“No, yeah,” I say. “He told me about that! He said it counted because he flirted with the intent to get his number. So even though he didn’t get the thing he wanted, he gotsomething, and the intent made it a heist.”
Rook watches on with a strange expression as the rest of us laugh ourselves to tears.
“Who’s Dante?”
This was always going to happen. We can’t all be together in a room and not talk about Dante.
Our laughing dies down slowly.
“Oh, he used to be on the crew,” Poppy says, like we practiced. “But he moved on to bigger and better things.”
“Excuse me,” I say. “There’s nothing bigger and better than us.”
Poppy shakes her head. “That’s what I tried to tell him.”
And that’s it. Now we have control of the situation. We can talk about Dante all we want as long as we don’t mention two things: that he’s my brother and that he’s dead. So Rook will never know that this job is actually about Dante and use that as leverage to get us to do it for free.
I clear my throat. “So this b—codex.”
Poppy nods.
“If we lift it,” I continue, “it’ll be noticed pretty quick. We’re going to need to do aRaiders of the Lost Arkhere.”
“A copy?” Poppy asks.
I nod. “Switch the real one with a fake so no one notices.”
Poppy grabs my laptop and starts typing. “I can make a replica,” she says, turning the screen to face me. “The entire thing is scanned into the Yale digital archives.”
“Not the entire thing,” Rook says.
We all turn to face him. One of the flying pieces of popcorn intended for Tolliver hits him on the shoulder.
He brushes it off as though it burned him, then checks his suit for a grease mark. “It’s pretty common knowledge that there are pages missing.”
I shake my head. “There are pages missing in the fake one at Yale. The real one, however…”
“You think it has all the pages intact?” CJ asks.
“I think that there’s a reason those pages were removed from the fake at Yale,” I say. “I also think what’s scanned into the archivesisn’t accurate to the original. There’s no way the syndicates would allow public access to a grimoire, translatable or not.”
Poppy grimaces. “But that means our replica won’t be accurate. I can’t replicate what I can’t see.”
I wave off the concern. “If we could replicate the pages accurately, we wouldn’t need to steal the book. We don’t need the Coven to be fooled forever. Just long enough to get out.”
“Speaking of,” Tolliver says. “How are we getting it out? Or getting the fake one in, for that matter?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. This is where my new sleight-of-hand talent would come in handy, if I were skilled enough to conceal something as big as the Voynich manuscript, but I’m not. There’s always the trick of hiding the book inside of something else, but that won’t work here. Bags will be checked as people enterandleave the venue. We could use a mule, but we come across the same problem.
“We could do a reverse IKEA,” Tolliver suggests.
Poppy’s eyebrows shoot up. “You want to tear apart a six-hundred-year-old book?”
“Codex!” I say excitedly, pointing at her.
She scowls.
Tolliver frowns in thought. “A few pages are easier to hide than an entire book.”
