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The format was also different from the casual pub/tavern quiz events that she’d grown accustomed to. Tonight’s event was more formal. Rather than starting with a big group of teams and solo competitors that got winnowed down as the night wore on, they were being split up from the start.

Their past performances on the Lucky Duck circuit were taken into account, and they were matched with comparable opponents, giving everyone a fair chance to advance. These were proper competitive heats, with contestants going head-to-head through increasingly more competitive elimination rounds. The organizers had installed a lower stage with a lectern in the middle for Tom Horner to preside over the ceremonies. Up on the main stage were two tables surrounded by wingback chairs facing the audience. These were the “hot seats” where the contestants would sit. Genuinely hot, thanks to the number of spotlights trained on them. The setup had the atmosphere of a televised debate.

Tempest arrived early, well before the call time for her first heat, so she could watch the first round of teams competing. She found a seat in the audience near the aisle in the fifteenth row. This was tactical. It was easier to read the room from the middle distance, and it was dark enough in the shadows that she didn’t have to worry about being seen. Years of blending into the woodwork at the bookstore had taught her how to observe without being seen.

From here she would also be able to keep an eye out for Dan Wilder, if he wasn’t competing in this first round.

She’d brought Dan Wilder’s annotated book with her in her tote bag. The same copy her stepbrother had thrust upon her in Portland, when she was setting up for Dan’s event. The very same book she’d unsuccessfully tried to sneak back to his table to be signed.

It looked different now, however.

Now the book had more sticky notes than pages. The margins were almost completely filled with her notes. She’d used it as a diary of sorts too, recording her thoughts on the inside cover, title pages and bibliography. Nothing was blank. Everywhere that wasn’t already printed was filled in with tiny, cramped sentences connecting his facts to her stories. Arguments, asides and follow-up questions. It was all in there.

It wasn’t really the same book she’d picked up in Portland anymore. It felt more like a conversation she’d been trying to have with someone for the last two thousand miles. This book was now as much hers as it was his.

There were two inches of space saved for him on the title page. She was still determined to get that signature from him.

Tempest didn’t spy Dan Wilder in any of the early heats, and before she knew it, it was her turn to wait offstage for her time in the hot seat.

The rounds were faster and more punishing than anything else she’d competed in so far. Questions were worth double points in the final eight, and the scoring was live on a screen above the stage, updated in real time so the audience could follow the gaps opening and closing between players.

Tempest made it through the first two rounds easily. She knew how to access the information she needed and, more usefully, she knew when to trust it and when to question. The slight delay she’d noticed in Denver was still there, that pause while she separated fact from opinion, sources from echoes, but she was getting to the answers faster. Her focus was on point.

She was so focused that she didn’t even notice Dan waiting for his heat until she successfully made it through her third round of competing and went back to the chairs in the audience to wait for the next two rounds.

Dan was seated two rows back from her—on the opposite side of the theater as he was competing in the opposite bracket. He was even more handsome than she’d remembered. Or perhaps she hadn’t been as focused on that then. She hadn’t known him as well then. She hadn’t read his whole book. She was also closer to him here than she’d gotten the night of the book signing.

Dan Wilder was focused on the stage. He had his elbows on his knees, and his chin resting in one hand. He watched the current competitors with rapt, unblinking attention. Again she sensed the predator in him. The relaxed tension. Like he might pounce at any moment. She imagined a chess player observing an opponent work through a problem. Looking for patterns. Looking for how they thought and any chink in their armor.

Tempest looked away before he noticed her. She wasn’t sure she wanted him looking at her in that way. She tucked the tote bag under her stadium seat. This wasn’t the time to ask for an autograph. That would have to wait till later. After she’d been eliminated, and he had likely won. She would do her best to meet him then.

Except she was not eliminated. And neither was Dan.

Tempest went on to beat five other people in two more rounds. Dan also won all five heats on his side of the room. The audience thinned and then swelled again as word moved through the venue that standing champion Vance Priest had been bested by the former champion, and had once again stormed out of the competition after losing. Tempest heard the news from backstage, felt the audible shift in the crowd, and had understood what it meant. Vance Priest was out for the final round. The bracket was open and she was heading back in, advancing to face her next, and final opponent for the title tonight.

Finally, she was face to face with Dandelion Wilder. She just never imagined that their meet-cute would happen on a spotlit stage in front of hundreds of people. She was starstruck, overwhelmed, and frankly shocked to have made it there.

The lights were worse this time. Like they’d turned them all up and switched more of them on. The world was a wall of white, compressed down to Tom Horner, in his best purple tuxedo, standing between them at center stage. Thankfully, the audience was a rustling darkness beyond the glare. She could not see or be distracted by any individual faces.

She took a deep breath and placed both palms flat on the table in front of her.

She wasn’t alone at that moment. Not really. She was in the company of her books, the entire collection, past and present. They all settled into the darkened auditorium of her mind, like tardy students rushing to find their seats before a lecture. She had the oddest sensation that they weren’t only observing. They were participating as well. They were cheering for her. Loving her back. If her books could have slow-clapped and whistled, they would have done so for her.

“Break a leg, Tempest,” Dan Wilder said, from across the stage.

He was smiling at her, but it was a competition smile, polite and assessing, not at all the one he’d had on his face when he was talking to Fortune and his fans at Owl’s.

“Same to you, Dandelion,” she said.

He tilted his head. Tempest swallowed.

Quickly she looked back at Tom Horner.

There were twelve questions in the final round. They traded correct answers through the first eight, the scoreboard barely shifting, the audience making a low appreciative sound each time they both cleared another hurdle. It was the kind of competition that felt almost perfunctory in the early stages, two people sailing through the motions. The answers came easily to both of them. They were well matched.

Question nine was like a change in weather. The questions got trickier.

“This composer,” Tom Horner read slowly, enjoying the buildup, “was so consumed by triskaidekaphobia, aka a fear of the number thirteen, that he substituted it by marking 12a in his musical scores rather than write it down. Coincidentally, he was born on the thirteenth of the month, died at an age whose digits added up to thirteen, and took his last breath on a Friday the thirteenth. Name him.”