He sipped the remains of his herbal tea, inhaling the scent of chamomile and hawthorn. Steam from his cup clouded his window. His father had often grown angry when he spent too much time admiring the sunlight, and Jack would pay for it with the skin off his back. After all, idleness and time-wasting were sins.
He turned, leaning against the window and pulling out his golden pocket watch to examine its etched surface. He had all the time he needed now. Still, he couldn’t escape the feeling that someone was watching him. Probably a relic of my early days.
As he took a final sip of tea, he glanced at his new companion, Alexandria. She sat hunched over her laptop on his dusty green sofa. Her wavy hair and heart-shaped face reminded him of Fiona.
He had full confidence that she would be able to decode the Voynich manuscript. Other code-breakers before her who’d failed to unravel the mysteries of the ancient alchemical text hadn’t been sufficiently motivated. But of course, they hadn’t been as desperate for meaning as Alexandria.
Staring at the screen, she toyed with her lip ring. Her eyes were different than Fiona’s. Fiona’s were amber, framed by long lashes, but Alexandria’s almond-shaped eyes were a deep brown.
“Will wine interfere with your work?” He walked over to the kitchen that adjoined his living room. “Pinot noir is your favorite, right?”
“Yeah, sounds good.” She stretched out her legs, resting her bare feet on his coffee table. Silver rings decorated two of her toes.
He pulled out two long-stemmed glasses and uncorked a bottle of an oaky 2007 Oregon pinot, pouring out two large glasses. He hadn’t been feeling himself lately, and this might revive him.
“You said you were going to tell me more about this project,” she called out before turning to look at him. “And teach me magic. How have you learned so much? You look younger than me.”
He crossed the room and handed her a glass, joining her on the sofa. His watch was set to eighteen years—his physical prime. There were times that it would be convenient to look a bit older, especially in this modern world where childhood stretched out ever longer: no drinking until twenty-one, no children until after thirty. People had been lucky to live past thirty when he was a boy. But he didn’t feel eighteen today. He felt—old.
“I look young for my age,” he said, smiling. Of all the things he could say to her, this was the truest. He took a sip of wine, leaning back to savor it. “The project, since you asked, is to find something that’s been lost for a long time. The most important object in the history of the world, in fact. Cracking the Voynich code will tell us where it’s been hidden.”
“Is it like the Holy Grail?”
He leaned back into the sofa’s armrest, gazing at her. “Some call it that.”
“What did you mean about rewriting all of creation?”
“Death, mostly. I want to conquer it. I want to save everyone. The gods made us in their image, except they put us in rotting bodies. It’s a travesty they should atone for. And I’d like to fix it.”
She squinted in the sunlight angling in through the window. “Okay, but… the world will be wildly overpopulated if nobody dies. There wouldn’t be enough food or space. The whole ecosystem would be in chaos.”
He leaned forward with a wry smile. “You see, Alexandria? This is why I need you. You think of these things. But you’ve got to think on a larger scale, too. With the Grail, we can remake everything just the way it should be. There’s no heaven waiting for us after we die. That’s a lie designed to breed complacency.” His cheeks grew hot as he spoke. “We have to make paradise ourselves. No disease, no starvation. No children dying from cancer, no plagues to eat at our brains as we grow old. Just paradise.”
“Wow. You really think you can do this?
He tilted his head down, a few dark curls falling into his eyes. “I think we can do this.”
She toyed with her shirt’s low neckline. “What is the Voynich, exactly?”
He rubbed his chin. “It’s a coded history book. It was written by alchemists in the fifteenth century. At one point, it belonged to Queen Elizabeth’s great alchemist, John Dee. Many of his books have been lost, but this one survived. Only no one has been able to read it. And somewhere in its pages, it details the Grail’s secret location. All I know right now is that it’s somewhere in Europe.”
She beamed. “Are we going to Europe?”
“Assuming you get back to your coding at some point, I don’t see why you shouldn’t join me when you’re done.”
She grinned, folding herself back into a cross-legged position to resume work, and Jack rose to stare out at the dusky graveyard, sipping his wine. There were still things to take care of here before he could even think of going to Europe. He still needed to pay a little visit to Virginia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thomas
Thomas’s jaw dropped. “What?” They must be joking.
“They’re going to send you home in gratitude for your help with Rawhed.” The guard’s bulbous gut gave him the look of a penguin. He looked Thomas over, surveying his dirt-stained woolen garment. “We’ll have to get you cleaned up first.”