“Are you saying it’s a decryption device?” Lukas asked.

How did he make that jump?

Priest nodded. “A pretty sophisticated one, considering it’s completely mechanical. If you used the right type of ink, you could write on almost anything and no one would be able to see it without these disks. If someone knew what they were doing, they could actually design a written code that required all five pieces to decipher.”

Lukas froze. “Five pieces?”

“Yeah—” Priest started, but Lukas was halfway across the room.

“Luke?” Jared called after him. His brother didn’t even break stride, and I felt Jared’s body tense behind me.

“And you never noticed that picture before?” Alara asked before an awkward silence set in.

Priest gave her a hard stare. “Of course I did. But there are hundreds of sketches in here. And like I said, that isn’t my granddad’s handwriting. His is down in the corner.” The word Lilburn was printed neatly at the bottom of the page. “Another member of the Legion must have drawn it before he inherited the journal.”

“Then why is this Shift thing such a big deal all of a sudden?” Jared asked.

“Because of this.” Priest pointed at the seal. “Kennedy found it.”

Alara and Jared squinted to see what had taken my mind only seconds to record in complete detail. They gasped as recognition registered on their faces.

Jared looked at me. “How’d you even see it?”

“I have twenty-twenty vision.” I didn’t want to tell them about my freakish memory. Priest might think it was cool, but Alara would undoubtedly point out that it wasn’t very useful, unless we needed to take a standardized test about destroying vengeance spirits.

“If the seal is there, it means something,” Alara said.

“It does.” Lukas parted the sheet with one hand, his journal in the other. “Listen to this. ‘Five pieces. Separated until the day comes when, united, we can finally destroy him. Until that day, the pieces remain hidden from the demon that hunts them. The shift is the key.’ My uncle read it to me once. He thought it was a metaphor, and the five pieces represented the five members of the Legion, like the pieces of a puzzle.”

“But it mentions the Shift from the drawing,” I said.

Lukas set his journal on the worktable so the rest of us could see it. “The word shift isn’t capitalized here. He didn’t think it was a physical object.”

“ ‘Until the day comes when, united, we can finally destroy him.’ ” Alara repeated the words, trying to work it out.

“What if—?” Lukas leaned over the diagram. He gripped the sides of the table until his knuckles turned white. He finally raised his eyes to meet ours.

“I think the Shift is a weapon.”