30

APPLAUSE LIKE A THUNDERSTORM ROARED through the audience as the curtains came down, snapping Lottie out of the Aoi Tōyō spell.

In the story the vampire cat had been killed and the villagers had won, but the real one was still lurking, and she finally knew how to defeat it. Still hidden under the stage, Lottie watched the audience; right at the back of the theater one person stood as still as a statue, not clapping at all. Sayuri Chiba.

Sayuri’s ink-black eyes locked directly on hers through the little crack, her gaze so sharp it made Lottie take a step back, tripping over a box of masks, her tiara slipping sideways.

Lottie tried to right herself. They needed to act now. The only way to solve this mystery was to work together, but to get Sayuri on her side there was one very big thing she needed to do.

It was the first rule of her mantra, the simplest of all. Be kind.

It wasn’t Sayuri whose mind needed changing. She wasn’t some game that Lottie needed to beat. Sayuri was just a girl, as scared and isolated by her responsibilities and worries as any of them were, and the only thing Lottie needed to do was apologize, and she knew exactly how to do it.

Wrapping her robe tight around her, Lottie ran up the steps to backstage to find her bag. Rummaging quickly, she found Lili’s diary and tucked it carefully into the fabric of her Aoi Tōyō robe.

Smiling politely, she made her way to the backstage door. Lottie was so determined, so engrossed in her mission, that she almost went right into Sayuri.

She managed to step neatly out of the way as Lottie came crashing out of the back of the theater into the balmy night to where she was waiting on the dirt steps.

“Sayuri! I’m sorry.” Lottie bowed so low her hair lapped at the ground, the billowing Aoi Tōyō costume draping around her. It was loud outside, a symphony of singing insects and rustling bamboo swaying overhead. “I’m sorry that Ellie and I took our Partizan for granted,” she began steadily. “I’m sorry that we may have brought Leviathan to you, and I’m sorry for all the pressure this has put on you. You have a million things to worry about, and I don’t want to be one of them. So, if you’d like it, I have this for you. It’s Liliana’s diary.” She paused to grab the diary from her robe, holding out the pages, but feeling more like she was holding out her own beating heart. “I think it has the clues to solving Takeshin’s mystery. If you don’t want to team up, I respect that, but I want you to have this.”

She kept her head down, watching the dirt creep up the ends of her tangled curls, tinting the moon-stained gold with a muddy brown. Slowly, like letting a feather float from your palm on the wind, she felt Sayuri remove the diary from her hand.

“Stand up.” Her voice was low, at odds with her dry expression. Lottie did as she was told, acutely aware of the sweat building over her theater makeup. “It was quite a rude awakening to discover you were a Portman. It is never fun to be confronted with the fact you might not know as much as you think.”

Lottie swallowed hard. “I can’t apologize for not revealing my role as Portman,” she said firmly. “But I hope that this diary can make up for any trouble Leviathan have caused you. It was my ancestor’s, and I think, maybe with your knowledge, it’s the key to solving it.”

It hurt, more than she could believe, to give away the diary—but they had to stop Leviathan, and if this is what it took, if this was the way to get Sayuri to share whatever info Banshee had, she’d do it.

“You’d really give me something so important to you?” Sayuri eyed her suspiciously.

“I would.”

Something passed over Sayuri in that moment, a ghost of a thought. “I won’t take it.” Lottie felt her whole body collapse. “But if you insist that there’s a clue in here, I’ll allow you to show it to me.” Sayuri placed the diary back in Lottie’s palms, curling her hands around Lottie’s own to hold it snug between her fingers again. “Only I cannot be blamed if there is no link at all and you humiliate yourself.”

Her skin was warm and smooth like summer flowers, sending a feeling of calm through Lottie, and she realized quite suddenly that this was the first time they’d ever touched. Tears pricked her eyes, only now realizing how much it had hurt her to give the diary up, and how kind of Sayuri it was not to take it.

Biting her tongue, Lottie could tell by the way Sayuri looked away again that they both felt it. That when it came to their schools, there was no such thing as coincidence.

Moving farther into the shadows of the building, farther away from the laughter and chatter of backstage, Lottie opened the diary, effortlessly locating the passage about Kou.

“There’s no proof that that is my Kou,” Sayuri said bluntly.

“I know,” Lottie agreed, “but look.” She turned the pages to the sketches: the glowing tree, the horned cats, the flocks of magpies, suns and moons.

Sayuri’s eyes grew wide. “Those drawings . . .”

“I didn’t notice until I was watching the plays tonight, but they’re all references to Kou’s favorite stories.”

Fingers trembling, Sayuri grabbed the diary, pulling it toward her. Eyes ablaze, she looked at the images intensely.

“Turn the page,” Lottie prompted, and slowly, with great care, Sayuri turned to the enigmatic list on the single page.

A cat

A hiding place

A sword

“What is this?”

“I’m not sure, but look—”

Before Lottie could finish, Sayuri spotted the ripped-out page and she jumped up, her robe flying around her like a petal storm.

“Come with me,” she whispered, ducking low to check quickly around as if she expected someone to be following them.

Without a word of explanation, she flicked the diary shut and grabbed Lottie’s wrist, the two of them gliding through the school like ghosts, white-robed and feet barely touching the ground. Lottie followed without question, letting Sayuri lead her with such speed that she felt that they were flying.

They arrived at the big glass door that led to Kou Fujiwara’s museum, their reflections staring back at them from the darkened interior. Without the context of the play, Lottie looked scary in her Aoi Tōyō costume, a spirit in the glass with a jungle of bamboo spewing like a spider’s legs behind her. Only Liliana’s tiara resting on her head gave any indication of her true self beneath the makeup.

Sayuri looked around, opening the door behind her back and ushering Lottie in quickly.

“If this is the key . . .” she began, gesturing for Lottie to take a seat on the floor and keep low, “we need to know we are not being watched.”

Lottie nodded, heart thundering away. Sayuri opened one of the cat-decorated chests, carefully pulling out the small one Lottie had seen her searching through the night she’d followed her.

“This is full of Kou’s unfinished work.” She sat beside Lottie and set the box down in front of them.

The distinctive scent of the museum began to curl around Lottie, spilling over her, the two of them wrapped up in Kou’s world. It was deathly quiet, all the sounds of the school beyond safely locked out, its insect chirps and hot oily air giving way to silence and peace.

Last time, Lottie had felt like an intruder in this space, a ghost drifting through a secret world locked away in time. Now she was at one with the scene, a time traveler. Even her Aoi Tōyō robes felt right.

“This makes little sense to me,” Sayuri confessed, staring at the diary where she’d placed it beside the chest. “That your ancestor should know mine in a time so unspeakably unlikely. But if my theory is correct, and you are correct, then I’ve found the key.”

“It’s like magic,” Lottie offered, not caring if she sounded childish.

A smile spread over Sayuri’s face as she reluctantly allowed herself to get caught up in the story. “Yes, like magic, I suppose.”

Pop! The chest sprang open, pressure releasing. Sitting still and silent like a good child at school, Lottie watched Sayuri methodically lay out each worn paper and scroll until at last she held up a single piece of parchment. It shone silver, enchanted, and Lottie could see only three horizontal lines of Japanese text spread over the whole page.

“Open the diary to that list.”

Lottie turned back to the page with the frayed edge.

The paper fluttered, resting between Sayuri’s middle and index fingers as she held it up to the moonlight, and with all the careful energy of casting a spell she placed the paper in the heart of the diary.

眠  大  祭

る  竹  り

The characters meant nothing to Lottie, and yet when united with the diary they felt like the most important words in the world.

She felt it just as Sayuri did, a reunion deep inside her, an invisible force slotting together that had always been misaligned. The paper fit perfectly, its ragged edge an exact fit in the diary.

Tumbling waves of understanding washed over them while the pinewood scent of the museum fused with the dusty smell of the diary. It felt as though they were possessed, that Liliana and Kou were inside them and that they were smiling.

“What does it say?” Lottie asked, her voice barely even a whisper.

“Matsuri means ‘festival,’” said Sayuri, pointing to the two characters on the right. Then her finger moved to the middle word, as she read the characters from top to bottom. “The next word is ōtake; this means ‘the great bamboo.’ And finally nemuru, ‘sleep.’ It doesn’t make any sense on its own, but if you put the words together—”

“It makes a haiku,” Lottie said, counting the syllables out on her fingers.

The pages aligned to reveal a poem in two languages, and they read it together, their voices becoming a chant that drifted into the air like a spell.

“A cat—matsuri

A hiding place—ōtake

A sword—nemuru.”

The words were like someone else’s memories inside Lottie’s head. The firefly glow of the bamboo tree, the cat that led her to it, and Kou’s sword, the blade that watched her enter the museum. That same bamboo tree that miraculously held the Mayfutt symbol in its stem.

“Sayuri,” she said, almost breathless, gazing up into the other girl’s eyes. “I know . . . I know where the treasure is . . .”

“LOTTIE!”

The two girls jumped.

“Lottie, we know you’re in there. We can see you!”

It was Jamie and Ellie—and she’d completely forgotten about them.