CHAPTER SEVEN

Bologna, Italy

June 23

Evening

On. Off. On. Off. The dim yellow light flickered.

Becca wanted to scream—“Stop doing that!”—until she realized the flickering was coming from her own eyelids, opening and closing painfully. Apparently, she was trying to wake up.

“Can you sit?”

She knew the voice. “Wade?”

“Yeah. Try to sit up.”

With all her strength, she forced her eyes to focus on his face. “I might need help. . . .”

Sliding his hands under her shoulders, he lifted her toward him and propped pillows behind her. She was on what appeared to be a cot, low to the floor. Her side ached, and her upper arm felt on fire and was bandaged tight, with the pressure equal to the pain underneath the bandage. There was a musty smell, of damp stone or cement.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Bologna,” Wade said. “You remember. The tiny car? Last night?”

“I guess.” Her long sleep—like every sleep for the past few days—had been heavy, deep. Her mind was still hazy.

A candle floated across the room to her, banishing the dark along the way. Sara’s face was behind it, and now Wade was in the light, too. Sara knelt beside the cot, which was no more than a narrow mattress on a platform of wooden pallets.

“We’re safe for now,” said Sara. “They finally arrested the three knights from the airport terminal.”

“Of course Markus Wolff has vanished,” Wade added. “So has Julian. We haven’t heard from him since the airport.”

The airport, yes. Suddenly Markus Wolff’s stony face appeared in her mind, and it came to her crushingly. “Oh, what did I do? The diary! We lost a page didn’t we?”

“It would have been more except you clawed the rest away from him,” Wade said. “You fought like a tiger. We’ll work around the lost page.”

Pain ran up her arm into her shoulder and neck. “Sorry, I’ve been so out of it for the last . . . what is it, two weeks?”

“Nearly,” said Sara.

Becca tried to gauge how she felt. All right for now. She’d been resting for days, not really going completely unconscious, but not so conscious, either, having to drag herself out of sleeps so deep they seemed like comas. But as she felt more awake, she remembered more of the journeys by car and truck, the quick trips to doctors who said that without tests, it was impossible to say she was suffering from anything besides exhaustion. She felt she could slip off at any moment, but the search for the relics couldn’t afford any funny business like that, so she was trying to pull herself together.

Sara insisted she be hospitalized—Becca remembered that—which was the sensible thing, after all. But Becca had argued against it. It was way too close to the finish now. She wouldn’t be sidelined. She was there to find the first relic, in the sunlit cave in Guam. She wanted to be there when they found the last. Whatever and wherever that was.

“So. Okay.” She sat up and felt for the diary. It was next to her pillow. “I think the best thing for me to do is translate every last word of the diary into my notebook. If anything ever happens to me—”

“To the diary, you mean,” he said.

“At least you’ll have it. We’ll have it.” She held it close. “My notebook?”

Sara reached over to a small table. “I actually worked on some diary pages while you were sleeping just now. They were in French, which I know pretty well. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Good. Good. Can I read them?”

Sara handed her the red notebook, and Becca read the translation side by side with the original pages in the diary. When she was done, she smiled. “Really good. Just a couple of details. Here’s how I would say it.”

“September 1514

“This island—I dare not write its name—was Paradise when Nicolaus and I arrived some months ago. White sand. Dense forests. Plentiful water. Verdant hills.

“The two of us—joined finally by Nicolaus’s brother, Andreas—work night after weary night, week after draining week, until Ptolemy’s device is complete.

“No sooner do we finish connecting the twelve relics than the dragons of light appear. The sky beasts. The battle in the heavens shakes overhead. At the same instant, the relics begin to move, all in different and strange ways, as if they are living things, tethered in their places. Light bursts out and up from the machine. Then the sky itself breaks apart, as if to show us a tunnel through it. It is a fiery crown of golden light amid the deep black, a ring of fire, a crown of flame.

“‘A hole in the sky!’ Nicolaus cries. He throws the main lever.

“The astrolabe roars around the two of us huddling in its center. A great rush of wind threatens to crush us, and we are launched on our first mission into the tunnel of time.”

“And here’s the second passage,” Becca said. “From a year later.”

“September 1515

“The second voyage is horrifying.

“Our ‘hole in the sky’ has multiplied a hundred times. A thousand. Where once we saw groves of apple trees, trickling creeks, and the music of angels, now there is death, flood, ravaging fire, the wail of lamentation.

“‘We’ve done this, Hans, you and I,’ Nicolaus cries. ‘Our travel has wounded the universe!’

“Upon our return we vow to destroy the machine.

“But as we raise our hammers against Vela and Scorpio, Triangulum and Crux, our instruments are shattered to dust. No matter what we do, the relics remain alive, intact, unbreakable!

“‘Then we’ll unbuild the machine and hide the relics where none can find them,’ Nicolaus says. ‘And may God have mercy on our souls!’”

The three of them sat there stunned.

“These are brand-new passages about the first voyages,” Becca said. “Amazing.”

A soft tap sounded from across the room. Sara crept over and lifted a squeaky latch. A door opened. Another candle. Another face.

Becca stared. “Isabella Mercanti?”

Isabella was a scholar and the widow of Silvio Mercanti, a college friend of Roald Kaplan and a Guardian. Isabella had helped them often in the past.

“How are you feeling, dear?”

“Pretty good,” Becca said. “We’re at your house?”

“No. But of course you were very tired when we arrived last night. You are in one of the safe houses my husband, Silvio, owned across Europe, where he did his Guardian work. I am discovering things in them. Come. The coast is clear.”

Together, they climbed a narrow set of stairs into a bright kitchen. Sunlight flashed through the windows.

“Thanks for taking care of us, of me,” Becca said. “I’ve been kind of out of it. But I feel stronger now.” She didn’t exactly feel stronger, but she hoped she would soon.

“You rather have to be strong,” Isabella said. “There is so much left to do.” She led them into a small windowless library, where they sat at a large oak table, spread with maps and charts and several old volumes in different languages.

“First, let me say that your friend Maurice Maurice managed to send a message to me this morning. Terence had once told him of me, he says. Lily and Darrell are safe. Or they were safe two weeks ago on their way to Gibraltar. They have since vanished.”

Becca frowned. “Vanished?”

“This is not as bad as it sounds,” Isabella said. “The Order is murdering Guardians all over. Being ‘vanished’ is a good strategy. Our own best plan is to remain so ourselves. Now, two riddles. One or perhaps both are about the twelfth relic.”

Becca felt a jolt of electricity, and found herself completely awake. “Markus Wolff said the twelfth relic was the answer to everything. He told us this in San Francisco.”

“It may be,” Isabella said. “The first thing I found among Silvio’s papers is a poem by Michelangelo.”

“The artist?” said Wade.

“Sì. Many know him as a painter and sculptor,” Isabella said. “He was also an excellent poet whom I have spent a lifetime studying. For thirty years, I have catalogued and edited his entire work. Yet this sonnet is completely unknown to me. I have begun to translate it, but there are severe difficulties because of his strange language. I have only part of it, and it is very rough. Tell me what you make of it all.”

She set a stiff sheet of paper on the table and read them her translation.

“My friend, I see you suffer from a wound

And offer you my lustrous southern cloak.

You say your life and soul were here marooned

Until a better soul espied a drifting barque.”

“This is all I have so far. It is very rough,” Isabella repeated. “Later, there is a phrase, the only Latin words in the otherwise colloquial Italian poem. Scientiam temporis. The knowledge of time. I believe there is a secret here, but much of his phrasing is new to me. It is undoubtedly by Michelangelo, but the language is mystical.”

Becca felt weak. A wave of heaviness seemed to crash over her, eddying in her mind, darkening her sight as if a blanket had been thrown over her head.

The wave receded, lifted away—instantly, she thought—but some minutes seemed to have passed, because Wade, Sara, and Isabella were now hovering over Silvio’s second clue, but staring at her.

On the desk was a wrinkled envelope, singed around the edges.

“My husband kept several secret safe-deposit boxes at various banks in Bologna. This was in one of them. Becca, I believe you should open it.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because of this.” Isabella held up the envelope. Scrawled on it were the words:

For Rebecca Moore

—November 1975

“It’s impossible, of course. You weren’t even born yet,” said Wade.

“Impossible or not, look inside,” Isabella said.

With trembling fingers, Becca opened the sealed envelope. Inside was a single paper note of French currency, dated 1959. It was folded crisply in half and appeared unused.

The nineteenth-century French poet and novelist Victor Hugo appeared on both front and back. The front of the note showed Hugo before a building called the Panthéon. In the sky above the dome, tiny numbers and symbols were scribbled.

@24@7@5

The back showed a row of buildings, also in Paris, that Isabella said was in a square called Place des Vosges. Above one of the rooftops were more numbers and symbols.

@2@8@9@6

“Why is this addressed to me?” Becca said. “I don’t know what it means. This money isn’t even good anymore, is it?”

“Not since the euro replaced the French franc more than fifteen years ago,” Sara said.

Becca slipped on her reading glasses and held the bill close, studying it for other clues, when she felt her head grow heavy again. Her arm throbbed with a dull pain, and she sank back into her chair. “I’m so tired. I think I need to sleep a bit more.”

“Becca? Bec—”

But if Wade said any more, she didn’t hear it. She slipped away into a kind of waking sleep. It was very much like the blackouts she’d suffered in London months ago, though that was clearly impossible here, unless . . .

Something was moving, darkening across her vision, and there he was, the astronomer himself, Nicolaus Copernicus, entering the fog of her mind in a whirl of green cloak and stern dark eyes. In one hand he clutched a painting, swimming in pinks and blues and browns, of a young woman, or a man with flowing dark hair. It was too blurry to make out details.

Nicolaus was speaking, but his words weren’t clear, either. Trying to pierce the dense air of her dream, she listened intently, and a single word floated to her.

“Hope . . .”

“Hope?” she said in her mind. “Is that what you said? Who is in the picture? Nicolaus, is it Galina?”

But the fog rolled over Nicolaus and over his picture and over her, and if Wade spoke again she didn’t know, because everything faded into darkness.