“The action!” Gigi declared.
Slate snorted. Audibly. Grayson pivoted sharply to glare at him.“You.”
“Him,” Gigi agreed. “He’s mine.” She gestured at Knox. “That one, too. Your uncle Toby is more of a temporary-custody type thing, just until we get Avery and Eve back, but for now, I understand from my temporary Toby that we’re all working toward the same goal, trying to solve pretty much the same mysteries, and I just know in my heart of hearts that there’s a whiteboard around here somewhere with clues written all over it.”
There were, it turned out,fourwhiteboards.
“Meet Lucy, Ethel, Bonnie, and Clyde,” Xander told Gigi and her entourage.
“You name your whiteboards?” Slate said dryly.
“You don’t?” Xander replied, and then he looked from Slate to Gigi, from Gigi to Slate, and back to Gigi again. “You have horrible taste in men,” he deadpanned.
“Andyouhave extremely large whiteboards,” Gigi replied, surveying them.
All four were covered in notes. Gigi could make out several different sets of handwriting. She recognized Grayson’s and Xander’s and was betting the left-handed scrawl was Jameson’s. As for theotherhandwriting snuggled up with Grayson’s here, there, and everywhere on board number two…
Gigi assessed the occupants of the room. In addition to her crew, she counted six Hawthornes (four brothers, one wife, one aunt), one Alisa, one Max, and a Lyra Kane.
Bingo, Gigi thought.
“This is it?” Slate eyed the boards. “This is everything you’ve got?”
“He, too, is very impressed by your large whiteboards,” Gigi translated, and then she gave herself a minute to take in the writing on allfour boards: notes; shorthand; a geometric symbol; what appeared to be a poem with a strange array of dots underneath it; a lone photograph held to one of the boards with a magnet. As Gigi read through it all, certain words stuck in her head.Prague. Orpheus. The Mercy. Monoceros.One entire board was taken up with a timeline that stretched all the way back to a Crucible in 1967. From across all four boards, names jumped out at Gigi, one after another.Calla. Zella. Lyra, my Lyra. Edgar and Luiz Aquila Reyes. Alice. Avery, Eve,andHannah.
Gigi couldn’t help glancing at Toby when she read that last one. Uncle Grizzlypants Hawthorne hadn’t said much on the flight, but Gigi had her ways—enough so that she now knew that Avery’s mother, Hannah, had once turned down an offer from the Gilded Blade.
Enough so that Gigi wasn’t surprised to see the nameAliceon the board.
“You want to tell me everything,” Gigi announced to the room at large. She took a page out of her siblings’ books and chose not to phrase that as a question. “All of you, Hawthorne and Hawthorne-adjacent types alike, want to walk me through everything you know, explaining every last notation on this board, so I can make some additions of my own.”
Grayson opened his mouth, probably to object, but Slate preempted him. “Save your breath. Your sister always wins in the end.”
And eventually, Gigididwin. The others walked her through everything, bit by bit. Gigi said nothing until their explanations were done, and then she held out a hand to Xander. “Marker me, baby.”
Xander obliged. “Lucy, Ethel, Bonnie, and Clyde are all yours.”
Gigi started with the timeline, which she extended back from 1967 to 1951. Over the year, she wrote the wordCrucibleand three names:Helena,Vega, andAndy, adding a notation that Vega and Andy, at least, were pseudonyms chosen as a part of the Crucible ritual.
Next, Gigi turned her attention to the whiteboard with Grayson’s handwriting on it… and Lyra’s. You could tell a lot from handwriting.
I shall call her Code Name Buying Limes, Gigi thought.
Beneath the headingWatcher/Lily/Woman in Red, Grayson hadwritten Calla’s name, and he’d identified her Candidate for the current Crucible as Eve. Lyra’s scrawl took over for the headingHand/Omega/Woman in Black, with no Candidate yet identified for the current cycle. Grayson’s grandmother was theJudge/Monoceros/Woman in White, and Avery’s name was written beneath Alice’s with a question mark next to it, since it was theoretically possible—though, Jameson believed, unlikely—that the Omega was the one who’d taken her instead.
Regardless…
“It wasn’t supposed to be Avery,” Gigi said, and then she told them about Nora.Allabout Nora. Then, adding notes to the board here and there as she went, Gigi moved seamlessly onto Helena Thorp and the Crucible and spiders and webs, not to mention the fact that Helena Thorp had insisted Callawasn’tthe Watcher.
No one interrupted Gigi, so she just kept going and going. “At the end of the Crucible,” she eventually circled back to explaining, “one of the three Candidatesascends—that’s what they call it—and becomes the Watcher. The other two, if they survive, return to society. The Gilded Bladeplacesthem somewhere they’ll be of use, in wealthy, powerful families, close to would-be kings. There’s a distinct possibility our favorite Blade-y Lady-Cult has been doing this since the Middle Ages, thereby establishing an indeterminate but possibly very large number offamily linespassed down through the generations. In a historical context, I guess the whole thing almost makes a twisted kind of sense? Not a lot of choices for the ladies of the Middle Ages! But I digress.”
“Survive?”Grayson said the word like it was a thorn in his throat, like evenafterhe spoke, it was still lodged in his windpipe, making it harder to breathe. Gigi couldn’t bring herself to evenlookat Jameson.
She offered them what she could. “Some years, all the Candidates survive.”
“But not always.” That was Knox, from the edges of the room—as far from the rest of them as he could get without Gigi initiating Project Spider Monkey for his own good.
“Not always,” Gigi echoed. “Andtechnically… I never saw the Woman in Red’s face, just her eyes, and Helena seemed pretty certainthat Calla was dead. And technically, I kind ofwastold that there was no Calla Thorp anymore?” Gigi swallowed. “That Calla wasgone.”
