“Yet. Maybe Claudia or Piotrek has seen it somewhere.”

I’m quiet.

“Audra . . .” He takes my hand. “I’m with you, whatever you decide. Wherever you go.” He kisses my fingers. But there’s strange conflict in his eyes.

“Just do me a favor,” I say.

“Anything. You know that.”

“If, by some chance, you really are with me for a different reason . . . take the key. You have the code now. Don’t hurt anyone. Just go and do what you have to do and leave us alone.”

He looks as though I’ve struck him. And I hate myself for what I just said, but I can’t help it. Because I can’t stand the thought of one more life on my conscience—all because I chose to trust the one person I really want to believe more than anyone.

“What does it take to prove myself to you?” he says, his voice breaking. “That I’m not after what everyone else is, even though I’m the most logical person to want it?”

“I don’t know,” I say and wish that I did. He takes me by the shoulders and kisses me—roughly, with rising desperation, fingers encircling my arms. I welcome it, wanting it to expel every fear inside my mind. Instead, tears squeeze out the corners of my eyes.

“I love you, Audra,” he whispers. “Don’t you get it?”

I love you, too.

And that’s what scares me.

I pull away and leave him there, return silently to bed.

A minute later, he steps out of the bathroom and quietly puts the lightbulb away. But I know I’ve hurt him. I know it, and I can’t help it.

And I know, too, that Ana’s not asleep.

30

I lay in my bunk a long time, trying to make sense of the symbols, the letters or numbers they represent. Pounding against the empty storehouse of my memory for anything to do with Vienna, Shakespeare, sin and virtue, even rearranging the words and then the letters of the cryptic line on the key.

Why did I go to the trouble of having those symbols permanently tattooed on my body? To put them in a place that only a lover—near a black light, no less—would see? Something meant to be revealed under the right circumstances—Claudia’s flat, the dark strobe at court. Something there, if I needed it, its discovery contingent on my return, but invisible under normal conditions.

The pants in the spare closet were mine. Did I also put the black light in that lamp?

A fail-safe. Like the numbers in the tao cross and the key I left Ivan for safekeeping, assuming we’d both be alive.