26

The Road to Blessington, Ireland

They’d navigated the hectic area around the Dublin airport and were entering the more scenic countryside. Salem’s skin felt tight, her heartbeat light and fast in a way the Ativan hadn’t been able to soothe, but the near gray of the clouds comforted her like a blanket. There was relief in returning to Ireland’s close skies, its smell of wet woodsmoke, the fairyland green of the hills unfurling toward her like a welcome mat.

She flipped the B&C open, tethering it as she’d done on the journey to Stonehenge.

Charlie was wiggling in his seat. “The historical implications of this discovery are staggering. How will this affect the field of cryptography? Archeology? Anthropology?” He’d started to talk about Stonehenge a dozen times on the plane ride, stopping himself as he realized they could be overheard. He’d swallowed each question before fully offering it to Salem; let them gurgle in his belly as they walked through the airport, coughing to keep from burping them as they filled out the car rental paperwork.

They spewed forth once they slipped inside the Lilliputian Nissan Versa.

“Who’ll believe Bronze Age builders created a binary code that withstood the ravages of time?”

Salem was only half listening. Questions drove research, but she had plenty of her own. She needed answers. The WiFi signal came through immediately. All four bars. Salem pulled up a search engine, fighting against the contagion of Charlie’s childlike enthusiasm. For all her fears for Mercy, she felt a thrill growing. Solving a puzzle had always done that for her. “You and me, for starters, and that’s all I’m worried about right now.”

He bent his head toward her screen. “What’re you after?”

Such a good question. When she blinked, the whole of the internet unfurled itself against the back of her eyelids: loops and swirls, locked doors, long hallways, data that could reach to the moon and back a thousand times over, answers to questions she’d never even thought to ask, mysteries created and solved in black holes that collapsed on themselves. “Anything. Everything. There must be more to this than what we’re seeing. There is no way Stonehenge is nothing more than the world’s largest, sturdiest Post-it note, you know?”

Charlie laughed. It was the first time she’d heard it. The sound was sweet, a little high and breathy like a mouse caught off guard. “She jokes! I wasn’t sure if you had a sense of humor.” He collected himself. “In all seriousness, your point is excellent. We can’t get too married to the first clue we’ve found.”

“Exactly.” Salem pushed her hair behind her ears. “We need to find out if Stonehenge served dual purposes and, if so, what they were. Regardless of that, we need to dig until we know exactly who created the binary-based message, and who its intended audience was.”

“Spend your time researching the people who built it and who came to it, because I’ve got all the stonework information you’ll need on Stonehenge up here.” Charlie tapped his skull, and then pointed to the dash-mounted GPS. “Satnav says we have forty-five minutes to your Mrs. Molony’s house. Do your worst.”

He didn’t need to tell her twice. Like Mozart at a piano, she dove in, tapping out search terms, backing off when they offered the gentle pushback of a bottomless dead end, following up ruthlessly when the points of information began to connect, to hum with the unique frequency of pattern, a Fibonacci-esque orchestra of meaning and purpose that appeared as coincidence to the untrained eye.

A twinge of doubt stained the thrill of pursuit: had her mother not necessarily molded her to be the Underground’s code breaker, but rather observed and nurtured a natural talent? That thought triggered a memory. In it, Salem was twelve.

A self-defense instructor had been invited to their home. It was the second time such a thing had happened. The first time, it had been a judo instructor brought into the Wiley household to train both Bel and Salem. It was strange how normal such a thing had felt, but then, Grace and Vida were always doing stuff like that for their girls: dance classes, first-aid training, dragging Bel and Salem to community ed knot tying or immersion Spanish workshops at the local high school after hours.

Salem wouldn’t even have questioned the close quarters self-defense instructor coming into their home for a private lesson except for Bel’s absence.

“Bel would love this,” Salem had said. “She’d think it was super cool.”

Vida and Daniel had exchanged a look. They could pass so much to each other without using words. Salem understood that’s how it worked when you married someone. You learned to read their mind. Salem could do that with Bel. She knew how good it felt.

Vida must have won the eye-wrestle because she spoke. “Bel doesn’t need this class. She’s too advanced.”

Salem felt her face crumble into her turtleneck sweater. Of course Bel didn’t need another self-defense class. She was beautiful and strong and smart and perfect, and Salem was holding her back. Their parents had had the girls take fewer and fewer classes together. Even with the judo instructor, Bel had ended up teaching him something by the end of the session. She was a physical genius. Salem was a computer nerd, not good for much if the electricity went out.

Daniel must have seen her expression. “Honey, we all have our strengths. Bel is good at sports, strength, and speed. Your gift is in your noggin.” He’d tapped his head.

“Then why do I need this class?” The instructor was supposed to arrive any moment. How gross would it be to wrestle with a stranger in your living room with your parents watching? Grody gross.

Vida had scowled. “Because you’re a girl.” She said girl like it was a dirty word. That was confusing. Vida was famous for her support of women’s rights, and didn’t all women start as girls? Daniel reached for Vida, but she pulled away. A gray shadow had fallen over her face. Salem had seen it there before, mostly when her mom had that third glass of wine, or on the rare times when Daniel had to travel without her and she had to sleep alone.

“You know what, Salem?” Vida continued, that gray shadow pinching her mouth. “Even if you get all the training in the world, you still might not be able to stop them. They might steal your most precious center, take it without a second thought, as if it wasn’t even yours to begin with.”

“Vida!”

Salem had never heard her father use that tone. It was clear they were talking about something else, and it was terrifying. Salem began to cry.

“That’ll get you nowhere,” Vida had said, even as Daniel led her away. “It’s better you learn that in this world, girls don’t get to play.”

The instructor had shown up, and Salem had worked so hard to do everything right. Her mom didn’t come out for supper that night. Daniel said he was tired and had gone to bed early. When Salem leaned her ear against the painted wood of their bedroom door, she heard her mother crying softly, and Daniel whispering soothing words.

Salem wiped away the memory and the blotch of uncertainty it brought with it—what had happened to make her mom like she was? —as best she could. It didn’t matter if she’d always had an inclination toward mathematics and logic; it gave her mother no right to conceal her connection to the Underground. She should have told Salem about it.

Gaea offered a rosebud, her signal that she’d collected data that could be something or nothing. When Salem clicked on it, she was surprised to see it was an earlier line that she’d cast, the one looking into the bombing outside Parliament. Across the world wide web, Gaea had found only two servers sourcing any reliable data connected to the bomb, and maybe not even that. One server was housed in Moscow, the other in London, and they’d shared a message that contained the exact day and time of the bombing embedded in what appeared to be an innocuous business email. It was likely only coincidence, but Salem sicced Gaea on both servers just the same, creating an algorithm that would scour those two servers for anything else that might shed a light on who was behind the bombing.

Then she refocused on her Stonehenge search. As a computer scientist, she had automatically laid her hunches to the side. Fears and feelings could not be allowed to steer her work. If there was no evidence to indicate Stonehenge was grounded in the feminine, it would be a waste of time to research based on the subjective sense that women and Stonehenge were inextricably linked, even if she’d been unable to shake that feeling since being introduced to Mrs. Molony’s unearthed replica.

Did the fact that Vida saw everything bad that happened—political, local, global, environmental, getting cut off in traffic—as a conspiracy against women affect Salem’s decision to put aside her hunch? Didn’t matter. Science was science.

After cross-referencing multiple sites, Salem established that the English Heritage site contained the most comprehensive Stonehenge research. The data they presented posited that the Heel Stone may have been the earliest component of Stonehenge, followed by a circular ditch. Inside the ditch were the Aubrey Holes. As Charlie had said, the Aubrey Holes had held timber and possibly stone, an earlier but similar version of Stonehenge that was lost to the ages. Cremated remains were deposited in the Aubrey Holes, one per hole, enough remains to qualify Stonehenge as the largest known Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles.

Five hundred years after the digging of the ditch and the creation of the timber-based monument and graveyard, the enormous sarsens and smaller bluestones that still stood today were brought in. They were erected in a vaguely similar pattern, the sarsen stones following the circle pattern of the Aubrey Holes but also erected in a horseshoe shape in the center. The bluestones were placed between the sarsens.

As she read this research, Salem fought the urge to glance at Charlie, who was vibrating in his seat. It felt like a small betrayal to look up this information rather than simply ask him. After all, he’d been the one who first told her about the holes.

Still, science. She had to be sure for herself.

Three hundred years after the sarsens and bluestones were brought in, the bluestones were rearranged to form an oval and a road was built between the structure and the river Avon. That formation had produced the code they’d cracked today. Around the same time, barrows—burial mounds for the respected and wealthy—began appearing immediately next to Stonehenge or on hills within view of Stonehenge, indicating that either Stonehenge had been considered a holy place or an homage to the powerful. Also, celebrations drawing as many four thousand people began, the festivals occurring at midsummer and midwinter every year.

Salem felt the warm and familiar tingle that sparked when she located the beginning of a thread she was trying to unravel. Stonehenge had been a gathering place for the Neolithic leaders. They had ordered its creation through whatever means available, and they gathered twice annually on constellation-based dates.

Who were these exalted leaders? Knowing that would help Salem to understand who had orchestrated the code and, potentially, their reasons for using it. The loudest hits on Stonehenge and Stonehenge-adjacent burials came back from a hundred years or so after the construction period of Stonehenge as they now knew it. These discoveries included the burial mound of the “Amesbury Archer” along with other males interred with pottery, amber, gold, and flint, which would have represented great wealth at the time. More interesting was the oxygen isotope analyses proving that the powerful people buried at Stonehenge had traveled from all over what was today known as Europe as well as western Asia and northern Africa, again, as Charlie had said.

Salem programmed Gaea to gather all research related to Stonehenge, stack it all on top of each other, collate and dismiss any repetitive information, and create a separate document of the outliers. A minute after she ran it, Salem found herself looking at something unusual, something unsettling.

“Oh my god.”

“What?”

Salem jumped in her seat. She’d forgotten Charlie, and the rest of the world, were here. She was looking at whispers—a bone fragment discovered here or there, articles peppered around the internet rather than one cohesive document—but they all said the same thing: the bodies cremated or buried at Stonehenge immediately before, during, and after the construction of the monument that had produced “second” were women.

“Stonehenge research from 2300 BC, which is when the version of the monument that we saw in the visitor center was created.” Salem instinctually turned the laptop screen toward him, even though he couldn’t study it while he drove. “Did you know that mostly women were buried there at that time?”

He smiled, a quiet, soft gesture. “What do you think it means?”

“Something inconceivable,” she said.

“Yet your hypothesis is …?” he gently prodded.

There was only one explanation. “That four thousand years ago, women held the power.”