She didn’t say any more, certain he remembered Ethan and Eleanor’s obituary.

“Fine, but can we please get moving?” Keefe asked, and the frantic edge to his voice made him sound a lot more like he had earlier. He trailed his hand along the iron fence and narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to concentrate on the feel of the metal. Or maybe he was taking in all of the nearby sounds. “Nothing’s familiar here. I need to find something familiar.”

“You’re going the wrong way,” Fitz told him, pulling something crumpled out of his pocket.

It took Sophie a second to realize he’d brought the photograph of Lady Gisela—and it was hard not to hug him for thinking of that.

He pointed to the parliament building. “This is what your mom was standing in front of. It’s just hard to tell which part of the building specifically, since it all kind of looks the same—and the clock is so huge that you can see it from lots of angles. Hmm.”

He held up the photo and waved it around, like he was trying to piece it into a puzzle.

“Okay, but none of this is triggering any memories. Even the smell isn’t familiar.” Keefe sucked in a deep breath through his nose, coughing in the process.

“Yeah, the air here’s really thick,” Fitz said, crinkling his nose, “between the fog and the pollution and that weird damp smell. Are we near a river?”

“The Thames,” Sophie agreed, pointing to the lights on the bridge ahead, which happened to be the same direction that Keefe’s mom had been looking in the picture. “That might be a good way to go,” she told Keefe, “since you can see a lot from the river, like the London Eye and the Tower Bridge and the Tower of London and—”

“A river doesn’t sound familiar,” Keefe interrupted. “What about the library? Which way do we go to find that?”

“I… don’t know,” Sophie admitted. “I’ve never been there before—or seen pictures.”

And she hadn’t bothered to look it up before they’d left, because she hadn’t planned on walking that far.

Fifty minutes.

At night.

Just the three of them.

That would be a little too much spontaneity.

And they couldn’t take the Tube. Not dressed the way they were—and not without knowing what stop they’d need to take. Plus, they didn’t have any money to buy tickets, or a handy Technopath to help them make a birth fund withdrawal.

More important, though…

What happened if she brought Keefe to the scene of the accident and something about it felt familiar?

That was a kind of truth that there would be no going back from.

She hadn’t considered that when she’d offered to bring Keefe to London—hadn’t realized this little visit could make everything So. Much. Worse for him.

“Think we can ask someone for directions?” Keefe wondered.

Sophie shook her head a little too vigorously. “We can’t let anyone see us.”

“Why not?” Keefe argued. “You bought gelato in Florence! And you bought those super-dry biscuits with Dex!”

“I know, but…” She tried to think of a good excuse, and the best she could come up with was “We’re already taking enough risks. No bodyguards. Elvin clothes. Zero preparation. Dark streets with too many shadows—and we know the Neverseen come here. I don’t think we should add anything else to the mix.”

“Fine,” Keefe said, running a hand down his face. “We’ll just… start walking and hope we see a sign or something.”

“I think we should start by figuring out what your mom was looking at,” Fitz told him, locking his knees so Keefe couldn’t drag their group forward. “Once we start wandering, we might never find our way back here.”

“I agree,” Sophie said, jumping on any excuse to keep Keefe away from the library. “We need to know if there’s a hidden path.”

“Why?” Keefe demanded. “You already said we’re not going to follow it. And Forkle’s going to look for it later. And let’s not forget that there’s a chance Sandor’s let him know we snuck off—and if he has, I’m sure Forkle will guess we came here. So we want to get as far from this place as possible, so he can’t haul us back home before we’re ready.”

“But what if it’s not a hidden path?” Fitz countered, dragging Keefe and Sophie down the sidewalk. “Knowing might be important. Come on—it’ll only take a few minutes to find it.”

But it took them ten minutes just to find the exact spot where Lady Gisela had been standing.

Then the real work began.

And with each passing minute, Keefe got antsier and antsier.

“It’s hard to tell,” Fitz said, squinting in the same direction that Lady Gisela was looking in the photograph. “I think it might have something to do with that sign for the Underground, but… I don’t know.”

“Maybe,” Sophie agreed. “They could probably hide something pretty easily in all of that wrought iron. Though… would the beam of light really be able to reach her all the way over here? Seems like the crystal would have to be closer, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably true,” Fitz admitted, “unless the crystal’s up high and angled to hit a pretty strong beam of sunlight.”

“I guess,” Sophie said. “But this is London. It doesn’t get that many bright sunny days, so it seems like they’d have a lot of times when their path wasn’t usable.”

Keefe paced around the limited space covered by their obscurer. “Why are we still here? None of this is familiar.”

“That’s good, though, isn’t it?” Sophie asked, keeping her voice extra chipper. “If you’ve never been here, then—”

“Then I still have no idea where I actually went,” Keefe cut in, “or what I did. I thought that’s why we came here—you said this was about triggering my memories.”

“I know. Just… give us a few more minutes,” Sophie pleaded. It was now 11:39. If she could stall the wandering a little bit longer—like, maybe until 11:45—they’d definitely have no time to get anywhere near the library, because she was planning to use midnight as the “we need to get home and face the consequences of our actions” handy cutoff, but Keefe would still get fifteen solid minutes of exploring time. “I promise, we’ll—”

“Wait,” Fitz interrupted, placing a hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “Did something just sparkle in that metal piece under the light bulb of the streetlamp?”

Sophie followed the angle of his stare, which did look similar to the angle that Lady Gisela’s head had been tilted in the photograph.

And there did seem to be something glittering where he was pointing—but it was hard to tell with it being so dark.

“I guess it’d make sense to build the path into a streetlamp,” she realized. “That way it’s still usable on a rainy day. Maybe that’s why they chose the lantern in Paris, too.”

“Oh, that’s true,” Fitz said. “I didn’t think of that. I’m going to levitate up there and check.”