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 realizedhowloud he’d said it.
“I don’t know,” Gigi told him quietly. “I don’t know if her namewasHelena 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 ifAndywasAndromeda? 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 wereLeo,Caelum, andCrux. And don’t get me started on her grandsonOrion.”
“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’sfather’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 AliceisLyra?” 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 wassigningit?”
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 thatyourgrandmother 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 andtheirmother. “This couldn’t have been taken any earlier than the eighties, and this woman doesn’t look like she or her mother wasplacedwithin a wealthy, powerful family to me.”
The woman, the boys’ worn clothes, that ratty blanket—they lookedimpoverished.
