Page 97 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Even if this is a trap and Richard’s right now commandeering a jet to fly here and kill us all, it’ll take five hours at least,” said Nicholas. “There’s no spell in the Library that can transport a person magically across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Esther stood, slapping her hands on her thighs, and Joanna jumped.

“I’ll make tea,” Esther said.

“I should take the dog out,” Nicholas said, but he remained seated, arms on his knees, slouched forward. Esther was aware that all of them were in various states of dishevelment, but looking at Nicholas she was impressed once again by how successfully a five-hundred-dollar shirtcould compensate for blood loss, stress, and exhaustion. As long as she didn’t linger on his face, he looked elegantly tousled instead of the panfried mess Esther knew herself to resemble. If all this ended—when all this ended—she was going to allow herself a few “investment” pieces. Maybe a really nice cashmere sweater.

She indulged in these shallow thoughts like dark chocolate, nibbling their edges and letting them melt on her tongue, inconsequential. She thought about cashmere sweaters, fine leather shoes, silk underwear so thin you could feel someone’s breath through it.

In the kitchen she put the water on and then, waiting for it to boil, she went into the living room. She’d stashed her duffel bag in a corner behind the couch and hauled it out, then sat on the couch beside it. When she unzipped it, she caught a whiff of her bedroom at the research base, all stale air and lemony detergent and a hint of Pearl’s lavender shampoo, and her throat clenched. She kept digging through her bag.

She’d kept the note Maram had sent through the mirror and wrapped it in a thick wool sock along with the plastic vial of blood. With care she unwrapped both note and vial and set them on the coffee table. Then she pulled outLa Ruta Nos Aportóand opened it to the title page, where her mother had written “Remember: the path provides the natural next step.”

She looked at the note from the mirror and at the label on the vial: “This is the path. It will provide the natural next step.” She looked again at the nearly identical words on the inside of the novel. Then back at the note. She compared the two, charting the climb of her own heartbeat.

The handwriting was very, very similar.

So similar it might arguably be the same hand.

How had she not clocked this before? She took a shaky breath. A floorboard creaked above her, and she felt a rush of gratitude that the others were all upstairs so she could steal some privacy to let herself, for one split second, believe. She traced her fingers over her mother’shandwriting in the novel. There was a chance that when she went back upstairs, another note would be sitting on the floor of her old bedroom in this very same handwriting. A chance that on the other side of the mirror, a woman who looked like her was waiting.

The kettle began to whistle. Esther slipped the note and vial of blood into her pocket and went to make tea.

When she got upstairs, balancing mugs in one hand and a teapot in the other, the tension in the room was so taut she nearly turned around and went right back out. Nicholas was sitting on the bed with his feet planted on the floor and his gaze planted on the mirror, and Collins was pacing back and forth. Joanna was still kneeling in front of the closet.

“Jo, help me with these cups,” Esther said, and for a while they were occupied with pouring, passing, sipping, wincing, blowing across the steaming surface of the water, sipping, wincing again.

“Been thirty-three minutes,” Nicholas said. “But who’s counting? Not I. I’m having a tea party, apparently.”

“We don’t need to sit in this room all night,” Esther said. “Let’s go downstairs and put on a record or something.”

“Maybe only one of us should stay in the house and the rest should pack up and go,” Joanna said.

Esther did not like this suggestion in the slightest and began to say so, but a sudden change in Joanna’s face stopped her.

Her sister’s eyes were fixed on the mirror, her lips parting in a little O, and Esther was on her feet before she knew what she was doing, hot tea spilling over the sides of her mug and down her fingers, but the heat felt far away, unimportant. She heard Nicholas suck in a breath as Joanna reached forward and pulled the closet door further open, so they could all clearly see what Esther had already seen: a piece of paper floating down from the mirror.

In its wake the glass seethed and settled, and the paper fluttered down before coming to rest on the floor. Joanna reached out and plucked it up,then stood and went to hand it to Nicholas. Esther saw that her fingers were shaking so badly she nearly dropped it.

“You look,” she said to Nicholas. “I can’t.”

Esther willed herself patient as Nicholas cleared his throat and began to read aloud.

“We are on our way out of the house,” he read. “The Library will soon be empty. Remember: the path provides the natural next step.”

Goosebumps broke out on Esther’s arms.

“That’s it?” Nicholas said, flipping the paper over. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for?”

“They’re on their way,” Joanna said, standing. “Richard knows where we are. Is she warning us to run?”

“But what of the last bit?” Nicholas said. “The path provides the natural next step. What path? What step?”

“The Library will soon be empty,” Collins read over Nicholas’s shoulder. “So what? What does she want us to do, hop on a plane, rent a car, get to the Library, break into Richard’s office, and smash everything before someone comes after us?”

“Hmm,” said Nicholas. “Maybe?”

To Esther their talk was noise, buzzing and meaningless. She touched her collarbone, where her tattoo lay inked beneath her sweater—a palindrome. A sentence that could be put through a mirror and come out unchanged. She took the plastic vial of blood and Maram’s mirror-note from her pocket and held them in her hands, thinking about the novel she’d been translating in her spare time for years. In Gil’s world, women found themselves in mirrors: they became hypnotized and stared into their own eyes until they recognized themselves, and once they did, the mirror ceased to be a trap and became instead a doorway. An escape route. A path.

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