“Obviously.” Stellan reached for me. He met my eyes, then quickly looked away again.
“What?” I thought again of what he’d said earlier.
“What do you mean, what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” I let him help me down and boost me up the other side because the hole was deeper than I was tall. I could have sworn his hand lingered longer than necessary on my back on the other side, but when we’d scrambled to standing, he just gave me a nudge down the tunnel and followed close behind.
It was eerily quiet, the only noise the damp squishing of our clothes. I felt my shoulder brush the cool, wet wall, and shuddered when I had to wipe a film of spiderwebs from my face. The tunnel narrowed and shortened, so we had to crawl. It opened into a wider clearing a few minutes later, and we stood up one by one, shaking out our limbs and looking around. And then we saw what was on the other side of the clearing.
Our lights shining ahead seemed to fall off into nothing. The tunnel dead-ended into open air.
We made our way slowly to the edge. It was pitch-black. Jack brought his light up, and drew in a sharp breath.
“It’s a pyramid,” Elodie said, barely louder than a breath.
The rocky sides of the chamber went straight down. But when I looked more closely, I saw tiny steps carved into the side, starting just below the ledge. On the floor of the chamber, about two stories below us, a small, gleaming white pyramid rose out of a pool of water.
My breath caught in my throat. The tomb of Alexander the Great, and his mother. It had to be.
“It’s—” Elodie whispered, then cut off. From below came a sound we never would have expected to hear in the world’s most famous lost tomb.
Voices.
CHAPTER 12
There were two people talking down in the cavern. Judging by how muffled they were, they must have been inside that pyramid.
They were the voices of a boy and a girl. Voices we knew.
Lydia and Cole Saxon.
“How the hell did they get here?” Elodie hissed. The chamber must have had other entrances. But that wasn’t what she was asking. How did they know how to get here?
I’d been waiting to confront my siblings for so long, but now I was paralyzed.
“We have to get down there before they get what we’re looking for,” Stellan whispered. “And then put a bullet in their heads and end this whole thing.”
Jack motioned us all back to the tunnel, where we could whisper without being heard. “You’re not going to want to hear this, but we can’t kill them.” Stellan started to protest, but he went on, “I know some of us might be leaving the Circle, but not all of us are. And I doubt any of us want to give them another reason to hunt us. Right now, the Circle believes the Saxons completely and thinks we’re monsters. If we ambush them and kill them without a trial, that’ll only confirm it. The only way is to capture them and bring them to the Circle.”
I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides. That was so opposite how I’d felt for so long. He was right, though. “Okay,” I said.
Reluctantly, Stellan and Elodie nodded, too. We tiptoed back out. Jack pointed his light at the stairs. They couldn’t be more than a foot wide and six inches deep, cut right into the rock wall, with no handhold, and certainly no railing.
Elodie pushed to the front and pointed down. Jack lit her way.
“Be careful,” I breathed, and she swung off the edge and onto the top step a few feet below, so just her head and shoulders stuck up above the ledge.
Our lights bounced over her, like strobes in a club. Stellan followed her. Trying my best not to think about the sheer drop into darkness inches away, I got on my hands and knees and lowered myself down. Stellan held on to my waist as my toes touched the top step, and, like he knew I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, kept his hand on me while Jack dropped above us until all four of us were in a line again, and down we went, step by narrow step.
Halfway down, Elodie came to a sudden stop. She brought her arm to her mouth, racked by silent coughs. She bent over—and then suddenly she was slipping, her arms pinwheeling in the air.
Stellan grabbed her. I grabbed him. My arm was ripped out of Jack’s steadying grasp, but he snagged my waist, leaving the four of us locked together in a precarious chain.
I could feel Jack’s heart pounding against my back. Stellan leaned on the wall for a second before he looked up, his face inches from mine, and I realized my fingers were digging into his shoulders, right over his scars.
I jerked them away. “Sorry,” I whispered.
He shook his head with a bit of a smirk, as if to say, That is the least of our problems.
Elodie looked back at us. “It’s slippery,” she mouthed, unnecessarily. Stellan put a finger to his lips and we listened for any sign Lydia and Cole had heard us. They were still talking inside. None of us let go of each other the rest of the way down.
The bottom of the stairs disappeared into water. Jack waded into it as quietly as he could, and where I’d expected to slosh through it at knee height, he sank in all the way to his shoulders, and I could tell it went deeper. He glanced up and shrugged silently. We’d have to swim.
We all deposited our phones in a plastic baggie Elodie had with her, and I held my bag aloft as we waded down the steps into the cold, murky depths.
The pyramid was bigger than it had looked from above. It was sticking out of the water at least twenty feet, and who knew how far it went beneath. It was built of silvery-veined white marble that looked like it hadn’t been touched for a very long time. With our flashlights turned on it, it seemed to be glowing in the dark pit.
“This is actually it, isn’t it?” Elodie breathed, treading water.
But this wasn’t the time to marvel at history. I gestured around the side of the pyramid.
When we reached the back, the first thing we saw was another set of steps just like the ones we’d come down. That must have been how Lydia and Cole had gotten in. And nearly at the top of the pyramid, a dim yellow light shined through what looked like an open door. Stellan raised his arm silently and pointed, and we swam to him to find another set of stairs leading up the pyramid’s slanted side.