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Were they messages? Magic? Some ancient wisdom entrusted only to her parents?
    Why hadn’t her father continued teaching her?
    Why hadn’t he given her anything to go on?
    She narrowed her eyes and curled her lacerated fingertips into her palms.
    It
wasn’t
safe. He was right about that.
    They
wanted it, and they’d never stop until they had it.
    They’d come for her father. They’d come for Nin. And they would come for Sefia sooner or later. No one was safe.
    Unless she stopped them.
    Sefia closed the lid and clicked the clasps back into place. She’d use it against them if she could, but they would never lay their hands on it again.
    All these years, she’d had someone to protect her, but now she was alone, and
they
were still out there. With Nin, if she wasn’t already . . . Sefia dug her fingers into the, hissing as the pressure stung her paper cuts.
No.
Nin needed her now. Needed her strength and her resilience, her cleverness and her resolve.
    There was only one way to protect herself from the people who had destroyed her family.
    She had to stop them herself.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    S he tried to pick up the trail again a day later when her ankle hurt less, but the rains had washed everything through, eliminating whatever footprints they’d left in the jungle. Though crowds made her uneasy, she scouted populated areas for signs of the woman in black and her mysterious companion, asking after them in nearby villages and in lumber encampments in the forest.
    But no one had seen them.
    No one knew anything.
    It was as if they’d disappeared altogether, leaving her with only one clue: the strange box of paper with the symbol on the lid.
    So she retreated into the thick jungles of Oxscini to sharpen her skills and study the object. She turned every hunt into a challenge now, made sure every arrow found its mark. She figured out how to throw knives and make poisoned arrows from the skins of frogs, to sneak up on prey twice her size and track targets in the dark.
    Because she knew they were out there, the people who came for her father, who came for Nin, and who would come for her too . . . if she didn’t get to them first.
    Sefia spent weeks stalking around Oxscini’s interior, poring over the papers, inspecting, searching, wondering. She took to making her camp in the trees, in a hammock fashioned out of rope, and when she took out the strange object, she felt like someone were peering over her shoulder, scanning the lines for secrets just as she was.
    It didn’t take her long before she could recognize different marks as easily as she recognized animal tracks—the empty gasp of an
O
, the murmur of an
M
—but it wasn’t until a month later, on a night with a full moon shedding pale light over the canopy, while she was lying in her hammock with the object propped up on her knees, that she began to read.
    A single line had caught her eye. Just a few markings clustered together, like the footprints of a sandpiper that has abruptly taken flight. They stood out because they were alone;the other marks paraded on and on across the paper, but these ones were flanked by white space.
    She leaned so close to the paper that the tip of her nose nearly touched it, and she inhaled its pulpy odor. Furrowing her brow, she fought for the right sounds, willing her tongue and teeth to work—the whispered consonant, the hiss.
    This
    Grinning, she smacked the paper with the flat of her hand. She said it once more, memorizing the order of the shapes: “This!” The next word was faster:
    is
    And the one after, even quicker:
    a
    The last one made her pause. She struggled with the pieces, trying to force them together, to make them make sense.
    â€œB-buh . . . buh . . .”
    Then it came to her, in all its clarity, leaping like light out of a prism, into bands of color:
    book .
    She said the whole thing again, more sure of