Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth

14



The sun had started its leisurely crawl across the sky shortly after Drake hauled himself out of bed. Now the clock on the dashboard of their taxi ticked toward nine a.m. as the Greek cabbie steered around the potholes on the road to Akrotiri village.

The first sight of the village made Drake wonder if they somehow had ended up in the wrong place, but the taxi driver explained that the tourists who made the trip out to see the ruins didn’t bother to stop in the village and that that was just how the villagers liked it. The place reminded Drake of little American towns that had dried up and blown away when highways were built that took most of the traffic off the byways of earlier days.

Other than the single blue dome at the center, the rest of the village that sprawled around the base of the hill looked like a scattering of child’s blocks, painted white and left to fade in the sun. Rising in the middle of that ordinariness was the hill Sully had read about, and atop it the Goulas—the tower—and the fortress around it.

As the taxi wound its way through the narrow streets of the village, people paused to watch them pass, eyes narrowed with curiosity, some of their expressions not at all welcoming. People worked here, going about their lives with no interest in the more commercial concerns of the rest of the island. Driving through Akrotiri village, Drake felt as if they were slipping back in time.

The driver took them up the hill as far as he could manage, past the single blue-domed building, and then in toward the crumbled wall of the fortress, but there he had to leave them off. Drake paid him double his asking price and promised twice as much if he would retrieve them at five o’clock. He took the cab company’s phone number along with the driver’s promise and then watched the man drive off, raising a cloud of dust with his departure. He spotted several other, smaller clouds in the distance—vehicles on the road, either to the village or, more likely, to the dig site.

“You think he’ll come back?” Jada asked, standing beside him and watching the shrinking dust devil that indicated the retreating cab.

“We can hope.”

They had eight hours before the taxi driver returned—if he returned. Drake figured that gave them plenty of time to explore the ruins. If the labyrinth was there and there was a way in, they would find it. And if they came up empty-handed, he could always call and try to get the taxi driver to return sooner, though he worried that they could end up with a lot of walking ahead of them.

Drake unzipped his pack and took inventory, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything vital: water, fruit, and cheese from the hotel, rope, flashlight, gun. They all carried the same essential supplies, but Drake hoped they wouldn’t be down there long enough to require the use of anything but the flashlights.

“Nice place,” Sully muttered, looking up at the fortress. “We should convert it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

“I feel like I’m in some Greek version of Dracula,” Jada said, gazing up at the fortress. “We’ve got the remains of a castle and the little village of people who stare at you as you go by. All we’re missing is a Greek Dracula.”

“That’d be just our luck,” Sully sighed, and started walking.

“Good thing there’s no such thing as vampires,” Jada replied, setting off after him.

Drake said nothing. He slipped his backpack on and started walking.

“Wait, there aren’t, right?” he heard Jada ask.

“Not that we’ve ever run across,” Sully admitted. “And we’ve seen some wild stuff. Sometimes stories are just stories. Vampires are absurd, anyway. They’re always better dressed than everyone else, right? But they’re up all night killing people and drinking blood, and half the time they live in graves and crypts or whatever. Yeah, these are not creatures well versed in the laundry arts. Stupid. Who believes that crap?”

Drake smiled. Laundry. He could always trust Sully to find the practical angle.

Jada and Sully caught up with him. Sully patted his pockets in search of a cigar but apparently had left his last one behind in the hotel. He’d managed to remember his gun but not a cigar. Drake almost suggested it might be his subconscious trying to make a statement about smoking but decided not to antagonize his friend. Don’t poke the bear, Sully had often said when Drake was younger. As rules went, it was a smart one.

They began by making a complete circuit of the fortress, following the perimeter and examining the places where the walls had crumbled. The medieval stone structure had begun to collapse like a sand castle in some places, eroded by entropy, but in others the walls remained standing strong. They found only a handful of places where crevices had formed in the exterior of the ruin, and none of them yielded evidence of anything beneath the structure.

In the most dangerous places, haphazard attempts had been made to block off entry. There were signs and in one place a piece of railing that looked new enough to be a recent effort, but if so the village or the island had run out of money before it could be completed. A twelve-foot stretch of metal railing with nothing on either side of it would do little to keep inquisitive visitors away. It slowed Drake and his friends not at all.

At the rear of the fortress they encountered a partially collapsed doorway. Wooden supports had been put in place to prevent more of the stone above the door from falling, and makeshift wooden doors had been put in place to block the entrance. Once upon a time, the wood might have been strong and new, but the arid weather and sea air had dried and weakened it. A chain looped through the door handles, but it took Drake three kicks to smash the doors open, one of the handles tearing right out of the wood.

And they were in.

“Now let’s see what we can find before the police show up,” Jada suggested.

Sully pushed the doors closed, then dragged a couple of heavy blocks of broken masonry over to keep them from swinging inward.

“Do they even have cops here?” he asked.

“Maybe not in the village, but on the island?” Jada said. “Yeah.”

“This is as remote as you can find on Santorini,” Drake said. “I’m guessing there aren’t a ton of cell phones. And no matter what weird looks we got on the way up here, they must see the occasional tourist checking this place out. They’re more likely to think we’re idiots than thieves or vandals or something.”

“So we’re relying on them thinking we’re just American fools?” Sully asked.

Drake shrugged. “Pretty much.”

“It’s probably a safe bet,” Sully agreed after thinking about it for a second. “But if we’re out here long enough, someone will get the police to check on us or come looking themselves.”

“Then stop talking and get to work,” Jada said, smiling.

Sully snapped off a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”


For more than an hour, they explored the courtyard and the rooms of the fortress. Some were completely shattered and full of debris, and Drake tried not to wonder what was beneath the rubble. If what they sought had been closed off by the earthquake, it would take a lot more than bare hands to uncover it.

Other rooms were well preserved but empty, dust on the floor a reminder of the unsteadiness of the whole structure. The wind off the Mediterranean gusted powerfully from time to time. When it whistled over the hill and through the cracks in the walls, it seemed to make the very foundations shiver.

The second and third hours found them peering beneath fallen stairs and investigating darkened alcoves. Throughout the fortress there were cracks in the walls, and in some places the floor had given way. They treaded carefully there, warily creeping through rooms Drake wouldn’t ever have dared to enter by choice. They all carried their guns, and Sully and Jada each had one of the industrial flashlights they’d stashed in their duffels before boarding the ship from Egypt. Sully’s kept flickering, the battery threatening to die, but so far it worked well enough.

Many of the breaks in the walls and floor opened into jagged nooks, and they examined those holes carefully, searching for any indication that there might be more open space below. In one of the less damaged corners of the fortress, Drake found a doorway with stairs leading downward.

“Jada, I need a light,” he called.

She and Sully abandoned their searches to join him, shining their flashlight beams down into the dark of the old stone stairwell. One part of the left-hand wall had fallen in, but Drake started down, careful not to get ahead of the pool of illumination. They managed to pick their way over the debris on the stairs and found a bit of hallway at the bottom. Only a bit, however, as the corridor to the left had been entirely blocked by a rockfall from above. The ceiling had given way there, and whatever lay in that direction was closed to them.

The right-hand side held much more promise.

If the door had been made of metal, they’d never have gotten through. The earthquake had shifted and buckled the frame enough that the lintel pressed down on the door from above. The whole frame seemed off kilter, slanted to the left, and the door was tightly jammed within the new angles of the frame, squeezed from the top and sides. But the pressure had been enough to split the wood down the middle. The boards were thick planks, but they had splintered and now the two sides of the door were held together only by thin iron bands on the top and bottom.

“I’m a little worried the whole thing’s going to come down on top of us if we try to break through,” Jada said.

Drake and Sully studied the doorway. Sully ran his fingers along the top of the broken door, where the ceiling pressed down onto it.

“I can’t promise you it won’t,” he said.

Drake scoffed. “Come on. You think this piece of wood is holding up the thousands of tons of rock above us?”

“No,” Sully said, frowning as he looked at the door. “But if it’s what kept the doorway from collapsing—”

He shrugged—“Ah, screw it”—and put all his weight behind a kick that made the wood shriek and dust sift down from above. Sully kicked the door twice more in rapid succession and then winced, backing away. He massaged his knee.

“You all right, old man?” Drake asked, smiling.

“Why don’t you give it a shot, wise guy?” Sully growled.

“I would’ve been happy to if you’d let me know before you started unleashing all your righteous kung-fu fury on the mean old door.”

Sully sighed heavily and stood, preparing to kick the door again. Jada covered her mouth, trying not to let him see her laugh.

“All right, grumpy,” Drake said. “Let me give it a shot before we end up having to carry your geriatric butt out of here.”

“My geriatric butt is still young enough to knock you unconscious,” Sully warned. Then he stretched his leg, still trying to work the kinks out of his knee. “But yeah. Have at it.”

Drake smiled, knowing it was a cocky grin but unable to help himself. He stared at the door, determined, and shot a hard kick at the split in the wood. It shrieked, the crack widening, but the thin iron straps were not going to give so easily. The impact on the door had shot up his leg hard enough to rattle his teeth, but he wasn’t going to let Sully know that. Drake kicked again, and it might have been that the stone lintel shifted a little, or it might have been the door frame. It was hard to tell.

He glanced at Jada, wondering if she was right to be concerned. If they hadn’t run out of fortress to search, he would have suggested that they keep looking, but this room was their dead end. If they found nothing beyond the door, they would have to start over. Drake would go over the various chambers and sublevels of the fortress even more carefully, and Jada would go with Sully into the village to start asking around about the earthquake and what might have been on the hill before the fortress was built.

“This is turning out to be a waste of a day,” he said.

Jada had her hair back in a ponytail, and when she frowned and crossed her arms, she looked like someone’s recalcitrant teenage daughter.

“Are you giving up?” she asked.

“Nah,” Drake said, deciding this was not the moment to suggest they call the taxi back and head somewhere for a drink. He slid the gun from the back of his waistband and handed it to her. “Hang on to that for a second, will you?”

As she took it, he drew a deep breath, glanced at the door, then ran at it. Even as he launched himself off the ground, he knew what a stupid idea it was. Trying to be Action Man always ended in bruised ribs and a bruised ego. His regret lasted a millisecond, and then his feet struck the crack in the door and it burst inward in a shriek of metal and wood.

Drake tried to put a hand down to break his fall but still rapped his knee hard when he struck the ground. He grimaced, sucking air between his teeth, and got up slowly, massaging the same knee Sully had been nursing a minute before.

“You’re no Bruce Lee,” Sully muttered.

“I got the damn door open,” Drake countered, dusting off his trousers.

“Do you two ever not bicker like children?” Jada asked.

Drake and Sully exchanged a look, and then both of them grinned.

“Not really,” Sully said.

“It’s always his fault,” Drake said. “I’m innocent.”

Sully rolled his eyes. “How is it I’ve let you tag along with me so many times over the years?” he asked, stepping through the wreckage of the door, shining his flashlight around a room that had been closed up for more than half a century.

“You? I’m the one who lets you tag along. But that’s going to change, trust me. Grumpy old man with stinky cigars.”

“Enough with the cigars,” Sully called back to them, his voice echoing off the walls of what seemed like a fairly large room.

“I agree,” Jada whispered to Drake. “Enough with the cigars.”

“I heard that,” Sully said.

“Good,” she shot back.

Jada handed the gun back to Drake, who returned it to his waistband as they followed Sully through the shattered door. As they passed over the threshold, Drake looked up at the buckled frame. He said nothing to Jada, but he didn’t like the look of it. The split door had been acting as a massive support beam, just as she had feared. Grit sifted down from cracks in the stone above the ruptured wooden frame. But it was only a single room and the last one open to them. If they left without examining it, they would always wonder.

“Suddenly I’m thirsty,” Sully said, waving his flashlight around.

As Jada swept her light across the ceiling and then aimed it forward, Drake understood the joke. They were in a medieval wine cellar. Unlike the rest of the fortress, this room had been carved right out of a section of ancient stone, part of the hilltop. The curved ceiling was built of stone blocks, and arched alcoves lined the walls. Old casks were stacked in several of the alcoves, but over time the wood had dried so badly that the seals had opened and the wine had long since drained away and evaporated, leaving only stains and a dull but distinctive odor.

“Nice. How come I don’t have one of these?” Drake asked.

No one answered. Jada and Sully had both begun searching the room. He figured they were checking the alcoves for secret passages, since there was no obvious sign of cracks or breaks in the cavern floor. The fortress had been built eons after the labyrinth would have been abandoned, but if this was the location of Daedalus’s third maze, it was entirely possible that whoever had built the fortress would have known about the labyrinth and constructed some kind of hidden access. And given that the wine cellar had been carved out—or plugged into an existing split in the rock—it made sense that if there were any kind of access, it would be through here. But with a single circuit of the room, half in darkness since he didn’t have a flashlight, Drake could tell that the builder of the fortress had given this room only one purpose, and that was storing wine.

“Guys, this isn’t the place,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Sully allowed.

But Jada kept looking, trying to haul a cask out of the way so she could shine her light behind it.

“Jada,” Drake began.

“Hang on,” she said.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. If she wanted him to wait, he would wait. She had more riding on solving this puzzle than he did. Drake glanced at Sully, who had started to examine the ceiling with his flashlight. There were cracks there that Drake hadn’t noticed upon entering, and he didn’t like the look of them at all.

“We should get out of here,” he said.

Sully kept searching. In the far corner of the wine cellar, a long, jagged crack—several inches across at its widest—had opened in the ceiling. Drake followed the beam, walking over for a closer look. He didn’t like it at all.

“Do you hear that?” Sully asked.

They all paused to listen. Jada had given up her search behind the cask and now stood at rapt attention. At first, Drake couldn’t make out any particular sound. In the cellar of the abandoned fortress, all noise seemed so far away, and he expected the keening of the wind or some muffled cry or perhaps footfalls in the hallway. Then he realized that the sound Sully had heard existed on a different level, a low groaning that seemed to come almost from inside his own skull.

No. It’s not in your head. It’s coming up through you. And it was. The groaning, grinding noise traveled up his legs from the floor, his bones vibrating almost imperceptibly.

He stared at his feet, anxiety rising, but then he noticed something that distracted him from his alarm. The wine casks in the alcove right behind him had long since given up their contents, and a small river of wine must have flowed across the floor, leaving a dark bloody stain on the stone when it dried up. Drake followed the zigzag course of the trickling wine stain with his gaze and realized it ended against the back wall.

“Sully, give me your flashlight,” he said.

“Nate, we’ve gotta go,” Sully said.

“Just for a second.”

Sully complied, and Drake used the beam of the flashlight to follow the dry river of wine to the wall. The floor had been slightly canted at the time the casks gave way. But there was no large stain near the wall to indicate the wine had pooled there, which made no sense at all.

Drake dropped to his knees, following the wine with the light, and then he saw where the wine had gone. Along the seam where wall met floor, though the wine cellar was mostly carved out of the rock, a split had occurred at the juncture of floor and wall. The spilled wine had not puddled there because it had poured into that crack and down into the hill below.

“Look at this,” Drake said.

“Nate,” Jada said worriedly, studying the cracks Sully had found in the ceiling.

“Just for a second,” Drake insisted. “The wine went somewhere. I know it could just be a fissure, that it doesn’t necessarily mean Luka was right about the labyrinth being here, but—”

“Of course he was right,” Jada said. “I mean, fathers think they’re right about everything, but when it came to his research, mine didn’t like to guess. He would hypothesize, sure, but if we found that reference in the journal, it’s safe to assume there were other clues and bits of evidence he gathered that we don’t know about. Maybe there’s even stuff in the journal but we just don’t know how to interpret it.”

Sully went rigid. A second later, Drake felt the tremor that had frightened him.

“Know what?” Drake said. “If there’s a way down there, it isn’t from this room. I vote we—”

The crack was so loud that it shut him up. The whole room began to rumble, and that was enough for Drake.

“Go!” he shouted, shoving Jada ahead of him.

Drake led the way with Sully’s flashlight. Jada twisted as she ran, shining the flashlight above them, and Drake couldn’t keep himself from glancing up to see the long cracks racing across the ceiling, opening wide spaces between the rows of stones that had been laid there centuries ago.

The noise grew so loud that it drowned out his thoughts, and just as he was about to shout for Sully to run faster, the roof of the wine cellar started to cave in. A piece of stone hit his shoulder, and again he shoved Jada, but harder this time. She careened into Sully, and the two of them fell through the open door, sprawling on the floor in the corridor, near the bottom of the stairs.

Drake swore as he saw the wooden door frame buckling further as the weight of the ruin above them shifted and the frame began to give way.

He dived through the opening just as the frame splintered and a huge slab of rock crashed down, barely missing his legs. The three of them scrambled backward, rising unsteadily, the corridor pitching around them. The slab seemed for a moment as if it would block the wine cellar from view, but then it tilted away from them, and they watched in astonishment as it fell into a hole where the floor of the wine cellar had been.

An entire section of the fortress above collapsed into the room and crashed through the floor, smashing it open in two places, rubble sliding down to half fill the gaping openness of the broad corridor beneath them.

Rubble shifted, and they coughed, covering their mouths and noses until the dust had begun to settle.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sully murmured, shining his flashlight across the holes in the shattered floor.

“We almost died,” Jada said, unsteady on her feet.

“Yeah,” Drake said. “On the other hand—”

Jada shone her light into the rubble and the ancient corridor below them. “Yeah. The labyrinth of Thera.”

“It better be,” Sully said. “Or we’ve done all this damage for nothing.”

“All we did was open a door,” Drake reasoned.

“Says Captain Dropkick,” Sully rasped.

“Guys, can we just find out if this is the labyrinth, please?” Jada asked.

Sully put an arm around her. “Come on, kid. You know we entertain you. It’s like going on a Mediterranean adventure with a couple of vaudeville stars.”

“Or the bickering brothers I never had,” Jada mused.

Drake crouched at the edge of the pit that had opened where the wine cellar had been moments before. Dust still lingered, a low cloud misting above the rubble. The huge piece of masonry that had been above the door made a sort of ramp down into the more treacherous wreckage, but the fortress had ceased its trembling. The rubble shifted a little, bits of rock sliding down to find a new resting place.

“Jada, can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Of course.”

Drake turned from the rubble and arched a mischievous brow. “Are you old enough to even know what vaudeville is?”

“Hey. Don’t knock vaudeville,” Sully protested.

“I’m not. I’m saying you’re old.”

Sully sat down beside him and slid his legs over the shattered edge of the floor. “I’m not old. I’m seasoned. And for your information, I wasn’t alive in the vaudeville era. I’ve just seen a lot of old movies.”

Drake smiled but said nothing more. He couldn’t really tease Sully about old movies because he loved them, too.

“Are we really doing this?” Jada asked.

For a second, Drake thought she was still talking about their bickering. Then he saw that she’d come up to stand behind him and Sully and was staring down into the pit. So much of the roof had come down that in places they could see the blue Aegean sky. But Drake was much less interested in what had been opened above than he was in what had been revealed below.

Sully pushed off the edge of the floor.

“Damn it, Uncle Vic, be careful!” Jada said.

Drake figured all three of them were holding their breath, but the huge slab of stone did not shift as Sully slid down it. When he reached the rubble, he waited as Drake slid down after him. The stone was warm under Drake’s steadying hands. At the bottom, he glanced up at Jada.

“This is really stupid,” she said as she sat down on the shattered edge of stone that had once been the wine cellar’s threshold.

Drake and Sully grinned at each other.

“We’ve never let that stop us before,” Drake said.

Jada slid the length of the slab, and Drake caught her at the bottom. The three of them exchanged weighted glances, none of them wanting to admit just how dangerous their next step would be. Under their feet was hundreds of tons of stone both from the part of the fortress that had given way and from the buckled floor of the wine cellar. But the opening at the far end of the debris called to them. There were secrets there, and that was what they’d come for. None of them would have turned back now.

They picked their way carefully across the rubble. Several times, the stone shifted under Drake’s feet, and he nearly toppled over before Sully or Jada grabbed him. He did the same for them, and soon they were sliding down a slope of debris, loose stone cascading around and beneath them.

Drake pitched forward and jumped the last few feet down into the ancient corridor below. As Jada and Sully followed suit, he glanced up into the ruin that once had been the wine cellar, peered through the openings above into the blue sky, and wondered how difficult it was going to be to climb back up the rock pile with it all giving way beneath them. He thought it might be like Sisyphus trying to roll his stone uphill. He figured they had four or five hours before the taxi driver returned. He hoped that would be enough time to figure a way out of the ruins.

“All set?” Sully asked.

Jada took a deep breath, tested her flashlight, and shone it down the throat of the dark corridor ahead. “Set.”

Drake would have been happier if he’d had a flashlight, too. But the ones Sully and Jada were carrying provided plenty of illumination. He had a lighter with him in case he needed to make a torch in an emergency.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” Drake said softly, his words slipping down the corridor and coming back in a whispery echo.

The stones rustled behind them, settling further. It occurred to him that as unstable as it was, the rest of the fortress might collapse while they were underground, trapping them. He tried to push the thought away, but it lingered in the back of his head, haunting him.

The corridor led them north about a hundred paces, sloping downward the whole way, and then turned west, where it ended abruptly in a steep set of stairs. Small cups had been carved into the stone at intervals. Drake rubbed the inside of the bowl and then licked his finger. His nose wrinkled with distaste.

“Lamp oil,” he said. “Nothing left, but these were lights.”

As they descended the stairs, Jada and Sully used their beams to illuminate the walls and ceiling, searching for any art or ornament and finding nothing. They had found some kind of subterranean complex built into the hill beneath the Akrotiri fortress but no indication they were in a labyrinth.

That did not come until they were deeper.


There were flowers over the door. Not actual flowers but an engraving in the stone depicting a small array of large-petaled blossoms. Sully kept his light on the engraving, and they all studied the flowers for several long seconds.

“What are they?” Drake asked.

Sully grunted. “I look like a florist?”

They both looked at Jada.

“What?” she said, shrugging. “Because I’m a girl I’m supposed to know botany? I have no idea what they’re supposed to be, aside from flowers.”

Drake tried to play off their presumption, ready to make some excuse, but Jada gave him a look that warned him not to try and then went through the arched doorway.

“What?” Sully said. “Girls like flowers.”

Drake shook his head. “You’re such a Neanderthal.”

“And you’re what, Mr. Sensitive?”

“Come on!” Jada snapped at them.

Their bickering was really starting to get to her, which amused Drake no end. It was also, he hoped, distracting her from her grief and from the danger they were in and from the burden of guilt they all felt for Ian Welch’s abduction and possible murder. They were all on edge, aware that they had to at least accept the possibility that the hooded men who had been waiting for them in the labyrinth of Sobek might be lurking down here already.

“She loves us,” Drake whispered to Sully.

Sully nodded sagely. “How could she not?”

The corridor jagged to the left, then to the right, and in a dozen steps they came to a junction with three possible avenues ahead.

“Looks like we’re in the right place,” Drake said.

Jada stared at the three doorways, shaking her head. “This isn’t going to work. We need rope—something better than bread crumbs to leave a trail. Otherwise we could be down here forever. We could get so lost, we might die before we found our way out.”

Drake shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“How do you figure?” Sully asked.

Drake lifted his shirt and tugged a cloth packet from his waistband. He unwrapped the cloth napkin he had taken from a room service tray left in the hotel corridor to reveal Luka Hzujak’s journal and maps, folded tightly and all tied together with shoelaces he’d purchased in the small store in the lobby.

“I didn’t think we should leave this in the room for sneaky ninja guys or Henriksen’s thugs to find if they searched it. Also, y’ know, maps.”

Sully frowned. “What the hell good will those do us? None of them are for this place. No one’s been here in forever.”

“He’s right,” Jada said. “My father was working with Maynard Cheney, studying labyrinths in general, including the design of what had already been uncovered at Crocodilopolis. His sketches in the journal refer to the maps in some places. It might not tell us every turn to take, but it could be the Rosetta Stone as far as figuring out the logic of this place.”

Sully shone his light on the journal while Drake flipped pages. Jada unfolded a map and then a second, finding what she wanted.

“Here,” she said, pointing to a junction in the labyrinth map that mirrored the one they were standing in. “It’s not the middle door. That’s going to double back into one of the other two. We’d be going in a circle.”

“If you’re right,” Sully told her.

Drake flipped another page, then went back three. “She’s right,” he said. “Luka has half a dozen variations on this, and only one of them has the middle door being the right one.”

“How do we know this isn’t one of those instances?” Sully asked.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Drake replied. “And neither did Luka. If it’s gotta be trial and error, then that’s what it’ll be.”

Sully nodded. “Okay.” He went over to the corner of the right-hand door, where the stone seemed worn by time, and kicked at the rough edge of the frame, knocking several chunks of rock to the floor.

“Just in case,” he said, holding up the biggest shard of stone. “Which way?”

“Let’s try this one first,” Jada said, shining her light into the left side tunnel.

Holding the journal open in his hands, Drake followed her. Sully seemed thoughtful but said nothing as he took up the rear. Drake studied the doorway, then looked along the corridor, which seemed to turn left again just ahead. Behind him, Sully paused to scratch something into the wall just inside the doorway.

“Your initials?” Drake asked.

“Hey, at least I didn’t write ‘Sully was here.’ ”

“But you were tempted.”

Sully shrugged. “Of course.”

Drake started to turn, but something caught his eye. He reached out for Sully’s arm and pulled him over, making him shine the flashlight beam at the wall just above the door. Something else had been inscribed there, and it wasn’t Sully’s initials.

“Jada!” Drake called.

She hurried back to join them, merging her light with Sully’s. In the bright splash of illumination, they could all see the small diamond shape engraved into the stone above the door.

“Do you think that means we chose right?” Jada asked.

Sully stepped back out into the junction, but Drake had a glimmer of memory. In the light from Jada’s flash, he scanned pages of Luka’s journal again, and a smile crept across his face. He tapped the same page he’d looked at before, showing several variations on the three-choice junction. In each instance, Luka had drawn a small diamond shape on two of the possible avenues but not the third.

“Look at the map,” Drake said quickly.

Jada set it on the floor and unfolded it. They huddled over it, studying it in the light.

“The middle path isn’t marked,” Sully called from the junction.

“He’s drawn them here, too,” Jada said, tapping a fingernail on the map, where her father had inscribed tiny diamond shapes in many places.

Drake got up and went out to the junction with Sully. He snatched the flashlight away and went into the middle tunnel, searching the wall above the door. Then he went into the third tunnel.

“Yes!” he shouted in triumph.

Sully and Jada stood in the junction watching him.

“So the diamond marks the path?” Sully asked.

“No,” Drake said, gesturing to the stone above the doorway. “It’s here, too. Only on the inside. No way to see it from out there.”

“But if it’s on two of them, how do you—” Sully began, and then he grinned, nodding. “Oh, I like that. The right way is the one that isn’t marked.”

“Exactly,” Drake said, glancing excitedly at Jada. “Your father had it figured out. But we never would’ve realized it if we’d only run into forks in the labyrinth. If it was one or the other, the diamonds wouldn’t have helped. But this has three choices, and if two are marked, that’s gotta mean that the absence of a diamond is what shows the right path. Which means we were wrong. It’s the middle door.”

The three of them stared at one another, smiling in triumph.

They hurried through the middle door and had gone about twenty feet when Sully halted abruptly.

“Wait, wait,” he said, running back to the entrance and scrawling his initials just inside the door. “Just in case we’re idiots.”