Life Eternal

“Hear what?” she said.

“I have to go.” I stood up.

“Wait!” she called after me. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll tell you later.” And I was gone.

Back in my room, I rummaged under my bed until I found the book I’d bought last year on Grub Day, our school outing to the town of Attica Falls. Its binding was a worn cream, with the title Attica Falls. I wiped it off with my hand, sneezing from the dust. I flipped through it until I found the article called “The Gottfried Curse,” the same one I’d read last year.

I skimmed the pages. Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Academy has been plagued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of the most perverse and bizarre nature.…

I flipped ahead, scanning the paragraphs about how Gottfried was founded first as a hospital for the Undead, until the head doctor, Bertrand Gottfried, died, and the school closed its doors. That’s when I found what I was looking for.

Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened. This time, as a school. The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress. She named it “Gottfried Academy,” after its founder.

Ophelia Hart. Or Ophelia Coeur? Coeur meant “heart” in French. Could they have been the same person? This was where I’d recognized her from. Ophelia Hart was the first headmistress of Gottfried Academy. She was the nurse who had turned it into a school, and who seemed to preside over it while all of the strange tragedies were occurring. And then in 1789, the tragedies mysteriously stopped. I flipped ahead, trying to figure out if they had anything to do with Ophelia Hart leaving the school, but there was no other information.

I leaned back on the carpet, deep in thought. Ophelia could have changed her name to “Coeur” to keep her real identity a secret. But it was easy to see through. Why didn’t any of the books about her scientific work mention it? Why hadn’t Noah’s father, a celebrated historian, considered that Ophelia Coeur could have been the first headmistress of Gottfried? The names seemed far too similar to be coincidental. He hadn’t even mentioned anything about that.

And then I realized: the Ophelia that Noah’s father had told us about had done all of her water research in the early 1900s.

The Ophelia on the page in front of me, the one who was the first headmistress of Gottfried, had been alive in the mid-1700s, which was right around the time when the Nine Sisters had been killed.

It seemed impossible that there were two Ophelias in the Monitoring world, and each with a variation of “heart” as a last name. But did that then mean that these two Ophelia Harts—one a nurse in the 1700s, the other a nurse and scientist in the early 1900s—were the same person?

We were right, I thought, piecing it all together. Ophelia was the ninth sister. That was the only explanation for how a woman could stay alive for two hundred years, maybe more. She had used the secret of the Nine Sisters to become immortal.

“It’s true,” I said out loud, even though there was no one else in the room to hear me. I stared at her name in the book, unable to believe that I had finished what my parents had started, that I had actually found her. I was one step closer to discovering eternal life, the secret that everyone had been searching for. But as I traced the O of her name, my excitement faded to fear, and I realized that I now had exactly what the Liberum wanted, and that soon I would have to face them. Life and death, Zinya had predicted. I was one step closer to that, too.

Chapter 14

SHUTTING THE BOOK, I THREW IT IN MY BAG AND went to the closet to get my mother’s shovel, not sure where I was planning on going, just that now I knew I had to take protection with me everywhere I went. The only person I wanted to tell was Dante, but the mere reminder that even after everything I was somehow still in love with him, made my chest ache. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I let him go?

I was about to shut the closet door, when I realized something was wrong. I hadn’t noticed it the night I’d confronted Clementine and her father, but now a wave of unease overcame me. I pushed through the mess of hangers, throwing shoes and clothes out onto the floor until I had a clear view of the back. The long rectangular case was there, but the shovel I kept inside it was gone.

But how? Hoping I was somehow mistaken, I pulled out the case and checked behind it, but found nothing. All the while, my own words echoed in my head. “Just don’t let them see your shovel,” I’d told Noah in the farmhouse. Could the Undead have followed me here, to my own room, and stolen my shovel? Feeling faint, I glanced at the window, and then at the door, wishing there was a lock on it, when I realized that there was a far simpler explanation.

Furious, I stormed through the bathroom and burst into Clementine’s room. She had just gotten back from dinner and was chatting with two of her friends by the door.

“Did you take it?” I demanded. “Did you go through my room?”

Clementine turned to me. “Take what? What are you talking about?”

“My shovel. It’s gone. Where is it?”

And barging toward her closet, I flung open the doors. Clementine yelled at me to stop, but I didn’t care. I pushed her clothes aside and fumbled through her shoes and bags, but nothing was there.

“It’s here somewhere. I know it is,” I said. Ignoring her protests, I checked behind the door, beneath her bed, beside her bureau. All I found was her shovel, which was made of a dark metal and smooth, oiled wood.

“I didn’t take your shovel,” she said firmly. “And I didn’t go through your room before, either.”

“Then who took it?” I demanded. “You’ve already gone through my things. You waited in my room for me when I wasn’t there. It was you. I know it was you.”

Clementine hesitated. “It wasn’t me.”

Before I could stop myself, I grabbed her slender wrist and dragged her into my room. “Then why is the case empty?”

She squirmed out of my grasp and parted her lips to respond, when her face gathered in a wince. “What is that smell?”

I shook my head. “What? What are you talking about?”

She covered her nose with her hand. “How can you not smell that?”

“You’re trying to distract me,” I said.

“I’m not!” Clementine insisted, and stepped back into the bathroom. “It smells like something rotting.”

I must have looked confused, because she pointed to the radiator below my window. “It’s coming from over there.”

I glanced at her once more to make sure she was telling the truth, and bent down. I sniffed at the air, trying to smell what she did, but my senses were so dull that I could only detect a vague stale odor, like something left in the fridge for too long.

Slowly, I reached beneath the vents and patted the floorboards until my hand met something soft and wrinkled. With a gasp, I pulled back my arm.

“What is it?” Clementine said from the door.

“I don’t know,” I said, my lips trembling as I crouched low to see what it was. Something knotted and white.

Clementine picked up an umbrella that I had thrown from the closet. “Use this,” she said.

Taking the umbrella from her, I stuck its curved handle beneath the radiator and pulled the thing out. It was a thick, gnarled root, like a carrot, except it was white and rotten. I touched it with the tip of the shovel. It was soft and shriveled from age, the bottom side brown and blistered from sitting on the floor in one position.

“I think it’s some sort of vegetable,” I said.

“Why is it here?” Clementine demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what it is. Someone must have put it here.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

If it hadn’t been Clementine, then who could it have been? There was no one else who would have wanted to come in my room. Except…the Liberum, I thought.

I ran down the hall to Anya’s door, carrying the root by its tip. If anyone would know what it was, it was her. But just as I raised my hand to knock, the door opened.

“Renée!” Anya said with a gasp. “I was just about to go to your room,” she said. “Why did you run away like that?”

The white root went flaccid when I held it up, pinching it by its wiry tip. “I found this in my room, beneath the window. Do you know what it is?”

She froze when she saw it. “It’s a parsnip,” she said slowly, gazing at its wrinkled skin.

“Why would someone put it in my room?”

She hesitated, as if she knew something but didn’t want to say it.

“Tell me!” I said, exasperated.

“A white root that rises from beneath the earth. It’s a symbol for the Undead.”

“What?” I said, my mind racing. Did that mean that the Undead had entered my room and left it there? Had they taken my shovel, too, to disarm me? “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would they take my shovel and leave this here to announce themselves, when they could have just attacked me? Why wait?”

Anya sniffed the root and winced.

“Do you think they were waiting for me to find the identity of the ninth sister so that if they take my soul they’ll have more information?”

“That would be stupid,” Anya said. “We might never find her.”

“That’s not completely true.”

Anya squinted at me, reading my expression. “Wait. Did you find her?”

We retreated to my room, where I showed her the article about the Gottfried Curse. “This proves that there was a Monitor named Ophelia Hart alive in the 1700s. And according to Noah’s dad, there was another Monitor named Ophelia Coeur who was alive in the 1900s. Coeur means ‘heart’ in French. It has to be a pseudonym. It’s too strange to be a coincidence—they have to be the same person.”

“But that means she would have been alive for over two hundred years. That’s impossible.”