Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth

3



Drake and Sully took the subway train that shuttled passengers between Grand Central and Times Square, then boarded another subway car, this one headed north. They sat quietly together, Sully warily watching other passengers. The lights flickered on and off, making strange scars out of the scratches some vandals had put on the windows. The seat beneath Drake had been sliced open, but that didn’t bother him as much as the smell that permeated the air, trace aromas of sweat and urine, like the ghost of someone else’s stink. The car rattled on the tracks, rocking back and forth in a lulling motion that might have put Drake to sleep on a day without murder in it.

Sully glanced around, more paranoid than Drake had ever seen him.

“What’s going on, Sully?” Drake said, voice low. He glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to them, his friend’s paranoia contagious. But it was the New York subway; as a rule, people tended to pretend they were the only ones on the train. “How come you’ve got Jada hidden away?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Sully muttered, glancing sharply at Drake. “She won’t talk to the cops ’cause she’s afraid of ending up just as dead as her father.”

“She knows who did it?” Drake asked, intrigued.

“No. But she might know why. Now shut your trap. We’ll be there soon enough.”

Drake didn’t argue. He could see Luka’s murder had Sully spooked. If he wanted to be overcautious because he feared Jada might also be in danger, Drake wouldn’t blame him. Sully was the girl’s godfather, and he took the role seriously. With Luka dead, he would do whatever he had to in order to make sure the girl was taken care of.

Though she wasn’t really a girl anymore, was she? The last time Drake had seen Jadranka Hzujak, she had been eleven or twelve years old. In the intervening years, he had been vaguely aware that the girl had been growing up, but it had been happening so far off his radar that it was difficult to imagine Jada as an adult. Five or six years ago, he and Sully had gotten together with Luka and had dinner in a little dive in Soho that looked like it hadn’t changed in decades. Over dinner, Luka had mentioned that Jada had been enjoying college, which meant she had to be in her mid-twenties now. But he couldn’t shake the image of the little girl she’d been out of his mind.

As the train pulled into the 79th Street station, Sully tapped Drake on the knee and got up, slipping through the standing passengers. Drake followed, smiling as he made his way around a prodigiously pregnant young woman.

On the platform, Sully leaned up against the side of a newsstand and waited for the train to close its doors and pull away. Drake thought he was being overly cautious, but he had altered his travel plans and come to New York and been in motion since he had gotten off the plane at JFK. A couple of minutes just standing still was welcome. Besides, he knew this game. Sully wanted to wait for the platform to clear to make it more difficult for anyone who might be trying to follow them to remain inconspicuous.

When the disgorged passengers had scattered and the train was gone, Sully fell into step beside Drake and the two of them went up the stairs in silence. Outside, the chilly autumn breeze swept along the sidewalk and the afternoon shadows had grown longer. Sully turned uptown, and Drake waited patiently until they were half a block from the subway station entrance before speaking again.

“Come on, Sully,” Drake said. “Patience is a virtue, but it’s never been one of mine. You dragged me halfway across the country—”

“You were in Chicago. That’s not even close to halfway.”

Drake frowned. “I was never good at fractions. And that’s not the point. Luka is dead, and from the way you’re acting, it’s obvious you think whoever killed him isn’t going to stop there. If you’re gonna drag me into a situation where I might end up in a trunk with some of my pieces missing, I’d at least like to know what I’m getting myself into.”

Sully shot him a hard look. “So would I.”

He let out a long breath, relenting, and glanced around to make sure no one was paying them any extra attention, then shoved his hands in his pockets and kept his gaze forward, talking quietly.

“Here’s the lowdown,” Sully began. “Maybe you remember that Jada’s mother died when she was a kid.”

“Breast cancer, wasn’t it?” Drake asked.

“Lungs,” Sully corrected. “Luka remarried a couple of years back, a woman named Olivia. Jada called her the ‘wicked stepmother.’ Olivia Hzujak works for a company called Phoenix Innovations. CEO is a guy called Tyr Henriksen—Norwegian, I think. Phoenix is mainly a weapons manufacturer, with business partners around the world, but they have a research division that keeps things pretty hush-hush.”

“Why does the name ring a bell?” Drake asked, wary as a car slowed in his peripheral vision. It turned out to be a taxi letting off a passenger, but Sully had him jumping at shadows. “Tyr Henriksen, not the corporation.”

“Thought you’d catch that,” Sully replied. “Henriksen’s an antiquities collector, and he doesn’t mind acquiring things in a shady fashion if the aboveboard approach doesn’t work.”

“He’ll hire smugglers and thieves if he has to,” Drake clarified.

Sully arched an eyebrow. “I know. Can you imagine? Rogues and villains.”

Drake said nothing. Sully was joking, but Drake didn’t think it was funny. He bent the rules and sometimes he broke them, and his line of work put him into contact with some pretty unsavory characters, but he didn’t consider himself one of them.

“Three months ago, Henriksen reached out to Luka through Olivia, trying to get him involved in a private project,” Sully went on. “Luka had a bad feeling about Henriksen’s proposal, I guess. He did some poking, started doing the research Henriksen wanted, and stumbled across something that worried him enough that he quit. Only he didn’t really quit. He kept working on the project, but for himself instead of for Tyr Henriksen.”

“This is all pretty vague.”

They’d walked a couple of blocks and now came to a stop at the corner of 81st Street and Broadway, waiting for the light to change. There was a Starbucks at the southeast corner of the intersection and Drake found himself craving coffee, but he kept his focus on Sully and the people around them. A young professional woman, he guessed Indian or Pakistani, walked a tiny mincing dog. Two men crossed at the light, carrying Starbucks cups and laughing together. Drake didn’t see any threat, but he felt it, though he figured that was mostly the picture the day had painted thus far.

“At first, all Luka would tell Jada was that Henriksen had wanted him to solve a mystery for him and that there was treasure at the heart of it. Something priceless,” Sully said. “Something—”

“Worth killing for,” Drake finished.

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Sully asked.

The light changed, and they continued north along Broadway.

“So Luka wanted the treasure for himself,” Drake said.

“It doesn’t feel right to me. Luka wouldn’t have put himself on the line like that. He loved his work and he loved his daughter, and I always had the impression he was content with that.”

“No offense, Sully, but you saw Luka once every couple of years. People change. And even if Luka didn’t change, you can’t climb inside someone’s head and see the world the way they see it.”

But Sully was shaking his head. “No way. I knew him as well as I know you. And Jada’s with me. She says her dad wasn’t excited the way someone who thought they were going to get their hands on something special would be. She says her old man just seemed afraid. When she pressed him about it, he told her Henriksen’s project was dangerous and the only way to stop him was to find the treasure before he did.”

They turned on 82nd Street. An old man passed them, his long wool coat too large for his age-shrunken frame, and Sully waited until they were a dozen paces beyond him before he paused and faced Drake.

“Look, Nate, here’s what it comes down to. Luka—he was one of the good guys. I want to make sure whoever killed him pays the price. Beyond that, Jada wants to finish this project. It cost her father his life, and she intends to see it through for him. I plan to be a part of that. I’m not as young as I used to be, and she’s not used to people trying to kill her, so we could use your help. If you end up in a shallow grave somewhere, at least you’ll know you went out doing something good.”

Drake arched an eyebrow, unable to hide his wry smile. “Well, when you put it that way, how could I resist?”

Sully clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks. It means a lot.”

“Don’t get all mushy, Sully. You’ll make me blush.”

Sully rolled his eyes and turned away, cutting diagonally across the street toward a five-story building that took up half the block, which consisted of a row of apartment houses. Drake waited for a messenger on an old moped to buzz past and then followed. The Upper West Side of Manhattan seemed like a nice place to live, with trees planted along the sidewalk and waist-high wrought-iron gates in front of short pathways that led to front doors. The apartment building had red doors, dormers on either end and a little chalet-style peak in the center. Sully went all the way to the last door at the end of the block, where 82nd Street met West End Avenue.

Drake followed him into the foyer. Sully hit a button labeled Gorinsky, and they were buzzed in immediately.

Their destination turned out to be an apartment on the fourth floor at the rear of the building. According to Sully, it belonged to an old college friend of Jada’s who was studying overseas and had left her a key and an invitation to use the place any time she was in the city. If there was an elevator, Drake didn’t see it, and he was impressed by how little difficulty Sully had with the stairs. Not that he expected his old friend to collapse halfway up, but Sully wasn’t getting any younger, and smoking cigars wasn’t exactly the athlete’s number one hobby.

The apartment door opened before they reached it. The woman who stood just across the threshold could have passed for a teenager at first glance. She wore a long-sleeved cream-colored top, tight black pants, and plain black boots, useful instead of trendy. Her hair was black, but the long bangs that framed her face had been dyed a vivid magenta. But with a second look, Drake saw the power in her five-foot-three frame and the intelligence glinting in her hazel eyes.

Jada Hzujak was definitely not a kid anymore.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sully asked quietly, hustling her back into the apartment. “You didn’t even ask who it was before you buzzed us in.”

Jada lifted her chin, ready for a fight. “I’m not stupid, Uncle Vic. There’s a camera in the foyer, remember? I watched for you.”

She jerked a thumb at the intercom panel by the door. Drake couldn’t see it from out in the hall, but he figured Sully was getting a look at a screen where someone in the apartment could see who was buzzing from down below and feeling pretty sheepish. That made Drake smile. He didn’t get to see Sully put in his place very often.

Then Jada looked at him. “Are you just gonna stand in the hallway, smiling like an idiot, or are you coming in?”

“I wasn’t sure myself for a minute,” Drake replied, “but I guess I’m coming in.”

Jada stood back to let him enter, then shut and locked the door behind him. Drake glanced at Sully.

“Cat got your tongue, ‘Uncle Vic’?”

“Shut up,” Sully snarled.

The apartment was neat to the point of being spartan, decorated in bland colors by someone without a lot of imagination. The few pieces of art on the walls all seemed to have been chosen to match the decor instead of the other way around. The only signs of habitation were the throw pillows in disarray on the sofa and the mess of papers and books on the floor and coffee table nearby.

“Jada, you may not remember Nate—” Sully began.

“I remember him just fine,” Jada said, tucking a magenta lock behind her ear as she regarded Drake coolly. “Though in my memory you’re taller.”

Drake smiled. “Well, to be fair, you were shorter back then.”

“You were cuter, too.”

His smile vanished. “So were you. In a bossy ten-year-old girl kinda way.”

“I was twelve.”

“I know.”

Jada laughed, then immediately sobered, as if she felt guilty for feeling any levity at all in a world where her father had been brutally murdered. She managed a small, melancholy smile, just the slightest acknowledgment that she’d enjoyed the sparring, and then turned back to Sully.

“I kept working while you were out,” she said. “I wanted to have something to show you when you got back.”

Sully followed her over to the sofa and sat on the edge as she started to arrange the papers on the coffee table, then lifted a few of them off the floor. From where he stood, Drake saw that many of the papers were drawings of what looked like mazes, but they were fully rendered illustrations, not a crude puzzle maker’s doodling.

“How much did you tell him?” Jada asked Sully.

“Just about Henriksen, and Luka being afraid. I didn’t get into any of the historical stuff,” Sully replied.

“ ‘He’ is standing right here,” Drake said, then looked from Jada to Sully. “And I thought she didn’t know what this mysterious project was.”

“ ‘She’ knew a little and is trying to figure out the rest,” Jada said, cocking her head and studying him. “What do you know about alchemy?”

Drake shrugged. “What’s to know? Crazy people thought they could turn random other metals into gold. And how cool would that be? Although treasure hunters would be out of work.”

Jada picked up an old book, its dust jacket yellowed and torn at the edges. He could barely make out the title, Science, Magic & Society.

“You don’t look like the homework type,” she said. “But if you want to read up, it might not be a bad idea. There were a lot of men through the ages—almost always men—who presented themselves as alchemists and claimed to be able to make gold. They claimed all kinds of other things, too. St. Germain told all of Europe he was immortal. Fulcanelli had a reputation as a sorcerer. Nicholas Flamel supposedly unlocked the secrets of the philosopher’s stone.”

Drake picked up the book and flipped a few pages. “Actually, my favorite was always Ostanes the Persian. You know, the guy who was with Xerxes during the invasion of Greece? Apparently introduced the black arts into the Hellenic world? Quite a rascal, that one.”

Jada gave him an appreciative nod.

“The crack about homework?” she said. “I take it back.”

Drake sat on the sofa, attentive as a schoolboy.

“Don’t be impressed,” Sully sniffed. “You can’t be in the business of acquiring antiquities without knowing the major alchemists.”

“I collect all the trading cards,” Drake put in.

Sully shot him a withering glance. Drake wondered if it was meant to stop him from making jokes or from flirting. Not that he meant anything by the flirting. It was a nervous habit he’d developed when he was around women who intrigued him, and Jada definitely intrigued him. Stunning, smart, and fierce, she still managed to have a sense of mischief that he admired. However, Sully was obviously protective of her, and Drake had no intention of testing that.

“I’ve been taking notes, trying to make sense of the things I remember my father saying in the past few weeks,” Jada explained, gesturing to the papers. “Uncle Vic and I went to the library this morning after he called you, and I tried to find the books I remembered my dad was so fascinated by late in the summer. A couple of them I couldn’t find, but I tried to get things that seemed the most similar.”

“What interests me the most is what I didn’t find,” she went on, turning to Drake. “One of the last things I remember my father saying about all of this was that he’d found some connection between all of what he called ‘the great alchemists’ and King Midas.”

“Not much of a stretch,” Sully said. “Midas was supposed to be able to turn things to gold just by touching them.”

Drake leaned forward, reaching for one of the maze drawings. “Maybe I missed something, but last I checked, Midas was just a myth.”

Jada nodded. “Maybe. But my father always said that every legend has at least a little history at its core.”

“What are all these?” Drake asked, holding up the maze drawing.

She took it from his hand. “My dad had been doing tons of research, but his inquiries were split pretty evenly on two subjects. The first was alchemy. The other one was labyrinths.”

“What’s the connection?” Drake asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Sully said, sifting through the illustrations. “Jada dug up references this morning on some of the more famous labyrinths.”

“Sketching helps me think,” Jada said. “Most of the ancient labyrinths only exist as ruins and foundations, but archaeologists think they’ve got some of them figured out. There are diagrams. I tried drawing them, trying to find design connections, that kind of thing.”

“Any luck?” Drake asked.

Jada’s expression turned contemplative. “A little,” she said, reaching for a larger book from the coffee table. “But the biggest piece of luck was right in front of me from the second we found this book in the library, and it took me until about twenty minutes ago to realize it.”

She tapped the cover, drawing their attention to the author’s name: Maynard P. Cheney.

“You know him?” Sully asked.

“No,” Jada said. “But my father had been talking to the guy constantly in the last few weeks. Cheney is working on a new exhibit for the Museum of Natural History. Want to guess the subject?”

Drake held up the labyrinth illustration in his hand and raised his eyebrows.

“Exactly,” Jada said, nodding.

“The museum’s only a few blocks from here,” Sully said as he stood.

“Let’s go have a talk with Mr. Cheney,” Drake replied, setting the illustration aside.

Jada rose, and they both turned to look at her. She seemed confused for a moment, and then her eyes flashed with anger.

“Oh, hell no,” she said, glancing back and forth between them. “My father is dead, and this guy might help us figure out why. If you want some girl who’s going to lock the door and hide behind the sofa, then you’ve got the wrong damsel in distress.”

Sully looked like he might argue, the thought of Jada in danger making him go pale, but one look from her and he didn’t put up an argument. Drake liked her more and more.

As Jada opened the door and led the way into the hall, he glanced at Sully. “I guess she’s coming along.”

Sully gave a wan smile. “You want to try to stop her?”

Drake followed Jada out the door. “Not in the least.”


As they walked down 81st Street, Drake hung back a ways, keeping an eye on Sully and Jada but also keenly aware of their surroundings. He checked every pedestrian and every vehicle but saw no sign that they were being followed. On the way uptown, he had considered Sully’s paranoia excessive, but now he wasn’t so sure. They had only the edges of the puzzle surrounding Luka’s murder, but if he had made some huge discovery involving alchemy, that likely meant gold. Maybe a lot of gold. And there were a great many people who would do just about anything for such treasure. He scanned the windows and rooftops but realized that it had become his turn to be overly paranoid. Even if Luka’s killers—and logic suggested there was more than one, considering how much effort it required to sneak a steamer trunk with a corpse inside it onto a train platform without anyone noticing—had found out where Jada had been hiding, they could not have predicted which route Drake and Sully and Jada would take when leaving the apartment.

Still, he was worried. As they walked, he turned the whole thing over in his mind. Luka’s wife had made the introductions between her husband and her employer. Drake wasn’t sure what her position was at Phoenix Innovations, but it stood to reason that she knew at least some of the details of the secret project Henriksen wanted Luka to work on. When Luka turned him down and started working on it himself, that would have put Olivia in a difficult position. Would she have told Henriksen what her husband was up to?

Jada referred to Olivia as her “wicked stepmother.” It might be a family joke, but Drake doubted it. The question was whether Olivia Hzujak valued her job more than she did her marriage. And if she had told Henriksen what Luka had been up to, would this billionaire CEO have gone so far as to have the man murdered?

Drake didn’t know. But someone had killed Luka, and to do it in such an odd and gruesome fashion—well, the killers hadn’t tried to hide their work. On the contrary, they had virtually assured that the whole world would know of it. By now, details of the discovery of Luka’s body would be on every news channel and all over the Internet.

Something didn’t click there. If Henriksen had wanted Luka dead, would he have made such a spectacle of the crime? It seemed far too great a risk for a man with so much to lose.

Ruminating on it, he picked up his pace as Sully and Jada passed the museum on the right and reached the corner of Central Park West. They looked comfortable together, like father and daughter. Sully spent most of his time focusing on his own fortunes, so it was fascinating to watch him become so wrapped up in someone else’s. He had no children of his own, but Jada was his goddaughter, and it was pretty clear he would do anything to protect her. Even if Drake hadn’t wanted to help Jada—which he did both for her own sake and because the puzzle intrigued him—he would have been on board just because Sully had asked.

It was the one thing that Drake and Jada had in common. As of this morning, Sully was the closest thing either one of them had to family. Drake hustled up the museum steps and through the door, finding Sully and Jada waiting for him just inside.

“Anything?” Sully asked.

“Not that I saw,” Drake replied, “but I’m no detective, so what do I know?”

Sully frowned. “Nah. If they knew where Jada was, they’d have tailed us from the apartment.”

Jada looked relieved as Sully headed off toward the information desk. For a person who had learned of her father’s murder only half a day before, she was holding together well.

By the time they caught up to Sully, he already had spoken to the neatly attired man behind the desk, who had picked up a phone and was having a conversation while half turned away from them. A moment later he hung up the phone and informed them that someone from Dr. Cheney’s team would be down to fetch them momentarily. Drake fought the temptation to make a crack about anyone “fetching” them and joined Sully and Jada in standing around an enormous plant, trying not to look awkward.

An attractive young woman arrived to fetch them, introducing herself as a graduate student working with Dr. Cheney. She wore her hair up in a loose bun, artfully disarrayed, and though her dark red sweater and gray skirt were fashionable and neat, Drake thought she looked more like a movie superspy masquerading as a museum employee than an actual graduate student. She made him want to enroll in classes or become a museum curator, and though Jada and Sully asked her questions while she let them up to the second floor, Drake missed the initial bits of conversation.

“—honestly surprised that the board went along with it,” the woman said as she marched up the stairs ahead of them. “Whitney Memorial Hall has been used for special exhibits numerous times, but in this case, they actually relocated the oceanic birds exhibit to the Akeley Gallery. Most of the birds, I should say. The Akeley is a smaller space, so some had to be put into storage. In any case, it underscores how enthusiastic they are about Dr. Cheney’s work that they’re willing to go to that extent. He’s been working night and day for weeks in preparation.”

They reached the top of the stairs in a wide rotunda. Through a huge entryway behind him, Drake saw elephants, and the sight saddened him. He had seen the real thing, up close and personal and on their own territory, and encountering them here felt almost grotesque.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tearing his attention away from the elephant. “I zoned out for a second. What’s this exhibit Mr. Cheney’s working on?”

The question earned him a look of scorn from their guide. “Dr. Cheney’s exhibit is called ‘Labyrinths of the Ancient World.’ His research into historical records and the physical evidence has been groundbreaking.”

“And he’s the curator of the exhibit?” Jada asked.

“Of course,” the graduate student sniffed, growing impatient and visibly irritated at their ignorance.

Without another word, all courtesy forgotten, she strode from the rotunda and down a short corridor past restrooms and a coatroom. A velvet rope blocked the huge rollaway doors at the end of the corridor. A small brass stand bore a sign that asked patrons to pardon the museum for its appearance while a new exhibit was being installed.

“They should switch her to public relations,” Drake muttered to Sully and Jada. “Doesn’t she just exude a welcoming warmth?”

Sully shot him a remonstrative glance, but Jada said nothing. She wore a hopeful expression as they followed their guide past the velvet rope. The graduate student used a key to unlock the large doors and slid one side open just wide enough for them to pass through.

“Dr. Cheney’s locked in here?” Jada asked.

“There’s an employee entrance as well. This was just the most convenient way to bring you in. And Maynard has a key, of course.”

Drake tried to hide his smile. Oh, it’s Maynard now. Someone had a little crush on her boss. It would have been adorable if she hadn’t been such a condescending witch.

They entered the exhibit after she and Drake nearly collided with Sully and Jada, who had stopped to admire Dr. Cheney’s work. Drake’s eyes widened as he took in their surroundings. Just ahead of them were two massive stones engraved with ancient languages: Greek on one side and Egyptian hieroglyphics on the other. A banner hung on the wall to the right, trumpeting the name of the exhibit—“Labyrinths of the Ancient World”—along with the tagline “Can You Find Your Way Out?”

“No way,” Jada whispered.

“Actually, I kinda think ‘way,’ ” Drake replied.

The graduate student slid the door shut behind them but didn’t bother with the lock. Apparently she didn’t think they would be there very long.

“If you’ll follow me,” she said, “I’ll take you through the labyrinth. Please don’t touch anything, and no photographs, of course.”

“Of course,” Sully said drily.

The labyrinth exhibit had been constructed as a maze, with information imparted along the way through diagrams and scale models. Monitors had been installed in the walls to show animated re-creations of the construction of the labyrinths, and at regular intervals there were cutouts in the walls where ancient artifacts had been placed behind thick glass. Some of the plaques identifying those objects were not yet in place and some of the cutouts were still empty, but Drake had the idea that the time was not far off when the exhibit would make its debut. And what a debut it would be. He felt certain that crowds would flock to the museum to lose themselves in the labyrinth Dr. Cheney had built.

What the irritated graduate student led them through was not a full-size labyrinth but only a tiny fragment created to give visitors the illusion that they were lost in a vast, sprawling maze. As they turned sharply angled corners and then doubled back again, Drake decided that Dr. Cheney had done an excellent job. In fact, being lost was no illusion at all. He imagined that when the exhibit was completed, there would be arrows or some other indicator to let people know if they were headed in the right direction, but he would have been lost without their guide, and he thought the same must be true of Sully and Jada.

“Is there a Minotaur?” Jada asked.

The graduate student glanced back at them over her shoulder and smirked. “No. But there will be a false turn that will be very dark, and you’ll hear a roar coming from it. Then the lights go out, and there’s a whole display about the legend of the Minotaur. We’re supposed to focus on history, not myth, but people who come to an exhibit on labyrinths are going to expect something on the legend.”

Jada started to reply but never got the words out. Whatever she might have said was interrupted by a horrible scream that echoed through the labyrinth, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. A man’s voice, in panic and pain.

“What the hell—” Sully growled.

The graduate student froze. “Maynard?” she called, panic in her eyes.

Drake and Jada exchanged a glance, and he could tell by the way she stood that they were doing the same thing: listening, trying to figure out the source of the scream. In the labyrinth, it might be impossible to pinpoint.

“This way,” Drake said, taking a left turn.

“No,” their guide said, grabbing his arm. “That’s a dead end.”

She walked straight ahead, and for a heartbeat Drake thought she would collide with the wall. Only when she passed through it did he see the opening; an optical illusion had made it seem like an unbroken surface. Dr. Cheney had outdone himself in creating his labyrinth exhibit, but the time to appreciate it had passed.

Drake, Sully, and Jada followed her through the opening and around a sharp turn that brought them to a fork.

“Which way?” Jada asked.

The graduate student seemed about to go right, but then there came a crash of glass and the thump of a heavy impact against the walls. Drake darted past the woman, down the corridor to the left. The sound had been close, and with the thud on the wall, there was no question about direction now.

Drake darted around a floor display, brushed the fake stone wall, and took a jag to the right. It felt like he’d reversed direction; for a second he thought the maze had misled him, but then it split into two narrow passages, one in either direction, and he turned left again, rushing in the direction of the crash. He heard Sully, Jada, and their guide pursuing him but didn’t slow. That scream had been one not of fear but of pain. And more than pain. He had heard men scream like that only in the worst of circumstances, when blood had been shed and life was fleeting.

“Nate, watch your ass!” Sully shouted.

Drake slowed, taking heed of the warning. They’d heard no gunshots, but he had no way of knowing what waited for them ahead. He dashed past a yawning darkness to his right and wondered if that was where the Minotaur’s roar eventually would be heard. Then he reached a turn where the ceiling sloped downward to an arched entryway. He ducked through and nearly tripped over a man sprawled on the floor.

“Damn it,” he muttered, regaining his footing.

A quick glance at the man’s dull, vacant eyes—and the stab wounds in his chest and the blood staining his clothes and pooling under him—was enough to tell Drake he wasn’t going to make it.