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Chapter 32

August

The first thing August noticed was that his desk was occupied by a pair of expensive shoes, crossed one over the other at the ankle. As he got closer, he could see those shoes were attached to legs, and those legs were attached to—

“What time do you call this?” She looked at him over the top of the newspaper. Her real face was on the front page. Nora was wearing glamour, of course, but there was still something unmistakably Nora-ish about her.

“Well, I’d call it lunchtime. Why? What do you call it? The banqueting hour? Feast o’clock?”

“No one respectable holds a banquet before sunset.” She folded the paper over, smoothing the edges. Her fingers were stained with newsprint. “Doesn’t work start at nine a.m.?”

August had made it back to the Bullhorn by the skin of his teeth after covering the riots yesterday. Just before the police started using force and charms. Half the Bullhorn had been locked down in the building overnight. Some of them worked, some of them tossed balled-up paper wads into baskets, some dozed at their desks. Until finally dawn came, and journalists could venture home without risking their skulls being cracked open. August had headed home to let his mother know he was alive. And take a shower and a nap.

But he didn’t tell Nora that.

“What would you know about work?” He sat on the edge of his desk, swatting her feet out of the way.

“I know what time the people who work for us are supposed to start.” Out of anyone else’s mouth, it would have been the sort of comment that deserved nothing but his disdain. From Nora somehow it was funny. Foolishly, August found himself wishing he could see her real face instead of her glamour.

“I don’t have any more leads.” August rubbed his hand tiredly over his face, craving a coffee. Last time he’d seen Nora, she’d walked out in a snit. “If that’s why you’re here.”

“Well, then lucky for me, I cracked your newspaper’s stupid little code.” She slapped the paper down, slightly harder than was necessary.

Code? That woke August up. “What code?”

“Oh, come on.” Nora tossed the newspaper down on the desk. It was dated two days ago. The front cover was emblazoned with Isengrim’s Fourth Letter to the People of Walstad.

Nora looked at August expectantly. August looked blankly back at her.

“Yes, it’s an old newspaper,” he said finally, in the same slow patient voice that one might use with a child holding up a rock they thought was interesting.

“Where do you get these letters from?”

August shrugged. “I told you, it’s not my department.” The letters from Isengrim moved a lot of papers, but the journalists weren’t all that fond of them. Half the time it meant someone was getting bumped off the front page.

“But if you had to guess,” Nora pressed.

“Mr.Vargene,” August acknowledged. “He’s our editor in chief. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen with the originals. So I guess Isengrim addresses the letters to him, and he puts them in the layout.”

Nora tapped her foot against the desk in a quick, almost nervous rhythm. “These letters are riddled with mistakes.” She tapped a place where there were two g ’s crowded tightly together at the front of ag g ain .

August shrugged. “Typesetting error. It happens when we’re in a rush to put something out.”

“That’s a lot of typesetting errors,” Nora said. She was watching him intently. There was something about Nora that made August want to be able to rise to answer her. But he really had no idea what she was looking for here.

Nora sighed and started reading aloud from the page. “ Mean n while , spelled with two n ’s, amidst the Holtzfalls’ games our city suffers! The peo o ple of this city have o o nce again ”—she tapped both double o ’s, an easy mistake on a trigger-happy typewriter—“ been n distracted from the true issues of this city’s working class by the antics of its most privileg g ed few. ” She tapped the double letters and spelling errors as she went. “ While yo o u slept, preparing for another backbreaking day of w v ork to pay for their lifestyle. ”—the v almost blended into the w next to it, but it was there— “they gather to decide which am m ong them is the lesser evil. The one who will govern over you until your gra a ndchildren are the on n es doing the backbreaking work in their names s . With two s ’s in names s . But then the mistakes stop. Everything after that is spelled exactly right. But if you put all the mistakes together…”

All at once, August saw it. “Noon,” he read out. “Gov Mans.” It was the paper from the day before the protests. With instructions of where they were to gather to scream their rage against the wealthy.

“Yes.” She sounded exasperated. Clearly she’d been waiting for him to catch up. “You really didn’t know about this?” And he realized suddenly what she must’ve been thinking: That he’d been leading her on some wild goose chase all around Walstad in hunt of answers, when all this time the way to the Grims was hidden right in his newspaper. That he’d been lying to her. But his look of confusion seemed to convince her. And finally, the carefully controlled tension she had been wearing since she arrived melted off her.

He’d never bothered to look all that closely at the Isengrim letters. They were just inflammatory hyperbole. Not exactly journalism.

How many of the other journalists knew? Was he not in the loop on this since he’d failed to scream his political allegiance to Isengrim from the rooftops?

“And then there’s today’s.” Nora tossed down this morning’s edition, Isengrim’s Sixth Letter to the People of Walstad . She’d already circled the letters. They spelled out a time only:

Eight tonight

So. That’s how the Grims were arranging meetings that the police couldn’t bust up.

Back before Isengrim, the Egalitarian People’s Party would boldly flyer the whole city, letting them know where their rallies would be held. It might as well have been an invitation to come bust the place up. But the cops couldn’t bust up a rally they couldn’t find…

“So eight o’clock, where?” August asked.

“Here I’d been hoping you might know that,” Nora said, leaning back in the chair. “And you have the gall to write about me being brainless.”

“I mean, if you really think it’s a good idea for you to go to a Grim rally, then I might stand by that.” Nora had never wavered, not since the night of the Veritaz, in her belief that the Grims were behind her mother’s death. That whatever the police officer in the photos had done had been on the orders of Isengrim. That Lukas Schuld had confessed to protect Isengrim. That finding answers would lead her to the man who most wanted to bring her family to their knees.

And now she’d found a way to get to him directly.

“Well, you know, I’ve been hoping to speak with the famous Isengrim. Discuss the weather, the rising price of wheat, which wealthy people he might have killed lately…”

August understood Nora well enough now to know that trying to dissuade her when she had an idea set in her mind was impossible. But he also had to try to be the voice of reason.

“You know who you are, don’t you?”

“The entire city knows who I am.”

“Exactly. And you want to go into the wolf’s den.”

“Only if I can find it. Whatever the code for the location is, it’s better hidden than the time.”

Nora’s eyes locked with his, and August felt the thrill of danger go through him. But also the thrill of getting a step closer to answers. To the story he needed. The lure of the con, his father would call it.

“Do you really expect me to believe you’re not smart enough to figure this out before tonight?”