In Plain Sight

“You’re very eager to get me to leave,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with your rune. I think you just decided to cut me out.” She waved her gun, motioning Alex to step back, and he did. Once he was away from the table, she looked at his drawings again. “You don’t have any doubts,” she said. “This rune is perfect.”

“So, you’re a runewright,” Alex said. He’d guessed as much, but it was nice to have his suspicions confirmed.

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “I am. I may not have your skill, but I can understand what you’ve done here. You’ve finished deciphering it,” she indicated his notes. “You just haven’t finished writing it.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Fortunately, I can.”

“So,” Alex said. “What now?”

She motioned him over toward the metal bed, though he was sure she didn’t have anything so pleasant involved this time.

“Sit,” she said, then handed him a pair of handcuffs from her purse.

Alex took the cuffs and looped them around the metal bar that formed the bed’s footboard, locking the cuff first onto his bound-up left hand, then carefully onto his right. Once he was secured, Evelyn put the gun against his chest and tugged at the cuffs with her free hand.

“So,” Alex said, trying to remain calm. “You must be the person who enticed that government researcher…what was his name?”

“You mean dear Quinton Sanderson?” Evelyn said, slipping her gun back into her purse. “Yes. I got him to steal the original drawings of the Monograph runes. He was very eager to help me once I explained what they were.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Of course not,” she said, her voice indignant. “He disappeared, just like Thomas.”

“So, you’re not Thomas’ sister either.” He thought back to the bed in Thomas’ apartment and how obvious it was that he had a lover. Clearly Evelyn had seduced him to get his help. The thought made Alex uncomfortable, especially sitting on the bed where Evelyn had done the same to him.

“No,” she said, drawing the stool up to the workbench and leaning over Alex’s drawings. “I found Thomas and convinced him to help me find the Monograph after poor Quinton disappeared.”

“He didn’t disappear,” Alex corrected her. “Neither did Thomas. They died trying to find that book.”

“And now you have succeeded where they failed,” Evelyn said, selecting a pen and an ink pot.

“No,” Alex said. “I haven’t. If you finish that rune and cast it, you and I will be just as dead as Thomas and Quinton.”

She turned and smiled at him.

“Never try to con a con artist,” she said. “Even I can see that your construct is finished. It’s balanced and elegant, nothing like that convoluted mess it started out as.”

She began to draw, filling in the missing parts of the construct, line by line from Alex’s notes.

“How is it you even knew about the Archimedean Monograph?” Alex asked after a few minutes passed in silence. “I mean, I can see Quinton stumbling across it in his work, but you didn’t work there. If you had, you wouldn’t have needed him.”

“My mother was one of the original researchers the government had working on the Monograph runes. She used to tell me stories about it as she trained me in her craft. Then, one day, she didn’t come home for dinner. My father waited up all night, and in the morning, there were men in suits at our home.”

“She’d disappeared,” Alex guessed.

“After that, I studied everything she left behind, her notes, her Lore, everything. Of course the government men took most of it, but I saved some. Hid it under the floorboards in my room.”

“It wasn’t enough, though,” Alex observed. ‘Was it?”

She stopped her work for a moment and hung her head, the strands of her dark hair obscuring her face. “No,” she said. “I tried to get a job at the archives where my mother worked but…”

“But you didn’t have your mother’s talent,” Alex said. “If you did, you would never have needed Thomas to figure out the rune, you could have done it.”

“That’s why I need the Monograph,” she said, her voice full of passion. “Whoever reads it will be the greatest runewright in the world. Can you imagine what secrets it holds, Alex?”

“Maybe it doesn’t really exist,” Alex said. “Have you thought of that? Maybe that rune is just a trap. A way for some powerful, ancient runewright to kill off his competition.”

Evelyn laid aside the pen and stood up; she had finished writing the unscrambled finding rune.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t considered it. You saw those other runes, how complex they are, so much so that there are still two that the government hasn’t been able to identify. Those runes came from somewhere, Alex. The Archimedean Monograph is real and it’s time to find it.”

She began to clear away the inks and jars from the workbench, leaving only the paper with the rune on it. Alex had no doubt that she’d been able to copy what was left, no matter what her talent.

“I wasn’t lying, Evelyn,” he said as she worked. “That rune isn’t ready. If you activate it, it will kill you, just like Quinton, just like Thomas.”