The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  She was back.

  “Are you going to ask me?” she said, face against her leg, a curtain of hair shielding her expression.

  I didn’t want to. Not after what had happened the last time.

  “Well?” She looked up.

  I shook my head. This all seemed too good to be true. A fantasy, a respite, and so necessarily temporary. I didn’t want to do something that might make us both wake up.

  “Ask.”

  She really was back. When Adriane gave an order, it was hard to defy. Especially when it was an order I was so desperate to follow.

  “Do you remember anything?” I asked.

  She didn’t flinch, much less scream. When she raised her head, there was a faint, plastic smile fixed on her face.

  “Nothing. One hundred percent blank.” The smile hardened. “I guess that makes me the lucky one.”

  I didn’t argue with her, though probably I should have, since she was the one who still had a fading scar on her cheek, the one who would sleep here, with the fluorescent lights, hospital sheets, locked doors, and distant screams, while I went home and curled up in my own bed, the one who’d planned to spend the rest of her life with Chris and, even if the images were buried in some inaccessible corner of her brain, had sat in a pool of his blood and watched him slip away. It was the closest we ever came to acknowledging what I’d gone through while she was sleeping; that I’d gone through anything. For Adriane, that was a lot.

  “My turn,” she said. “Heard from Max?”

  “He sent me a message.” It felt strange to say it. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have someone around who could be trusted. “I think he wants my help, but—”

  “Thank god. I knew he wasn’t—you know.”

  “They think he did it,” I said, when what I wanted to say was, Do you think he did it?

  “Obviously. What more would you expect from Chapman’s crack law-enforcement team? Competence?”

  “So, you don’t believe it? You think he’s innocent?”

  “You even have to ask?”

  “I know how you feel about him, and—”

  “Nora, come on. He’s a mouse. Not a killer.” Adriane laughed, then broke off abruptly. “Wait, you don’t think he did it. Do you?”

  I had told myself I was completely convinced of his innocence. But if that was true, why was I suddenly so relieved? Adriane had been there. Even if she couldn’t remember, some part of her would know. If Max had done something.

  Of course he hadn’t done something.

  She squeezed my hand. “He wouldn’t have left unless he had to.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But …”

  “He’s alive,” Adriane said. “You’re not allowed to feel sorry for yourself. Eventually he’ll come back.”

  The unstated corollary hung between us. There was a hard silence.

  “How are you doing?” I asked finally. “Really.”

  “I told you, my sanity’s been fully certified by the highest authorities in nutland. They’re kicking me out of here in a couple days.”

  “No, I mean … with what happened. Chris.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that.”

  “But if you want to … I mean, you know I’m …” Maybe I should have felt sorry for them then, all the parents and teachers and friends who’d ever stuttered through some awkward attempt to fix what couldn’t be fixed while I stonewalled, mute and blank, until they ran out of words and walked away, statue-still if they made the mistake of hugging, stroking, squeezing, or otherwise invading my sacrosanct personal space. But instead I just hated myself for being one of them, when I should have known better.

  “What do you want to talk about, Nora?” There was an edge to her voice. “You want to tell me all about discovering ‘the body,’ and getting the blood off your hands and what Chris looked like full of holes, whether his eyes were open, whether you screamed, whether I screamed?” Her voice didn’t shake; her body was perfectly still. Everything about her was steady, hard—but it was a brittle kind of hard. Like she knew if she tried to bend, even a little, she would break. “Or maybe you want me to talk. You want to hear what it was like to wake up in this place and have some random nurse in orange polyester tell me, ‘Good morning, it’s Thursday, the sun is shining, your parents brought flowers, my name is Sandra, oh, and by the way, you’ve been a zombie for three weeks and your boyfriend is dead.’ ” She raised her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and that was the only tell: It was trembling. “Talking won’t fix this. So for future reference, the answer to how I’m doing is ‘Fine.’ If you can’t deal with that …”

  “You’re fine,” I said, and it wasn’t until I did that I realized how much I’d wanted to talk—how tired I was of pretending. But I wasn’t the one who mattered right now. “I got it.”

  Adriane had never been much of a crier. But then, until now, she’d never had much to cry about. Perfect boyfriend, perfect life-sized Barbie-style dream house equipped with perfectly competent parental units, perfect GPA paired with a perfectly cultivated pretense of academic slacking, perfect posture, perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect love, perfect life. But it occurred to me now that it was easy to hide tears when you had the perfect smile. Maybe she cried more than I knew.

  “So,” she said.

  “So,” I said.

  “Gossip update. Never a bad place to start.”

  I did as she asked. I told her about Holly Chandler’s mid-volleyball wardrobe malfunction and Pranti Shah’s hookup with Ben Katz, even though he was ostensibly still sleeping with his semi-girlfriend of four years and also, it was said, the new English teacher. We faked our smiles until, gradually, they shaded into real ones. It was easier than it should have been to let ourselves forget.

  “Sing it for me,” she said after I told her about our history teacher’s drunken turn at a local karaoke night, when he had, according to the rumors (and lyrics) flying around school the next day, belted out an improvised love song to his ex-wife.

  “Not going to happen.”

  “I’m in a mental institution,” she pointed out. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to indulge my every whim.”

  We were both so good at pretending nothing mattered. I wondered if it was possible to be too good. “I promise, if you start believing you’re Elvis, I’ll buy you a sequined jumpsuit,” I told her.

  “Please. If I were going to have delusions of grandeur, I’d pick someone with much better fashion sense. Speaking of which, I’ve taken advantage of my recent leisure time to start putting together an itinerary. And don’t you dare complain about the store-to-museum ratio: Trust me, culture goes much better with a side of couture.”

  “What am I missing? Itinerary for what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Hello? Bonjour? Paris? Two weeks from today?”

  “Adriane …” I glanced at the bars on the windows, the door that didn’t lock from the inside.

  “I told you, I’m fine, and as of Saturday, I’m home. Plenty of time to shop and pack for les vacances magnifiques.”

  “Are you insane?” I said, without thinking.

  “Not anymore.” She didn’t smile.

  “I can’t go on that trip,” I said. “Neither can you. Not after what happened. The whole point was to go together, and now …”

  “ ‘And now …’? ‘What happened’? Since when did you become one of those people?” she said, suddenly angry. And behind the anger was something else, something that I knew she would never let me see. Something that could break her. We’d never had so much in common. “Chris is dead. Someone killed him. That’s what happened. You think sitting around here crying is going to change that?”

  “You think going to another country will? You think you’d have fun?”

  “It’s not about fun,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “Then what?”

  “Look, you’re right. This isn’t the way we planned it. Obviously. But if I’ve got a
chance to get the hell out of here, even for a week, I’m taking it. Or rather, ma mère and mon père are taking it for me.”

  “What?”

  “They claim that distance and European air will cure all my ills. Coincidentally, the week they’ve booked for themselves at some spa in Aruba will do the same for them. No way are they canceling their trip to look after their poor, wounded daughter.” She laughed, harshly. “That parent-of-the-year award must have gotten lost in the mail.”

  “Adriane, I’m sure if you ask them to stay …”

  “They’re going,” she said. “Hence, I’m going. Hence, you’re going.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “It is if you want it to be.”

  “Adriane …”

  “I’ll do your calculus homework for you. For the rest of the year.”

  “I can do my own.”

  “But I can do it better.”

  I didn’t smile. “I can’t go to Paris, Adriane. If you don’t want to talk about why, then fine, we won’t. But you can’t bribe me into it, or joke me into it, and you know it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Really?” That was a new one.

  “Fine—if you promise you’ll think about it.”

  That was more like it.

  “Just promise,” she added, “and I won’t bug you about it anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I won’t bug you for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “I missed you,” I said.

  “I probably missed you, too,” she said. “I just don’t remember.”

  25

  It should have been a night for celebrating. But Adriane spent it in a glorified mental institution, and I spent it where I spent every night: at my desk, Latin dictionary by my side, postcard in front of me, translation notebook abandoned in disgust, words melting together into useless soup.

  There was a soft knock at the bedroom door. “Nora?” My father. He hadn’t been in my room since the night after the murder, when my parents had escorted me from the police station to my bed, tucking me in for possibly the first time ever. Before that, he hadn’t been there in years.

  I slipped the postcard into the notebook. “Come in.”

  He perched on the side of the desk. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” I waited.

  He tapped the dictionary. It was a heavy, leather-bound Oxford edition, with gilded pages and an extensive list of original sources. He’d given it to me for my eleventh birthday. It would be humiliating to admit exactly how excited I was, but suffice it to say, there’d been squealing. “Glad to see you’re keeping up with your translating,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Homework.”

  I wondered if he missed those afternoons we’d spent in his office puzzling through that translation of Lucretius we’d never quite finished. At some point three days a week had become two, then one. I don’t know what came first: the day his door stopped opening for me or the day I didn’t bother to knock because Chris and Adriane had offered me a better option. I wondered whether he was still working on the Lucretius, whether he’d finished without me.

  I doubted it.

  He smiled. It looked funny on his face, the smile, like it knew it didn’t belong and didn’t plan on staying long. “Can I see?”

  If I said no, he might get suspicious. Also, I was desperate. I gave him the notebook.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Homework?”

  “It’s like a puzzle. We’re supposed to figure out what it means.”

  He ran his finger across my scribbled and crossed-out translations. “Where’s the original?”

  I flipped back to a page where I’d written out the full text of the postcard. He nodded, silently mouthing Max’s words.

  “Maybe that school’s worth the money after all,” he said.

  “I go there for free,” I reminded him.

  Ignoring me, he grabbed a pencil and began tapping different letters, counting quietly under his breath. “I wouldn’t expect them to be teaching steganography at this level. It’s impressive.”

  “Steganography?” The word sounded familiar, like something the Hoff had once told us about, back when, as general policy, I ignored everything he said.

  “Your teacher probably just called them ciphers, or codes, though that’s not quite accurate, as generally a code relies on the meaning in the message, substituting certain words or phrases for prearranged others, while a cipher will replace each individual letter with another letter or symbol, using some kind of algorithm.” He was slipping into teacher mode. His eyes were still fixed on the page. “But steganography depends on disguising the fact that it’s a cipher, or indeed that there is even a message at all. The message hides in plain sight, as if written in invisible ink. Which, incidentally, would qualify as a stegotext. Didn’t your teacher explain all this to you?”

  “It’s, like, an extra-credit challenge,” I said quickly. “She’s not actually teaching this unit until next week.”

  “Ah, in that case, I don’t want to give away the game.”

  “But what did you mean by plain sight?” Nothing, and certainly not the prospect of encroaching on some random high school teacher’s homework rules, could divert my father once he slipped into lecture mode.

  The smile returned. “There are a variety of traditional cipher techniques,” he explained. “The Caesar Shift, the Atbash—different eras generally had their own favorite forms of spycraft, but given that this appears written in plain text, as opposed to a substitution or transposition cipher, my best guess is you’re dealing with a stegotext, probably one where the message is buried amid decoy letters.”

  “And I would translate that by …?”

  “You simply need to know, or guess, the numerical key. If the key were six, then you’d find your message by counting out every sixth letter and disregarding the rest. You understand.”

  “Right, but how am I supposed to figure out the key?”

  “Trial and error,” he suggested. “Or the number is sometimes embedded in context clues. Not that you have any here, I suppose.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve got some time, if you want to try to work it through together.”

  “That would be nice, but …” But I couldn’t. “I shouldn’t. It’s homework, you know? I should probably figure it out myself.” I pretended not to notice him deflate.

  “Of course.”

  “But thanks. That was really helpful.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Pater ex machina. Anytime. Well.” He cleared his throat again. “I should leave you to it.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I mean, I’m done with all my other homework, so …”

  He was already backing out the door. “No, no. Schoolwork’s important, even at a time like this. I’m glad you remember that.” Somewhere, a door slammed. Mom was home. “I’ve got work to do myself,” he said quickly. He closed my door behind him, and a few moments later, I heard the telltale thud of him disappearing behind door number three.

  Pater ex machina. A cheap trick by which the invisible briefly and inexplicably made itself visible, only to change everything—and then, without warning, vanished all over again. That sounded about right.

  26

  Context clues.

  One statue. One illegible postmark, one demonic symbol.

  One word that meant anything: reus.

  One word with four letters.

  And that was the key.

  After weeks of desperate but useless attempts to translate the message, the final step was almost ridiculously easy. I could count to four:

  CASTOREM NON PVTO DEVM INCVRIA.

  NAM SVM EGO ACTVS VEHEMENS AVLA.

  DEMVS EI MELA OPPORTUNE. JAM

  EMERSVM JAM SIT VINDICI PAEAN EI.

  PRIMVM ALIENATVS EST COR MIHI. O CITE

  OPE ELISO LICUIT FAS. SIC SINT EXEMPLA

  ET SIM EGO IMAGO DESSE. NON CRIMINIS

  MEVM OPVS AT IN PAVORE REI SVM.
r />   LACRIMAE SVNT; AD VNDAS MITTE, VBI

  AVET FAS.

  It should never have taken me so long to see it. A truth that appeared only when all the meaningless nonsense was stripped away—it was the only way Max knew how to speak.

  CONVENIMECVMADSEPTJMVM VIAE

  IANSCICOLLISSEPTEMDECIMOAPRILIS

  ADIVVA

  I guessed at the spacing; I substituted I for J, U for V, and vice versa, as the Latin allowed; I found it.

  I found him.

  CONVENI MECUM AD SEPTIMUM VIAE

  IANSCI COLLIS SEPTEMDECIMO APRILIS

  ADIUVA

  Meet me Jansky Hill Road seven. Seventeen April.

  Google confirmed the impossible. Jansky Hill was Jánský vršek, a street in Prague, only blocks from the palace once home to Rudolf II of Austria, the sixteenth-century Holy Roman emperor.

  I called Adriane and told her we were going to Paris. I didn’t tell her that we wouldn’t be staying—that, instead, we would be risking expulsion by sneaking away from the chaperones, hopping a train to the Czech Republic, and finding our way to a dark corner of a foreign city, where we would wait for something to happen. I’d tell her when we were on the plane, when there’d be minimal time for either of us to have second thoughts, though I knew I was the only one who’d be having second thoughts. I’d convince my parents, if they put up a pro forma fight about my going to Paris, that distance would assuage my trauma, and with an ocean between me and that night, maybe I could finally start to forget it. They would know better than to believe me—but they would also know better than to argue.