She held it up. "Strength."
I shook my head, and shuffled through the cards until I found the one I was looking for. "This is Strength." My fingers tingled when I named the card, and from the way the Chorus churned, I knew that it wasn't, even though my eyes told me otherwise.
"It's the Fool, Michael," Marielle said. "You're holding the Fool."
Of course I was.
"No, I'm holding Strength, and you're holding the Sun. What you see is the Fool and Strength," I said, pointing to each of the cards.
"I don't understand this game," she said.
I took the card from her, and as I touched it, the lines started to squirm and change. I shuffled it back into the deck, along with the card I had picked out. "They keep changing on me. Sometimes into other cards, sometimes into weird amalgamations of multiple cards. I cut the deck in half and showed her. "See? Strength and the Fool." I waited until she nodded in agreement and then I put my hands back together, and without changing their position, split the deck in the same place again. "Now what do you see?"
"The same thing."
I looked. "I see the Sun and the High Priestess."
"How is that possible?" she asked.
"I don't know if it has something to do with your father or if I'm just losing my mind from all the recent activity in my brain, but the lines don't stay in place. The cards keep shifting, as if he's using them to communicate. Not very clearly, mind you. But when he wants to tell me something, he manipulates the cards."
In spite of the implication of her father being un-dead, Marielle stepped closer and grabbed my arm. "What are they telling you?" Her grip was tighter than necessary, and her body was uncharacteristically rigid.
"The Sun and the High Priestess," I said, putting the deck back together and taking advantage of that motion to drag my arm out of her grasp. Shuffling the deck a few more times, I cut it, reversed the halves, and went to flip over the top card.
"Stop." Marielle covered the deck with her hand. "No, I believe you."
"It's just a card," I said. "It's all in my head."
"It isn't," she said. Her tongue touched her lip nervously. "Leave it alone. Don't invite anything in. Not with those cards. Let them be."
"You have a better idea?" I asked as the Chorus slid around my spine and squeezed. What was it about the Sun and the High Priestess that had her so agitated?
She hesitated, caught by some internal argument.
"We've been spotted. We need to go somewhere else."
Marielle's gravity well fluttered. For a second, she almost seemed to be a little girl again, and then the weight of her Will came down and the image vanished.
"What about Tevvys' phone?" I suggested, trying to jostle her out of her mental peregrinations. "We could try to crack his passcode."
"I don't have it."
"What? Moreau gave it to you."
"He did, but I don't have it anymore. I left it back at the apartment."
"Why didn't you say so in the car?"
"I was-" She took a deep breath. "It doesn't matter."
"It does. I told Moreau-"
She cut me off. "It doesn't matter. It was a dumb idea."
"No, it wasn't."
"It was. For a number of reasons. Besides, if they wanted to call us, they'd call my phone. I'm sure someone has the number."
I wanted to argue the point, but before the words got all the way out of my throat, I realized she was right. If they wanted to talk, they'd be able to figure out how to reach us. No one knew my number but Marielle, but I'm sure a lot of the Watchers knew her number. The Chorus chattered, admonishing me too, and I bristled more at their umbrage than Marielle's comments. What was the other choice? I asked them. Killing Moreau?
I blocked their response, as the question had been rhetorical. It was so easy to find that path again, wasn't it? And what had I gained from going that route previously? Walking the dark path in the wood had only brought me and others pain. That wasn't the way. Regardless of what others wanted me to do.
"Don't worry about it," she said, filling my silence. "I'm sure Moreau took you seriously when you told him. And he might even have tried to follow your-"
"Don't," I said. "I get it. I fucked up."
She ran her hands through her hair, brushing it back from her face. "I'm sure the building collapsed on him," she said finally. "Squashed him flat."
"I'm sure he sold us out the first chance he got," I said, nearly at the same time.
We paused, waiting for the other to speak, and when neither of us leaped into the gap, she smiled. "What is done is done. Let's move on."
"Agreed." I waited for a second before asking. "The cards."
Her smile faded, but she nodded.
I turned over the top card of the deck. The Sun. The twins on horseback. Lafoutain moved in the cloud of the Chorus, and one word escaped from the vortex of their noise. Daughters.
Marielle eyed the card with some trepidation, and when I tapped it, she looked away somewhat nervously. The Chorus couldn't read her: her pulse was gone, and the swirling energy caught beneath the boat dispersed into the general stream of psychic force that ran through Paris.
"Daughters." When she appeared to not hear me, I said it again. "Tell me about the daughters, Marielle."
She searched my face for some sign that I knew what I was talking about, and the Chorus slapped away her subtle attempt to read my aura. I locked myself off as completely as she had-two can play this game-and stared back at her. Willing to wait her out.
When I had started to explain to her how her father moved in the cards, she had been nervous. Anxious, as if her father could tell me something she didn't want me to know. Like father, like daughter: the family couldn't help but keep secrets. Was that what Lafoutain was talking about? The age-old argument that men are transparent, unable to keep a secret to save their lives, but it is women who are impossible to read. If you want any secret to be truly kept confidential, you tell your daughter and not your son.
"All right," Marielle said. She nodded toward the quay. "Find us a cab. I'll call ahead and let them know we're coming. They can tell you themselves."
She seemed relieved that I hadn't asked about the High Priestess.
Tour Montparnasse stuck out of the glittering landscape of Paris like a bruised middle finger. The skyscraper was one of those concessions to modernity that was immediately regretted as soon as it was finished; shortly after the building was done, Paris outlawed any further skyscrapers within the central part of the city. One of those rare moments of humility from a civic government, and some believe the building remains so that no one ever forgets. You can kill the magic of a city by changing it too much.
It reminded me of the Eglanteria Terrace, the building in Portland where Bernard took the theurgic mirror and launched his assault on humanity. A spire to Heaven, drenched in darkness.
At the tower, Marielle typed a security code into the pad in the elevator, and we ascended to an unmarked floor. The doors opened onto a simple foyer, with a rose marble floor and pale green walls. There was no other exit, just a small marble plaque-the same sort of rose stone like the floor-with the letters "l F d M" engraved in it and another security keypad.
Mounted in each of the four corners of the room were tiny blisters of security monitors. Discrete enough to be easily missed, but not so invisible that you didn't see them if you were looking.
Marielle entered another passcode and the light on the pad flashed green, but nothing happened. In response to my raised eyebrow, she nodded toward one of the security cameras. "Entering the right code only announces you," she said. "You still have to be invited in."