She tried to get the engine to fire up again. But short of turning the rain to petrol, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. Wheeling the bike off the road, she leaned it against a stone wall and clicked off the headlight. The woods returned to a drizzly gray.
She left the goggles on the handlebars, but kept the helmet and gloves for warmth.
She ran.
Nearly an hour later, all uphill now, Adi stood in the middle of the road, leaning on her knees, fighting to catch a breath, trying to ignore how long it had been since she had had anything to eat.
Twenty-four minutes left. No matter how fast she ran, she wasn’t going to make it before six. She clicked the watch shut, rain dripping from the brim of her flyer’s helmet. She’d seen the towers of the abbey and the smoke rising over the treetops. She took a breath and kept going.
• • •
“What do you mean you can’t find them?” said Thomas. “They—they were just here.”
Brother Christopher, surprised at Thomas’s degree of panic, said, “Don’t worry. They’re around somewhere.”
Thomas passed the bucket along the line. He’d meant to not take his eyes off the boys, but with all the goings on, he’d lost track of them.
The urgency to put out the fire had turned to spiritless labor. There was no one coming out of that house alive. The rain was doing more now to quench the flames than the one or two buckets at a time.
“Do me a favor, Brother,” said Thomas. “Could we go and find them? I’ll explain later, but I need to know they’re all right.”
“Of course. We’re not doing much good here.”
Making a wide circle around the fire, Brother Christopher called to a group of boys staring blankly at the flames. “Paul? Taddy? Anybody seen the twins?”
A younger boy in the back said, “I saw them, Brother. A few minutes ago, at the front gate. With Professor Coal.”
“Good work, René,” said Brother Christopher. “Would you boys go put some coats on before you freeze to death out here.” They nodded, but didn’t take their eyes off the fire.
“Coal?” said Thomas. “The—history teacher?”
“You remember him?”
“I think. Wasn’t here long before I graduated. Never had him.”
“Odd man,” said Brother Christopher. “Good teacher, though. He talks about Napoleon, you feel like he was right there. He’s been gone a lot. Off to serve, don’t know where. Got wounded. Doesn’t talk about it. You know.”
They got to the front gate. No Xander and Xavier. No Professor Coal either. There were, however, a score of students and brothers gathered around the statue of Saint Alberic.
• • •
Adi saw it as she stumbled around the curve. A spark on the far side of the road, a golden fairy light in the mud, charming her away from the real world. There’s no time for this. She could hardly put one foot in front of the next.
But—there was no time anyway. Eighteen minutes left.
She trudged across the road, and leaned over to see.
It was four and a half years since she’d laid eyes on a coin like this. 1786. But even in the dim light she knew what it was. Her mind, tired as it had ever been, calculated the odds of this coin being here independent of Coal.
She couldn’t know that at that same moment, a half hour up the hill, Thomas and Brother Christopher and a group of students were all staring down at the same gold coins in a circle (with a ring of emeralds and diamonds next to them) scattered around the marble feet of Saint Alberic—Halick’s final act before soldering his soul for eternity to the man who had been his father.
Not that Halick had anything to do with the coin at Adi’s feet. The material in Coal’s pocket had just finally lost the battle with the caltrops.
What’s it doing over here? thought Adi, rubbing the coin with her thumb. Assuming he dropped it on his way to the abbey—wouldn’t it be—?
Then she spied the footprints, lots of them, scuffling through the mud, heading off the road. Not to the abbey, but from.
Looking through the woods, a twinkling through the trees, Adi saw the silhouette of the house and gave up fighting her intuition. Dropping the coin in her pocket, she headed for the light.