CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

RECALCULATING

I FELL ON cold, pricking knives. I tried to gasp, but the air had been displaced by…

Water.

The stabbing sensation slammed up through my body—the shock of cold. Colder than anything I’d ever felt. By the time my feet hit bottom I could barely feel them. I pushed as hard as I could, rising, my lungs tight as fists.

As I broke the surface, stunned and numb, I heard clattering noises. It took a second to realize they were footsteps.

“Jack! Over here!” Aly was calling.

The call seemed to come from everywhere. But I saw only blackness. “Where are you?”

“Here!” Cass said from my right. “There are stairs on the right. You didn’t have to slide!”

“Th-th-thanks,” I said through chattering teeth.

A flash of a light blinded me, and I felt something snakelike drop onto my shoulder. I recoiled with a yell.

“It’s a rope, Jack!” Cass shouted. “Grab it!”

I managed to close my fingers around it. Cass dragged me through the water, and then two pairs of hands lifted me over the surface of a sharp rock ledge.

I flopped against a slimy wall, grateful to be out of there but shivering uncontrollably. Aly and Cass had both taken thin blankets from their packs and wrapped them around me. “Easy,” Cass said. “Just sit tight.”

My teeth kept chattering. My entire body shook. I’d bruised my ankle against the bottom of the underground pool. I’d lost the machete.

“Well,” I said, my voice raspy and raw, “at least we’re off to a good start.”

I’m not exactly sure how Cass found all the wood. But it was really dry. He returned with pile after pile, proudly dropping it all on the chamber floor. “Very strange. A karst topography in a jungle environment.”

“No backward words, please, Cass,” Aly asked.

“Karst is a real word that means an area of limestone, sink holes, underground pools, cenotes,” Cass said. “This must have been some kind of sacred location. There are piles of beads, stacks of wood all around. Maybe this was one of those ancient places where they sacrificed maidens to the gods.”

“Why was it always maidens?” Aly said with disgust.

I threw a couple more pieces into the fire. The heat felt amazing. I wasn’t dry yet, but getting there. We were lucky that a fissure in the ceiling served as a flue to draw the smoke upward.

Cass warmed his hands over the flame. “All the comforts of emoh. Er, home.”

“Don’t get too comfy.” I stood up, slinging my wet backpack over my shoulder. “We have a long way to go. How many matches do you have left? Mine are soaked.”

Cass shrugged. “A few.”

“If we run out, I can use the flint,” I said. “My matches and my flashlight are useless after that swim. Aly, you grab some wood, just in case. Cass, you, too. How are you set for other supplies?”

“Three-in-one oil, rubbing alcohol, kerosene, and peanut butter and jelly sandwich—in separate containers.” Cass walked to the mouth of the pathway, shining his flashlight into the blackness. “But I forgot the monster repellant.”

I took the flashlight and stepped cautiously inside. The path seemed to have been blasted through solid rock. The ceiling was about eight feet tall, the walls craggy and covered with moss. I felt a drip of water and looked up to see a small stalactite.

“Looks like there’s a fork ahead,” Aly remarked. “Which way, human GPS?”

“Go right,” Cass called out nervously, then shook his head. “No. Recalculating. Left.”

Aly and I exchanged a wary glance. Our footsteps clopped loudly. The path grew wider and warmer as we approached a blind turn. The flashlight’s globe of light traced a path along the curved wall.

And then it hit a dead end.

“Want to recalculate again?” Aly asked.

“I—I don’t understand…” Cass said, nearing the sheer rock. “I remember this. There should be a fork here, where we go right!”

As I crept closer, I noticed that the wall contained a perfectly rectangular section of stone, placed into it like a large brick. It jutted out just enough for me to wrap the fingers of both hands around it. I handed the flashlight to Aly.

“Be careful,” she warned. “Remember what happened to Torquin.”

I pulled. With a loud sccccraack, the plug slid out. Under it was a collection of dirt and cobwebs, which I blew aside. Aly shone the flashlight in.

“What the—?” Aly said.

“Think,” Cass said. “‘Keys.’ Keys unlock things. Maybe this is some kind of door.”

“But the keys are divisions,” I said. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s a list,” Aly said, staring intently. “The elements must mean something.”

“Sisters, gamblers, seas—they have nothing in common!” Cass insisted.

“People are a combination of their virtues and sins…” I mused.

“Wait!” Aly blurted out. “Camelot!”

Cass and I looked at her.

“The part in the movie where the evil Mordred sings ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’?” she said. “Seven virtues…seven sins? And…gables! That’s a movie, too, House of the Seven Gables. Well, it started as a book. Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

“Seven Sisters…” I murmured. “My mom went to Smith College. She called it one of the Seven Sisters schools.”

“Seven continents and seven seas!” Cass blurted out. “And seven is a lucky number for gamblers! Don’t ask me how I know that.”

Aly’s fingers were reaching toward the pad. “Seven, divided any way, gives us a fraction with the same number pattern we saw outside, remember? Let’s give it a try.”

Carefully Aly tapped out 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, and 7.

We held our breaths, staring at the rock. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then a noise.

“Are we…rising?” Cass asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Look at the ground.”

It felt like we were rising. But only because the stone wall around us was sinking into the floor.

I looked up. From the shadows behind the rock, I could see the top of two archways.

“Yes!” Cass blurted out. “I told you! A fork! Okay, when this baby sinks, we march right!”

I shone the light into the right-hand pathway.

An eyeless, skinless face stared back at me with a toothy grin.