CHAPTER 63 JAMESON
JAMESON
Jameson was capable of thinking multitudes of things at the same time—about the art of the cascade; about Alice and her plans; about the Kyrie, short for Valkyrie; about the scars on Nora’s arms and entire families wiped out to purify the judgment of the Monoceros.
About the Crucible. About Avery. More than anything else, above and beyond everything else, Avery.
Jameson tried and failed to imagine what she would say if she were here. His mind was layered with racing thoughts roaring down twisting, parallel tracks as he stared at the constellation on the whiteboard. The constellation Lyra.
“You know what I’m going to say.” Lyra’s husky voice managed to break through the din in Jameson’s mind.
“And you know how I’m going to reply,” Grayson told her.
Jameson tore his gaze from the board to look at the pair of them, and this time, it didn’t hurt the way it should have to see Lyra and his brother standing so close to each other, to watch as Grayson cupped Lyra’s face, to know that the two of them were having a silent exchange because they’d already reached the point where they didn’t even need words.
Lyra was here, and Avery wasn’t, and that should have hurt but didn’t, because if there was one thing that Jameson recognized, it was a person who was thinking about doing something a little reckless.
Maybe even a lot reckless.
That was what this silent argument was about: Lyra being ready and willing to say Screw Nora and her plan, to put herself out there, to try to draw the Omega out… and Grayson, pulling her back. Without words. Without issuing a single order.
And Jameson knew, just from the fact that Lyra would have taken the risk for them, for Avery, Jameson knew that his brother was right.
Some risks could not be taken.
Grayson tilted Lyra’s face up toward his, and Lyra responded by cupping his jaw, like turnaround was fair play.
After a small eternity, Lyra spoke. “Fine,” she said, but her tone told Jameson there was a catch, and sure enough, she continued, “I’ll stay at Hawthorne House, safe and sound and hidden away, but only if you promise me that you won’t, Grayson.
I know you. I know that Nora saying she’d like to think that Avery will survive her plan is nowhere near good enough for you.
If I have to stay here, if you won’t put me on the chopping block, fine.
But if you reach the point where you need to go, you go.
You don’t get to stay here for me.” She raised her chin.
“Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”
Grayson narrowed his eyes at Lyra. “I don’t like this.”
“You wouldn’t be you if you did.”
“Fine,” Grayson told her. “If I need to go, I’ll go.”
Jameson’s throat tightened, because he knew that if Grayson went anywhere, it would be with him. That thought in mind, Jameson threw the obvious question out to everyone in the room. “Go where?”
Nora’s plan, whatever it was, wasn’t good enough. Neither was Alice’s cascade. So what’s next?
“There are still the keys to solve,” Zara said after a moment.
“And there’s this.” Xander tapped the timeline—more specifically, the point where they’d marked the Crucible before this one.
“Calla. Zella. And a third mystery Candidate who, assuming Calla really is dead, became the Watcher. We know that when Calla disappeared six years ago, she was sent to the Kyrie to train for an indeterminate amount of time before she was chosen as a Candidate. And we know that after the Crucible, Zella was placed. If we can figure out when that happened, we should be able to narrow in on a range of dates.”
Dates during which the last Crucible might have taken place.
Dates during which the present-day Watcher had died or disappeared.
We should have asked. That thought was bitter in Jameson’s mind. When Nora was here—we should have asked if Calla was still with the Kyrie when Nora left five and a half years ago.
“On it,” Max announced. “As it happens, internet stalking of the only mildly invasive variety is a specialty of mine.”
Soon enough, they had their answer. It had been just under four years since Zella had appeared on the social scene, arm in arm with her duke.
“The last Crucible took place sometime between four and six years ago,” Jameson summarized. “And we know Crucibles can last a week or a year.” Gigi had said as much. Slowly, Jameson looked from the timeline—to Toby. “And five years ago, Hannah died.”
Died—and left you that postcard. Avery’s mother had already received one invitation. They had to at least consider the possibility that Alice had returned to her. Again.
Silence reigned for a painfully long time, and then Toby reached into his bag for the postcard. He walked slowly up to the timeline, grabbed a magnet, and stuck the postcard to the whiteboard with a thud, right over Calla’s name and Zella’s.
Right over the word Watcher.
“Hannah is dead.” Toby said that like it was not up for debate.
“Avery’s mother lived by the adage Do no harm.
I am telling you right here and right now that Hannah Rooney didn’t escape her family and their criminal enterprise to walk right into another, and she never would have left Avery.
Not if there was a breath left in her lungs. ”
“Not even to protect you?” Jameson countered. “Not even if Hannah was dying and they offered her a chance to live? She needed a transplant. Who’s to say the Gilded Blade, with all its influence and all its connections, couldn’t have somehow arranged for that to happen? It’s been five years, Toby.”
“I know exactly how long it’s been.” Toby didn’t raise his voice, but his expression was one of a man screaming.
“Just like I know that it’s entirely possible that writing me that postcard was the last thing she ever did.
She wanted me to know what the Crucible was called.
That’s the reason that postcard is on the board. The only reason.”
Toby turned and left without another word. Jameson stared after him for a second or two, then went back to staring at the whiteboards and thinking about far too many things at the same time.
About the Crucible, which could last a week or a year and had to be survived. About Avery.
Always Avery.
There has to be something. Jameson slowed his breathing. He willed the sounds of the room to fall away, willed the world to melt away, everything except the board and the part of his own mind that had been trained to look for patterns and possibility and hidden meaning.
The constellation Lyra.
Vega. Aquila.
The ring box.
Deep in the hollows of his mind, Jameson could hear his grandfather quizzing him: What do you see?
It was rarer these days for Jameson to find himself haunted by the memory of that question, but he knew that there was a method of some sort buried in all this madness.
The awareness of that was like an itch beneath his skin, like the distant sound of a slowly creaking door.
What does all of this mean?
What’s the pattern?
What’s the trick?
How do the pieces fit?
Jameson took a step back. Then another. And another. Sometimes, the key to solving a puzzle was taking the wide view, the long view, so he just kept walking backward until he could take in all of the writing on all of the whiteboards at once.
What wasn’t he seeing?
The gnawing feeling that the answer was somehow right there built in his mind like a brutal wave, gaining momentum as it went. He stared and stared and stared at the boards, absorbing everything on them whole. Watcher, Hand, Judge. Lily, Omega, Monoceros.
That second set of terms had been new to Jameson when Grayson and Lyra had put them up on the board—all except for lily, which he’d heard from Gigi before he’d left for Prague.
The Monoceros is the Judge.
The Judge is Alice.
Alice is the Monoceros. Purity of wisdom. And Monoceros is a constellation.
Constellations and stars. Lyra, Aquila, Vega…
Vega had been one of the Kyrie. Aquila was a maternal last name. And Alice had encoded Lyra’s name on a poem that was written before Lyra had ever been born.
Why her? Jameson found himself silently addressing that question to his grandmother. Why was Lyra’s uncle so sure that you would come for her?
Her name in your ring box.
Her name on that poem.
The constellation Lyra—not Lyra but Lie-ra.
What do you see, Jameson? The old man’s voice was even louder in Jameson’s mind now. Tell me what you see.
Jameson walked slowly back toward the whiteboards, until he was standing in front of the board with the timeline on it and looking at the names of the Candidates from 1951.
Helena, Vega, and Andy.
And just like that, a piece, a single piece fell into place. A question.
“What was Helena Thorp’s name in the Crucible?” Jameson asked. “Was it Helena—or something else?” There was so much talking going on all around him that no one heard the question, so Jameson asked it again, louder. It was only when the room went silent that he realized how loud he’d said it.
“I don’t know,” Gigi told him quietly. “I don’t know if her name was Helena before the Crucible, or if that’s the name she chose and she kept it or—”
Jameson reached out and covered Helena’s name on the board, blocking it from view and from his mind, as best he could. One wrong data point could mask a pattern.
What’s the pattern?
How do the pieces fit?
Monoceros is a constellation. Vega is a star. And Andy…
Andy.
“Andromeda,” Jameson said, his voice coming out quieter than he’d meant for it to this time.
“What if Andy was Andromeda? Another constellation. We know the Candidates are forced to choose new names. What if they have a set list to choose from? Astronomical names. I have no idea why that would be the case, but—”
“In honor of the Monoceros?” Gigi suggested. “Because she has to die for one of them to ascend.”
Alice, Jameson thought. When the Crucible ends, Alice will die. He set that thought aside, because Knox Landry chose that moment to snort.
“Your theory would explain the Thorp family’s shit taste in names,” Knox offered. “Helena’s first three sons were Leo, Caelum, and Crux. And don’t get me started on her grandson Orion.”
“Constellation names,” Gigi said. “In memory of the Crucible?” Emotion flickered over her features. “In honor of Vega.”
This is something. Jameson could feel that, even if he couldn’t quite see what.
“Perhaps,” Grayson told Lyra, “somewhere in your family’s history there was a woman who adopted the name Aquila in the Crucible and kept it as a surname, once she returned.”
“A maternal surname is typically the mother’s father’s surname,” Alisa said.
“Does it have to be?” Lyra asked. “Could a family choose to pass a truly maternal name down the family line?”
They were close. Jameson could feel it—but they weren’t there yet. There was something else, something they were still missing, something Jameson could just almost grasp.
Something so close he could taste it.
His gaze went back to three words: LYRA, MY LYRA.
But this time, as Jameson read the inscription, he could suddenly hear the old man’s voice on that message in Prague, saying, Alice, my Alice.
My love, my love, my one and only love.
Lyra, my Lyra.
“What if Alice is Lyra?” Jameson hit the board, harder than he meant to.
“She would have had to choose a name for the Crucible. What if she chose Lyra? What if the old man figured that out, the way he figured out so many other things after he realized she was alive?” Love letters may take many forms. That could explain the ring box.
As for the poem… “When Alice drew the constellation Lyra on that poem, what if she was signing it?”
Xander walked over and put an arm around Lyra’s shoulder. “Were you by any chance named after someone?” he asked. “And relatedly, is there any chance at all that your grandmother or possibly great-grandmother was one of the other Candidates with Alice in nineteen sixty-seven?”
Jameson watched as Lyra’s focus returned—again—to the photograph of her father and uncle and their mother. “This couldn’t have been taken any earlier than the eighties, and this woman doesn’t look like she or her mother was placed within a wealthy, powerful family to me.”
The woman, the boys’ worn clothes, that ratty blanket—they looked impoverished.
“Where does that leave us?” Jameson couldn’t help the question as the adrenaline drained out of him all at once, leaving him feeling like a rag doll or a book that had been hollowed out.
“It leaves us with family lines.”
Jameson turned to see Toby back once more, his knuckles bloodied from who knows what.
“It leaves us,” Toby continued, “with the fact that Helena Thorp waited generations for a girl. It leaves us with the fact that membership in the web is passed down the female line, and Alice Hawthorne was a member of the Gilded Blade long before she ascended.” Toby turned—toward Zara.
“Tell me you don’t know anything about this. ”
Jameson’s aunt—the firstborn child of Alice and Tobias Hawthorne, their firstborn daughter—raised her chin. “I know nothing,” Zara said crisply. “But then, I was neither our mother’s only daughter, nor her favorite.”