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"Hear what?" she said

"I have to go" I stood up

"Wait!" she called after ?"

"I’ll tell you later" And I was gone

Back in ed under ht last year on Grub Day, our school outing to the town of Attica Falls Its binding was a worn cream, with the title Attica Falls I wiped it off with h it until I found the article called "The Gottfried Curse," the saes Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Acadeued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of thethe paragraphs about how Gottfried was founded first as a hospital for the Undead, until the head doctor, Bertrand Gottfried, died, and the school closed its doors That’s when I found what I was looking for

Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened This time, as a school The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress She named it "Gottfried Academy," after its founder

Ophelia Hart Or Ophelia Coeur? Coeur meant "heart" in French Could they have been the sanized her from Ophelia Hart was the first headmistress of Gottfried Academy She was the nurse who had turned it into a school, and who seeedies were occurring And then in 1789, the tragedies ure out if they had anything to do with Ophelia Hart leaving the school, but there was no other inforht Ophelia could have changed her name to "Coeur" to keep her real identity a secret But it was easy to see through Why didn’t any of the books about her scientific work mention it? Why hadn’t Noah’s father, a celebrated historian, considered that Ophelia Coeur could have been the first headmistress of Gottfried? The names seemed far too si about that

And then I realized: the Ophelia that Noah’s father had told us about had done all of her water research in the early 1900s

The Ophelia on the page in front of me, the one as the first headmistress of Gottfried, had been alive in the ht around the time when the Nine Sisters had been killed

It see world, and each with a variation of "heart" as a last name But did that then mean that these two Ophelia Harts--one a nurse in the 1700s, the other a nurse and scientist in the early 1900s--were the saether Ophelia was the ninth sister That was the only explanation for hooman could stay alive for two hundred years, maybe more She had used the secret of the Nine Sisters to becoh there was no one else in the room to hear me I stared at her name in the book, unable to believe that I had finished what my parents had started, that I had actually found her I was one step closer to discovering eternal life, the secret that everyone had been searching for But as I traced the O of her name, my excitement faded to fear, and I realized that I now had exactly what the Liberum wanted, and that soon I would have to face them Life and death, Zinya had predicted I was one step closer to that, too

Chapter 14

SHUTTING THE BOOK, I THREW IT IN MY BAG AND went to the closet to get , just that now I knew I had to take protection with me everywhere I went The only person I wanted to tell was Dante, but theI was somehow still in love with hi with o?

I was about to shut the closet door, when I realized soht I’d confronted Clementine and her father, but noave of unease overca shoes and clothes out onto the floor until I had a clear view of the back The long rectangular case was there, but the shovel I kept inside it was gone

But how? Hoping I was somehow mistaken, I pulled out the case and checked behind it, but found nothing All the while, my oords echoed in my head "Just don’t let them see your shovel," I’d told Noah in the farmhouse Could the Undead have followedfaint, I glanced at the , and then at the door, wishing there was a lock on it, when I realized that there was a far sih the bathroootten back fro with two of her friends by the door

"Did you take it?" I deh my room?"

Cle about?"

"My shovel It’s gone Where is it?"

And barging toward her closet, I flung open the doors Clementine yelled at me to stop, but I didn’t care I pushed her clothes aside and fu was there

"It’s here so her protests, I checked behind the door, beneath her bed, beside her bureau All I found was her shovel, which was made of a dark metal and smooth, oiled wood

"I didn’t take your shovel," she said firh your room before, either"

"Then who took it?" I des You waited in my room for me when I wasn’t there It was you I knoas you"

Clementine hesitated "It wasn’t rabbed her slender wrist and dragged her into my roorasp and parted her lips to respond, when her face gathered in a wince "What is that s about?"

She covered her nose with her hand "How can you not s to distract me," I said