CHAPTER 21
The mandate?” I said. “Wrong how?”
Jack leaned over my shoulder, staring at the note. “I haven’t got a clue.”
“Maybe they didn’t take him just because of me.” The guilt loosened its grip. I turned, pushing past Jack out of the claustrophobic closet. “Maybe it’s more. What could he know about the mandate? Something about the One?”
Jack followed and took the note. He held it up to the light, twisting it from side to side. “Fitz would have told me if he knew something like that.”
I perched on the edge of a white ottoman. Just how many secrets did Mr. Emerson have? “What exactly does the mandate say? The whole thing.”
Jack didn’t take his eyes off the note as he said,
The rightful One and the girl with the violet eyes.
The One, who walks through fire and does not burn.
The girl, born of the twelve.
Their fates mapped together become the fate of the Circle.
Through their union, the birthright of the Diadochi is uncovered.
The riches of Iskander, the power of Zeus, the means to vanquish the greatest enemies.
The One, when it is his, becomes invincible.
I drummed my fingers on the ottoman. “Again?” He’d said it so quickly, the words had blurred together, like he’d recited it a thousand times.
He repeated the mandate, enunciating this time.
“Wrong about the mandate,” I repeated. “The girl with violet eyes doesn’t seem like it could be wrong. What about the other lines?”
Jack rubbed the back of his neck. I could tell he was still trying to wrap his mind around anything about the mandate being uncertain. “‘Vanquish the greatest enemies’ seems obvious. We know what the union is.”
“At least you think you do,” I said. It would be great news for me if that was what was wrong.
Jack gave me a sideways glance. “As I said, it’s highly likely our interpretation is correct.”
I slipped out of my shoes and stretched my feet against the cool hardwood. “What the Order cares about is the One, right? They’re trying to kill him right now. What does it say about the One?” I tried to forget I was talking about a person I was supposed to marry. “There’s the ‘walk through fire’ line.”
“That could mean any number of things,” Jack said, pacing, “but it’s accepted to mean a proverbial trial by fire. The One who is the strongest would be able to make it through difficult times.”
“We’re supposed to find three things,” I said to myself. “I wonder if it could be clues about the mandate. About the One. And that’s what he thinks they’re wrong about.”
Jack just shook his head. “If he knew something about who the One was and kept it a secret . . . I just don’t know why he’d do that.”
I didn’t either. “For now it doesn’t matter what he means by ‘wrong about the mandate,’” I said. “He said to follow what he left. We can think about the mandate stuff if we find anything, but we have to follow his clues first.”
Jack’s eyes darted to me. I could see the hesitation in them. I knew he really should send me to the Saxons. The longer he didn’t turn me in, the more trouble he’d be in if they found out. But telling them would mean they’d want me there right away and we wouldn’t be able to help Fitz.
I found the compass points on his tattoo. As Jack stood right now, the north tip of the compass pointed right at me. There was something beautiful about it, but now that I knew what it meant, it seemed sinister, too. With consequences like those in play, could I actually trust him?
“Do you think the curated collection means the Hagia Sophia? He volunteered there, right?” I said, watching for his reaction.
Jack tapped his thumb against his lip for a few seconds, and then dropped it and squared his shoulders with a long exhale. “Yes. We should start there.”
If nothing else, I did believe he was worried about Mr. Emerson and would do anything to help. I’d just have to keep my guard up. I nodded and worked my aching feet back into my shoes.
Jack had been pacing from the mirrored closet door to the leather armchair sitting on a sheepskin rug, but now he hesitated in front of me. “I understand how you feel, you know. About the mandate. About all this.”
I looked up. “I’m not even worried about that right now. I just want to help Mr. Emerson.” I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap. “And I don’t think you could possibly know how I feel about it.”
He offered me his hand to help me up. “For someone in the Circle,” he said, “the union would be a huge honor. For you . . . this isn’t your world.”
He flicked his eyes to mine, and those old butterflies in my belly gave the slightest flicker of their wings. He let go of my hand.
I swallowed, then rubbed my face. My fingers came away smeared with mascara, and I realized I’d probably looked like a drowned mess this whole time.
“I’m going to wash my face before we go,” I said. I needed a second to not think about all this.
Jack nodded. “I need to borrow a shirt from Fitz anyway,” he said, rolling his shoulders. The shirt from Prada was a little tight, and stretched taut across his shoulders. The butterflies flapped harder, but I shook them off. What was wrong with me? How could I possibly be thinking about how good he looked in a tight shirt right now?
Jack gestured to the attached bathroom and disappeared back into the closet. I paused at the dresser, where he’d set the picture of him and Mr. Emerson. Mr. Emerson’s eyes sparkled from behind his glasses, and even Jack’s expression was a little less serious than I was used to. They were standing at what appeared to be the base of a snow-covered mountain.
“How old were you in this picture?” I said. It was so strange that Jack had known Mr. Emerson at the same time I had—it was like we’d been living parallel lives.
“It was my fourteenth birthday.” Jack’s voice was muffled. “Fitz always said birthdays were the most important holidays, and I could do whatever I wanted if I was with him.”
Mr. Emerson had said that to me, too. For my ninth birthday, he’d taken me and my mom to see The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie, at this tiny independent theater that served macaroni and cheese while you watched. It was my favorite birthday of all time.
I stepped into the bathroom but glanced back in time to see Jack’s white button-down shirt hit the floor in the doorway. I stared at it for a second too long, then turned on the sink and splashed cold water on my cheeks.
“If I’d wanted to lie on the couch and watch television all day, he would have let me,” Jack went on. “But when I turned fourteen, I wanted to climb Mont Blanc.”
I dried my face and dug my contact drops out of my bag. I put a drop in each of my tired eyes. “That’s in the Alps, right?”
“The peak of the Alps. He told the Saxons it was a training trip. He said he would have taken his own grandson if he’d had one. It was worth it, even if the sunburn lasted for days.”
I could see the edge of the picture out the door. Both their noses were bright pink, but Mr. Emerson wore a huge smile.
Jack walked out of the closet, tugging a clean white V-neck T-shirt over his head, and my fingers paused partway through raking my hair back into a ponytail. Then my gaze found the ridges of muscle above his hip bones and I turned back quickly, concentrating hard on twisting my hair tie.
Still, out of the corner of my eye, I could see him study me. He pulled a black blazer from the closet, and held up a cream one for me.
“You should put this on,” he said.
I looked down at my skimpy dress, and realized that we were very much no longer in a club. “Yeah,” I said, holding out my hand. “Muslim country and all.”
I could swear he blushed. “It’s pretty progressive here, actually, but it’s just that you’re, you know.” He studied his shoes, but waved a hand in the general direction of my body. “And that dress is . . . and we’re trying not to draw attention . . . and I guess it would be respectful . . . Never mind.”
He shoved the blazer in my hands.
The last time I’d seen him anything less than perfectly poised was when he was asking me to prom. Was it possible that invitation hadn’t been entirely fake?
“Thanks,” I said. I pulled the blazer on and rolled the sleeves so they wouldn’t cover my hands.
Jack leaned over the sink. It felt weirdly intimate, washing up together. I’d done this at sleepovers, of course, but Jack washed his face differently, less carefully. Like a guy. I tried not to stare at the way he splashed water everywhere, at how he ran wet fingers through his hair, at the drops of water resting on his eyelashes.
I looked into my own eyes in the mirror again. “Why the eyes? If the Diadochi were his generals, and not relatives, how do the families all have purple eyes?”
“It is odd, genetically, but the prevailing theory is they were all distantly related to start with, and interbreeding over the years concentrated the gene for the eyes.”
I handed him a clean towel. Jack scrubbed his hair and it stuck up in all directions. For some reason, right then, I realized why what he’d said about that picture seemed off.
“Wait. You said Mr. Emerson would have taken his grandson hiking if he had one. But he does,” I said. “His name’s Charlie.”
Jack stopped still, and slowly lowered the towel. His dark hair hung damply over his forehead. “Did you say Charlie?”
The famous Charlie Emerson. “He used to tell me stuff about his grandson.” I backtracked to the dresser and picked up the picture. “We were about the same age, and it’s like he wanted us to be friends from afar . . .”
Like a few years after we moved away, Mr. Emerson’s Charlie update was about how they went on a long hike for Charlie’s fourteenth birthday, and they both got sunburned.
I looked at photo-Jack’s pink skin. Real Jack opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
No.
“Is your favorite ice cream pistachio with frozen Thin Mints, by any chance?” Jack finally said, tossing the towel on the sink.
It had always been my favorite, and Mr. Emerson said my suggestion had made Charlie a convert. “Is your favorite movie The Godfather?” I countered.
“Yes. I—”
I set the picture down with a bang. “You’re Charlie Emerson?”
He walked past me into the bedroom, a stunned look on his face.
“How? And how did you not realize who I was, if he told you about me?” I went on before he could answer.
“Jack is my middle name. I—” He cleared his throat. “Charles was my father’s name. But I already knew Fitz before I started going by Jack. He calls me Charlie. He never showed me your picture. He said your name was Allie.”
Charlie Emerson was real, standing in front of me, and he thought my name was Allie. “He said you were his grandson.”
“He said you were his great-niece.” Jack turned around. “I can’t believe I’m meeting the girl who thought the first Godfather movie was the best. So many people prefer the second, and are obviously wrong.”
“What? No! The second was so much better. He told you I agreed with you about the first?”
“He did.”
“So did you even like my sundae?”
He bit back a smile. “I’ve always been partial to coffee ice cream.”
My mouth dropped open.
“I’m sorry!” he said, almost laughing. “Looks like Fitz lied to us.”
A laugh escaped my throat, and the moment of lightness felt so unexpectedly good, I could have cried. “I can’t believe you’re—we’re—”
Voices came from the other side of the wall, and Jack’s head snapped up.
“It’s the neighbors,” I started, but Jack put a finger to his lips.
“They’re speaking English,” he said.
Of course. It hadn’t sounded strange to me, but here it would. These were people who didn’t belong in this building.
The voices stopped nearby. From down the hall, Mr. Emerson’s doorknob jiggled.
Jack grabbed the note and handed me the pictures to stuff in my bag, and we ran out of the bedroom.
“It’s gotta be here. We must have missed something,” came a voice from the hall. The knob jiggled louder. “Didn’t you leave it unlocked?”
“It’s the Order.” Jack made a move toward the door, drawing his gun from his jacket.
I grabbed him. “What are you doing?”
“Capturing them.” He shook me off. “Torturing where they’re holding Fitz out of them. Whatever it takes.”
I was surprised and a little disturbed at the anger simmering in his eyes. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Mr. Emerson said very specifically for us to find this stuff, and not to let anyone else get it. If we get caught ourselves . . .”
Jack hesitated. He glanced back at the door and ran a hand over his face. Finally, he put his gun away. “You’re right. I just . . .”
I nodded. “I know.”
“But they’re out to get you, too.” I could see the logical side of him take over again. “We can’t risk them figuring out who you are. Let’s go.” He glanced around the room and hurried to a small window. He wrenched it open. For some reason, I hadn’t considered this would be our way out of here.
He started to climb through, and I hurried to him. “Is there any other way?” I peered out at the four stories to the ground below, fighting vertigo.
A crash from down the hall. They’d kicked in the door. Jack swung both feet onto the fire escape, and offered me his hand. “Not if we want to get out of here alive.”