“Beautiful,” Jules whispers, his eyes shining. “This looks like—what, thirteenth century?”
“Hmm, I’d say so, look at the stonework. Definitely from the twelve hundreds.” I answer like I know what the frak he’s talking about, and for once it makes him laugh—after a moment of hesitation where he forgot he was the only archaeologist among us.
“What is this place?” Neal asks. Our voices echo, but in a muffled way, since the spaces aren’t that tall.
Jules is all too happy to reply, shining his flashlight—handily provided by the tour company—around the place. “Back then, the city was built lower than it is today. They raised the street levels so they wouldn’t flood, so the new buildings just got built right on top of the old ones. Some of the underground city is basements and storage rooms, but a lot of it is like this—abandoned.”
“A whole city below a city,” I whisper, fascinated in spite of myself, in spite of what we’re here to do.
“We should keep shifting.” Dex is uneasy. “Up here there’s a shaft to the cistern—we’ll have to climb downwards.”
The corridors and tunnels twist and turn, some small enough to require us to crawl on hands and knees, others looking exactlylike alleyways, complete with rough-hewn doors on either side like decrepit old houses.
One of the tiny corridors—more like a big pipe, I realize—emerges into a much larger area, and the moment my head emerges from the tunnel I feel how different the air is. This is where Atlanta cut her way through to the old waterways, and though it’s hard to see the detail in the torchlight, it’s almost as though she melted her way through the rock. I guess, after all their years of exploration, it’s not so far-fetched that the Undying would have the technology for that.
Dex, leading the way, offers me his hand to clamber out of the pipe, followed by Jules and Neal. At our feet is a neat round hole in the ground, its cover already heaved up and out of the way.
Atlanta.
“Is there any way she knows we’re coming?” I ask in a whisper.
“We got no way of tracking you,” Dex replies. “She won’t know. She wouldn’t believe we could have got out of the cell.”
“And the portal? Could she move it, just in case?”
“No,” he says, holding out his hand. “The tracker I left you at the hotel, do you still have it?”
Neal pulls it from his bag, offering it to Dex.
“Here,” Dex says, tapping the screen, and zooming in. “Look, same place.”
“We thought that was tracking Undying teams,” I say, leaning in to look at the display, shoulder to shoulder with Jules.
“Close,” he says. “You remember the cables I pulled out of the shuttle before we blew it?”
I nod, my mind conjuring up a picture of Dex with a coil of what looked like rope slung across his chest as we rode through France.
“That’s what we need for the portal construction,” he says. “That’s what it’s tracking. They give off a unique energy signature, even when dormant.”
We all gather around the uncovered manhole, gazing downward, where a rope has already been anchored to the edge and left to dangle. Twenty or thirty meters below us is an inky expanse. The plink of water drips here and there, echoing in the distance.
“The old waterway.” Jules sounds breathless, and I know he’d be in scholarly heaven if he allowed himself to be distracted.
Suddenly, I feel like we’re back on Gaia, surveying that first great room inside the spiral temple. Nothing could ever match the strangeness of that moment, but something about being here with Jules, when his eyes are lit with that inquisitive fire, surrounded by ancient stone, facing a near-impossible task … it feels familiar.
God, when didthisbecome my normal and familiar?
I duck my head and ease it into the hole to look at what’s below, keeping my movements slow and steady. Most likely, Atlanta’s already down there, deep in preparation to get her portal up and running. If she sees my face instead of Dex’s, I’m sure she won’t hesitate to shoot.
I wait, blinking slowly, giving my eyes all the time they want to adjust, but there’s not a trace of light down there. I click on my flashlight, keeping it mostly muffled with my fingers, and ease my way back to take another look. Slowly—keeping it as far from me as I can, in case she aims a shot at the source of the light—I uncover it.
The expanse of water at the bottom doesn’t look deep—the level isn’t high enough to reach most of the pipes leading away from the reservoir. But one pipe’s bricks have been crumbled away, leaving only the tiniest heap of rubble to dam the water from gushing away.
“Thatways is where the water’s meant to go, and join up to the city supply,” Dex murmurs, after he and the others have joined me on their bellies around the shaft. “Which means …”
Slowly, he traces the beam of his own flashlight back along the walkway against the far wall. Then, like some nightmarish creaturelooming out of the shadows, it’s suddenlythere—the portal, squatting in the darkness. Inert for now, but alien nonetheless. In this watery, ancient cathedral of stone, it looks deadly.
“Why isn’t she here?” Jules whispers, and Dex is silent a long moment.
