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  The woman hurried forward, eyes focused on the distance. She was a tall and lithe blonde, almost as tall as Zawadi. She ran past without seeing him, then disappeared beneath the archway. The man stayed in the courtyard, checking behind the parked vehicles one by one. Dr. Corwin’s knee screamed as he shifted to the balls of his feet. Determination alone allowed him to withstand the pain of his cramped position.

  In the passenger mirror, beneath the reflection of the basilica, he watched the man draw closer and then disappear from view. Seconds later, he emerged less than ten feet from the driver’s side of the Škoda. Dr. Corwin shuffled forward to position himself at the rear of the vehicle, leaning heavily on the cane. The Taser was a police-grade weapon that, if properly applied, might give him time to escape.

  A whiff of expensive cologne drifted to his nostrils. Steady footsteps. The flap of bird wings on a roof.

  As the man rounded the back of the Škoda, Dr. Corwin waited half a beat more, looking for a clear shot at the chest or thighs. Large muscle groups worked best for neuromuscular incapacitation. Before the man could draw his concealed weapon, Dr. Corwin aimed the laser sight and pressed the trigger. A crackle of electricity broke the silence as the pair of electrodes darted outward, striking the man in the chest.

  Instead of freezing up and falling to the ground, incapacitated by the current, the man barely paused. Dr. Corwin’s elation turned to dismay. His pursuer must have had protection under that thin blue shirt. Leather provides excellent defense from Tasers, he knew, but more advanced options were available. Bodysuits and chest wraps as thin as foil, made to counter electroshock weapons.

  With a quick, arrogant smile, the man rushed forward, sure he was about to overpower the frail old man leaning on a cane. Yet his confidence worked against him. Dr. Corwin threw the useless Taser at the man’s face, causing him to flinch, and then, using the technique Zawadi had taught him, the professor brought his cane up and swung it with all his strength, snapping his wrist.

  Whether guided by skill or luck or providence, Dr. Corwin’s strike was true. The heavy cane—reinforced with steel bands—struck the assailant in the temple. He slumped to the ground, unconscious.

  The pain in his knee caused the professor to collapse against the car. With a grimace, he pushed off the vehicle and hobbled toward Via Zamboni.

  Had the woman heard the scuffle? There was no help for it now. He pressed down the silent street, breathing in labored gasps, wincing with every step. The sounds of nightlife increased. After passing a church with a thirty-foot entrance, he at last entered the piazza housing two of Bologna’s most beloved landmarks, Tower Asinelli and the crazily leaning Tower Garisenda.

  Pedestrians, street hawkers, cars, and taxis whisked around the traffic circle. Trattorias were still serving dinner. As soon as Dr. Corwin was safely ensconced in a taxi, speeding toward his hotel, he took a deep breath and considered his next step.

  For a moment, he debated heading for the nearest sanctuary, the library inside the Archiginnasio. He knew a secret entrance, and the library was well fortified. Still, after that brazen attack in the city center, he dared not risk another betrayal. Best to aim straight for his hotel, where he could lock himself in his room and request protection.

  Yet to whom could he turn? That was the insidious nature of betrayal. The damage it did to the rest of one’s relationships. Could it be Lars Friedman? Dr. Corwin would have bet his life otherwise. Anastasia? Xialong?

  Or was it Zawadi after all? The thought of this—the most probable answer—caused him to feel as if he had aged another decade in the last hour. What did they offer her? Or has she always been in their thrall?

  The hotel was minutes away. Bologna’s exquisite old town—courtyard palaces and uneven cobblestone lanes and romantic balconies jutting over porticos—passed by in a blur. His thoughts turned to safeguarding his invention. The test run that had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. This was no mere path to enlightenment through the tangled wood of history.

  This was a door that had never been unlocked.

  Even if he arrived safely back in Durham, all could still be lost. All could already be lost. He had to act fast, to protect what little chance remained. Letting his invention fall into the wrong hands could be catastrophic.

  “Signore!” he said to the taxi driver.

  “Sì?”

  “I need a favor. A very important one,” he said in fluent Italian. “And I’m willing to pay for it.”

  “Buono,” the cabbie said, hesitant.

  “Tomorrow morning, as soon as you can, I need you to mail something for me.”

  The driver’s face scrunched in confusion, but Dr. Corwin was already scribbling a note to Andie on a sheet of paper he had ripped from a Moleskine journal he carried in his briefcase. He hated to involve her but saw no other way. She was perhaps the only person on the planet he could trust without question, and who had no connection to the Society.

  He left Andie’s address on the piece of paper, gave the driver further instructions, and tipped him an extra one hundred euros in front of the hotel. As archaic as it seemed, snail mail sent by a random person was the best way to ensure the note arrived undetected. And if Andie did exactly as he said, no one should know of her involvement.

  He hoped he was making the right decision.

  Beaming, the driver shook Dr. Corwin’s hand and sped off. If something happened to the professor before he reached the United States, the fate of his invention depended on the integrity of a single Bologna cabdriver.

  Still reeling from the attack, his mind spinning with permutations, Dr. Corwin hurried toward the entrance to the Starhotels Excelsior, absorbing his surroundings with a glance. Plenty of cars still traversed the busy road that separated the old city from modern Bologna. A well-dressed couple who looked American had just exited the hotel, arm-in-arm. To his left, three Germans stumbled toward a late-night bar. Nearest to him, a homeless woman had just stepped onto the curb, approaching with a palm extended. The left side of her neck was distended by a grotesque tumor, covered in sores, slick with blood and pus. He hefted his briefcase and hobbled away from her, not trusting how quickly she had targeted him. Though the woman’s wrinkled hands and soiled clothing appeared genuine, such a disguise would be child’s play for the people searching for him.

  As he limped away on his cane, she pressed closer beneath the sodium glow of the streetlamps, muttering in rural Italian as she jabbed at her tumor, demanding attention. He could smell the reek of her now, fetid and rotting. Feeling her hand brush his shirt, he glanced back in alarm and saw the truth in her eyes: The stench of this woman was the stench of death. It was no disguise.

  The knowledge that she might have been used as a decoy chilled him, right as he turned to see the American woman unlock her arm from her companion’s, exposing a tiny handgun concealed by her purse and pointed right at the professor. From the shadows to his right, a hooded shape darted out, also holding a gun. Yet the muzzle flash came from the woman’s small pistol.

  The force of the bullet jerked Dr. Corwin to the side like a marionette. He stumbled and fell, blood pouring from his shoulder, as the American couple drew back in feigned shock. Two porters from the hotel rushed right past them as the man in the dark hood grabbed Dr. Corwin’s belongings and fled into the night.

  A police siren cut through the pandemonium outside the hotel. Within moments, a carabiniere whipped into the street and parked right beside Dr. Corwin, blue lights strobing, followed by an ambulance. Both vehicles must have been right around the corner.

  The pain was intense, but Dr. Corwin thought he would survive. As the paramedics inspected the wound, applied oxygen, and lifted him onto a stretcher, he tried to explain what had happened. No one would listen, and they kept telling him to calm down as the onlookers pointed the carabiniere in the direction the man in the dark hood had run off. Dr. Corwin looked around in vain as two paramedics loaded him into the ambulance, but the American couple had disappeared.<
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  As the ambulance swept through Bologna, the paramedics cleaned and bandaged the professor’s wound and sedated him with an intravenous drug. When the ambulance came to a stop, he realized something was wrong as soon as the rear doors opened and he saw crates stacked along the walls of a dingy warehouse. One of the paramedics held him down while the other took a scalpel and removed the skin from the underside of one of Dr. Corwin’s thumbs. The sedative dulled the pain and drowned his feeble protestations. After bandaging that wound, they shoved a tight-fitting latex mask over his face. He panicked when he couldn’t breathe, but then he heard a telltale beep—likely a handheld scanner—and they removed the mask.

  All of this happened very quickly, and Dr. Corwin could only watch in horror as the paramedics hustled him out of the ambulance and lifted him into the trunk of a black sedan. Just before the trunk closed, he saw another man setting a plastic-wrapped corpse, similar in age and build to Dr. Corwin, into the back of the ambulance.

  Durham, North Carolina

  2

  Andie Robertson woke bleary-eyed and stumbled to the bathroom of her rental home, a midcentury modern in dire need of renovation on the outskirts of Durham. The semester had ended, but she was helping Dr. Corwin with a textbook over the summer, and a folder full of source checks had kept her up half the night.

  Though she would have helped him for free, because it was Dr. Corwin and because she loved the research, her mentor knew she needed the money. Andie was a PhD candidate in astrophysics at Duke. With her tuition scholarship, teaching duties, and the pittance she made as Dr. Corwin’s research assistant, she was able to scrape by, but her lifestyle included copious amounts of coupon shopping, street food, and camping out at local coffee shops.

  Though a state school was more Andie’s speed, she had come to Duke because of Dr. Corwin. He was not just her faculty mentor; he was an old family friend. Twenty years ago, when Andie was a young girl in Princeton, New Jersey, Dr. Corwin had mentored Andie’s mother, Samantha, in her own PhD studies. Samantha was his favorite student. Andie’s father was a novelist who loved to cook. They often invited Dr. Corwin—a lifelong bachelor— over for dinner parties, or even by himself for a solid meal during the week. Andie and Dr. Corwin had spent many hours in the back yard, cataloguing the garden and studying the sky after dark, while her parents prepared dinner.

  Over the years since her mother disappeared, Andie had continued her close relationship with Dr. Corwin, and considered him a second father.

  Was my mother anything like me? Andie sometimes wondered. Before she decided to abandon her family and go find herself in the Far East, traipsing through temples and ruins while her husband drank and flailed, leaving her daughter to grow up bitter and alone?

  No. We are nothing alike.

  As always, Andie crushed thoughts of her mother as she would a roach scuttling across the floor.

  She brushed her teeth and thought about more pleasant things, like her plans over the break. Late spring in Durham was glorious and green. She liked when the city emptied of students and the humidity pulsed and the cool dark interior of a coffee shop beckoned. Stargazing at night on her flagstone patio, watching a movie during the afternoon heat, day trips to Wrightsville Beach.

  Andie finished brushing and leaned over the sink, splashing water on her face to wake up, running her fingers through short brown hair with cowlicks as stubborn as a rusty lock. She didn’t do hairstyles, rarely bothered with makeup, and bit her nails to the quick.

  Water dripped off her fingers, trickling down her narrow face. When she rubbed her eyes and looked up, the mirror had disappeared and she was floating inside a shadow world that surrounded her like the bottom of a dark lake, suffocating, all-consuming. Her surroundings still resembled her bathroom—the outlines of the objects and walls were intact, though transparent, revealing a hazy vista that resembled the gloom of a dusk sky. It was a place both familiar and surreal. Shapes of vaguely human forms, haunting and ominous, drifted through the murky substance of the void. A sensation of being watched overcame her, and of others seeking escape, and of glimpsing a small piece of a greater whole.

  And, above all, a feeling of being hopelessly, terrifyingly lost.

  The vision lasted only a moment, as it always did, winking out of existence as abruptly as it had arrived. Reeling, she thrust her palms onto the bathroom counter for support. She was dizzy and nauseated, panting, whipping her head around to make sure the room was real.

  Dammit, when will this stop?

  Andie had experienced similar visions countless times, for as long as she could remember. It was more than a dream, because she felt fully conscious. Yet it was not the real world either.

  She had hoped it would end when she reached adulthood. Instead the visions had grown stronger. No doctor or psychiatrist had been able to help; she didn’t even think they believed her. Stress and sudden bright lights seemed to be triggers, similar to epilepsy, though no drug had provided any relief. And sometimes it happened for no reason at all, as it just had. After a lifetime of searching for answers, from mysticism to traditional religion to scouring the annals of unexplained psychiatric phenomena, she now believed it was a glitch in her mind. Part of the great yawning mystery of the human brain and consciousness that science was barely at the tip of comprehending.

  As with everything else, she wanted to blame her mother, but these flashes had predated her desertion. Unable to give voice to the experience as a child, Andie had never even told her.

  After a minute, the dizziness passed, and she felt normal again. Or as normal as she ever felt. With a shuddering breath, she pulled a pair of summer jeans over her long legs, then shrugged into a green tank top that her pointy collarbone jutted out of in an annoying way. She didn’t care. It was hot.

  She ate a quick breakfast and finished dressing: a jade ring, a pair of leather bracelets dyed silver, and single-hued magenta knit sneakers—shoes were her one nod to fashion. Dr. Corwin was scheduled to return in two days, and she had a lot of work to finish.

  But first, she had a different sort of obligation.

  A child with a coffee-toned complexion in the front row waved her hand in the air, her mass of curly hair bouncing like copper springs. “Hey, are you really a teacher?”

  From her podium atop the scuffed auditorium stage, Andie smirked and tapped the silver piercing in her left nostril. She had heard the children giggling about it. “Does this suggest I’m not?”

  “It means you’re different.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. Is that your only question?”

  The girl, maybe eight years old, thought for a moment. “I know we’ve been to the moon, but I want to go to a star. Can I do that one day?”

  “That’s a great question. I’d love to go to a star one day too.”

  “So can we?”

  “Hmm. Did you know the closest star to Earth is the sun?”

  “The sun isn’t a star. It’s the sun.”

  The other children giggled at the little girl’s brashness. Milky Way Monday had become one of Andie’s favorite days of the month. She loved almost everything about her chosen field: the cutting-edge research, the nights spent gazing at the heavens, the heated debates about radical cosmological theories with her colleagues.

  Yet modern astrophysics was an esoteric field that dealt with concepts and distances vaster than most people could imagine. Mathematical formulas so complex they resembled an alien language.

  Andie found a visceral and very human satisfaction in talking about the cosmos to elementary school kids in daycare programs, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of East Durham. Not because the kids were any different—she found most children, in their own ways, amazing and insightful—but because of the chance to spark the imagination of kids who might not have the best opportunities in life.

  How many geniuses had humanity lost over the years to poverty or circumstance?

  How much further along might we be?

  Whi
le Andie was a very driven woman now, she would have fallen through the cracks herself without the intervention of Dr. Corwin at certain times in her life.

  “I’m not sure you’d want to go to the sun,” Andie said to the crowd of children. “It’s a little bit hot up there.”

  “How hot?” challenged the same girl.

  “The parts you can see are, oh, about five times hotter than lava.”

  “Hotter than lava?”

  “You think that’s hot?” Andie said. “The nuclear fusion at the core of the sun can reach temperatures of twenty-seven million degrees!”

  This fact elicited a roomful of blank looks. Neither nuclear fusion nor million-degree temperatures were cool. Lava was cool.

  “So you like volcanoes?” Andie asked, trying to recover. Children kept her much higher on her toes than a roomful of undergrads.

  “Yeah! Yeah!”

  “Did you know the planet Mars has a volcano three times as tall as Mount Everest? It’s the tallest mountain in the whole solar system.” After a few oohs and aahs, she turned to the curly-headed girl again. “Let’s get back to your question. What’s your name?”

  The girl twirled a finger in her hair. “Kayla.”

  Using a laser pointer, Andie aimed at one of the stars displayed on the projector screen. “You want to go to one of these, right? Maybe that bright one right there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “After the sun, this is the next-closest star to Earth. Its name is Proxima Centauri, and it’s about four point three light-years away. Does anyone know what a light-year is?”

  Silence.

  “It’s easy. A light-year is simply the amount of distance a beam of light can travel in a year. We even know how far that is: nearly six trillion miles.”

  The class started to fidget, and Andie thought about how to make it relevant.

  “How many of your parents own a car?” Most hands shot up. “If you wanted to drive a car to Proxima Centauri, it would take you about forty million years to reach it.”