CHAPTER 75 LYRA
LYRA
She looks like me. For Lyra, staring at the only picture Alisa’s people had been able to dig up of Katalin Aquila Reyes felt like looking in a mirror.
Objectively, Lyra knew the resemblance wasn’t exact.
Katalin’s cheekbones were higher, her jaw a little stronger, but her eyes and those thick, dark brows, a match for lashes so long and dark they’d never need mascara—they were Lyra’s, almost exactly.
The two of them had the same full lips, the same build.
Even the expression on her aunt’s face was familiar.
Genetics were funny that way.
“How old was she when she died?” Lyra asked. The Katalin in this picture couldn’t have been much older than Lyra was now.
“Twenty-one,” Alisa replied. “Hospital records are conveniently MIA, so we’re still running down the purported cause of death.”
Lyra wasn’t sure it mattered. Katalin Aquila Reyes was the Omega.
I made my choice, that note had said. It wasn’t you.
And it hadn’t been Nora, either.
“It feels pointed, doesn’t it?” Alisa said, raking her gaze over the whiteboards. “The Ascendants have a world of women to choose from, and all three Candidates for this Crucible have a Hawthorne connection.”
Avery. Eve. And Savannah. Even with an ocean separating her from Grayson, Lyra knew how hard his sister being taken would have hit him. Alisa was right. It did feel pointed.
“Why do you think that is?” Lyra sounded calmer than she felt. On the other side of Alisa, Libby was quiet. She’d been quiet since she’d woken up and padded into the Great Room to find Lyra, first thing this morning.
“When Nora mentioned the art of the cascade,” Alisa replied, “she did so in a way that referred to more than just Alice. She said they call it the art of the cascade. I think this feels pointed because it is pointed. I think Alice was forced into calling this Crucible. I think they all have plans. Zella’s not even an Ascendant, and she somehow arranged for Brady to be one of Avery’s picks for the Grandest Game.
There’s no telling how the unfolding of all this has been nudged this way or that—or to what end. ”
“Eve put me in the game,” Lyra pointed out, and then she paused. “Or she thought she did.” But had it been Eve, really? Alisa was right: There was no way to know.
Lyra looked past Alisa to Libby, whose left hand rested on the subtle curve of her stomach. Her T-shirt bore the words WE EAT MORNING PEOPLE right over that curve, and she was staring down at her own hand.
“Are you okay, Libby?” Lyra asked.
Libby touched her wrist lightly, then looked up at the board, at Alice’s poem. “Is it horrible if part of me understands?” Libby said.
“Understands what?” Lyra asked.
“The Gilded Blade,” Libby replied. “Or parts of it.”
“The part about manipulating would-be kings?” Alisa threw out. “Men who would abuse their power?”
“Men,” Libby said quietly, “who abuse women.” She looked down at her wrist again, and this time, Lyra saw the tattoo that wrist bore. It said the word SURVIVOR.
Alisa shot Libby a look. “You couldn’t be horrible if you tried, Libby Hawthorne.”
Lyra had no idea who Libby had been forced to survive, but suddenly, Lyra couldn’t help thinking about Nan’s fingers, about a four-year-old Alice leaving windows open and hoping her father would fall.
The Kyrie were monsters. Nora’s scars and the fact that there was a history of wiping out entire families was proof of that.
But setting aside the Kyrie, setting aside the Hand and the job, the core idea behind the Blade, women banding together to limit the damage done by men in power, a web of women nudging the world this way or that…
Lyra could understand the appeal of that, too. But not like this. She looked back to that picture of her aunt. The Omega who’d been very well suited to that role, a true believer. Never like this.
“I am trying so hard,” Libby said, “to trust that everything is going to be fine, and I just keep telling myself that Avery is her mother’s daughter, that she’s stronger than I’ll ever be, that she’ll be fine.”
From where Lyra was standing, Libby Hawthorne seemed plenty strong. The woman was a rock. But something told Lyra that wasn’t what Libby needed to hear right now. “You knew her?” Lyra said instead. “Hannah?”
“She was wonderful,” Libby told Lyra. “And if she really is the Watcher, if they forced her to join them somehow, if she has some kind of plan, if she’s cascading all of this, then maybe it really will be fine.”
Too many plans. That thought hit Lyra with visceral force. Alice. Hannah. Katalin and the Kyrie. And Nora isn’t going to just give up…
“I hate this,” Lyra gritted out. “I hate just waiting.”
She hated that Grayson was an ocean away, that he was hurting and there was nothing she could do about it. Frustrated, Lyra looked to the letters they’d written on the board most recently: A, J, K, and Q.
“I am so sick of games,” she said.
“Amen to that,” Alisa muttered.
“What about Odette?” Lyra asked the lawyer.
“We have another lead,” Alisa said in a measured tone that clearly communicated that she wasn’t getting her hopes up. “In Italy.”
“Italy?” Lyra repeated, and then she looked to Jameson’s writing on the board. “Tuscany?”
Alisa shook her head. “Adriatic coast.”
And all I can do, Lyra thought, all we can do—is wait.
“I come bearing cupcakes, ladies.”
Lyra turned. So did Alisa. So did Libby. Nash stood in the doorway, holding a tray.
“How many of them did you eat?” Libby asked him.
“More than his abs would suggest,” Alisa replied.
“Speakin’ of abs…” Nash shot Alisa a knowing look. “Where’s your Mr. Landry?”
Lyra felt the oddest ache then, at the back and forth among the three of them, like what she was witnessing was just the faintest echo of what they were normally like, what Hawthorne House was like when it wasn’t shrouded with darkness.
“This is the part,” Alisa told Nash, “where I tell you to shut up.”
“Actually”—Max came running into the room at full speed—“this is the part where I declare myself Queen of the World!”
It didn’t take Lyra long to read into that. “You figured something out about the puzzle. The letters on the keys.”
Max held out a sheet of paper shaped like a narwhal.
“After a good night’s sleep—thank you very much, melatonin—I scrambled the order of the letters, creating every individual permutation of them.
Then I reset my brain by pretending Xander and I were playing Spin-The-Bottle Battle, after which I looked back down at my list, and voilà. ”
Lyra took the sheet from Max and took in the precise sequence that Max had circled:
J, Q, K, A.
“Need a hint?” Max said. “Pretend there’s a ten in front of the J.”
Lyra saw it then, that magical Hawthorne solution that was simple, elegant, and obvious, in retrospect.
J, Q, K, A.
“Add ten at the start,” Lyra said, “and you’ve got a straight.”
Ten, jack, queen, king, ace.
“That’s right, beaches.” Max victory-punched the air. “Who wants to distract themselves from a sense of impending doom by helping me ransack Hawthorne House for any and all decks of cards?”