Page 101 of Winterveil

At eight or nine, it had been too sophisticated a notion for her to comprehend. Now it made her throat tighten.

Klaudia was watching her steadily.

“My father was a doctor, too,” Nadiya said. “You know that. You saw it in my file. He worked in a CIA lab. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but . . .”

“At this point, I wouldn’t write off anything as a coincidence.” Klaudia’s gaze sharpened. “I’m sure it’s not easy, but anything you can remember could be useful.”

“Right.” Nadiya shut her eyes, as if she could will some memory to emerge from the blackness. But every time she saw so much as a flash of color, it dissipated again. “I’m sorry. I wish I could. . . .”

“You were very young,” Klaudia said, her voice surprisingly gentle. “At that age, trauma can significantly alter the structure and chemistry of the brain.”

Nadiya didn’t like to imagine that—her mind being reshaped like clay by invisible hands, its ridges and creases all mangled, its pathways diverted. “Yeah. Well, sorry again. I’ll keep trying to think.”

Klaudia nodded and returned to her paper. Nadiya gazed down at the book, but her vision kept swimming, blurring all the words. This wasn’t her domain, anyway. She missed the reassuring weight of a pistol in her hands and the accompanying adrenaline racing through her veins.

The sound of footsteps made her lift her head. Julian and Giselle entered the alcove, Crispin trailing a few paces behind them.

“Good morning,” Giselle said. Upon seeing her, hearing her voice, Nadiya felt her heart skip a beat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sleep in so late.”

“It’s fine,” said Klaudia. “Rest is a necessity. It was a long night.”

“A necessity for you, too,” said Julian. “How long have you been awake?”

Klaudia’s eyes flickered, but she didn’t answer the question. “Sit down,” she said. “We need to figure out our next steps.”

Obediently, Giselle, Julian, and Crispin all pulled out chairs and dropped into them. Julian reached for one of the papers—a map of Traumstadt, showing both elevation and false lines of latitude and longitude.

“The whole arena isn’t even half a mile,” he said. “We could hope to just get lucky.”

“By doing what?” Nadiya asked. “Knocking on doors and asking all the holograms if they happened to see a mysterious cube?”

“Well, I would try and charm them first. Maybe they’d invite me in for tea.”

Nadiya resisted the urge to smile and wondered where along the way she had stopped finding Julian Joyce-Young III entirely insufferable. Maybe when she had seen the vulnerable boy beneath all the old-money arrogance and roguish bravado.

Giselle leaned over the table to examine the map she had drawn for Klaudia, with the addresses in Cyrillic letters. “It’s strange, isn’t it, to use letters for the addresses instead of numbers?”

“It’s definitely unusual in America,” said Klaudia, “but it could be typical in Germany. I don’t know. I’ve been looking for patterns in the letters, some association between them. So far I don’t see anything.”

Giselle squinted. “Maybe it’s a cipher.”

“A cipher?” Nadiya echoed.

“Dr. Iver put me in a cryptography class for a week when I first came to Valeran,” Giselle said. “I don’t think he really expected me to learn anything, but I remember the professor talking about some simple methods of, um, encryption.” Her voice was halting. “He taught us a simple substitution cipher called ROT13. It’s where you replace each letter with the thirteenth letter after it in the alphabet.”

“The Russian alphabet has thirty-three letters,” Klaudia said, “not twenty-six.”

“ROT . . . 16?” Giselle tried.

Klaudia took one of the manila folders and tore it into evenly sized squares—thirty-three of them. On each one she wrote a Cyrillic letter. She arranged them in order in front of Giselle.

Even having seen proof of her abilities before, Nadiya was still impressed by how swiftly Giselle laid out the scraps in rows of five to represent each of the addresses. Then, like pulling a slot machine, she cycled through the alphabet, shifting the letters one by one in order.

Admittedly, Nadiya was also paying very close attention to the way her delicate fingers maneuvered the papers, as well as the stray lock of auburn hair brushing her cheek.

Klaudia watched Giselle carefully, shaking her head at each five-letter arrangement. The hope was that eventually it would spell out something significant, a clue. But as the moments wore on, accompanied by the swirling of the orchestral music, Nadiya’s hope began to fade.

“Wait,” said Klaudia suddenly, shooting out a hand.