Nightingale, Sing by Knight Karsten

Author:Knight, Karsten [Knight, Karsten]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2016-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

The cinders stop smoldering

The flames now effete

But his gaze watches, vigilant,

While his gilded heart beats

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. A riddle within a riddle?

You can figure this out, I coached myself. You don’t need Atlas’s help on everything. I traced my finger through the stanzas and isolated the keywords.

Cinders.

Flames.

Gaze.

Gilded.

Something else caught my attention. At the end of the word heart, the cursive trail extending from the letter “t” was looping and misshapen, as though the pen had trailed on too long. When I squinted at the page, I realized it wasn’t accidental at all. That squiggle was actually the letter “h.”

The word was hearth.

My head snapped to the left. There was the fireplace, cold and unused—its cinders no longer smoldering, its flames long since dead. There was the portrait of Harry Widener gazing vigilantly.

And sandwiched between the portrait above and the fireplace below was a golden inlay in the wood.

A gilded hearth.

I knelt in front of the fireplace. My hands groped around the gold ornament for any sign of weakness, but it was firmly attached to the wall. However, when I slipped my arm inside the flue, I discovered a loose brick directly behind it.

I dug blindly, raking at the loose mortar with my nails, until at last the stone popped free into my hand. On its exposed side, it was a normal brick, its craggy surface stained with soot. But when I flipped it over, I found that someone had carved out the middle and placed a rolled up page inside.

The ninth riddle.

I tucked the journal page into my pocket, brick and all, and drew my hood tight around my face. Then I walked briskly down the main staircase, inhaled a deep breath, and unlocked the library’s front doors.

The alarms sounded instantly. Outside, a group of freshman girls standing on the quad turned in surprise. When they saw me barreling down the stone steps with all but my eyes concealed, they shrieked and ran in the opposite direction.

The university police had a better response time then I’d anticipated. I turned the corner just as a public safety van came barreling across the quad.

But they wouldn’t find me. By the time I heard the car doors slamming and the chatter from the officers as they hurdled up the stairs, I was already disappearing through a side gate. I cast off my hood as I stepped out onto Mass Ave. so I wouldn’t look suspicious, before making my way back to the subway station.

I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until the train car jerked forward, heading away from the platform and back downtown, toward the safety of the Dollhouse. The car was empty except for a blind man with a seeing-eye dog, who’d boarded right before the doors hissed closed. Still, I resisted the urge to take out the riddle and read it. I kept one hand delicately draped over the bulge the brick formed in my pocket.

With the car in motion, I finally remembered to text Atlas. Chill the champagne, I wrote, just enough to put his anxiety to rest.

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