I hide my phone in my lap, prepared to message Izzy on every single one of her social media accounts until she finally responds. Except, for some reason, none of her profiles will load. I must have a bad internet connection. But… no, everything else seems to be working fine.

What’s going on? I reload and then reload again.

Nothing. All her profiles are gone.

She’s either deleted her accounts or blocked me.

Why would she do that? My breath feels trapped, my mind ping-ponging between worry and hurt.

I pull up the last text message Izzy sent me.

Please don’t go to Italy. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to, and now I have a really bad feeling about your trip.

When she hadn’t responded to any of my follow-up questions, I’d put her warning out of my mind and chalked it up to a drunk text. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first. But now I’m not so sure.

Kor sees the look on my face and takes my hand under the table with a comforting squeeze.

“We’re starting to talk in circles,” Kor says to the rest of the Chamber. “Let’s continue this discussion tomorrow. Ada needs to go home; she’s been through a lot.”

Alfie objects. “She’s been exposed to incredibly sensitive information. We can’t just let her go home!”

“Of course we can,” Kor says with finality. And because Kor is Kor, everyone listens and the meeting is adjourned, giving me free rein to leave.

As soon as we’re out of the Chamber, I try to ask Kor about Izzy.

“Not yet.” He shushes me and pulls me after him. He uses a bright orange keycard to exit the Families’ private archives—I’d asked for my own keycard but was denied—and leads me up the stairs into the museum.

It’s closed to the public at this late hour, and in the low light, the echoing stillness of the ancient chapels and galleries is haunting enough to give me chills.

The Cloisters—a building designed by combining different architectural elements taken from medieval abbeys, monasteries, and convents—houses a huge collection of medieval art and architecture. But only part of the collection is open to the public. Up in the tower and down below in the archives are many more pieces, including the Families’ private collection of relics tied to the existence of the exiles.

My mom texts me saying she needs to get some things from her office and will be ready to go in fifteen minutes, so I let Kor lead me through the silent, spooky halls of the Cloisters until we reach his favorite gallery, the Unicorn Tapestry Room. Seven beautifully detailed tapestries with life-size figures depict a story that has puzzled art historians for years. The tapestries are infamously mysterious; no one even knows who commissioned or made them.