She turned back to the column and focused again on the gilded urn. It was a few yards away, but she could see the way it was knobby and bent, almost like it had been finished hastily. Or perhaps, it had been forged like that, uneven—intentionally.

The words that had appeared on the copper page above the image of the urn in the book she still carried in her backpack swam in her head. She didn’t need to look at the page again to recite them.

“Les erreurs ne sont pas dans l’art, mais chez l’artisan.”

“You speak French,” Nick stated.

“A lot of the great mathematicians are from overseas. When I’m translating long texts, I usually need to use an app on my phone. But for this, I could work from memory.”

“It isn’t Lafayette, is it?” Nick asked.

Hailey was quiet. Adrian continued staring at the two of them, obviously wondering, again, who the hell they were. Then he cleared his throat.

“Not Lafayette. It’s Isaac Newton. ‘Errors are not in the art, but in the artificers.’”

Nick looked back at him.

“Gravity. The apple. That Newton?”

“Yes,” Hailey said. “The father of mathematics and physics. Came up with the laws of motion, calculus, gravity. But he was also one of the main driving forces behind early chemistry. And he was seriously into the occult.”

Nick seemed bewildered, as he eyed the urn.

“And you think this is all connected. The picture in the book, the quote from Newton. That urn—”

“What’s going on here?” Adrian finally stammered. “Who are you people?”

Hailey ignored him, still staring at that urn, at the imperfections in the metal. Then at the way the interior of the old elevator shaft was dimly lit, and the darker atmosphere where she and Nick and Adrian were standing. Her mind was spinning, as she worked through the problem.

Suddenly, she unslung her backpack and dug inside. A moment later she found what she was looking for; a small compact mirror, which she often used in casinos to check her face during a heated counting session.

She turned to Nick.

“I need a water bottle. Plastic, the kind they sell outside at those vendors.”

“Hailey—”

“Just go.”

His face had the look of someone who didn’t like to be told what to do, but he brushed past the bewildered professor and headed quickly back the way they had come, out into the park. Once he was gone, Adrian gaped at her.

“Did you hear me? What is this?”

“Like you said, Professor. A research project.”