’t. “Did you get ahold of Anya?” I said.

“The nanny didn’t answer,” he said gruffly. “I knew she wouldn’t. That’s the protocol if I’m not calling from my number. I’ll call again in a few minutes.”

Elodie was poking carefully at an edge of the metal. “Have any of you heard of curse tablets?”

We shook our heads.

“They were common in Alexander’s day. Thinly hammered sheets of iron with words stamped into them, usually asking the gods to curse someone who had wronged the person.”

“You think that’s what this is?”

“It looks like it, sort of. But they’re meant to be bigger, squarer. This is more of a strip.”

“Doesn’t matter if the words are there.” Jack pulled out his phone and brought up an app to translate ancient Greek.

Elodie frowned. “They’re not, though. These are the letters, but some of them are backward, and they’re not lined up with each other in a way that makes sense.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of code,” Jack said.

“The last clue did say the bones unlock something,” Elodie mused. “But it’s not like the bone has to do with a code. Unless maybe the clue itself did?”

The three of them leaned over the metal under the lamp, and I sat back, thinking. They knew much more than I did about all of this, but there was something tickling at the edges of my brain.

“Did they even use substitution ciphers at that time?” Jack asked while Elodie wrote down all the letters.

“No,” I said. They all turned to me. I jumped up. “No, Alexander used a very specific kind of cipher. It was one of the first recorded codes. We did a project in school. I can’t believe I forgot. Where’s that bone?”

Elodie was clearly skeptical about the school project part, but she produced the bone and unwrapped a scarf from around it.

I picked up the edge of the metal piece. It felt like thick tinfoil. “Is it strong enough to be folded?” I said.

Elodie shrugged. “If you have to.”

I handed the bone to Stellan, and held the metal piece up to it. Then I wrapped it around in a spiral, covering the outside of the bone like a maypole. “This was the cipher,” I said. “You wrapped the thing around a cylinder of a certain size, wrote the message on it, and unwrapped it. The person reading it had to have the right size cylinder to wrap it again and read it, or else it just looked like gibberish.”

I finished wrapping and held it up. “Does that look any better?”

Stellan inspected it. “The letters are in the right direction now.”

Jack grabbed the phone and entered them again, going around and around the cylinder of bone.

He finally hit Translate and let out a low breath before he met my eyes. “Who knew American schools would have more answers than three people who have been part of the Circle for years?”

He turned the phone to us.

They said a woman should never have power again, it read. Now a woman holds it all.

Elodie grabbed the phone out of Jack’s hands. “The Diadochi said that exact thing about Olympias. She was causing trouble for them. She must have written this.”

“Why do you know so much about Olympias?” Stellan said.

She rolled her eyes at him, ignoring the question. “That doesn’t tell us anything concrete, though.”

“I only typed in part of it,” Jack said. “There’s more.”

We set to translating the second half:

I will hold all the secrets with me, where I await my son for our eternal rest, in the city named for him. My followers shall watch over us, at the thirteenth at the center of the twelve.

We stared at each other. That was exactly what Napoleon had said. Alexandria. The thirteenth at the center.

“So we have to go back to Alexandria,” I said. “I wonder if Olympias’s followers had some kind of headquarters? How would we find that out?”

Stellan looked up at the ceiling. “We already searched so much of Alexandria—”

Elodie’s phone rang, interrupting us. It was Luc. She put it on speaker.

It was worse than we’d thought. Not only did the Circle believe we’d set the bomb and tried to kill them, but the Melechs had “discovered” that the virus was our blood—obviously the Saxons had told them to spread the word. “So needless to say, they are not particularly happy with you,” Luc finished. “The fact that you’re the girl with the purple eyes and Stellan the Great is not going to get you out of this.”