Page 55 of Prince of the Sun

Then he tips his head back and dissolves into laughter.

The sound is rich and careless. Like a child allowed to run free. It snakes around my body, starting at my toes, sending thrilling little chills all the way up my spine.

Too soon, his laughter ends, and Daerios’s eyes return to mine, an unusual sparkle at their edges. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I think I missed that part of lecture.” A smirk tugs at his lips. I can tell I’m not going to like what he says next. “But I’m quite familiar with labia.”

By the time I reach my dorm room, my heart is pounding so hard I’ve forgotten why I was so desperate to get here in the first place. Let’s see, I was in the library, and then I was in the street, and Daerios was there, and his tongue flicked as he said the wordlabia, smooth and easy, as if he—

No.God. No. I cannot think about that right now.

The library. Yes. I was in the stacks, highlighting Elvish papers, and—

The papers. I unhook my backpack from my shoulders and drop it onto the floor, too hurried to even reach the coffee table. I unzip the top. Inside: a mess of printed paper.

“Cara!” I holler. “Cara!”

“What, what,what?” She appears in her doorframe, pixie cutruffled, glasses askew. “Where’s the fire?”

“No fire.” I snatch up the papers and hurry over to where she stands. “You have a scanner, right?”

“Yes?” She eyes the wad in my hand. “Why?”

“And can you—” I hesitate briefly, then plunge on. “What are the odds you can write a program that could detect a code written in Elvish?”

On the run over here—before I was sorudelyinterrupted by Daerios—I considered whether I could truly ask Cara to do this. To do so makes her vulnerable. Drags her into a culpable position, something I never wanted. But I’ve deemed this information too valuable not to ask.

“Pfff.” She rolls her eyes. “What do you think I am, a CS1 student? Of course, I can. I mean, it’ll take a day or two, but that’s only because I have three psets due on—”

“Great.” I shove the papers into her hands. “Because I need you to decode this dissertation.”

“This?” She flips through it, noting the circles in red marker. “What’s with the scribble?”

“They’re intentional errors,” I say excitedly. “It’s how the elves are hiding information from the humans.”

Cara raises an eyebrow, looking at me over her glasses. “And you just discovered this?”

“Yes.”

“And you think you’re the first human in one hundred years to do so?”

“Yes.”

“Oh-kayyy.” She shuffles the papers to line up evenly. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Clearly, she doesn’t believe me. I don’t care. “You’re the best.”

I turn to head to my bedroom, but Cara says, “Can I ask what, exactly, you think they’re hiding in here?”

I glance back over my shoulder. “Better if you don’t.”

“I think we need a break.”

Daerios pushes the note, marked with his familiar, letter-perfect cursive, into the side of my laptop. We’ve been sitting side-by-side in the Loker Reading Room for the past three hours, working on our Linguistics midterm project. At first, I felt every pair of elven eyes scalding the back of my neck, but the longer I worked, the more deeply I sunk into our morphological search, the less their gazes burned.

I bend over and scribble back, “Breaking up with me already?”

Daerios rolls his eyes. He bunches up the note, tosses it at my forehead, and starts gathering his supplies. I do the same.

When we emerge into the early-afternoon sunlight, I ask, “So, what kind of break are we taking? A shopping break? A lunch break? A J.P. Licks break? You know, I don’t think noon is too early for cake batter ice cream.”