“Of what?” Again she touched my wrist, and her fingers moved in that circular motion, a brief, tender massage. “Look, George—I can’t be separated from the Order. Can’t you see that yet? We come as a package. And if you want to ‘connect’ with me you have to deal with that.” She stood up and brushed down her skirt. “You came all the way to Rome to save me, didn’t you? What a hero. And now you’ve found out I don’t want to be saved, you’ve decided to rescue poor Lucia instead. But don’t you think you have a duty to figure out what it is you’re saving us all from?” She held out her hand to me. “What, are you stuck in that chair? Come on.”

Her tone of command, the outstretched hand, were compelling. And we had, oddly, become a center of attention, her standing, me sitting, a kind of eddy in the endless stream of people. I was surrounded by faces, all turned on me with a kind of half smile. I felt the most intense pressure to go with Rosa.

I drained my coffee, reached up, took her hand, and stood.

She was, of course, still working on my recruitment into the Order, or at least on neutralizing me as a threat. I knew that. She was following her own agenda. But by now, so was I.

We were brother and sister. What damaged goods we were.

Walking still deeper into the Crypt, we took the stairs.

That wasn’t as simple as it sounds. The structure of the place internally was very complicated, with floors and partition walls and bits of mezzanines all over the place, and we had to walk sometimes hundreds of yards from one staircase to the next. Everything was bathed in a pearly, sourceless fluorescent glow, and looked the same in every direction. As I got turned this way and that I was soon lost. But that was probably intentional; inside the Crypt you weren’t supposed to know where you were.

Still, it soon became clear that we had passed below what I had roughly labeled as Level 1, the uppermost, most modern-looking area of the Crypt, where schoolchildren studied purposefully and the scrinarii worked amid their computers and card indices and steel library shelves. It was a big place; Level 1 was actually several stories and mezzanines. Now we clambered down steel staircases into the heart of the level below, Level 2, which I had only glimpsed before from the mezzanine levels above.