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What the woman had spoken was ‘amulet,’ but also ‘fragment,’ and ‘key.’

Seeker, Ellie thought as another facet of meaning flashed into her awareness and then slipped away again.

“You meanIfoundit,” Ellie corrected her uncertainly as her hand moved reflexively to the place on her neck where the black disk used to hang.

“No,” The woman looked at Ellie from across the room. “That is not what I meant at all.”

Ellie absorbed that with a tickling sense of fear. She asked the next question—the one that itched at her uncomfortably from the whitewashed walls and frosted glass.

“Where are we, really?”

The woman drew her hand from the tub and set it regally in her lap.

“We are in the mirror,” she replied.

More echoes. More meanings.

Eye. Blood drinker.

God.

A cool fear whispered across Ellie’s skin. The washroom around her looked safe and familiar, but something…unstablevibrated at her from the lines and the shadows. The tiled floor and the white tub were nothing but a thin veneer over a chaotic darkness that would drive her mad if she actually looked at it.

The more she thought of the veneer, the thinner it became until it seemed as though the contours of the room began to flicker. The shadows grew, and Ellie wondered if she was about to tumble into them—to be chewed up and spat out as something else on the other side.

Suddenly the woman was there. She set a firm brown hand to Ellie’s chin. Her grip was gentle but strong as she turned Ellie’s face so that it was the woman she looked at and not the room.

Her figure shifted as Ellie watched, from the colorful blouse and skirt to an embroidered huipil like those worn by the women of Santa Dolores.

A gorgeous feathered headdress and ornaments of jade. Startling flashes of red body paint and a high-necked English blouse. All of it flickered and twisted around something else that remained steady and unchanging—the dark conviction in the woman’s eyes and the scars that marred her cheek.

“Stay with me,” the woman ordered.

Other meanings, other senses of her words mingled in Ellie’s mind.

Listen. Strength. Hope.

“Who are you?” Ellie gasped.

The woman smiled. The expression was grim and slightly dangerous.

“Do you really wish to know?” she challenged.

The want bloomed up inside of Ellie, driven by curiosity unsatisfied for far too long. For days now, she had sensed that she was at the verge of discovering something desperately important—something that this woman stood at the center of.

The desire focused, deepened—and the room around her snapped from view, replaced by a flash of vivid, painfully distinct images.

A dark-haired, umber-skinned girl of twelve crawled from a black tunnel to a narrow, painted room. A jagged red wound marred her cheek. Women waited for her there as water splashed from a copper pipe in the wall.

The wound resolved into a scar. The face and body matured, and were decked in jade, gold, feathers, and paint. Her arm wrapped around the throat of a drugged deer. She held an obsidian knife in her hand.

Black glass glittered beneath her as others, older and more elaborately costumed, watched solemnly at her back.

Another word slipped into Ellie’s mind as meanings fell over each other in layers.

Initiate. Priestess. Blade.

The woman knelt before an elder who wheezed with weakness. His skin was ravaged by sores as he placed a heavy black stone around her neck.