“Don’t leave me in here, okay?” he asks, grinning and taking my hand. “This place is freaking me out.” In Alexei’s Russian accent, that sounds almost funny, and I can’t help but smile.
“Don’t worry, tough guy. I’ll protect you.”
We cross the massive room, following the footsteps until, as if by magic, they disappear. There’s a wall ahead. A dead end. I turn quickly, sweeping the beam of my light across the floor, but I can’t see where the feet might have retreated. Maybe they did, walking on the section of floor that isn’t as dusty. Or maybe …
I step away from the wall and look at it from a new angle.
“Okay,” Alexei says. “I suppose this is a dead end. I’m sorry, Gracie.”
I can feel him turning, backing away, but I can’t stop looking at the wall. I can’t stop thinking Spence was here. I know it. I can feel it. He was too intrigued when I saw him outside, and, according to Jamie, he wore his grandmother’s necklace every day of his life. He wasn’t the type to turn back just because something looked to be off-limits.
He came here.
And then he ended up dead.
“Gracie,” Alexei says. I can feel his hand on my arm. “We should go find the others. Perhaps they have had better luck.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not yet.”
I start in the upper-left-hand corner of the wall and slowly sweep my light across it, moving in a gridlike pattern. I cover every inch. Every brick. Every loose piece of mortar and —
The mortar is loose, here in the right-hand corner. I step forward, reach out to touch the stones the way I’ve seen Ms. Chancellor do, pressing and pulling.
“Gracie, please. It doesn’t look stable. We should go.”
I know Alexei is looking at me like I’m a crazy person. I can hear it in the way he says my name. But it’s too late for looking crazy to bother me.
“Just a second. I think maybe …” The stones are turning, they’re easing into position, and a moment later, the floor shakes a little. The wall moves, sliding aside, revealing an empty space of echoing darkness, but as soon as I shine my light upon the floor I see more footprints.
Alexei is mumbling something that I think must be the Russian equivalent of Oh my freaking goodness.
But I don’t stop to think or reason, I just follow the footsteps to the other side of the wall, where there is nothing but blackness. The air feels different here — fresher. Even though the walls on either side of me are closer and the room feels smaller, when I shine my light forward it stretches out farther and farther and I know we’re not even close to the end.
“Gracie, we shouldn’t be here,” Alexei says, but even his voice is filled with wonder.
I turn my light upward and see that even here the ceiling is covered with images, faded but clear. In the first, a king is surrounded by six knights, each of them bowing before him, offering their swords.
“Look at that one,” Alexei says.
I cast my light over an image that looks vaguely familiar. It’s the room we just left, I realize, but it’s filled with piles of gold. Rubies, emeralds, and pearls overflow from chests, spilling out onto the floor.
Treasure.
Even though we’re standing still, my heart has started to pound too hard. The light shakes as my hand trembles.
“They almost look real,” Alexei says as the gems in the pictures catch the light, gold shining, diamonds glowing. A cold dread grips me.
“I think they are real,” I say, and just that quickly … I know.
We aren’t supposed to be here.
Spence wasn’t supposed to be here.
The last person who came to this place looking for treasure died, and it doesn’t matter that he ended up miles away from here — I know it isn’t safe.
“Gracie, I think we’d better get out of —”
But before Alexei can finish, we hear it: a faint scraping, the sound of small rocks being ground into dirt as something heavy moves across an ancient floor.
We spin in time to see that the wall is moving again, closing, locking us in. Alexei races toward the entrance, but he and I have wandered farther inside than we realized, and even with his long strides, I know that it’s too late.
A second later the wall closes, trapping us inside the black.
“No!” I yell, as if that can make the wall open again.
There must be a trigger, I think. I pray. But the wall is almost solid stone, and on this side the pieces of the puzzle aren’t moving, aren’t working. If there’s a trigger to open the door I can’t find it, and as my hands move over the stones, I feel my fingers scrape — my hands bleed. Panic blooms inside me.
“No,” I say, almost to myself. “No. No. No.”
Darkness surrounds us. I realize too late that I’ve dropped my flashlight, and it’s started to roll away, faster and faster. The floor must slope downward, because the flashlight is picking up steam, and a new kind of panic fills me.
I jump to my feet and race across the floor, chasing after the rolling beam of light.