"No," I said quickly. "We can"t."
"What? Why not?"
"Because they"ll ask us how we found the farmhouse, and I"ll have to tell them about my visions, and then..."
Noah waited for me to continue. "And then what...?"
"And then..." But the more I searched for an answer, the more I realized I didn"t have one. I let my arms drop to my sides. "I don"t know."
"It"s not your fault that you"re having these visions. If anything, the headmaster should be grateful. It"s because of you that we found the Undead in the first place."
Feeling all the more miserable, I gave him a slight nod.
The windows of the headmaster"s office gave off a warm yellow glow as we walked toward them. The cobblestones were packed with snow.
An older woman wearing a heavy sweater and a brooch answered. His secretary. She surveyed the state of our outfits, which were stained from the night before. "Out late practicing?" she asked.
"We need to speak to Headmaster LaGuerre," Noah said.
"I"m afraid he hasn"t arrived back yet from the winter holidays. Is everything all right?"
Noah glanced at me. "Do you know when he"ll be back?"
"He"ll be in the office tomorrow morning. Do you want to leave him a message?" she asked, and took out a pen.
"No," I said firmly. "We"ll come back tomorrow."
After we made plans to meet before cla.s.s the next day, Noah walked me back to the dormitory. The snowflakes caught in my eyelashes as I stood on the stoop.
"Thank you," I said.
"Please don"t say that," he said softly, though there was an edge to his voice. "It makes me wonder if I could have changed your mind."
I pushed a lock of hair from my face. "No-I-"
But before I could say anything more, he backed down the stairs. "Keep safe, Renee."
I was so dazed when I got back to my room that it took me a few moments to notice the closet door was ajar. "Strange," I said, flipping on the lights and glancing inside, where nothing seemed wrong. But as I went to my desk, something crunched beneath my feet. A few pieces of broken gla.s.s were strewn in front of my bed; the remainder of a water jug I kept on my nightstand. Bending over, I picked up a shard and then checked the trash bin, where I found the rest of the gla.s.s. Someone had been here.
Throwing my stuff down, I burst through the bathroom and banged on Clementine"s door.
To my surprise, the headmaster opened it.
"Renee," he said as he put one of Clementine"s bags down. He was wearing a coat and hat, his shoulders dusted with snow. Clementine was standing behind him in tall fur boots and earm.u.f.fs.
"Headmaster LaGuerre," I said, my shoes squeaking against the wood as I stopped short. "You"re here."
He gave me a bemused smile. "Yes I am. Were you coming to say hi to Clementine?"
A smirk spread across Clementine"s face.
"Oh, um-yes. I"ll come back later. Sorry to intrude."
"Well, don"t leave on my behalf," he said. "I"ll be gone after I help Clementine carry her things in."
"Oh, that"s okay," I said, and made for the door, when Clementine stepped forward.
"Did you want to ask me something?" she said, taking off her gloves. "You can do it now. No need to be shy."
I glanced at her, and then at her father. He blinked, waiting. "I just-found something in my room. A broken water jug. And the closet door was open, but I"m certain I closed it before I left. I was wondering if you saw anyone go into my room while I was away?"
Clementine raised a delicate eyebrow. "But I only just got back. How would I know?"
The luggage by her feet was wet from snow. Maybe she was telling the truth. But then who had been in my room?
I slept on Anya"s couch that night, beneath a coa.r.s.e patchwork quilt that her grandmother had made, with the sign of the cat embroidered on it for good luck. Anya lit candles around the room while I told her about the farmhouse and the dark figure that had been standing behind the children as we"d run into the woods. Even long after she fell asleep, I stayed awake, the candles around me flickering as the clouded eyes of the boy I"d left writhing on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor blurred into Dante"s, haunting me until I drifted into dreams.
Anya shook me awake the next morning. The candles had all burned out, and the January day was peeking in between the curtains. "We slept through Strategy and Prediction," she said, throwing clothes on. Our cla.s.s was supposed to have been held at a location outside of the city. By the time we made it out the door, cla.s.s was over, and the van was already parked near the school gates. I spotted Noah by the curb, holding his gear.
"What happened?" he asked. "We were supposed to meet the headmaster this morning."
"I"m so sorry," I said, lowering my voice when I noticed Clementine watching us. "I overslept."
Noah studied me, as if trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. "You didn"t not show up because of-"
"Of course not," I said, before he could finish.
The headmaster was carrying the last of the supplies out of the van when we approached him.
"Headmaster?" I said, tapping him on the shoulder.
He jumped. "Oh, Renee. And Noah. What can I do for you?"
"We need to talk to you," I said. "In private."
Shutting the door, he rubbed his hands together in the cold. "Is everything all right?"
I nodded. "It"s about the Liberum."
The smile faded from the headmaster"s face. "Excuse me?" he said, bending over us.
Down the path, Clementine watched us.
"We know where they are," Noah said. "We saw them."
The headmaster looked in either direction and then b.u.t.toned his coat. "Come with me," he said.
Inside his office, he cleared stacks of paper from two chairs and motioned for us to sit. Then he settled himself behind his desk and crossed his hands. "Now tell me."
"It started with a vision of a farmhouse," I said, and told him about our trip, the nightmarish house, and what I"d overheard through the heating vent. Noah finished the rest of the story while I stared at the plants on the windowsill, trying to push the image of the boy in the bas.e.m.e.nt out of my head.
"You"re certain the person you saw was a Brother of the Liberum?" the headmaster asked when we were finished.
I hesitated. "Not certain, but I heard him speak in Latin when he was talking to the children."
"You knew this last night and you didn"t tell me?" he said, staring at me.
"We went to your office, but you weren"t there," Noah said, not knowing what the headmaster was referring to.
"Did they see you?"
"Yes," I said.
"But most of them were blind," Noah interjected.
The headmaster"s shoulders slumped in relief. "And they had no way of identifying you?"
"No," Noah said, just as I blurted out, "Maybe."
The headmaster glanced between us, his eyes wide as he waited for a clear answer. "Did they follow you here?"
I swallowed as he turned from Noah to me. Someone had broken into my room, and it hadn"t been Clementine. Could it have been the Brother of the Liberum? "Maybe."
The headmaster"s face seemed to drain of its color. His eyes darted to the window, and without warning, he stood up and closed the shades. "Then you need to prepare yourselves."
But how?
I skipped the rest of my cla.s.ses that day and ran to the waterfront, the wind chapping my cheeks as I slowed and stared at the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River. Across the water on the opposite bank, the rounded peaks of the grain silos stuck out of the snowy gust like mountaintops. I walked toward them, my feet making fresh footprints in the snow as I approached the railing.
The wind swirled through, making my eyes water as I leaned over and spoke to Dante. "If I don"t see you again," I said, swallowing, "I wanted to say good-bye."
"Bye, bye, bye, bye..." The sound sent a chill through my bones as it echoed back to me.
Wiping my cheek, I was about to turn away when I noticed a message scratched into the metal of the handrail among the rest of the graffiti. Except this one was written in Latin. I"ll come for you, it said, as if he had heard me and spoken back.
"Being on the defensive isn"t enough," I said to Anya over dinner late that week. Four guards were manning the doors of the dining hall; otherwise, everything seemed to carry on as normal. No one else knew about the threat of the Liberum.
"Are you suggesting we go out and find the Liberum before they find you? Because I don"t want to do that." Anya slid down in her chair, sipping a gla.s.s of milk. Noah was nowhere to be seen. He had barely said a word to me after our meeting with the headmaster, and after cla.s.ses he had just disappeared.
I lowered my voice. "Of course not. The Liberum are looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters. The last part of the riddle-that"s what they really want, right? But we can"t let them have it. You should have seen what he was like...." I said, remembering the dark figure, his body thin and somehow sunken.
The table behind us erupted in laughter. Probably from some stupid joke.
"We need to find the riddle," I said. "We need to find it before they do."
Anya glanced over her shoulder. "But how?"
I chewed on my straw. "I don"t know."
And then from somewhere behind me, I heard one of Clementine"s friends say, "Gottfried should be shut down. It"s just breeding the Undead."
"That place is cursed," another girl said.
"Gottfried," I repeated. "Curse."
The Gottfried Curse. I had almost forgotten about it. Pushing my plate aside, I turned to Anya, my face flushed. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" she said.
"I have to go." I stood up.
"Wait!" she called after me. "Where are you going?"
"I"ll tell you later." And I was gone.
Back in my room, I rummaged under my bed until I found the book I"d bought last year on Grub Day, our school outing to the town of Attica Falls. Its binding was a worn cream, with the t.i.tle Attica Falls. I wiped it off with my hand, sneezing from the dust. I flipped through it until I found the article called "The Gottfried Curse," the same one I"d read last year.
I skimmed the pages. Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Academy has been plagued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of the most perverse and bizarre nature....
I flipped ahead, scanning the paragraphs about how Gottfried was founded first as a hospital for the Undead, until the head doctor, Bertrand Gottfried, died, and the school closed its doors. That"s when I found what I was looking for.
Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened. This time, as a school. The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress. She named it "Gottfried Academy," after its founder.
Ophelia Hart. Or Ophelia Coeur? Coeur meant "heart" in French. Could they have been the same person? This was where I"d recognized her from. Ophelia Hart was the first headmistress of Gottfried Academy. She was the nurse who had turned it into a school, and who seemed to preside over it while all of the strange tragedies were occurring. And then in 1789, the tragedies mysteriously stopped. I flipped ahead, trying to figure out if they had anything to do with Ophelia Hart leaving the school, but there was no other information.
I leaned back on the carpet, deep in thought. Ophelia could have changed her name to "Coeur" to keep her real ident.i.ty a secret. But it was easy to see through. Why didn"t any of the books about her scientific work mention it? Why hadn"t Noah"s father, a celebrated historian, considered that Ophelia Coeur could have been the first headmistress of Gottfried? The names seemed far too similar to be coincidental. He hadn"t even mentioned anything about that.
And then I realized: the Ophelia that Noah"s father had told us about had done all of her water research in the early 1900s.
The Ophelia on the page in front of me, the one who was the first headmistress of Gottfried, had been alive in the mid-1700s, which was right around the time when the Nine Sisters had been killed.
It seemed impossible that there were two Ophelias in the Monitoring world, and each with a variation of "heart" as a last name. But did that then mean that these two Ophelia Harts-one a nurse in the 1700s, the other a nurse and scientist in the early 1900s-were the same person?
We were right, I thought, piecing it all together. Ophelia was the ninth sister. That was the only explanation for how a woman could stay alive for two hundred years, maybe more. She had used the secret of the Nine Sisters to become immortal.
"It"s true," I said out loud, even though there was no one else in the room to hear me. I stared at her name in the book, unable to believe that I had finished what my parents had started, that I had actually found her. I was one step closer to discovering eternal life, the secret that everyone had been searching for. But as I traced the O of her name, my excitement faded to fear, and I realized that I now had exactly what the Liberum wanted, and that soon I would have to face them. Life and death, Zinya had predicted. I was one step closer to that, too.
SHUTTING THE BOOK, I THREW IT IN MY BAG AND went to the closet to get my mother"s shovel, not sure where I was planning on going, just that now I knew I had to take protection with me everywhere I went. The only person I wanted to tell was Dante, but the mere reminder that even after everything I was somehow still in love with him, made my chest ache. What was wrong with me? Why couldn"t I let him go?
I was about to shut the closet door, when I realized something was wrong. I hadn"t noticed it the night I"d confronted Clementine and her father, but now a wave of unease overcame me. I pushed through the mess of hangers, throwing shoes and clothes out onto the floor until I had a clear view of the back. The long rectangular case was there, but the shovel I kept inside it was gone.
But how? Hoping I was somehow mistaken, I pulled out the case and checked behind it, but found nothing. All the while, my own words echoed in my head. "Just don"t let them see your shovel," I"d told Noah in the farmhouse. Could the Undead have followed me here, to my own room, and stolen my shovel? Feeling faint, I glanced at the window, and then at the door, wishing there was a lock on it, when I realized that there was a far simpler explanation.
Furious, I stormed through the bathroom and burst into Clementine"s room. She had just gotten back from dinner and was chatting with two of her friends by the door.
"Did you take it?" I demanded. "Did you go through my room?"
Clementine turned to me. "Take what? What are you talking about?"