Life Eternal Part 12

He tangled his legs with mine, his fingers stroking my shoulders, his lips pressed against the back of my neck. Outside, the wind was strong, making the boat beneath us tilt and sway, pulling our bodies apart and then pushing us back together until I drifted to sleep in his arms. Sometime around midnight, I stirred, hearing him whispering in my ear. "I love you," he murmured, thinking I was still asleep. But he didn't need to say it, because I already knew.

I awoke the next morning alone. Sitting up, I turned to the s.p.a.ce beside me where the shape of Dante's body was still imprinted in the cushions. I touched it even though I knew it would be cold. I shouldn't have been upset; I knew that he would have to leave by midnight, before the Monitor sweep. But no matter how hard I tried, I knew I would never get used to his absence.

Out the window, it was a dull rainy day. I gathered my things, the boat creaking as I steadied myself and tried to put on my clothes. I was about to leave when I picked up my sweater. Lying on the floor beneath it was a note. It must have fallen when I first got up.

I unfolded it.

I promise.

I smiled and clutched it to my side, feeling that Dante was still with me as I climbed out into the drizzle.

When I got back to the dormitory I went straight to Anya's room. She opened the door just as I was about to knock, appearing in the doorway in a black jumper and purple tights. Her red hair was pulled into a loose braid.

"Oh good," she said. "You remembered this time."

We didn't have a plan when we set out. I figured we could just follow what I'd done in my vision: buy a bouquet of flowers, go to the reception area, and tell them we were visiting room 151. It wasn't anything brilliant, but we were going to a hospital. How hard could it be?

We traveled there by foot, Anya holding a wobbly umbrella between us as we traipsed through the puddles. The Royal Victoria Hospital was just as I remembered it: a sprawling lawn leading up to a ma.s.sive stone building, the flags on the spires waving in the wind. Inside, the building had glossy floors and clean white walls. A line of nurses sat behind the reception area, typing. I walked toward them, Anya's wet shoes squeaking behind me.

"Hi," I said to a nurse with big hair. "We're here for visiting hours." I placed the bouquet of flowers on the counter for emphasis.

"Who are you visiting?"

"Er-room 151."

"In which ward?"

"Pediatrics," I replied, a little too stiffly.

She typed something into her computer, and then frowned. "What's the name of the patient you're visiting?"

I gave Anya a panicked look. This wasn't supposed to happen. "Um-"

"Pierre," Anya said, cutting in. "He's my cousin."

I nodded. "Her cousin."

"Last name?" the nurse asked, giving us a suspicious look.

"LaGuerre," I blurted out.

After typing something else into her computer, she leaned back in her chair. "Pierre LaGuerre?"

It sounded so silly when she said it out loud. "There is no patient here with that name, and there never has been, according to our records."

I could feel myself start to sweat. "Oh, um-"

"What are your names?" The nurse's voice was stern as she picked up a pencil.

Anya kicked me just as I was about to answer. "Our mistake," she said. "We must have gotten the wrong hospital."

The nurse stood up, but before she could respond, Anya grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the exit.

"Now what?" I asked, once we were outside.

"We go through the tunnels."

She led me to a mall, where we took an escalator down, down, down, until we emerged in the underground level. The halls were tiled in gray and lit with bright fluorescent lights that made me shield my eyes. People bustled around us, shopping, drinking coffee, heading toward the food court, which stank of hot oil.

I followed Anya as she wove through the tunnel system, taking a left and then right, past a metro entrance, a perfume shop, and a huge grocery store, until we made it to a tunnel that had been almost completely blocked off by cement slabs.

"I think this is it," she said, stepping past a shallow puddle of orange water.

"How do you know about this?" I asked, sucking in a breath as I pressed myself against the side of the tunnel and followed her.

"All of the Russians here know about them," she said, leading me through a dank corridor lined with rust. "We were the ones who built them. Well, not me, but, you know, Russian immigrants. When I was little, my father used to take me through all the barricaded tunnels."

At the end was a narrow stairway that led to a single door. Anya pushed it open with her shoulder. It opened into a long storage closet in the hospital. Kicking away a box, I stepped over a mess of supplies-gauze, syringes, boxes of latex gloves-until I made it to the far door, lined with light.

"Let's use these," Anya said, and picked up a sheet of visitor stickers. Writing the name Tanya on one sticker, she peeled it off and stuck it on her shirt. She then wrote Dasha on another sticker and stuck it on my chest. Together, we crouched by the door, listening to the footsteps outside, and when there was a lull, we snuck out.

We found ourselves in the geriatrics ward-a drab place, its overhead lights buzzing in silence. It felt vacant and cold, as if it were inhabited by death. Trying to act inconspicuous, Anya and I walked toward the elevators. A bell dinged and we stepped inside.

It was crowded with two nurses standing by a patient on a stretcher. He was an old but robust man, his bare arms still muscular, his beard a deep gray. He wasn't dead, but sleeping; I knew because I couldn't sense him. Anya stared at him as I pressed the b.u.t.ton for the third floor, which was labeled Pediatrics.

"You know, he was kind of good-looking," she said, when we got off.

I groaned. "He could be your grandfather," I said. "Your great-grandfather."

"I think older men are s.e.xy," she continued. "Their chest hair. I love it."

I put my hand up. "Just-stop-no more. Let's focus," I said, eyeing a nurse as she talked on the phone.

Everything was just as I remembered: the drawings on the walls, the crayons and picture books in the waiting room, the hum of machines beeping, nurses chatting, shoes tapping against the floor. A line of bedrooms.

Then room 151. "Someone's in there," Anya said, peering through the window. Standing on my toes, I peered over her shoulder. A single bed stood in the middle of the room, and a boy was lying in it, the sheets tucked around his tiny legs.

I knocked. When he didn't move, I knocked again, louder, and turned the k.n.o.b.

The room was still, save for the breeze from an air-conditioning vent, which blew up beneath a potted plant, making its leaves quiver. The same boy from my vision was asleep in the bed, his arms riddled with patches and tubes, as if he had been turned inside out.

Anya poked his leg, but he didn't wake.

"Don't touch him!" I whispered.

"Why not?"

"Just-watch him while I go under, okay?" I took out a piece of notebook paper and a stick of graphite from my coat. The plastic tiles felt cold and slippery as I knelt on the floor.

Pushing away a knot of wires, I slid underneath the bed, which was nailed to the floor, my body just fitting in the narrow s.p.a.ce. I patted the ground with my hand until I felt something rough and cold, like metal. I traced its edges with my fingers: it was in the shape of a circle. And placing the piece of paper over the area, I rubbed the page with graphite to make an impression of the surface, hoping that I was doing it correctly.

I emerged with a sneeze. We both froze, waiting for the boy to wake up, but he didn't move.

"So what is it?" Anya asked, pulling dust bunnies out of my hair as we looked down at the rubbing I had made. It was an oval plaque of some sort, engraved with the following inscription: to arrive there follow the nose of the bear to the salty waters beneath; Beneath the words was a crest depicting a small bird. I felt my heart skip. "It can't be," I whispered, gripping the paper.

"What?" Anya said.

"It's a canary," I said, tracing its wings. "The crest of the Nine Sisters."

Before I could say anything more, the small boy shifted in his bed, making Anya and me jump. "Let's talk about this somewhere else," I whispered, and made for the door.

"So what is it?" she said as we waited for the elevator.

Glancing down the hall to make sure no one was looking, I took out the paper. "Some sort of riddle. A set of directions," I said, pointing to the first line: to arrive there. Suddenly, I looked up. "Maybe it's a set of directions to the secret of the Nine Sisters."

I looked to Anya, expecting her to be excited, but instead she said, "I don't know. It seems too easy. Why would it be beneath a hospital bed?"

I watched the dial of the elevator tremble as it moved down the floors toward us.

"The last line ends with a semicolon, not a period. Maybe it's incomplete."

Anya looked skeptical. "All of that stuff is a legend, though. We don't even know if any of it is true."

"It's a stretch, I know, but this exists, right?" I said, staring down at the page. "What else could explain this?"

"How are you so sure it belongs to the Nine Sisters?"

I pointed to the bird at the bottom of the page. "This is the exact same crest that's in our history book, under the Nine Sisters. I looked them up last night."

Anya shook her head. "It can't be. It has to be a fake, or a crest that looks just like it."

"Why? Why can't it be real?"

She gazed at the paper as if she feared it. "How could you have seen that in a vision?"

"Maybe I was meant to find it."

As she studied me, a smile spread across her face. "That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

"So what do you propose, then?" I asked, taking offense. "We just ignore it?"

She sucked on a lock of red hair. "Fine," she said. "Let me see it again."

The elevator dinged, and a down arrow lit up. Once the doors closed, I took out the rubbing.

"So we have to follow the nose of the bear to the salty waters beneath," I said, reading the final two lines.

"I don't know what that means," Anya said.

I crossed my arms. The nose of the bear. That couldn't be referring to a real bear. Maybe it meant an etching on a building, or a rock formation that looked like a bear....And the salty waters probably referred to the ocean....

"But Madame Gout said that the Nine Sisters vowed to let their secret die with them so no one would ever find it," Anya said. "So why would they leave a riddle leading to it?"

I didn't know, and before I could say anything more, the elevator doors opened to the ground floor.

"Renee?"

My eyes traveled up from the right leg of his pants, cuffed as if he had just come from riding a bicycle, to his collared shirt, unb.u.t.toned at the top, to his auburn mess of hair.

"Noah?" He was carrying a cup of coffee and a book.

He looked at my name tag. Quickly, I ripped it off and crumpled it in my hand, hoping he hadn't read it.

"What was that?"

"Nothing," I said, giving Anya a look. She did the same. "Why are you here?"

"Visiting my grandmother," he said.

I swallowed, staring at his dimples, at the dark red stubble on his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."

"No, it's okay. She's been here for a while. I like to come every so often to say hi, even if she can't hear me. I was actually on my way here when I ran into you on the street."

"You were?" I said, inexplicably relieved to realize that the flowers weren't for Clementine, but for his grandmother.

"Who are you visiting?"

"Oh, um, no one, really."

"No one, really?" he said, letting out a laugh. "What are you doing here, then?"

As I searched for the right answer, Anya piped in. "Sampling the cafeteria."

"We were just leaving," I said, grabbing her arm. "We have to get back to campus for a..."

"Club meeting," Anya said, finishing my sentence.

He backed into the elevator. "A club? What club?"

"It's girls only. A private thing," Anya said, making my face go red with embarra.s.sment.

"I hope your grandmother feels better," I said, just as the doors closed. Together Anya and I ran back to St. Clement, splashing through the puddles collecting on the flagstones, and into the dormitory.

IT RAINED FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, SEPTEMBER washing into October with little change. I should have been happy about my discovery in the hospital, but I couldn't feel anything but dull. With Dante gone, time seemed to stand still around me; the mornings just as cloudy and dark as the evenings, as if the sun had never decided to rise. There was no wind, like the world was holding its breath along with me, waiting for him to return.

Anya and I spent the beginning of October huddled in the library, trying to decode the riddle. I looked up the crest of the canary dozens of times, comparing the photographs in the books to the one on my rubbing just to make sure. Despite the imprecision of the graphite, the similarities were unmistakable. The crests were the same. That's when I got the first tingling sensation that I might be right: the secret of the Nine Sisters wasn't dead; it was preserved in a riddle.

But what did it mean? I had already searched all of the indexes for anything about oceans, bears, noses, or any combination of them, but the clues were so vague that they rendered nothing. The more I studied the rubbing, the more I was certain of only one thing: the verse was only one part of a larger riddle. And in order to make sense of it, I had to find the other pieces.