Aaron twitched the tapestry aside. “Got it,” he said, lifting the tapestry up and away. Behind it was a massive safe, made of enameled steel. Even it was white.
“Maybe her password is some variation on the word white?” Aaron suggested, looking around. “That’s definitely her thing.”
Tamara shook her head. “In this room, that would be too easy for someone to say by accident.”
Aaron frowned. “Then maybe the opposite. Jet? Onyx? Or a really bright color. Neon pink!”
Nothing happened.
“What do we know about her?” Call asked. “She’s on the Assembly, right? And she’s married to Alex’s dad, whose last name is Strike, so obviously she didn’t take his name.”
“Augustus Strike,” Tamara said. “He died a few years back. He was pretty old, though. She’d been filling in for him a lot by then, my parents said.”
“And she said something about a husband before that — and having kids,” Call said. “Maybe they got a divorce, but if not, that’s two people who married her and died. Maybe she’s one of those ladies who kills her husbands for their money.”
“A black widow?” Tamara snorted. “If she killed Augustus Strike, people would know about it. He used to be a very important mage. She has her seat on the Assembly because of him — before her marriage she was just some no-name mage from Europe.”
“She could just be unlucky,” Call said. He hadn’t realized Alex’s dad was dead. He wondered if Tamara’s parents had dissuaded Kimiya from seriously dating him because of his lack of connections. This year, Alex and Kimiya seemed to be close again, but Call wasn’t sure what that meant.
“Alexander,” he said aloud. “Alexander Strike.”
That wasn’t the password, either.
“Do we know where they were from?” Aaron asked. “Europe is a pretty big place.”
“France!” Call yelled. Nothing happened.
“Don’t just yell France!” Tamara scolded him. “There are a lot of other countries.”
“Let’s look around and see what we find,” Call said, throwing up his hands. “What do people use as their passwords? Their birthdays? The birthdays of their pets?”
Tamara found a notebook, bound in a light gray leather, under a stack of books. It held notes on the comings and goings of guards, names of elementals, and a half-composed note to the Assembly explaining how security measures at the Magisterium and Collegium could be tightened while the two Makaris were still apprentices.
Tamara dutifully read out anything that seemed like it could be a password, but the safe didn’t change.
Aaron discovered a small stack of photos with several grim-faced people, two small babies and a very young woman with dark hair standing off to one side in a baggy dress. The photos were grainy and nothing in them was familiar. The landscape was rural, with fields of flowers behind them. Was one of the children Alex? Call couldn’t tell. Babies all looked pretty much the same to him.
There was nothing written on the backs of the photographs. Nothing that could possibly help them discover a password.
Finally, Call looked under her bed. At this point, he was starting to feel a little desperate. They were so close to getting the key and being able to talk with the elementals, but increasingly he was feeling as though figuring out the password of someone they barely knew was impossible.
There were a few white shoes with low heels and a single cream-colored slipper. Behind them was a wooden box. It might have been the only thing in the whole room that wasn’t some variation on the color white. As Call scooted closer to it, he wondered if the box was hers at all. Maybe it was a leftover of the last person who’d used the room.
He pushed it out the other side and went around the bed to inspect it. Worn wood and rusty hinges — not at all her style.
“What did you find?” Aaron asked, coming over to Call. Tamara sat down next to them.
Call lifted the lid …
… and the face of Constantine Madden stared back at him.
Call felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
It was Constantine in the photograph, no doubt about it. He knew Constantine’s face as well as he knew his own, for all sorts of reasons.
Not all of him was visible. Half his face was young and still handsome. The other half was covered by a silver mask. It wasn’t the same mask that Master Joseph had once worn, to fool everyone into believing he was the Enemy. This one was smaller — it concealed the terrible burns Constantine had gotten escaping the Magisterium, but that was all.
Constantine was standing among a group of other mages, all wearing the same dull green uniforms. Call recognized only one of them: Master Joseph. Master Joseph was younger in the photo, too, his hair brown instead of gray.
Constantine’s clear gray eyes stared right at Call. It was as if he were smiling at him, down the years. Smiling at himself.
“That’s the Enemy of Death,” said Aaron in a hushed voice, leaning over Call’s shoulder.
“And Master Joseph, and a bunch of Constantine’s other followers,” said Tamara, her voice tight. “I recognize some of them. I’m starting to think …”
“That Anastasia Tarquin was one of them?” said Call. “There’s definitely something weird going on. The Enemy’s wristband opened her door, she has pictures of him …”
“She might not be keeping it because it’s him in the photo,” said Tamara. “It could be because of any of the other people.”
Call stood up on legs that felt wobbly. He faced the safe, his hands in fists at his sides.
“Constantine,” he said.
Nothing happened. Tamara and Aaron stayed where they were, half crouching over Anastasia’s opened box, looking up at him. They both had matching expressions on their faces — the expression Call thought of as their Dealing with the Fact That Call Is Evil expression. Most of the time they could ignore or forget that Call’s soul was Constantine Madden’s.
But not always.
Call thought of the followers of the Enemy of Death. What had drawn them to Constantine? The promise of eternal life, of a world with no death. The promise that loss would be reversed and grief erased. A promise that the Enemy had made to himself when his brother died, then extended to his followers. Call had never experienced real loss, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like — he didn’t even remember his mother — but he could imagine the kind of followers that Constantine had undoubtedly attracted. People who were grieving, or frightened of death. People to whom Constantine’s determination to get his brother back would have been a symbol.