Anastasia’s was just as easy to spot. A thick white mat had been placed in front of it, and the door itself was made of pale marble veined with black that looked like smoke. Call remembered her having all her expensive, pale white furniture carried inside on the first day of school.

  “This is her,” Call said, pointing. “It has to be.”

  “Agreed.” Aaron drew close, tapped his fingers against the marble. He examined the seams of the door, but like all doors in the Magisterium, it didn’t have hinges, just the flat pad where you were supposed to wave your bracelet to get in. Eventually Aaron stepped back, raising his hand. Call felt a familiar pull underneath his rib cage.

  Aaron was about to use chaos magic.

  “Wait,” Call said. “Don’t — not unless we absolutely have to.”

  The pulling feeling went away, but Aaron gave him a look that was almost hurt. “What have you got against chaos magic all of a sudden?”

  Call tried to form his jumbled thoughts into words. “I think it brings the Masters running,” he said. “I think they have some way of sensing it, at least when it’s used in the Magisterium.”

  “I figured it was the racket that Skelmis made in our room that got them there so fast,” said Tamara thoughtfully. “But they did race over pretty quickly for just some noise. Call could be right.”

  “Okay, then,” said Aaron. “What do you suggest?”

  For the next ten minutes they went at the door with everything they could think of. Tamara cast a fire spell, but the door was impervious. It didn’t react to freezing, either, or to “Open sesame,” or to the unlocking spell Tamara had used on the cages in the village of the Order of Disorder. It just sat there, looking at them, being a door.

  It didn’t react to being kicked, either, Call discovered.

  “Seriously?” Aaron said, after they’d exhausted their ideas and were leaning sweatily against the opposite wall. He glared at Master Milagros’s kitten poster. “All this worrying about the safe and we can’t even get past the door.”

  “Somebody got past our door,” Tamara pointed out.

  “So it’s possible,” said Call. “Or at least it should be. I mean, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. These doors are the Magisterium’s security. We shouldn’t be able to wave just any wristband at one of them and have the door open.” He waved his arm at the door for emphasis.

  There was a click.

  Tamara stood up straight. “Did that just —”

  Aaron took two strides across the hallway and pushed. The door slid open smoothly. It was unlocked.

  “That’s not right.” Tamara didn’t sound pleased; she sounded upset. “What was that? What happened?” She whirled on Call. “Are you just wearing your regular band?”

  “Yeah, of course, I’m —” Call pushed up the sleeve of his thermal shirt. And stared. His wristband was on his wrist; that was true. But he’d forgotten the wristband he’d shoved up above his elbow.

  The wristband of the Enemy of Death.

  Tamara sucked in a breath. “That doesn’t make sense, either.”

  “We’re going to have to figure it out later,” said Aaron from the doorway. “We don’t know how much time we have in her room.” He looked agitated but also a lot happier than he’d been a moment before.

  Call and Tamara followed him in, though Tamara’s expression was still worried. Call felt as if the Enemy’s wristband was burning on his arm. Why hadn’t he left it back home, with Alastair? Why had he wanted to wear it to school? He hated the Enemy of Death. Even if they were in some way the same person, he hated everything Constantine Madden stood for and everything he had become.

  “Wow,” Tamara said, shutting the door behind them. “Check out this room.”

  Anastasia’s room was stunning. The walls were glittering, veined with quartz. A thick white pile rug covered the floor. Her sofa was white velvet, her table and chairs were white. Even the paintings on the wall were done in shades of white and cream and silver.

  “It’s like being inside a pearl,” said Tamara, turning in a circle.

  “I was thinking it was like being inside a giant bar of soap,” said Call.

  Tamara gave him a withering look. Aaron was stalking around the room, looking behind the china cabinet (white, with white dishes) and behind a bookshelf (white, lined with books wrapped in white paper) and under a (white) trunk on the floor. Finally, he approached a long tapestry hanging on one wall. It had been woven in threads of cream and ivory and black, and it depicted a white mountain of snow.

  La Rinconada? Call wondered. The Cold Massacre?

  But he couldn’t be sure.

  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.

  Anastasia had lost several husbands, after all. Maybe she wanted one of them back.

  Call raised his hand, looked at the Enemy’s wristband, and then, again, at the safe.

  “Jericho,” he said.

  There was a click, and the safe opened.

  Call, Tamara, and Aaron went still at the sound. The safe was unlocked. They were going to be able to sneak down to see the elementals. The plan had worked. But Call was still nervous enough to make his hands shake.

  Anastasia had seemed like a nice, non-murderous person, but despite that, it seemed that she was either trying to kill him or she was on his side for terrible reasons. He didn’t like either option.

  “So … you better cast fire into the lock,” Tamara said. “Before that poisonous snake elemental crawls out.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Call fumbled to get his thoughts straight. Snapping his fingers, he kindled a small flame between them. Then, approaching the opening, he let it grow into a long, thin bar of flame — like an arrow without a quiver or bow. He tossed it through the open hole of the safe. It whuffed, briefly seeming to grow and burst in the enclosed space. Call couldn’t tell if there was an elemental in there, coiling around. Had he sent enough fire to destroy it? Did it disperse or just slither into some corner?

  Call reached out his arm toward the hole in the safe.

  Don’t flinch, he told himself. Don’t move fast. If you see a snake, it’s an illusion.

  His fingers edged forward as he heard an intake of breath behind him.

  “Call,” Aaron warned, “don’t go too fast.”

  The snake’s head slithered out of the hole just as Call’s hand skimmed the edge. It was the bright green of poison, with black eyes like two droplets of spilled ink. A tiny orange tongue flicked out, testing the air.

  The hair on his arms rose. His skin crawled at the feeling of a snake sliding over him, cool and dry. Was that an illusion? It didn’t feel like an illusion. Every muscle in his body clenched as, against all his instincts, he reached deeper into the safe. He felt around for a moment, encountering more coils of something that felt like smooth rope.

  He shuddered involuntarily. Outside the safe, the snake began to wind its way up his arm.

  “Anastasia wouldn’t have lied to the Masters, would she?” Call asked in a voice that quavered only a little. “This is an illusion, right?”

  “Even if it isn’t, I don’t think you should startle it,” Tamara said, her voice sharp and nervous.

  “Tamara!” Aaron scolded. “Call, we’re sure. It’s an illusion. Just keep going. You’re almost there.”

  Aaron should probably have been the one to do this, Call thought. Aaron definitely wouldn’t have been seriously considering giving a high-pitched scream and bolting out of the room, not even worrying about the alarm.

  But along with that thought came a tiny thread of doubt. If Aaron did want him dead, what better way than to tell Call to do something stupid. What better way than to encourage him to be brave and dumb.

  No, Call told himself, Aaron isn’t like that. Aaron’s my friend.

  The snake had reached Call’s neck. It started to twine, making itself into a snaky necklace … or a noose.

  At that moment, Call’s finger touched what felt like a key. The jagged metal bit was cool against his skin. He closed his palm over it.

  “I have it. I think,” he said, starting to withdraw his hand.

  “Go slow!” Aaron commanded, almost making him jump.

  He glared in Aaron’s direction. “I am!”

  “We’re almost there,” Tamara said.

  Call’s arm emerged, then his hand, with the key in it. As soon as he was free, the snake disappeared in a puff of foul-smelling smoke, and the safe resealed itself.

  They’d done it. They had the bronze key.

  They closed up Anastasia’s room as fast as they could and hurried toward the deep passage of the Magisterium where the elementals were kept. Call kept glancing nervously back over his shoulder as he went, half expecting Rufus or one of the other Masters to have discovered what they were doing and come after them.

  No one was there, though. The corridors were quiet, and then even quieter as the stone around them smoothed out, the walls and floor turning into marble that was so polished it was slippery. Doors carved with alchemical symbols flashed by, but this time Call didn’t pause to look at them. He was sunk into thoughts of Anastasia Tarquin, of the photo in her room. Of Master Joseph. Was Anastasia Tarquin one of his servants? Was she the spy in the Magisterium, looking out for Call because he was — despite everything that had happened — still Master Joseph’s Chosen One, the soul of the Enemy of Death?

  Tamara came to a stop in front of the massive door made from the five metals of the Magisterium — iron, copper, bronze, silver, and gold. It shone softly in the ambient light of the corridor. She turned to look at Call and Aaron, a determined expression on her face. “Let me handle this,” she said, and knocked once, sharply, on the door.

  After a long pause it swung open. One of the young guards Call remembered from the last time they’d been there squinted out at Tamara suspiciously.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. He looked like he was about nineteen, with shaggy black hair. The uniforms of the Collegium were a deep navy, with stripes of different colors down the sleeves. Call suspected the colors meant something — everything in the mage world did. “What’s up, kid?”

  Tamara restrained her annoyance at being called “kid” admirably.

  “The Masters want to see you,” she said. “They said it’s important.”

  The boy swung the door wider. Behind him, Call could see the antechamber, with its sofa and dark red walls. The tunnel leading away into the distance. His heart pounded. It was all so close.

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?” the boy said. “Why would the Masters want me to leave my post? And why would they send a runt like you to get me?”

  Aaron exchanged a look with Call. If the Collegium guy didn’t cool it, Call thought, he’d end up on the floor with Tamara’s boot on his neck.

  “I’m Master North’s assistant,” Tamara said. “He wanted me to give you this.” She held out the guide-stone. The boy’s eyes widened. “It’ll take you to where the meeting is — you need to give evidence about the protections here. Otherwise you could be in trouble, or your boss could be.”

  The boy took the guide-stone. “It wasn’t her fault,” he said, sounding resentful. “Or any of the guards’. That elemental came from somewhere else.”

  “So go tell them that,” said Tamara.

  Clutching the guide-stone, the boy stepped out into the corridor. He slammed the door behind him, and Call heard the tumblers of a dozen locks as they slid into place.

  “Better scram,” the boy said, glancing briefly over the three of them, and then headed off down the hall.

  When the guard was out of sight, Call fumbled the key out of his pocket.