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Some of the meager group gave small nods.
Jack shook his head like he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “The people in this room . . . plus a few others hiding in Circle households, doing nearly nothing?” he asked. “You mean to tell us that’s the entire Order?”
“We used to be more,” Fitz said. “There was a clash with the Circle a few decades ago that decimated our ranks, and we haven’t recovered.”
Half the questions I wanted to ask immediately went out the window. I saw now exactly why they hadn’t mobilized to rescue my mom. They were barely staying afloat as it was.
Fitz took a seat. “I know that’s surprising, but just because we don’t have numbers doesn’t mean we don’t have insight. And I know you have much to report.”
He introduced us to the Order members and gave a brief rundown of how he knew us, and what we were to the Circle. “And this is Avery.” He looked down at me. “Sweetheart, I’ve thought for a long time about how I might tell you this.”
A kernel of worry took root in my gut. Did I not already know all the secrets there were to know?
“This is not the ideal way to do it,” he went on, “but I believe this is important for everyone here to know. Some of you will remember Claire. Avery is Claire’s daughter.” All around the table, people sat up straighter, shooting alarmed glances at me. “Which means,” Fitz continued, “that she’s my granddaughter.”
I couldn’t possibly have heard right. “Your what?”
“Your what?” Elodie echoed.
Fitz nodded at her. “You never knew Claire. I didn’t want anyone here to make the connection.”
Across the table, Jack looked nearly as shell-shocked as I felt.
“How—” The boat was barely moving, but the chair under me felt unstable. I pressed my palms to the tabletop. “What?”
“I’ll tell you everything. I promise.” Fitz sat and squeezed my hand where it rested on the table. “I just couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.”
I tried to pay attention to the Order members around the table introducing themselves, but I couldn’t think about anything but that word. Granddaughter.
It can’t be true, I wanted to say, but of course it could. It explained everything. Why Fitz would have cared about us—and why he went to so much trouble to learn about the mandate. Why my mother trusted him.
I glanced over at him. Now that I knew . . . he had my mom’s eyes. Clear and bright and green. I hadn’t noticed when I was a kid. I hadn’t noticed so much. Now that I knew, it was even harder to stop the flood of memories. Some were nice: movie nights and holidays, how we ate Sunday brunch together every weekend and my mom would read us our horoscopes from the newspaper. Some were strange. I remembered a conversation I’d overheard one night, when my mom had asked Fitz whether he thought I should be home-schooled. I remembered the day we left Boston—it was the only time we moved that my mom cried. She tried to hide it, but I heard her after she thought I was asleep that night in the hotel. Because she hadn’t just been leaving behind a friendly neighbor. She’d been leaving the only family she had, probably because something had just happened that had made them decide it was no longer safe to stay. She was terrified and didn’t know whether she’d ever see him again.
A foot touched mine under the table, and I blinked back to the present. Stellan raised his eyebrows in a silent question. I nodded. I’m fine.
The boat had started moving, and we were cruising slowly around the back side of Notre-Dame. I tried my best to tune back in to the conversation.
“We’re not surprised to see this turmoil happening,” a middle-aged woman with close-cropped black hair I’d vaguely heard introduce herself as Hanna was saying. “Every one of the Circle’s messes in the past centuries has been for a reason. Yes, the wars do tend to be over some petty infighting, but they also have a purpose: to change the power structure of the world to the Circle’s advantage. After World War Two, the United Nations was formed. It was an obvious way for the Circle to give themselves very public power while looking like it was for the good of the world.”
“The UN was also formed to bring peace within the Circle,” Jack pointed out.
Fitz nodded. “In the same way, I believe the Saxons created this current crisis to seize power for themselves while assuring the Circle they’ll bring peace. Dictators throughout history have done the same thing to wrest power away from anyone weaker.”
I couldn’t argue with him. We knew that was exactly what they were doing.
Elodie filled them in on our search for the cure, and what we’d found. Nisha took over from there. “Since we last talked to you, we have discovered something more about Mr. Korolev’s blood.” She glanced at Stellan. “We believe it has to do with how the virus works.”
Stellan sat up straighter.
Nisha explained to the rest of the Order what had been in the report Stellan had told me about, about how his blood seemed to heal him like it did by replicating certain compounds far more rapidly than was normal. “After learning this and learning that Miss West’s blood is the cure,” she finished, “we believe that the basic mechanism could be that the virus itself is only in her blood, but in very small quantities, and that his makes it multiply out of control and become dangerous.”
Elodie was nodding along. It did make a lot of sense. The boat went under a bridge, and we were plunged into darkness for a moment before reemerging into the light. We were coming up on the Louvre in the distance.
“How does that help us?” Jack asked.
“We’re not sure yet,” Nisha conceded.
“What we’re afraid of,” Elodie clarified for the Order, “is that the Saxons will capture them for more of their blood. The attacks—though they’ve been devastating—have so far been small, but if they get more—”
