“I think you are the only one who does,” Grace said.
“That’s not true. Jesse believes in you. In fact, all of them believe in you. They have left this task in your hands, Grace. Because they believe you can do it. It is only up to you to believe it too.”
Behind her eyelids, now, she saw not Christopher, but the notes he had given her—his observations, his equations, his questions. His handwriting scrolling across the darkness, and then her own notes, intertwining with his, and Christopher believed in her. And Jesse, Jesse believed in her. And just because her mother had never thought she was worth anything didn’t mean her mother had been right.
“It’s not the runes,” she said, almost opening her eyes with the shock of the realization. “It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the steles.”
“I knew you could do it.” She heard the smile in his voice. “And you’ve invented ever-burning vellum. Splendid work, Grace.”
Something brushed against her temple, tucking her hair behind her ear. A ghostly touch, a goodbye. A moment later, she knew he was gone.
She opened her eyes, turning to look behind her. There was nothing there, yet the wave of despair she had expected did not crash over her. Christopher was not there, but the memory of him was like a presence—and more than that, a new feeling, something blossoming under her rib cage, something that made her push aside the papers in front of her and reach for her stele, ready to get to work.
Something that she imagined felt very like the beginning of believing in herself.
* * *
The walk through London was uneventful; Anna and Ari had to duck down an alley at one point to skirt a Watcher, but otherwise the streets were mostly empty, save for the now-expected blank-faced mundanes. As they passed a shadowy doorway, Ari glanced to the side and saw a goat-faced demon crouched in the shadows, holding four human infants. Each one was suckling at a scaled breast. Ari fought back the urge to retch.
“Don’t look,” said Anna. “It won’t do any good.”
Concentrate on the mission, Ari told herself. On the Silent City. On the end of all this.
St. Peter Westcheap had been utterly destroyed in the Great Fire. Ari had been worried it would have been built over with shops or houses, but they were in luck. At the corner of Cheapside and Wood Street was a small paved area, surrounded by a low iron railing—a piece of the old churchyard, most likely.
They went in through the gate. From the center of the courtyard rose a massive tree, its bare branches forming a sort of canopy over the few old graves that remained, their surfaces too worn to read. Benches had been placed at various intervals, their slatted wooden seats rubbed mostly away by years of rain and snow.
As Oscar bounded through the frozen bushes, Anna went to examine the old gravestones. Ari, however, found herself drawn to the tree in the courtyard’s center. It was a black mulberry; they were not native to Britain but had been brought over by the Romans, before there had ever been Shadowhunters. The bark was not black at all, but a sort of orangey-brown, and as Ari leaned in closer, she saw a pattern slashed into it. A familiar pattern.
An Unseen rune. “Anna!” she called.
Oscar barked as if he’d discovered the rune himself. Anna joined Ari at the tree, looking dusty but pleased. “Oh, well done, Ari,” she said, drawing her stele from her belt. “Now, Unseen runes are used to hide and conceal.…”
With a look of fierce concentration, Anna struck a line through the rune, obliterating it. A sort of shimmer seemed to pass over the tree, and the roots began to move beneath the ground, twisting and curling aside until a black gap opened at the base of the trunk. It looked like the entrance to a cave.
Ari got down on her knees, the ground icy-cold even through the thick material of her gear. She peered into the gap, but it was utterly dark within. Even when she took out her witchlight and illuminated it, the shadows were almost too thick to pierce; leaning in as far as she could, she glimpsed the faint outline of steps leading down. Stone steps, with faint runes carved into them, half worn away by time.
She wriggled out from under the tree and threw her head back to look up at Anna. “This has to be it,” she said. “The entrance to the Silent City.”
Anna knelt down and reached for Oscar. He snuffled at her hands as she tucked a piece of paper into his collar. “Good boy, Oscar,” she said. “Back to the Institute with you. Tell them we found it. Go on, now,” she said, and went to open the courtyard gate. Oscar trotted out bravely and set off down Cheapside at a loping pace.
Anna hurried back to Ari. “It’s getting darker,” she said. “We ought to hurry. Do you want to go first?”
Ari found that she did. The hole at the base of the trunk was narrow and oddly shaped. She had to flip over onto her stomach and wriggle backward through the gap, sliding a little before her knees met the uneven surface of the stone steps. She scrambled down them backward, on her hands and knees, until she hit a level floor.
She stood up, her witchlight held high. Above her, Anna was making her way down the stairs, managing to make crawling backward look elegant. Ari turned around slowly, shining her light into every corner. She stood in the center of a stone room, dusty but clean, with a floor made of overlapping flagstones. When she glanced up, she saw a vaulted ceiling that soared above her, studded with semiprecious stones, each one carved with a single, shining rune.
They were inside the Silent City.
* * *
Alastair had made it most of the way to meet Grace and Jesse when the explosion went off. He was pleased to note that he barely reacted. With the events of the past few weeks, a small explosion in Grosvenor Square hardly rated more than a raised eyebrow. Besides, it was quite a small explosion—just a short burst of flame in the air a few yards ahead of him, and then the smoke that remained as it went out, and in the middle of the smoke, a piece of paper.
He lunged forward to grab it before the wind whipped it away. There were Shadowhunter runes all around its edge, most of whose meanings he couldn’t remember offhand. But in the middle of the page was a note in a slightly crabbed hand:
If you are reading this, this is the first Fire-Message that has been sent with success. It has been written by Grace Blackthorn and invented by Christopher Lightwood.
He blinked at the paper for a moment, as though expecting it to disappear, or explode again, or turn out to be a hallucination.
“By the Angel,” he muttered to himself, “they did it. They actually went and did it.”
Still staring at the paper, he crossed Grosvenor Square toward the Consul’s house, and as he approached saw Jesse—wild-haired and wild-eyed—burst from the door and run down the front steps.
“Did you get it?” he shouted. “Did you get it? The message? Did it arrive?”
Triumphantly, Alastair raised the fire-message over his head. “It worked,” he said. “It bloody well worked.”
“It was Grace who figured it out,” said Jesse. “Adding a communication rune to the stele before writing the message—that was it. Can you believe it was something so simple?”
“I can believe anything at the moment,” Alastair said. And madly, insanely, under the crackling black sky of possessed London, they grinned at each other as if neither of them had ever been more delighted in their lives.