“You’re Progeny. Get one. I have to get rid of this phone. I’ll leave you a new contact in the next five hours.”

The line clicks off before I can say anything else.

I stare at the space between Luka and me for a stunned moment, and then, belatedly, at the phone in my hand.

Without a word I pull up a browser, type in “University of Chicago” and “library.” Tap on a list of images.

The Harper Memorial Library comes up.

And there it is: the cathedral of learning, with its vaulted ceiling and rows of long tables I remember.

There is an actual place with real records of my existence. If I had an ID with my old name on it, if I weren’t supposedly dead, I would be able to walk in and get my student record, find something about my former life.

I realize Luka’s watching me. He looks pale.

“Okay,” I say, more to myself than to him.

“What was he saying about rediscovering something?” Luka says. He looks ill.

“He wouldn’t say. Something he thought I found.”

Luka’s gaze is locked on mine. An instant later he walks to the driver’s side and gets in.

“He’s right,” he says. “We have to get you out of the country.”

13

“I can’t just go to Croatia!”

Back on the two-lane highway in flat Farmville, USA, we might as well be talking about one of Pluto’s moons. I hug my arms around myself against the cold, touch my tongue to the inside of my lip where it got cut.

“He’s right. You’ll be safe. No one knows how to hide like the Progeny,” Luka says, eyes on the road.

“There have got to be Progeny here somewhere.”

“Not like there. If the Historian knows you’re alive, that you faked your death and erased your memory to protect something . . . something important enough that he sent Rolan to get you to rediscover it . . .”

“So he could kill me and then harvest my memory and give everything to the Historian—I get it.”

Luka’s jaw twitches, the set of his mouth flat.

“What does he think I found?”

Luka’s quiet for a moment before he says, “The diary.”

“Diary?”

“That has to be what he meant,” he murmurs. He passes his hand over his face and then pounds the rim of the steering wheel with a curse.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t what we planned!”

“What diary?” I demand.

“Bathory’s. People have been searching for it for centuries. I knew Rolan would let you live long enough to find something you remember, but if they’re talking about the diary . . .” He looks shaken, even in the dark. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“So I hear. About this diary?”