Frantically, I searched for something, anything that would give us a few seconds. Shooting in this crowded place would be a disaster. If we could just get out of their line of sight, we could disappear. This place was a maze.
The shopkeeper at the next stall stood plastered against a rack of jars, his eyes wide. Steps away from him, I saw it. His stall had a rickety wooden roof, held up by poles tied to the ground. If I timed it right, and if I could get the Order guys under it, I could crash the roof on them and we’d get those seconds.
“Give me the note,” I whispered to Jack.
“We can’t let them have it,” he said through clenched teeth.
“I have a plan.” I pulled him to the side so the stall was between us and the Order.
“You’d better be right,” Jack murmured. “Inside left jacket pocket.”
I reached around him and stuck my hand in his pocket, feeling around until I found the scrap of paper. He kept the gun trained on the men as I pretended to trip and grabbed the support rope.
“Okay,” I said, holding out the note and letting my voice waver like I was afraid they’d shoot us. I nudged Jack, gesturing for him to lower the gun. “Here. Take it.”
All four of them darted toward us, and when they were a couple of yards away, I yanked the cord. The stall trembled—and as the redhead reached toward me, its entire top collapsed. His fingers grazed my arm as I jumped out of the way.
What I hadn’t realized was that the top of the stall was more than a roof. It was a spice stall, and the top must have been used for extra storage. Bags full of spices tilted and tipped, and finally fell. Red and yellow and cinnamon brown and saffron orange rained down in fragrant cascades. I sneezed once, twice, three times, trying to keep a hold on Jack’s back, wiping at my eyes with my other hand.
In the second it took for the men to realize what had happened, we were sprinting down the next aisle, and my heart leapt in triumph.
We didn’t try to outrun them this time. Jack ducked into the tiny bit of space between two tentlike shops and pulled me after him, yanking the fabric closed to cover our tracks. We fought off the rippling white canvas, staining it orange and yellow and red on our way to the center of the bazaar.
Finally Jack stopped, so suddenly that I slammed into him.
“Do you think they’re—” I started, but he put a finger to his lips and cocked his head to the side. The fabric billowed into us from both sides, and I clamped my mouth shut.
“I think we’ve lost them,” Jack whispered, and I realized it was true. We had lost them. Me and Jack. Me and Charlie Emerson. We had done this together. I couldn’t have done it without him, and he couldn’t have done it without me. We, the two of us, had just jumped out a window. And ridden a motorcycle. And gotten away. I kind of liked that word. We.
Jack glanced down at me and his eyes were shining, but not with worry like they so often were.
“You—” He cut off and bit his lip.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re—that was great. Really good.” He was panting as hard as I was, the red-yellow-orange dusting his shoulders and across his chest.
I couldn’t help but grin. And then I muffled another sneeze in my elbow.
A smile pulled at his lips. “It’s the spices. They’re almost in your eyes.” He reached up to my face but stopped, like he’d thought better of it. “Um.” He gestured to my eyes.
I wiped my face and looked back up at him. The dimple came out in his right cheek.
All of a sudden, I realized we were pressed so close between the two fabric stalls that we were practically in each other’s arms.
“Come here.” Hesitantly, he took my face between his hands. He ran his thumbs under my eyes, along my cheekbones, the tip of my nose. “There you are,” he said, in that perfect accent. “All better.”
I waited for him to drop his hands, but he didn’t. I suddenly realized how infrequently Jack met my eyes. He watched everything else so closely, not missing a detail, always prepared, but he hardly ever looked at me. Now his eyes, dark and stormy at the edges, fading to a glowing silver in the middle, held mine, the softness in them crowding out his hard edges.
I could swear he moved a little closer, or maybe I did.
I licked my lips, almost unconsciously, and now he wasn’t looking at my eyes anymore; he was looking at my mouth. And now I was looking at his, and his lips parted, and my heart sped up to a flutter—
The fabric billowed again, and we both startled. Jack’s hands fell away from my face. “Right,” he said. He backed a step away, concentrating a little too hard on fighting off the white canvas.
“Yeah. Right,” I echoed. I pulled the blazer tight around me. Had we really just almost kissed? I looked at his mouth again, and quickly away. This was just the adrenaline talking. Nothing else.
Plus, the words punishable by death still echoed loud in my head, and the thought of Liam’s Keeper, and the Emirs’ Keeper, and all the others who had undoubtedly suffered the consequences of going against their families. Jack wasn’t just risking his job by not turning me in—he could be risking his life. But he was doing it for Mr. Emerson, not me. Wasn’t he?
“What now?” I said quickly.
Jack cleared his throat. “I guess we go to the Hagia Sophia. I would say we wait until morning, but the clock’s ticking. The Saxons don’t care if you’re partying in Istanbul and I’m keeping an eye on you, as long as I—and by extension, you—am back in time to prepare for the ball tomorrow.”
I adjusted my bag. “So, what you’re saying is that we have twelve hours or so to figure out what Mr. Emerson meant and how it relates to this thing the most powerful people in the world have been trying to find for centuries.”
Jack ran a hand through his hair. “Right.”
I blinked. “Then we’d better get going. I’m sure you have connections that could get us in even though it’s the middle of the night, but I was thinking maybe we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.”
He cocked his head to one side. “I was thinking that exact same thing. If anyone in the Circle knew what we were up to, they’d be on us in seconds, and they wouldn’t be happy. But how—”
I glanced down at my dress. “I have another idea.”