As we crossed the parking lot, I glanced back. Maybe Malcolm was right. I hadn’t been happy in a lab after everything I’d done, either. Even with everything that happened to me, I craved being part of something bigger.
Chapter 29
Rav
“Touristwith the blue backpack at ten o’clock,” Percival murmured. “Fourth time he’s circled that column.”
I tracked the kid from behind my sunglasses, noting his relaxed posture and curious interest in the architecture. “Not a threat. I’m betting he’s an art history major.”
The area near the sewer entrance at the House of the Arches was too busy for the first hour we’d been there. Tour groups with flag-waving guides, families corralling children, and solo travelers, but nobody I recognized from Fenix, nor anyone sporting the phoenix tattoo of the organization’s elite.
“We need to get down below.” I checked my watch. “It’s already eleven hundred.”
This morning, cameras one, two, and three had gone dark entirely. It had to have been a battery failure. But three out of five cameras? Had we simply forgotten to charge the damn things?
We didn’t forget shit like that.
Unless it was me, and I was distracted by Brooke.
It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“Let’s move,” I said when the crowd seemed to move as one, away from our target entrance.
Percival nodded, shouldering his pack. We both wore the tourist uniform—cargo pants, hiking boots, moisture-wicking shirts. My cap and sunglasses concealed most of my face. Nothing that would draw attention.
We moved separately through the growing crowds, maintaining visual contact without appearing connected. It was a more tactical approach than when I’d been here with Brooke the past two times.
Damn Brooke. My focus kept slipping. Her face flickered through my mind—her eyes when she’d revealed her scars, her vulnerability, how completely she’d expected me to reject her.
The way her breath had caught when I’d touched them. The small sounds she’d made when?—
Shut it down. Not now. Not here.
The maintenance entrance was tucked inside a small building, designed to resemble the excavated ones. Mario had shown us out this way yesterday, so Percival and I were familiar with the lay of the land.
We slipped inside the door Mario had unlocked for us two hours ago, closing the door behind us. After donning helmets and coveralls hanging inside the maintenance building, we made our way into the cool tunnel. I switched on my helmet’s lamp, keeping the beam low. “Ten minutes straight ahead. Take a right. Then the second left.”
The weight of stone pressed down from above. Centuries of history; life and death; buried, forgotten, and found again. The passage narrowed, then widened, the walls streaked with mineral deposits that reflected our light. A few times, we had to crawl on our hands and knees through particularly small junctions.
“You’re different today,” Percival said after several minutes of silence.
“Different how?”
“Tense, but not in the way you usually are. It’s the kind of tense that comes after…” He trailed off, no doubt expecting my fist to fly in his direction.
The passage split ahead. I paused, mentally reconstructing the tunnel system from our previous visit, rather than checking the map in my backpack. “This is our first right turn.”
We moved forward in the dank corridor, the sounds of tourists filtering down through drainage holes above us. Water dripped somewhere ahead in the dark.
“I mean, you’ve had that look since you arrived,” Percival said, breaking the quiet.
I huffed out a breath. “What look?”
“The same one you had in Masum Ghar when you’d sneak back to quarters at 0400 and think nobody noticed.”
My jaw tightened. “We have dead cameras and thirty-five hours until the Greek Fire is deployed.”
He didn’t press. But that would only last so long.
