CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Lily was amazed at the speed with which they could go from Vatican City, which was, let’s face it, a little piece of heaven, to what must have been the grungiest neighborhood this side of . . . well, the opposite.

“You know my husband, Silvio, was a Guardian since college,” Isabella told them as she drove them away from the Vatican. “As a member of your uncle Henry’s group, Asterias, he took secret rooms in many cities. I know the last room he took before he died was near the main train station here. Number one hundred and forty-nine. No street name. When the pope said there is a street—Rowboat Street—it fell together.”

Even in midday, the streets behind the Stazione Termini, the main railroad station in Rome, were full of shadows, eerie, sad. Why Lily happened to think of Becca right then, she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because she wanted Becca to see everything she was seeing, to somehow make it better.

When their car finally stopped—it had to, because the streets were overparked and too narrow for them—Lily, Darrell, Wade, Isabella, Roald, and Sara piled out and onto the street. The smell hit them instantly. Hot garbage, thick train fuel, smoke.

Halfway down one block, they took a cut-through to the next block over, wading through puddles of what smelled like sewer water, and stopped at 149 Via Barcaremi.

“Wait here.” Roald entered and checked out the lobby. “Clear.”

“Silvio always chose the top floor if he could,” Isabella said.

There was no elevator, so they walked up a narrow set of squeaky stairs to the fifth floor. There was a single door off the landing.

Using a key she’d discovered among her husband’s effects, Isabella unlocked the door. A whiff of train fuel hit them when she opened it. This time Sara entered first. After a few moments, she reappeared at the door, her face pale. “You have to see this.” She waved them in and closed the door behind them.

Isabella gasped. “Oh! Silvio!”

Pasted and tacked and taped from floor to ceiling across all four walls in the front room were thousands—tens of thousands?—of snapshots, magazine photos, old daguerreotypes, satellite images, paintings, maps, sea charts, drawings, engravings, and rough sketches of places and faces from all around the globe. They were arranged in clusters like the many solar systems of an immense galaxy, often centered on a single image surrounded by dozens or more relating to it in a mysterious collage, while hundreds of colored threads were strung from one image to another, to several others, weaving a thick web of connections completely around the room and back again.

But one thing was consistent.

Galina Krause dominated nearly every cluster of images.

“This is the Galina Room,” Wade said, standing in the middle of the floor and staring. “She’s everywhere. A red thread connects her to almost every other picture.”

“Silvio must have been working on all this for years,” Sara said.

Lily noticed numerous references to 26 April 1794, the infamous date known in Guardian history as Floréal Muguet. There were satellite photos of Paris, Guam, Tunis, Malta, San Francisco, and Havana, along with early photographs and engravings depicting the relics suspected of being in each location.

“Silvio was active in Asterias since our college days in Berlin with Uncle Henry,” Roald said. “I feel so strange that I—we—got involved only six months ago.”

“Heinrich wanted to keep you out of it,” Isabella said, “because of the children.”

“I’m so sorry, Isabella,” Sara said. “If only Silvio were still here with us today.”

Isabella nodded. “If only. But he would be honored and grateful for all that you have done for the Magister.”

Photos, some grainy, some crystal clear, showed Galina in Paris, in Istanbul, in Budapest, in Tunis, Geneva, London, and dozens of other cities they had battled her in. Several close-ups showed the scar on her neck at various stages. Thinking of wounds, Lily thought of Becca again and wanted to be with her or her with them, well again. She closed her eyes and pushed back the tears. Lily knew that if Silvio Mercanti were alive, a more recent shot would show how Galina’s scar had become inflamed.

Isabella, murmuring in Italian as she slowly walked toward a smaller back room, suddenly froze when she came to the doorway. “Oh, dear. This is it.”

The room, when they all entered it, was indeed it.

In large letters across the rear wall were the words Il dodicesimo reliquia.

“The twelfth relic,” she said.