Bette stood up and shuffled to the subway doors, waiting for them to open as the train slowed to a stop in the 86^th Street upper east side subway station.  She stepped out and pushed through the turnstiles in an unhurried manner, dragging her feet; it felt oddly difficult for her to move normally.  Her body just felt sluggish.

It had been a week since Sylvia’s memorial, and over the five or six nights since then, the troubled, restless insomnia that she’d been battling ever since returning from London worsened, and had started to weigh on her.  She tried to convince herself that the worsening insomnia had been accompanied by sharpening lucidity, as she threw herself into an all-out effort to use the newly constructed codex to translate and then pull together the volumes of information that Spencer had left her in combination with what she’d collected in her storage unit in Luxembourg.

“You’ve left me to fight this on my own.  Who do I work with now?” she muttered to herself as she slowly climbed the steps leading up to the street.

Losing Sylvia had been an emotional blow, not just a mental one.  Apart from her sorrow for Tom and Andy, the loss had another meaning: just when it seemed even more important for Bette to be able to talk to someone about everything that was going on, and to have someone with Sylvia’s background and expertise to throw ideas around with, Sylvia had slipped away.

She acknowledged to herself that she had benefited from incredible luck and good fortune, but it was all coming to a head: she felt her enemies were closing in, circling around her, getting into position.   And there were still so many unanswered questions she had to answer!

During the reception after the memorial service for Sylvia, imagining the amped up tension she felt as a dark fist closing around her heart, Bette half-stumbled away from the small group she’d been with to try gather herself.  Tom found her in a dark, secluded corner near the restrooms, leaning against the wall, softly beating her fists against it.

He moved quickly to embrace her, fighting back his own tears, as he wrapped protective arms around her.

“Damn it all to hell, Tom,” she cried out, muffled against his shoulder, as she let her tears fall.  “What if I can’t find the one thing people have been chasing for close two hundred years?  Worse, what if I can’t sustain the effort of so many good people down through the all those years to keep that from falling into the hands of ….”