They called it Lost Island, a simple name for an island that, as far as most of the world knew, did not exist. As the high afternoon sun poked through winter's sempiternal quilt, if only briefly, Elias saw the Gray Academy in a new, not-so-gray light. The century-old stone complex and its season-defying gardens composed a scene fit for his mother's brush.

The picture disappeared as Harriet led the two of them through a thin forest of white-barked alders that bordered the island's eastern edge, twigs snapping under their footfalls as chirping sparrows swooped in and out of sight, heard if not always seen. Lost Island felt considerably bigger on the ground than it had appeared from the vantage point of an airship.

"You still haven't told me where we're going," Elias mentioned. "Or, for that matter, why we brought an oil lamp. It's the sunniest I've ever seen it here."

"It is hardly a long walk," Harriet replied, carrying the swinging light in question, "and you've only been here a couple of days. Better to discover a place than to hear about it." This was, judging by the way she said it, a simple matter of fact.

Elias only smiled, feeling something he had not felt in a while.

As the forest parted back open, the ocean bleeding and then gushing through, he saw at once their humble destination. Tucked beneath one sea cliff and built atop another was a cemetery, its few dozen graves creeping beyond the confines of a shallow, crumbling border that had lacked either foresight or ambition.

"Whenever I'm in need of a little solitude or a bit of silence, I come here," Harriet said.

"So, this is your favorite hideaway on the island," remarked Elias, who believed one could learn a lot about a person based on their chosen favorites.

"It might be, yes. A bit grim, I suppose."

He smirked. "I like it anyway. Are we going to steal a body?"

She chuckled and shook her head. "Not unless you want to."

As they wandered the small cemetery together, Harriet letting him take it all in, Elias could not help himself: he mentioned nothing to her as he casually skimmed gravestones for his father's name. Alas, there were no Sylas Emerands, and why would there be? His body had been lost at sea, or so it was said. Months after the fact, his mother had made their own driftwood grave for him, burying a wooden box of clothes he had left behind. Elias had buried her next to that box.

"I want to show you something." Harriet grazed his shoulder as she beckoned him toward a modest mausoleum—the only one in the cemetery—jutting out from the cliff wall. Its stone facade had, over generations, blended in with the natural rock behind it, its stately columns now entirely covered in moss, its carved inscription barely legible above a green copper door, faded like the markings of a dead language.

Elias reached upward, brushing moss off the letters. Millard Fullmore, they read. "So, this is where they buried the hero of Lost Island. Not a bad view for eternity."

"Most people never go inside," Harriet informed him.

"Why is that?"

"Because they keep it locked."

"And you're not most people? Do you have a key?"

Harriet shook her head. "I have a trick."

Elias was, admittedly, fond of tricks.

"Take this." Harriet handed him the oil lamp. "Light it."

Elias immediately set down the lamp, retrieved his tinderbox, and struck into being a small flame. While undertaking this delicate work, Harriet took two steps back and, with all her limited weight, flew forward and kicked the copper door of Millard Fullmore's mausoleum hard and fast. The door snapped open, rattling against stone.

Elias lifted the lit oil lamp. "That's your trick? Kicking it open."

"Works like a charm," she said. "The lock is loose. We can force it closed again on our way out. Come on."

He followed her inside, shaking his head, and into an ink-black crypt and down a narrow set of stairs that burrowed into the cliff like a mole hill. The sunny day receded in the doorframe behind them as Elias carefully watched his steps.

They reached the bottom of the stairs. Despite being of only middling height for a man, Elias ducked his head to keep from whacking it on the stone ceiling, while Harriet was just short enough to maintain her posture. The room was barely larger than a shed and equally unadorned: the ends of candles rested on the sills of alcoves, along with a few coppers minted in decades past. Elias picked one up, ninety years old according to the date embossed along its bottom edge, and flicked the coin over his shoulder, catching it behind his back with the same hand. If Harriet was impressed, she did not say anything. He placed the copper back where he had found it.

She was sitting on Millard Fullmore's coffin like a stone bench, feet kicked out. Elias placed the lantern down beside her, its single light source contrasting the soft contours of her golden face as she watched him analyze the room.

"Was there a particular item you wished to bring back for our assignment?" he inquired.

Harriet shrugged. "I hadn't figured that part out, but this is a team assignment, Elias. I brought us here, so you choose something. One of those old coins maybe."

"Zylas won't bemoan us stealing from the dead?"

"Borrowing from the dead. And who better to borrow from?"

"I trust you have a better sense of him," Elias said. "Of all of this, honestly. What lines we can and cannot cross. I have a habit of crossing lines, which I'm trying to… not indulge, at least for the next month."

"You just need to know which ones to cross," she said, "and with whom. Dawnlight, as you heard the other night, some call him a line-crosser."

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"Do you agree with that assessment?"

"Well, I don't think crossing lines is necessarily a criticism. Lines were crossed to discover the Gray Academy. Lines were crossed to merge the schools."

"And here I thought Zylas made a rather compelling case for the sanctity of restrictions this morning."

"Everything has its place," she said. "The world is a project."

Constance crossed lines too, Elias supposed, in her own way. As did Jalander. As had his father. "Have you always known about the Valshynar and collectors and all of this, even before you awoke?"

Harriet nodded. "It's all I've ever known. The gift is generally hereditary. Both my parents were collectors. My mother was like me: fast. And my father, he was classically Valshynar. Clever. Too clever, according to some."

"Was?" He picked up on her past tense.

"She died when I was seven, and he died when I was fourteen," Harriet said. "An accident and a stupid disease. Nothing much to say there. We are still mortals, after all. I was mostly raised by my father, and he liked crossing lines too."

"You could tell I was a line-crosser, couldn't you." Elias cracked a grin in the shadowy lamp light.

She suppressed a smile, rather unsuccessfully. "As soon as I laid eyes on you. You've lived your entire life outside of them. Outside of us. Quite the opposite of me."

And yet Elias felt they had so much in common. "My parents are also dead, by the way. Same stupid story—accident and disease—only it was she who raised me."

He was still circling the tiny tomb, searching for the perfect object. Perhaps Harriet's suggestion was a sound one: a century-old copper from Millard Fullmore's mausoleum would surely satisfy their assignment. But Elias could perform more than mere coin tricks. "Let me try something," he said.

He turned to his sight, asking it to point him toward the most interesting object one might uncover inside this crypt. It was a somewhat strange, altogether ambiguous request, and he wasn't entirely sure the sight would indulge or even understand him. But the gift he possessed was not a client to be bartered with, however often he treated it that way, but rather a real part of him. He must have felt the question clearly enough, for a faint green line appeared before him, twisting around Harriet, who saw nothing at all. He followed it.

The line led into a wall.

Furrowing his brow, Elias touched the stone into which his directions appeared to end. The stone was loose, he noticed. He tried to pull it out, and when that did not work, he pushed it instead. The stone receded a few inches, and the sound of something like a lock clicked from somewhere unseen.

Suddenly, even more stones withdrew into the wall. The room shook as dust fell into his hair, as Elias watched in awe as a door-shaped recess deepened and then gradually opened into an actual door, stones sliding horizontally into a groove in the wall. A final bang, another cloud of dust, and the shaking ceased.

Harriet caught up with him, mouth agape.

"How does that work?" Elias asked, adding yet another mechanism to his mental list of Valshynarian mysteries.

Harriet exhaled a long breath and then another, each sounding like a sentence lost for words. "How did I not know that was there?" It was more of a question to herself. Lantern in hand, she headed through first.

Past the secret door was another, even smaller room. Elias followed Harriet, ducking his head lower, keeping close to her by necessity. Inside the hidden space was another stone casket, this one shelved into the rough-hewn wall, a tree branch creeping through the low ceiling like a crooked finger.

"A tomb within a tomb," Elias observed. "But if the one out there is Millard Fullmore's, who's in here?"

Harriet clearly had no idea. "What's this?" She bent down to one knee, holding the light closer to the casket, then reached her arm through a tight crevice beside it. Clutched in her hand three seconds later was a thin cracked-leather book. She brushed dust off its cover like snow from a sidewalk.

Elias took the oil lamp from her as Harriet delicately opened the book's stiff pages. In hallowed silence, they read the first one together.

"It's his journal," Harriet eventually said. "This is Fullmore's journal. Why is it in here, rather than out there?" She peered back through the opened door, to the more familiar casket offering no answers.

"I suppose we should keep reading," Elias suggested.

And so they sat down on the bumpy ground, too enraptured to spare a concern for comfort, shoulders touching as they read each entry together, exchanging nods whenever they were done with one page and ready for the next. The journal began a few years after Millard had discovered Lost Island, when he and a crew of collectors (twenty, to be precise) began construction of what would become the Gray Academy. While certain entries were densely logistical and lacking in context, others grew increasingly personal—this was his journal, after all—weaving a story that seemed to seep and then pour out from these secret pages, as uncontainable as the feelings that had inspired it. Though the Gentlemen was never named, he was always capitalized and increasingly described in artful detail: his endearing habits, his crooked smiled, the heat of his presence growing from spark to flame to roiling fire. Elias was just experienced enough in life to recognize the symptoms: Millard had loved him.

"They must have spent so much time together building this place in the early years," Harriet reflected. "Blissfully isolated from the world and all of its… complications. Attitudes around such relationships were not what they are now, even among collectors."

"Then Millard discovered even more than he is given credit for," Elias said.

Harriet smile at that, then at him. "So, you think that there is the Gentleman?" She knocked on the second casket, snug in its alcove, like a front door.

"I wager that's a good guess."

"I wonder who added his crypt, then," she pondered. "Fullmore's must have existed first, meaning someone built this for them. Someone capable of setting up a sliding stone door. No one in the journal comes to mind."

"Fullmore lived another thirty years after this was written," Elias said, "more life than I've lived in total. Could be anyone. This journal is just an excerpt, though I suppose its placement here is telling."

"So, do we present it to High Collector Zylas?" Harriet held up the cracked-leather book.

"I don't know. It feels… personal."

"It's history."

"I guess I don't know where that line is drawn, when a man becomes an artifact."

Pausing before shifting with purpose, Harriet slid the journal back where she had found it, a hiding spot within a hiding spot, resting at the feet or head of the Gentleman for whom much of it had been penned. "We'll bring an old coin," she said. "I don't think we're even being graded on this."

"I like coins." Elias shrugged.

"Even the dead like them, apparently."

It was an old superstition: leaving coins for the departed in case they needed a little currency in the afterlife. Elias was surprised that even collectors adopted the cultural custom, though he supposed it was just another way of saying goodbye when words were inadequate.

They were still seated beside one another, alone in a hidden catacomb inside a locked one, located on an island separated from the Great Continent by an impossible ocean. Elias felt like a single star in an empty sky, and he wondered whether it was the same feeling Millard Fullmore experienced all those years ago. "It's sort of freeing, isn't it?" he said. "Being so completely cut off from the world."

"Sitting inside a claustrophobic tomb provides you with a feeling of freedom?" Harriet rested the back of her head against the coffin.

"Oh, very much so," he insisted. "Privacy is the ultimate freedom." After a moment of quiet, blissful liberty, he asked, "What was it like growing up among the Valshynar? Do they control every aspect of your life?"

Privacy also allowed for unguarded questions.

"Not completely," she said. "It's more like there are certain boundaries, and so long as you operate within them—it's less bad than it sounds."

"I suppose that depends on what one wants."

And as he said it, Elias could not quite tell what it was that he wanted. Whether his wants were another act of rebellion or if, in this case, they had been meticulously plotted out for him, a bread trail leading into a gilded cage—for who were better metalworkers than the Valshynar? Why coerce a man you can entice, as Mr. Grimsby liked to say.

Was Harriet a knowing part of this? No. She was too honest. She was like him.

But did she see it too, he wondered? Did she question, as he did now, why Lucas had introduced them when he did? Was that afternoon in the ring truly only a test, or had they already been constructing their invisible cage, all without using a single bar. Only an auburn-haired girl with a mole on her cheek and emerald eyes that never strayed from the horizon.

He kissed her anyway. It happened like an accident, like they had both tripped and fallen into one another.

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