My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I just… I want to talk to her. I want to know what’s going on. But…” I trailed off, uncertain of what to say.

“Let me guess,” Isaak said. “The geroi want you to keep playing flashcards with me?”

I sighed. “I do not know what that means. But yes. I am supposed to keep an eye on you.”

He looked back and forth between Ceilos and me. “Then let me come with you,” he said. “I mean… if you guys can build the time postern, then that means I can go home, right?”

Ceilos tapped his lower lip thoughtfully. “It couldn’t hurt, Nadin. He already knows too much of what’s going on. If this gets us answers…” He didn’t say any more, but I could see in his eyes that he was thinking of Tibros. If I could prove myself to the geroi—if the time postern really was the answer—then maybe our partnership…

I lowered my head. “All right,” I said. “You can help us—for now.”

Isaak grinned and thrust his right hand toward me. I stared at him, baffled.

“Oh, right,” he said. “It goes like this.” Then he took my hand, clasped it in his own, moved it up and down. I started at his touch.

“What was that?” I asked, my face flushed.

“A handshake,” said Isaak. “It means we’re in this together now. We’re a team.”

Chapter 20

“What are you going to tell the geroi if they find out we left the hospital?” Isaak asked as we stepped into the elevator.

“I will tell them the truth,” I said. “That I was showing you around the city in the hopes that the audio-visual stimulation would help the System decode your brain waves faster.”

“And you’ll just omit the part that I don’t really need the System to communicate?” he asked with a grin.

I squared my shoulders. “A partial truth is not a lie.”

He laughed. “I like the way you think.”

The elevator hummed as it began to propel us toward the surface.

“So what’s Ceilos doing, again?”

This was the part I was most reluctant about sharing with a stranger, even one who claimed to be on our team. I’d never had a “team”—besides Ceilos and Gitrin, that is, and look at where trusting Gitrin had gotten me. But Isaak understood far too much, even when we tried to be subtle. He read people almost as well as the System itself. There was no point in concealing things from him.