The Nameless Girl didn’t turn back. “Oh,” she said with a sigh. “I hope so.”

Yehuda Leib shook his head in confusion. He could sense her there beside him, even when he wasn’t looking—the way she moved, the way she warmed the air…

It felt familiar.

Like home.

“Are you…?”

But the Nameless Girl was distracted. “The names,” she said. “I think we have to find our way in through the names.”

Yehuda Leib nodded. “Yes. But I never learned to read them.”

“I can,” said the Nameless Girl.

Yehuda Leib pointed. “What does this one say?”

The Nameless Girl squinted at the weather-faded letters in the stone. “ ‘Chaim, son of Herschl and Hindeh.’ ”

“This one?”

“ ‘Fruma, daughter of Tzipora and Menachem.’ ”

And, at just this moment, a mournful yowl split the night.

Yehuda Leib and the Nameless Girl turned quickly over their shoulders.

Someone had fallen. Someone important.

Lilith.

Her body was impaled, limp and lifeless, upon a horseman’s lance.

She was dead.

“No,” breathed the Nameless Girl.

And then, something changed: in the blinking of an eye, one of the great gray War Cats had become a tall, slender woman, and as she strode forward through the ranks of the Lileen, her shift began to fade from gray to pure snowy white.

As one, the Lileen gave a roar of pride and leapt forward against the soldiers again. Lilith, wearing her new self like a well-fitting dress, lunged out to avenge her own death—but not before bending low to whisper to one of her War Cats, a single, slender finger pointing across the valley toward the Nameless Girl at the tower’s edge.

The Nameless Girl was transfixed. Yehuda Leib wanted to get her attention, to turn her back to the stone wall, but he couldn’t think what name to call out.

Softly, he laid a hand on her shoulder.

The Nameless Girl gave a little gasp of surprise at the warmth of his hand.

“Come on,” he said. “I think our extra time is running out.”

Swiftly, they worked their way along the tower’s face, Yehuda Leib choosing stone after stone, the Nameless Girl reading out name after name. They had just come to a corner and a new face of the tower when the names began to grow familiar:

Yekhiel Tzvi—he’d heard that before.

Nosson Dovid—that one, too.

And then Avimelekh.

That name he knew for certain.

Yehuda Leib moved down to the next stone and pointed with certainty.

“That one,” he said. “It’s that one.”

The Nameless Girl leaned in close and read:

“ ‘Yehuda Leib,’ ” she said. “ ‘Son of Avimelekh and Shulamis.’ ”

Yehuda Leib nodded.

This was it.

This was his gravestone.

Leaning forward, he let his fingers run over the strange shapes of the letters; lightly, smoothly, the stone swung back, like a door.

And what they saw beyond shocked them.