“Definitely,” Josh said. “And I doubt most of the board even knows about this. You haven’t been able to contact your guy, have you, Amy?”

“He’s in Iceland,” I said. “I left him a voice mail, but…” For all I knew, some Elysian with access to Gus’s Digger in-box could be erasing any message clueing him in on the plot.

“Listen to this,” said Demetria, holding up another e-mail. “‘I doubt the club will meet Sunday night, due to the current atmosphere of scrutiny. Now is the perfect time to decide upon our next move. Why delay? This is our moment. The old order is crumbling. Let’s not get caught in the rubble. Yours under the rose’…et cetera.”

“Who wrote that one?” Mara asked.

“Um, someone named Hector.”

All of a sudden, Odile straightened. “Wait. I’ve heard of this before. Elysion.”

Demetria eyed her. “Don’t tell me you got an invite.”

“No, I read about them. In the annals. They existed once before, when the club first began accepting non-white and non-Christian members. Some of the old guard were upset, so they formed a secret secret club.”

“Gross,” said Jenny. “What happened to it?”

Odile shrugged. “I don’t remember the details, but it’s in the Black Books. I guess the rest of the club discovered it and flipped out.”

“So now history is repeating itself,” I said.

Demetria put down the e-mail. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go nail these jackasses to the wall.”

“First we’ve got to find them,” said Clarissa. “Where do we think they’re meeting? It’s not at the tomb. I was just there.”

“Did you go all over?” Josh asked.

“I didn’t search the place, if that’s what you mean, but it was definitely empty. I was upstairs, downstairs—I even went into the kitchen, because someone left the light on down there. Total ghost town.”

I picked up another sheet. “Does it say anything about location in these e-mails?”

“Precious little,” said Jenny. “Which I suppose means they always meet in the same place, since they never feel the need to announce location, only time.”

“When do they meet?” asked Josh. “Maybe we can narrow it down based on that.”

Jenny began flipping through the pages. “Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, here’s a Monday, a Tuesday, a Friday, another Wednesday. There was a Saturday the first weekend in October—”

“I remember that night,” said Odile. “It was the Jane Fonda marathon Kevin insisted we all go to and then he disappeared in the middle of it.”

“George wasn’t there, either,” I said. We’d gotten in a fight about it.

“Do you think they were trying to keep us busy?” Greg said. “If we were all at the theater, then we couldn’t be—”

“In the tomb,” said Clarissa. “But they weren’t there just now. I swear I would have noticed.”

I looked at the e-mails Jenny had discarded. I’d spent so much time with George in the last few weeks. Where had I seen him? One of the Wednesday meetings caught my eye. Like I’d forget that night. George and me, in the tomb. But it made no sense. He hadn’t been at any Elysion meeting. He’d been with me.

But I hadn’t heard the door open when he’d come in. And his skin hadn’t been cold from the outside. And he’d guaranteed me that everyone had gone home for the night…. Oh, God.

“They meet in the tomb,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

Josh’s eyes met mine and a flicker of understanding passed between us. “But where?” he asked. “Not the Inner Temple, surely.”

Is that how George had known there were no cameras? I couldn’t bear to think of it. “And not the Firefly Room or the Library.” I would have heard them. “I think it’s unlikely to be anyplace on the main floor. Are there any rooms in the tomb I’m not aware of?”

“Considering it’s you, probably,” Clarissa said with a smile.

“Who knows?” said Odile. “The blueprints are missing from our archives.”

Everyone turned to her. “What?”

She shrugged. “They’re listed in the card catalog, which, by the way, is a total disgrace, but they aren’t on the shelves. I wanted to use them back when we were planning the Straggler Initiation, but I couldn’t find them.”

Jenny lifted her hands. “I swear that wasn’t me. I drew my own floor plan.”

Time to change the subject. “What do you want to bet they went missing right around the time the Elysians came up with this idea?” I said.

“But how is it possible that none of our big sibs bothered to tell us about some other room in the tomb?” Greg asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know about it,” I said. Oh, Amy, how could you be so stupid? “Maybe the only big sib who knew was someone very well versed in Digger history. Someone on the side of the Elysians.”

Someone like Poe. Man, I almost had him in that alcove after we’d visited Edison College. He was obviously trying to figure out if I knew anything about Elysion. He’d practically told me himself. But, like always, I’d resorted to trading snark rather than actually listening.

I picked up one of the earliest e-mails from “Nestor.” I will give the Elysion boys this: They sure knew how to pick their names. I’d read Homer. Nestor was the wise old warrior who’d advised all the young heroes in The Iliad.

From: Nestor-X1@phimalarlico.org

To: Elysion-X1@phimalarlico.org

Subject: Re: next time

I think the complaints are unfounded. Naturally, our space does not have the grandeur of the Inner Temple, but it is far better suited to our purposes. Recall the temples of Mithras and other spartan assemblages. We’re warriors. What do we need of luxury? Besides, if you wish to split hairs, our entrance beats the crap out of theirs, and shares its history with the most glorious artifact in the Inner Temple.

Yours under the rose,

Nestor

Their entrance? But if everything in the tomb was built at the same time, why would an entrance have anything to do with the antiques we kept in the Inner Temple? And what “artifact” was he talking about anyway? The oil paintings? The engraving of Persephone? The elaborately carved throne?

The only thing I’d ever seen that looked like the throne was the carved wood frame on the diamond-dust mirror hanging in the basement. I faced the group. “Clarissa, you said someone had left the light on in the kitchen?”

“Yes. So what?”

“I think they’re meeting in the basement.”

“Where in the basement?”

“Behind the mirror.”

En masse, the nine of us headed over to the tomb on High Street. Discretion was a thing of the past. During the trip, I berated myself for ignoring all the signs. Poe and George, appearing in the kitchen out of nowhere. Poe, grilling me for what else I’d found out in Jenny’s room. George, making excuses for times he’d bailed on me and hiding secrets on his computer. I’d been sure it was about another girl. Clever, clever—any devious action on his part surely related to sexual, not societal, betrayal.

I was so clueless.

Josh and Harun threw open the tomb door and we strode in, completely mindless of who might have the street staked out. We took the stairs down to the basement and crowded into the narrow hall—nine little Diggers, staring up at the tall, mildly warped mirror.

Soze slipped his fingers around the edge of the frame and tugged, but the mirror didn’t move. “It’s not this side,” he whispered. He tried the other. “Still nothing.”

“Maybe there’s a catch,” Thorndike said. She ran her hands up and down the frame. “I can’t feel anything, either.” She dusted her hands off on her cargo pants. “Hate to say it, Bugaboo, but I think you got it wrong.”

“Let’s search the rest of the tomb,” said Juno. “They have to be here someplace.”

“No,” said Lucky. “I think she’s right. Look.”

She backed up a few steps and pointed at the mirror. The frame’s intricate carvings detailed the rape and imprisonment of Persephone, her seduction-by-pomegranate, and her eventual subscription into the royal family of the underworld. And there, at the top, sat a large carved rose.