Faith is the last thing Claudia looks like she has in me. “I notice I had no choice in the matter,” I say.

“Thanks to your so-called Watcher friend, the Scions already know of your resurrection,” he says. “Rest assured, the risk is solely ours. If you are killed, they will harvest your memory. They will know where you saw us. What we look like. Anything we told you. If we are killed, they will learn only that you are here, and that you remember nothing.”

“You say you don’t know why I disappeared. But when we spoke you knew what I had done.”

He shakes his grizzled head. “Not at first, though it became obvious. You had talked once, in theory I thought, about doing such a thing. There was some new unsanctioned clinical trial in the U.S. that you had heard of. You wondered out loud about the benefit of such a procedure to any Progeny who knew too much. You called it a last, life-saving defense. I didn’t believe you would actually do it! Then you vanished. I left Zagreb two weeks later. Many did, spooked by your disappearance. The same thing happened after your mother went missing. And so imagine my surprise when I heard your voice again, especially after the news that you were dead.”

I unsling my backpack and set it down. “I take it you didn’t know about the dying part.”

“You couldn’t have told me. Had something happened to me, the knowledge of your plan would have been harvested from my memory.” He shrugs a shoulder. “You knew this.”

“So you’re saying you have no idea why I did it? That doesn’t make sense. The only thing I left myself was a single link to you!” I try to tamp down the rising wave of panic, but it’s not working.

“I said I did not ask and you could not tell me,” he says, far too calmly. “I never said I had no idea.”

I feel myself squinting in the pattern of light thrown across the room, yellow diamonds strewn against the walls. “Is this about the diary?”

Claudia makes a sharp gesture. “Do not speak of that here!”

Ivan stays her with a mild murmur. “Reason dictates that if you were close to finding it, you would not have stopped until you ended this all,” he says. “You would not have buried it and abandoned the legacy simply to stay alive. And the Audra I knew did nothing without reason. And many things seemingly contrary to reason. That was her genius.”

I note that he hasn’t answered my question.

Then I realize: He doesn’t want to talk in front of the others.

“Well, I don’t know what that reason was anymore,” I say.

“You see?” Claudia says. “She knows nothing. Why should we risk any more lives for her?”

I am so over this chick.