“I am very proud of you two. Grace would be, too.”

Amy’s eyes misted. She leaned forward and hugged Mr. McIntyre. That didn’t feel awkward at all.

Attleboro, Massachusetts

Evan sat in front of the computer in the command center attic, his head resting in his hand. It was midnight. The house was quiet. Even Saladin was asleep on a stack of papers.

Sinead slipped through the doorway and came to sit in the chair next to him. “You should get some sleep.”

“I want to be here when she wakes up.”

“Don’t your parents wonder where you are?”

“They think I’m in a sleepover study group. As long as I say the words Harvard and extracurricular, they’re on board.”

Sinead snorted. “Look, they didn’t get to Basel until midnight. When she contacts us, I’ll wake you up. There’s a six-hour difference – it’s only six A.M. there.”

Evan shook his head. “I’ll crash on the floor if I need to. She’s going to want all this information as soon as she wakes up. And there’s stuff I can do while I wait.”

“There’s always stuff we can do,” Sinead said. “But if we work ourselves to exhaustion, we can make mistakes. And that doesn’t help anyone.”

He knew she was right. Around him the blue screens of the computers glowed. The monitors from locations around the world were temporarily dark. Tacked to the walls were printouts from their research. Sinead had put up six bulletin boards, one for each Vesper in the Council of Six.

They had run out of space on the wall, so Evan had strung a wire from one end of the room to the other. They’d begun to clothespin random pieces of information from Cahill texts around the world.