“You guys,” I said with a sigh. “We’re trying to save the world. It’s not selfish to improve ourselves. Consider it your duty to take the jinsei. Not because it’s what you want, but because it’s what the world needs from you. You’re heroes. Armor yourselves for what’s coming. Because I guarantee you our enemies won’t hesitate to use every resource at their disposal to destroy us.”
“I understand,” Abi said.
Eric nodded and shook my hand. The two of them no longer seemed nervous or uncertain. They looked more confident than I’d ever seen them before.
“We’ll meet down here for lunch,” I said, “and see how everyone is doing.”
“I’ll make sure the spirit staff prepare a hearty meal for you,” Niddhogg said as he fluttered toward the kitchen. “Lotsa meat and carbs to refuel!”
Clem snatched the last case off the table and tilted her head toward the door. “Let’s get to work.”
We dumped our trays in the bin by the door and headed for our dorms. Eric and Abi took off to split up their share of the sacred energy, and I followed Clem to her dorm room to do the same. Hahen told me he’d meet me back in the room, then vanished through a wall. It was still hard to get used to that trick.
“Don’t judge,” Clem said when we reached her door. “I’m not much of a housekeeper.”
She took a deep breath as if steeling herself for an unpleasant task, then threw open the door and stormed into her room.
Other than a small pile of clothes on her desk chair and an unmade bed, the room was spotless. If there was a speck of dirt anywhere, I would have been amazed.
“Clem—” I started, only to have her cut me off.
“I know, let me just throw these in the cleaner,” she said as she snatched the pile off the chair and tossed it into the closet. “I’d make the bed, but there’s not—”
“It’s fine,” I insisted. “Really.”
To prove my point, I threw myself onto her bed. A faint whiff of perfume rose from the sheets as I bounced off the mattress. It was light and citrusy, a scent I’d only just realized followed Clem wherever she went. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed how good my friend smelled before that moment.
“I still haven’t adjusted to doing all this myself,” Clem said, a red flush creeping into her cheeks. “I never had to worry about it at home. And here it never seems there’s enough time.”
With everything we had going on in our lives, Clem worried about making her bed. I wanted to laugh at how ridiculous that was but stifled the urge in order to save her feelings. If it was important to my friend that she make her own bed, there must be some reason.
“Hanging out with me keeps you busy,” I said. “You’ve had more important things to do. Like checking out these keys.”
I pulled the chain from around my neck and unlatched the fastener. All four of the orichalcum keys slid off its silver length and landed on Clem’s messy bed.
She flopped down next to me and picked up one of the treasures. She tried to rotate the compass in the end, but it refused to budge. “Is this what you went to get before Siberia?”
“Three of them,” I said. “Already had one. They look almost identical. They’re supposedly called Empyrean Wind Keys, though the only place I read that term was in Tariq Khan’s interview. He might have made the whole thing up.”
“You took these from Tariq Khan?” Clem asked. One of her eyebrows was raised very high, and her lips were pursed.
“Maybe?” I shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“I hope not,” she said. “I heard his name a few times this summer. He was always inviting my host family to fundraisers for one thing or another. But who wants to go to Egypt in the summer? Ugh. Did you notice all these have a different cardinal direction facing the top of the key?”
“Huh, no,” I admitted, and looked at the keys as Clem had arranged them. My key, with north facing the top and the needle fixed on the book symbol on the rim, was on the far left. The next key had east at the top, the next south, and west on the final key. Seen that way, it was obvious that all of the keys had slightly different barrels. Mine was thicker at the top, but narrowed at the tip, while the West key on the opposite end of the line was the exact opposite. The South and East keys had slightly thicker barrels in the middle and were narrow on either end. “They look like they fit together.”
It took me only a few seconds to pick up the North and East key and figure out how to assemble them. The South and West keys were easy to snap into place after that, and as I did so, the compass ends each bent away from the barrels, forming a sort of cradle at the key’s wide end. At the toothed end, the key now had four blades jutting away from a barrel that was the same thickness all the way down.
Clem’s eyes burned with curiosity as she watched me assemble the key. “That has to be right,” she said. “Now what?”
Now that the key was fully assembled, it was as solid as if it had been forged in that configuration. I couldn’t have pulled the pieces apart if I’d tried. “This end looks like it’s meant to hold something.”
“The Heart,” Clem said. “We should get the others.”
Clem was right, but I didn’t want to share this moment with anyone else. I shook my head and dug the
