Page 53 of Prince of the Sun

Useless. Absolutely useless.

I’m about to give up entirely, to shred the evidence of myresearch and head back to Quincy, when I notice something strange on the printed document closest to my elbow. It’s the elvish novel, the one titledDeath of Love at Midnight.In the sentence immediately following the offhand mention of Shadow Elves, the author makes a grammatical error. A small one, but notable nonetheless.

In Maevish, to form either the nominative plural or the nominative dual, you add one of two possible endings: For plural,-rif the noun ends in any vowel, but-ëand-iif it ends in a consonant. For dual, almost all nouns add-t,unless the word ends intord;in that case, a-uis added.

Though both cases refer to plurals, the nominative dual is slightly different—it refers to natural pairs, such as two eyes belonging to the same person. In the sentence at which I’m staring, which translates, roughly, to, “He tied his shoes,”the author translated shoes ashyapati,when it should behyapatu.After all, apairof shoes is not a plural; it’s an obvious dual.

I stare at the flaw. How is this possible? Human authors make grammatical errors all the time, but these areelveswe’re talking about. They don’t publish anything short of perfection.

I remember the error I found when I was readingEverything We Know About Elaërion.I’d written it off as likely the result of the humans transferring the original text to their collection. But this? Direct from the source material?

At first, I want to laugh. To run out of the library, waving the printed document in everyone’s faces, evidence that elves are human too.

I mean, sort of.

I flip over the page, curious to see if I can find any errors in the other documents. This one is a section of an elvish dissertation on methods of communication in the late 1950s. I read carefully, hunting through each letter. And then—

There.

A reference to threemessages, translated asmentat, as if it were a dual. But it’s not.

I scan further down the page, only to find the same mistake repeated two lines later. And, three lines after that, a slight mix-up in the past tense and present.

What the hell?

Abruptly, I stand. I march back over to the slow-churning Microsoft computer across the stacks. I pull up the rest of the dissertation on communication. I hitPRINT ALL.

In minutes, I’m back at my desk, searching for more errors in the paper. I find them. In fact, they’reeverywhere—hidden in misplaced vowels, in singular rather than plural, in infinitives and gerunds and partitives and datives. I circle each and every one with thick red marker. When I’m done, I flip through the pages, looking for some sort of pattern.

At first, nothing jumps out at me. It’s only after several perusals that I notice the obvious. The thing staring straight out at me, underlined twice in black Sharpie.

Zolaë Aldar.

The dissertation’s mention of Shadow Elves happens on page five. When I flip back through the previous four pages, they are completely clean of errors. It’s onlyafterthe author mentionsZolaë Aldarthat the mistakes begin.

Holy shit.

I stuff the dissertation into my backpack, then turn back to the other printed pages. First, I see the novel: second sentence after the mention ofZolaë Aldar,a mistake. I flip the page. An academic paper on the economics of developing nations. Four lines after the mention ofZolaë Aldar,a mistake. I flip the page. Again. And again. And again. Every time, the pattern repeats.

It’s like mentioning Shadow Elvesprecipitatesthe errors. Like it’s a prompt of some sort.

A trigger.

And I would bet my nonexistent hat that, were I to print off the rest of these full texts, I would find similar strings of subtle but, to a linguistics major like me, remarkable errors. Well-hidden, on the part of the elves.

Breath heaves in and out of my chest. I stand up, and stars dance at the edges of my vision. Balance leaks out the holes in my ears. I stumble, catching myself on the cluttered wooden desk. By now, it’s nearly noon, and I’ve eaten nothing today.

But there’s no time for food right now. No time for anything but celebration, because I’ve done it. I’ve figured it out. Why the elves flooded the Universities when they arrived on Earth. Why they ingratiated themselves into our libraries and built their own system of publication. It wasn’t just for the access to information. It was a disguise, too. A front. A pretense of academic research.

These aren’t errors.

They’re a code.

I burst from Widener Library so suddenly that I scatter a flight of pigeons, which swarm into the tourists taking photos with a selfie stick two steps down. I cover my grin as I high-step past them, trying not to laugh at the idea of the image the camera must have captured.

I’m dizzy. I’m gleeful.

I did it.