I didn’t know. All I knew was that the thirteenth volume wasn’t here. No way would Baldric just place it, handily available, among the other books. There was something I was missing.
“Wait.” I stepped onto the platform itself and lifted myself up on my tiptoes. “What’s that? There something in its mouth?”
Carefully, I climbed up its bent knees, jutting out just far enough to make a pretty good foothold. As I came almost eye to eye with the phantom, I remembered, looking into their hollow, black depths behind the sheen of crystal, that this thing was not a “fossil” at all. It was alive. Its flesh and exoskeleton may have transformed into a different substance, but like Pete and Mellie had demonstrated in the London facility, with the right material it could be called back to life. It was an unsettling thought. More unsettling when I stuck my hand up its exposed throat, my arm avoiding its long teeth, sharper now inside the crystal coating.
My hunch was right. Deep inside its mouth, jammed neatly into the roof of its mouth, was a key. I grimaced, trying to yank it out without impaling my arm on its jaw.
“Yes,” I whispered when it finally came loose, but the deep rumbling behind the bookcase caught me by surprise. Startled, I turned too quickly, slipping off the phantom’s knee and falling off the platform.
“What’s going on?” Lake said, helping me up from the other side of the chains. “Is the bookcase moving?”
Chae Rin scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief as an invisible force dragged the shelf out at an angle, revealing a black space behind it.
There was nowhere else to go but into the passageway. It had opened only a sliver, so we had to slide ourselves through one by one. The girls followed me down a set of creaking stairs, deeper and deeper, and then into a dimly lit corridor of red brick until we came to a locked iron door. The key fit perfectly. The lock clicked, and after swinging the door open, we entered a vast space that could have been another exhibition area anywhere else in the museum.
It was a little dusty in here, but otherwise, the area was well kept. Perhaps Baldric visited from time to time during his tenure as the secret volume keeper. The elaborate white border stretching across the four corners of the ceiling had beautiful patterns in the plaster: rose vines twisting and sprouting blooms across the wide strips. On each side of this secret area were three tall suits of armor carrying real spears, standing guard in their rows. I walked across the marble floor, marveling at the two crystallized phantoms on display at the front of the room with only a velvet rope separating them from the rest of the hall. Dragons, like the one upstairs, though these were even bigger, their outstretched wings almost touching the ceiling. And in the middle of the wall between them hung a beautiful painting—a portrait, rather—of a plump, rosy-cheeked girl in a lavender Victorian dress, her charcoal hair swept up at the top of her head. At the bottom of the frame read a dedication:
For Patricia Haas: 1848–1865.
“Patricia Haas,” I whispered as the other girls spread to different corners of the hall. Naomi had said that Baldric’s family had kept the secret volume safe through generations. But the girl’s first name caught my attention also. “Emilia, Abigail, and Patricia . . .” The three girls Alice had mentioned in her letter to Marian.
“Guys, come look at this!” Lake said excitedly, disappearing behind one of the two open doors. We followed her inside.
“Okay, I think we can agree this place is hella weird,” Chae Rin said as Lake motioned to the three stone statues in the center of the room.
I’d seen them before. These women, their bodies carved out of white stone, naked but for their hair wrapped around them like ancient robes. They were exact replicas of the statues stationed around Blackwell’s mansion. And like Blackwell’s statues, each held a pearl in her hands, their bodies only slightly different in position. The mysterious “knowing” in the hollow grooves meant to represent their eyes was the same for each of them. As if they saw us. As if they’d known we would be coming here.
It was like the statues were just another exhibit. Well, secret room or not, we were still in a museum. The three statues faced each other in a triangle on top of a wide, circular platform at the center of the room. And next to the platform was another golden stand with a plaque telling its visitors the name of this exhibit. This time it was only one word: FāTUM.
“?‘Fātum’ . . . does that mean ‘fate’?” I asked.
Belle walked up to the velvet rope surrounding the platform. “Fate. Destiny. Sometimes ‘death.’ Though other times it refers to the words uttered by gods. Their words . . . their will . . .” Belle went silent, but her eyes never left the statues. “What are these? Why are they here? Who are you three supposed to be . . . ?”
“We tried to get into the other room, but it was locked,” said Chae Rin. “I have no idea what these statues are. Or that.” She pointed at the digital clock screwed into the front of the room behind the statues: 20:00. Twenty-four-hour time. But that couldn’t have been right; we’d left after midnight.
Belle stepped over the velvet rope and knelt down next to the platform. “These depressions . . .” At the foot of each statue was a straight, sunken path that stopped just at the edge of the platform. “It’s leading the statues away from one another.”
After a long moment of considering the pathways, she hopped onto the platform and tried to push one of the statues.
“This is so weird.” Lake shook her head and snapped her photos.
Chae Rin walked up to the rope. “What are you doing?”
Belle gave her best effort, but they didn’t budge. They were a little taller than us and made of marble. Heavy. Too heavy to move yet. “It’s no use,” she said, righting herself. “The inoculation is wearing off, but I’m still not strong enough to move these on my own. Chae Rin, what about you? You could use your power to move the stone.”
It was true that it had been a while since we’d inoculated ourselves. I could start to feel the beginnings of magic struggling awake deep within my body. It must have been the same for Chae Rin, who sighed.
“I don’t know what you think is going to happen, but all right. Why not?” She lifted her hands, grimacing as she struggled to channel the power through her body. Gradually, one statue began to move, dragging along the depressed path in the stone platform with a terrible screech. Our powers were coming back, but that also meant we had to finish up here and get out fast. It was hard to tell how long we had until the Sect could track us again, and with Naomi’s ring bugged during our conversation with her in Madrid, we couldn’t be sure who was already on our tail.