Lyra surveyed the now-enormous theater, taking in the stacks of film reels that filled the newly revealed section of the room. Hundreds, perhaps even a thousand, were stored in metal canisters, stacked six feet high in row after row.
With the longsword in one hand, Grayson walked the length of the room, assessing the sheer volume of film tins staring back at him. Lyra resisted the urge to follow. She didn’t need to be near Grayson Hawthorne. She was fine.
You don’t have to be fine right now. Lyra hesitated to admit, even to herself, how deeply Grayson’s words had affected her. I’ve spent my entire life being fine when I wasn’t.
Each time he opened up to her, showing vulnerability, it became harder to see Grayson as the arrogant, aloof Hawthorne she once thought him to be. Each time, she glimpsed more of the person she remembered from when she was sixteen, watching Grayson interviewed alongside Avery Grambs.
Sometimes, Lyra could almost hear the masked heiress saying, In the games that matter most, the only way to truly play is to live.
With her throat stinging, Lyra reached for a tin from the nearest stack. There was a gold shape drawn on its lid.
“You found something.” Odette did not phrase that as a question.
“A triangle.” Lyra thought back to the symbols at the beginning of the
montage. There hadn’t been a triangle—not in the circled answer. She reached for a second tin and found another triangle, and another, then she moved on to a new stack. More of the same. She went farther down the row and finally found a canister bearing a different symbol.
“Look.” Lyra held the film tin out to Odette, her gaze cheating back toward Grayson. “There’s an X on this one.” Lyra jogged down the rows, grabbing two more tins from different stacks. “An E,” she reported, “and… a different E?”
Grayson moved like a shadow, silent and swift, directly behind her. “That,” he said, “is not an E. It’s the Greek letter sigma.” He turned his head slightly. “Which makes these three not an E, an X, and a triangle, but epsilon, chi, and delta.”
Lyra chewed on that. “Anyone in this room read Greek?”
“The letters.” Odette’s voice was oddly subdued. “You think they spell something?”
“Not if they appear on every canister,” Grayson declared. “There are too many—”
“—possible combinations,” Lyra finished. It was the Scrabble letters and poetry magnets all over again.
“Yes.”
Lyra hadn’t been aware that Grayson Hawthorne could say yes the way he said no.
“Drawing a singular meaning from them would be an impossible task,” Grayson continued, “even for someone with a certain familiarity with Greek.”
“In other words,” Lyra said, her voice dry, “yes, you can read Greek.” Grayson held out a hand. “May I?”
Three times he’d asked her that. The dance. The sword. And now. Lyra handed him the sigma tin.
Grayson opened it, examining its contents. “There’s writing on the underside of the lid.”
Even just the sound of his voice made Lyra remember that voice piercing the darkness. Come back to me.
Setting her jaw, Lyra focused on opening tins, one after another after another. Inside each, she found a reel of film, and on the underside of each lid, there was a four-digit number. 1972. 1984. 1966. “Years?” Lyra said.
“Fair assessment.” His Majesty seemed to consider that high praise. “Then again,” Grayson continued, “Hawthorne games are full of bits and pieces of information designed to eat up your time and lead nowhere. I would suggest that before we spend any time decoding the writing on the tins, we first complete a rudimentary search of all of them to ensure that none contains anything… extra.”
“Open every canister,” Odette summarized. “Then, assuming we find nothing of note in any of them, turn our minds to the letters and numbers.”
“The code,” Lyra said.
“The code,” Grayson confirmed. “And the cipher.”
Lyra caught his meaning almost instantly. “The symbols. From the film.” She drew the sequence in the air from memory:
 |
“There was another set of symbols at the end,” Odette told her. “You were… otherwise occupied when they appeared on the screen.”
Otherwise occupied. Lyra refused to think about the flashback. Beside her, Grayson knelt, his black suit jacket flaring out around his thighs as he laid the sword on the ground.
“We’ll rewatch the film,” Lyra said, allowing herself to take in the lines of his body, anchoring herself to the here and now. “Right after we go through the tins.”
“Yes.” Grayson Hawthorne and his yeses.
They divided the room into sections, and each of them took one. Lyra fell into the rhythm of the search as time ticked by, stack after stack. Greek letter on the outside. Year and film reel inside. Nothing else. An hour later, Lyra had made it nearly to the end of her section of the room.
The moment she saw the symbol on the tin, she stopped breathing. That symbol. The Greek letter on the tin she’d just picked up was shaped like a horseshoe. Or a bridge.
Lyra sucked in a jagged breath, and the air burned her lungs as the roar of blood pumping in her ears drowned out everything else. Her hands went cold. Her face was on fire. Fighting the flashback was like fighting a riptide. She could feel it trying to pull her under.
Blood. She could feel it, warm and sticky on her feet.
Without warning, Grayson was there. “You will stay with me,” he said quietly. “Right here, Lyra. Right now.”
His hands. Her face. The past receded—only slightly.
“When I was seven,” Grayson said in that same quiet, steady voice, “I once ended up locked in a cello case for six hours alongside a longsword, a crossbow, and a very unruly kitten.”
That was ridiculous enough—unexpected enough—to bring her the rest of the way back. Here. Now.
Him.
Grayson bent to block out the rest of the world from her view. “Give me your eyes, sweetheart.”
Lyra looked at him. “A kitten?” she managed. “A calico, I believe.”
Inside Lyra, the floodgates broke. “This symbol,” she bit out. Each breath she took felt like shards of glass in her lungs. “The night my biological father killed himself, he drew this symbol on the wall in his own blood.”
Grayson’s hands made their way from her face to the back of her neck, his touch warm and sure, as he followed her gaze to the Greek letter in question. Lyra expected him to name it, but he didn’t.
“What begins a bet?” Grayson said, his voice low and humming, the kind of voice that reverberated down her spine. “A bet,” he repeated.
“Grayson?” Lyra spoke his name like a prayer.
“It wasn’t a riddle,” Grayson told her. “It’s wordplay. A code. What looks like two words is, in reality, only one, with the middle of the word omitted.”
A bet.
“My grandfather tried this on us in a game once,” Grayson continued, his voice shot through with almost palpable focus. “At the time, we were looking for codes, and there was more than one word that had been broken in two, so we got there eventually—or rather, Jamie did.”
Intensity rolled off Grayson in waves, but Lyra barely even felt it. Wordplay. A code. A bet. What letters could you insert in the middle to form a single word?
“A bet.” Lyra’s voice rang in her own ears. “Alphabet. What begins alphabet?”
“Not that,” Grayson murmured, and if there had been space between them before, it was gone now. “Not A—or in the case of the Greek alphabet, not alpha.”
“Not the beginning,” Odette said, her voice coming to Lyra as if from across a great distance, “but the end.”
The last letter. Lyra wasn’t even aware that she’d reached for Grayson, but suddenly, her fingers were clamped down on his arm. With his hand still on her neck, Grayson leaned his head toward hers, bowing until their foreheads brushed.
He knew what this meant to her. He knew, and from the look in his eyes, she would have sworn it meant something to him, too.
Odette was the one who actually said it, her voice cutting through the air like a bullet: “Omega.”
