Page 72 of Prince of the Sun

My stomach bottoms out as soon as I read the first line.

SEARCH FOR THE ONE

I inhale, remembering Daerios’s words from last night:We do marry—but only in rare cases. Only when we are absolutely certain that the person when we’ve found is the one.This message cannot really be talking aboutmarriage, can it? How absurd to hide that in the folds of academia.

I keep translating.

SEARCH FOR THE ONE

OXFORD

COMPLETE - ALL RECENTLY PUBLISHED WORKS, A – L

NO SIGN OF LIGHT

No sign of light? What the hell?

This message clearly has nothing to do with love; as far as I know, such is not to be found inrecently published works.

I’m going to need more messages.

I download every paper I can find in Harvard’s database that contains the trigger,Zolaë Aldar. As soon as the document completes downloading, I run it through the code-cracking file that Cara sent to my email earlier that morning. The code is rudimentary—Don’t judge me,Cara said,I was working under a deadline—which means it takes several minutes to parse through the document in question, but I don’t care. It works. That’s the only part that matters.

Every message begins the same:SEARCH FOR THE ONE

And, in a majority of cases, ends the same:NO SIGN OF LIGHT

The middle is always different. After running six documentsthrough Cara’s code, I paste the Maevish translations into a single word document and compare their contents.

SEARCH FOR THE ONE

NEW LEAD: CARRIE DAELISH

24, BIRMINGHAM, UK

OXFORD TO FOLLOW UP

And, from a journal article published at Oxford two weeks later:

SEARCH FOR THE ONE

FOLLOW UP: CARRIE DAELISH

VERIFIED

NO SIGN OF LIGHT

A similar message appears at in a short story published at the University of Shanghai several years later.

SEARCH FOR THE ONE

NEW LEAD: LIU QIANG

35, BEIJING, CHINA

BEIJING TO FOLLOW UP

And, in another short story, several weeks later: