Jess left the others to the frantic work of choosing what to take—arguments, he saw, were fierce and passionate between Wolfe, Khalila, and Thomas—and went instead with Morgan to a small table in a corner. She’d borrowed a Codex from the Obscurist Magnus, and now she placed it on the table between them.

“What do we need that for?” he asked her.

“You’ll need to let your father know what happened and that we’re coming through soon,” she said. “The Obscurist can send us all to the London Serapeum, just as we originally planned. He’ll have to help us get free of the guards there.”

“My father’s not going to fight the High Garda! My father doesn’t fight anyone. He’s a smuggler, not some mercenary captain.”

She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “You’re his son. He’ll fight for you, Jess.”

“No,” he said grimly. “He won’t.”

That froze Morgan for a moment, but she shook her head. “Then we have to offer him good reason. Surely what we’re carrying will be enough of an incentive.” She used a thin-bladed knife that Wolfe had given her to carefully slit the endpaper of the Codex and peel it back; beneath that lay inked symbols that shimmered like metal in the dim late-afternoon light. She touched them and lifted her fingertips, and a three-dimensional column of symbols appeared, floating on the air as if they were made of burning fragments of paper. She studied them for a moment, then reached in and pinched one of them between her thumb and forefinger. As she pulled it out of the column, it dissolved into ash and smoke. She put her hand over the top of the shivering column and pushed it back down until her palm lay flat against the backing.

When she took her hand away, it looked exactly the same. “That takes care of anyone trying to read anything written in this particular Codex,” she said. “Now I’ll link it directly to your father’s. Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a link to your father, but you do. It’s necessary for it to be a personal connection.”

Jess shrugged and held out his hand, and before he could blink, she’d drawn that sharp little knife across his finger. The cut was shallow and he hardly felt it at all, but a line of blood welled up. Morgan grabbed a quill and dipped the end into the red, and he frowned at her as he sucked the wound closed. “Shouldn’t do that,” she said as she wrote a line in a blank page of the Codex—more symbols, then his father’s name: Callum Brightwell. “I might need more blood.”

“Make do with that,” he said. “Have you ever heard of vampires?”

She gave him a wild sort of smile, put down the quill, and reached for a bottle of silvery ink she’d brought with her. She shook it, then uncapped it and dipped the quill into it. “What I write here, only your father will see. By using your blood, I’ve mirrored this Codex to his. The ink will disappear in about a minute after I write, and it’ll leave no trace on either book. So tell me what to say.”