The Conspiracy of Us

The must of old paper permeated the air, and I stopped at a history section. Jack climbed to the balcony, too, and touched my shoulder to squeeze past. When I glanced over, he was looking at me. We quickly turned back to our respective shelves.

“Here,” he said after a few silent minutes. He was crouched on the other side of the balcony, a stack of books in front of him. He held one with a cracked black cover open to a title page, with Napoléon Bonaparte scrawled unmistakably across it, in the same penmanship as the diary in my bag. “Looks like all these are his,” Jack said.

He handed me the one he was holding and picked up the other three, and we made our way down to the first story and to a heavy oak table.

“You look for a ripped-out page, and I’ll skim the entries for anything about the One,” Jack said.

I nodded. As I opened the first book, the library door opened. Instinctively, I shoved the books behind us and stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack, forming a wall, but the woman—in all black, and with a duster in one hand—just muttered something in French and scurried back out the door.

I let out a breath. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. I have a room here.”

Jack pursed his lips. “It’s okay for us to be seen together in public, but me in your room? Not so good.”

I tried to ignore any thoughts that his being in my room conjured up, and the pang that came with them. “A Keeper and a random distant cousin getting caught with a bunch of Napoleon’s diaries and talking about who the One is? That wouldn’t be great either,” I said quickly.

“Right. Okay, then.” Jack followed me down the hall.

I made sure there was no one around, then let him in and locked the door behind us. Without the hum of conversation from the hall, the room felt too quiet. “Give me one,” I said.

I took the top diary and perched on the bed—realizing I still hadn’t slept in it once—and Jack set the rest of them on the coffee table. As I flipped carefully through the gossamer-thin diary pages, I realized something that should have been obvious.

I jumped up. “Let me see the ripped-out page.”

Jack took the leather pouch out of his jacket and handed it to me. I unfolded the paper. “Let’s just check if any of the paper matches.”

Jack’s eyes lit up. We eliminated two of the four books immediately—the size was wrong. The last two were similar, but when I rubbed a corner of each between my fingers, the texture of what looked like the oldest of the diaries matched exactly.

While Jack leafed through it, I paced the room and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My cocktail dress had smudges all over it and a bloodstain at the hem, the blazer had become wrinkled and dirty, and I swear the dark circles under my eyes got darker as I watched.

“Come look at this,” Jack said. “He starts talking about the mandate here. About how there’s no purple-eyed girl, and nobody knows who the One is. He decides someone as important as him shouldn’t be forced to depend on the established route to the treasure, and he’s going to take a more direct path.” Jack flipped ahead, reading to himself. “There are a few pages about where he’s sent troops to search, and then, all of a sudden, it stops cold. Back to battles and strategy. No more mention of the tomb, the mandate, nothing.”

I perched next to Jack on the chaise. “Where’s the last page he talks about the tomb?”

Jack turned back to it, and I pushed carefully on the binding. “There!” It was nearly hidden, but there were unmistakably the ragged edges of a ripped-out page.

“It’s like he found it, decided immediately to hide the fact—maybe because he didn’t like what he found—and never spoke of it again,” Jack said, frowning.

“Until he hid this page in the diary he kept on his deathbed,” I said. “Did we look closely at the rest of that diary?”

Jack shook his head. “Not yet.”

While he did, I made a list of things we knew about the One on the little notepad on the vanity. “The One is a member of one of the families,” I said out loud, “meant to marry the girl. ‘Walk through fire and does not burn,’ it said in the mandate.”

I wrote that down, and wrote (Means: good in a crisis?) beside it. “New Achilles”—from Napoleon’s diary. (Invincible? Near invincible besides one flaw? Line of mandate mentions something about the One “becoming invincible.”)

Jack stood and paced, diary open in one hand, flipping pages with the other. “Oh,” he finally said. “I don’t know if this is anything new, but it’s something.”

We both sat on the edge of the bed, and he let the book rest open at a page filled with nearly illegible scribbles and sketches. He pointed to one scrawl, in French. “Walk through fire unharmed. Not burned. He lives.” Under it were hastily sketched flames, licking at the words.

He pointed to another scrawl. “Heir of Achilles.”

“Heir?”

Jack shrugged. “Like ‘the new Achilles’ in that line? But what it means, I don’t know. It sounds like another metaphor.”

It did.

“It’s like he’s trying to figure out who the One is, too. Why would he care if he’d already found the tomb?”

“We have to keep in mind that these are the ramblings of somebody who’s about to die,” Jack said. “But it seems undeniable that he did find something.”

I added Heir of Achilles to my list. Jack closed the diary and my stomach churned.

“If this is it,” I said, tearing the page off the notepad, “we’re not much closer to knowing who the One is than we were before.”

Jack scraped a hand through his hair. “If the Order touches him, I’ll kill them myself,” he said quietly, then out loud, he said, “We have to talk to Stellan. We have to go to the ball and find him.”

“To the ball?” I had considered earlier that my father would be there, but it was starting to feel like tempting fate too much. “What do you think he’s going to be able to figure out that we haven’t?”

Jack stacked the diaries in a neat pile. “I honestly don’t know. But don’t we have to try? I promise, no one will even notice you there. It’ll be fine.”

A fleeting image darted through my mind of the tiny photo that used to be in my locket. Dark hair, dark brows, like mine. The reason I’d wanted to come back to France in the first place.