“Mind,” I whispered as I pulled the ouroboros from the box and laid it over the triangle. It was exactly the right circumference to surround the triangular seal, with only the points touching the inside of the circle. When nothing happened, I twisted the bracelet, and something clicked. The ouroboros dropped from my fingers, sinking into the floor in a ring that had formed in the mosaic until it was almost flush with the tile.
“Body…” I placed the small metal frame inside the triangle, and another soft click echoed through the foyer.
Yoslyn squealed and grabbed my arm.
Wilder picked up the box and handed me the ring. He seemed to be holding his breath.
Though I could not imagine it was necessary for the puzzle to work, I slid the ring onto my middle finger. I couldn’t help it. How could Inotwear it, now that I knew what it was and who it had belonged to?
With my hand curled into a fist, I pressed the stone directly into the space inside the square frame, and it sank into the tile with another click.
Then…
Nothing.
“Turn it,” Yoslyn whispered, as if someone might overhear us.
I twisted my fist, unconvinced that would do anything, considering that the stone was perfectly round, but then I heard another click…followed by a deep groaning rumble.
The tile beneath us began to tremble, and Yoslyn squealed again as she retreated toward the benches built into the atrium wall. I grabbed the bracelet and the frame and scrambled back, just as the floor began to fracture at its center, right where we’d been standing. Only it wasn’ttrulyfracturing. It was shifting, the marble stones sinking in a pattern.…
Stairs.
The stone tiles around the central symbol were settling into the ground, each a little deeper than the last, to form a narrow spiral staircase leading below the floor of the atrium.
“Stars alight!” Yoslyn exclaimed, grabbing my arm.
Wilder held out the open box, and I dropped all three pieces inside. I took the box from him and he grinned at me, excitement gleaming in his eyes, but there was something else there, too.
He looked oddly…relieved.
A strange feeling rushed over me, foreboding and eerie, and it flushed the excitement entirely from my form.
“Wait.” I reached for Wilder’s arm, but he was already in motion, and my fingertips hardly grazed the sleeve of his tunic.
“No time,” he insisted, already three steps down. “Everyone in the building will have heard. They’ll be on the way to claim our discovery.”
Panic spiked my pulse, and I rushed down the steps after him, into the dark, my gaze trained on his silhouette. But I’d gone only six or seven steps, my head still protruding above the floor of the foyer, when I heard a sharp crack, then the crash of clay shattering. A hissing echoed up the steps toward me.
Startled, I retreated two steps toward the foyer, my heart thudding in my throat, my fingers scrabbling at the tile floor, now at the height of my shoulders, as I fled from what sounded like a snake about to strike.
From the dark stairwell below, Wilder gasped.
The hissing faded, and he coughed as he stumbled up the steps toward me, reaching for the edge of the floor.
On the edge of my vision, Yoslyn backed away again, one hand covering her mouth, her eyes wide in horror. Shouting echoed from behind her, from the depths of the Panacea wing.
Wilder was right. They had heard.
“Am-ber.” Wilder croaked the broken syllables of my name between wet, hacking coughs, and as he turned to me, crawling slowly up the steps, his face pale, lips stained with blood, light fell beyond him to reveal the shattered remains of two small clay pots—and a thin white cloud bubbling up from the contents that had spilled from them to combine on the stairs.
“Go!” Wilder coughed again.
Instead, I rushed down several treads and grabbed his arm, my pulse racing in my ears. I pulled as hard as I could to tug him to his feet, but he was too heavy.
“Yos—” I shouted over my shoulder, but a fit of coughing swallowed her name as I pulled on Wilder’s arm, terrified to see him struggling to lift himself. To watch his arm shake beneath the weight of his torso.
“Yoslyn!” I tried again. “Help!”
