“I’ve altered your facial nodes in the police database,” Jester says. “It may help for a while. Meanwhile, here is the news article: ‘Audra Ellison, wanted for the murders of Nino Kolar and Imre Tomić and the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Ana Gudac.’ ”

“Kidnapping?”

“It says you drugged and kidnapped her after murdering her partner in a fit of jealousy. There’s no mention of anyone else by name. Only that you may be traveling with others.”

At least I’ve been singled out. It isn’t a guarantee of anyone else’s safety, but for now, at least, they’re not in the news.

I don one of Claudia’s wigs before we leave the Skoda at a car rental lot and switch to a larger Peugeot kombi complete with expressway stickers.

Fifteen minutes later, Jester’s got the etching of the last symbol on my back propped against her laptop screen, where she’s re-creating it by hand, muttering at every bump through a construction zone.

If Jester cracks that symbol, I will finally know what I’ve been protecting all this time. The thing that Nikola and the Scions alike want desperately enough to kill for. A weapon, Nikola called it. Evidence that most likely proves Bathory’s guilt—why else would I have erased it? What makes Nikola so sure, then, that he can use it against the Scions?

But right now my biggest question is how to wield that same weapon against him.

“You said you’ve been gathering information on Nikola for years,” I say to Jester. “Like what?”

“Anything. What courts he appears at. Who his confidants are. Few have the courage to openly oppose him, but Tibor has never trusted him. Not since the rumor began that Nikola wanted to make a census. You can imagine the kind of alarm that would create, how dangerous that would be in any hand—even one of our own. Nikola argued that the Historian already has such a census in the form of a genealogy dating back centuries. Or, at least, that has been the rumor forever. Every time a hunter makes a kill and harvests a memory, a little piece of that puzzle gets filled in for the current and previous generation. It’s how they know to assign new hunters to marks as new Progeny are discovered.”

“A death map,” Claudia says.

“With such a genealogy the Scions can trace bloodlines for hundreds of years to the children of Elizabeth we descend from: Anastasia, who was illegitimate, and Pál—the only male to pass the legacy, which he received from Elizabeth herself. The Franciscans kept such a thing for us once until the practice was abolished, two hundred years ago, when the genealogy was stolen and many Utod died.”

“What could Nikola possibly gain from a census?” Luka says. “Except for the potential to wipe out an entire underground?”

“Just that,” I say. “The potential to wipe out an entire underground.”