“I am too,” said Eva. Abruptly, she let go of the pendant she held. “Do you dance, Zofia?”

“No.”

Eva tilted her head. “But Laila does?”

“Yes.”

Although Zofia recalled that Laila did not always consider what she did at the Palais des Rêves to be dancing.

“I envy her that … among other things,” said Eva. “Laila and you are close?”

When Zofia nodded, Eva made a hmm sound at the back of her throat.

“She’s very astute, isn’t she?” asked Eva lightly. “It’s as if she knows the impossible sometimes.”

Laila knew what other people did not because she could read what other people could not. But that was a secret, and so Zofia said nothing. Instead, she followed the commotion of the room, watching as an artisan opened one of the atrium walls and shoved in the broken stag.

“A prison cell,” said Eva, following her gaze.

Zofia’s throat tightened. She did not like cramped, lightless spaces. She had not even known there was a prison cell hidden within the Sleeping Palace’s atrium.

“How did Laila and Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie become lovers?”

“They’re not,” said Zofia. A second later, Zofia realized she had said the wrong thing. Her pulse spiked. “They are. I mean—”

“Oh good, you waited!” called Enrique, jogging toward them from the library hall.

He shifted the mass of notebooks under his arm. When he got to them, he was out of breath. He looked to Zofia and grinned. Zofia felt the smile as if it were a tangible thing, and it made her feel uncomfortably warm. She did not smile back.

* * *

ONCE MORE, THE THREE OF them stood in front of the Tezcat doors.

Zofia could not shake the news that Eva had told them about the Horowitz girl and the pogroms. More than anything, Zofia wished she could hear from Hela … and then she paused. She hadn’t heard from Hela.

Due to the Order’s numerous inroads throughout Russia, Séverin had arranged to let her hear from her sister weekly. The last time had been exactly eight days ago when Hela had spoken of her cough returning and of meeting a boy named Isaac. Zofia told herself she should not be concerned. Statistically, there were a number of reasons why mail should go awry: human error, illegible handwriting, weather, etcetera. Any action must be accompanied with a standard deviation. If she had the figures to calculate the chances, she would not panic. And yet, without it, her panic often felt unquantifiable, defying the boundaries of a solid number, and instead, threatening to grow into a gaping hole that would swallow her thoughts whole.

“Ready?” asked Enrique.

Without answering, Eva drew her taloned pinky ring across her palm and pressed her hand onto the metal shield. The hinges of the Tezcat portal glowed a light blue, and then swung open. Behind the first door lay nothing but the damp moss that had grown over the brick which had become so tightly adhered to the Tezcat portal entrance that hardly an inch of space existed between the opening and the wall.

“As expected,” said Enrique.

But Zofia could hear the slightest tremor in his voice.

“Now for the well in Odessa,” said Eva.

Eva pressed her palm against the second door. Again, the hinges glowed fluorescent and then released. A bubble rose in Zofia’s chest. She told herself to be calm … to count the things around her. When the door opened, she counted the bricks: eighteen; the bolts around the Tezcat Portal: forty-three; the beads of blood welling on Eva’s palm: seven. But none of it prepared her for the sight of the bricked-up well once she knew why the name had been inscribed.

“I knew there was more writing here,” said Enrique. He turned to Eva. “Knife, please.”

Eva handed the blade to him, and Enrique began to scrape away the damp moss that grew around Moshe Horowitz’s name. When he was finished, he read aloud the inscription:

“For the family of Moshe Horowitz, gone but not forgotten…” He scraped at the rest of the moss covering the brick. “… This being the site where Rebekah Horowitz went missing and, presumably, drowned…”

Rebekah.

An old hate scraped at the back of Zofia’s mind.

When Zofia turned thirteen, she remembered her mother’s belly swelling with child. Zofia had not wanted another sibling. She didn’t like all the new changes—the sound of constant woodwork to build a crib, the stream of visitors, the unfamiliar dishes her mother now craved. But then her mother lost the baby. At first, Zofia could not understand how someone might misplace an unborn infant, but then she saw the midwife leaving her parents’ bedroom with a basket of bloody rags, and she understood.

Was it her fault? She knew her will carried consequence. It was the age when her Forging affinity had started to manifest, the age when she realized that if she held a piece of metal and wanted it set aflame or bent … she could do it. What had she done…? Jewish law held that the child had never lived, and so it never died. And yet, her mother whispered “Rebekah” at the grave, and when the rabbi at synagogue called members to stand for the Kaddish, she stood in the women’s-only part of the synagogue and glowered at anyone who looked her in the eye. Zofia still thought of the name, Rebekah, though she never uttered it aloud. To her, it was the name of a change she did not know how to want. It was the name of a fear that never had a chance to become a joy, and it filled her with shame that she had not tried to love it, and would never have the chance.

Now, Zofia felt that same rush of urgency and powerlessness all at once.

The urgency to protect what she knew, and the dread of not knowing what to expect. She steeled herself, thinking of Laila’s dark eyes and Hela’s gray gaze, and she promised herself she would protect them.

Zofia broke off one of her Tezcat pendants, shining the fluorescent light against the bricks. Small, writhing insects burrowed back into the lining of the brick. Her light caught a molten, silver shape. Enrique held up his hand.

“I recognize that symbol,” he said, frowning.

“Where?” asked Eva.

Zofia peered closer. There, buried right beneath Rebekah’s name and no bigger than a thumbnail was a small, flipped number 3.

“I’ve never seen that symbol,” said Eva. “Is it the letter E?”

Zofia tilted her head. The symbol reminded her of something she had seen in her father’s study, a mathematic sign like the lowercase omega.

“I know I’ve seen it before,” said Enrique, flipping through the pages of his notebook.

“It looks like a math symbol,” said Zofia. “Like the transfinite ordinal number.”

“Trans what?” asked Eva.

“Transfinite is a number treated as ‘infinite’ or far greater than finite numbers, but not quite infinite, and ordinal is a theory used to describe a number that describes the collection of other numbers.”

Eva rubbed her temples. “What do those words even mean?”

“Knowing Zofia, I’m sure it will prove to be brilliant,” said Enrique.

He shot her a warm smile. Zofia studded his face: brows pressed flat, mouth tipped up at the corners. A pattern of pity. He pitied her. And Eva was not even listening. Zofia’s cheeks heated, and she walked away from the Tezcat portal to the third door. Enrique stayed behind, documenting the symbol.