“And risk exposure with a single harvested memory? We’ve been, by design, as unknown to your world as you are to the common one around you. Renounced as heretics by the sect we served, cut off even from them for the things we meant—and had—to do. But we never forgot who we were. And we waited, in anticipation of a day like this. It’s time for the Scions—and princes like Nikola—to be held accountable.”

“And you and your ‘Watcher’ friends are going to do that.”

“No. You are.”

This time my laugh is genuine.

“Except that you’re failing to realize one thing: unless you and your brotherhood of evil monks knows where the diary is—do you, by the way?”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got nothing. Even if I managed to somehow find and deliver it, you and I both know the Historian would never let Luka or me live. And that’s assuming the diary even exists.”

“I believe it does, that it is the key to ending this, and that you have more to bargain with than you know.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“You aren’t just Progeny, Audra. You’re a direct descendant of Anastasia.”

“Her first daughter? The illegitimate one?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they all died out.”

“Not all of them.”

I think back to the conversation with Jester. Nikola’s census. And then I know: Nikola isn’t trying to chart the Historian’s so-called death map. He’s trying to locate more descendants like me.

The children of Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter are more powerful than those of her legitimate son.

My ability to sense Ivan and Nikola. To persuade an airport, to project suggestion ahead of me on the run . . .

“Your brain is brilliant. Your gifts are stronger. They fade later in life. Or at least . . . that’s the theory.”

“No one’s lived long enough for you to know,” I say dully.

“Your line has been hiding for centuries. That it survived at all is testament to its power, Audra. There was a massacre two hundred years ago, when the genealogy the brothers kept was stolen. That wasn’t the work of Scions. Anastasia’s line has been hunted by a faction of princes for generations in an effort to keep you out of the Scions’ hands.”

“You’re saying it was an inside job. That the Progeny are killing their own.”

“Is that really so surprising, given what you know?”

“Then why did Nikola bring me to the Historian—why, when he killed my mother?”

“I don’t think he killed your mother.”

“You think she killed herself rather than be used as a pawn by either of them.”

“I’m speculating, but I don’t think he did. I do know this: You’re a great prize to the Scions. Do you know what they could do with someone like you?”

“Then why not just take me? Why send me after this thing?”