23

HUGGING was Max’s least favorite human activity, just below crying. But right now Alex was doing activity number two because she was sad. And he was doing activity number one because he knew it would make her feel better.

Sometimes you had to.

Max was sad too. He could not shake the smell of skunk. And Kristin was sitting against the wall with her knees pulled up around her face. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have forced him to stay behind. We could have waited behind the rock door and opened it for you when you got back.”

“Maybe he’s OK . . .” Alex said. “You heard water, right, Max?”

Max nodded. “Really far down, though. So if it was deep, he might have done a big belly flop and survived. But if was shallow, he probably cracked his skull open and died instantly.”

Kristin grimaced. “I . . . I will choose optimism.”

“It’s about all we can do,” Alex replied, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Brandon can be crude, but he’s a wonderful pilot and a sweet man. And we owe him. He saved our lives by landing on the water. And he was the one who led us here.”

“Let’s see if we can find him,” Max said, standing up. “Or his corpse, before it rots.”

“Max!” Alex snapped.

“Sorry.” Max stood. He flicked on his light and walked toward the carving on the wall.

“The top part of this map is pretty clear,” Max said. “It’s the bottom that’s messed up. Worn away over the years. So . . . we definitely take the left part of the fork. Looks like it leads to another room. From there it gets . . . um, a little complicated.”

“Obliterated is the word,” Kristin said. “This isn’t going to do us much good.”

Max stood back, aiming his phone camera and snapping an image.

“I think we need a rubbing too, in case the phone runs out of juice,” Kristin said, fishing around in her backpack.

As she pulled out a big white sheet of paper and a thick charcoal pencil from her pack, Max looked over toward Alex. She was still staring wordlessly down the right-hand tunnel. “Hey,” Max said softly, “can you help us?”

Alex turned to Max with a blank, red-eyed stare. He wanted to cheer her up, but he wasn’t sure how. It looked like something inside her had died.

As Max pressed the top left corner of the paper tight against the wall, Alex held the upper right. With great care, Kristin traced the map’s upper section until she had a decent image. She rolled up the paper and stuffed it into her pack. Her eyes moistened as she looked at Alex. “We’ll find him,” she said.

Alex nodded.

“Go slow,” Max said. “Every path we’ve been on is slippery.”

Taking the lead, Max shone his flashlight into the left-hand tunnel. It angled downward too, but it wasn’t round or square. It was shaped more like two parentheses joined at the top—maybe eight feet tall but no floor, really. Max had to plant each step on the V shape formed at the bottom. His ankles bowed outward with the effort. It helped to steady himself against the wall with his free hand.

The path meandered downward in an irregular zigzag pattern. At times it inclined upward for long, long stretches, and Max feared they would never go any deeper, just cross from one end of Iceland to the other. Other times it switched back so it seemed they were returning to where they’d started. Max lost track of time, listening for the sound of water, hoping they would get to the place where Brandon had landed.

Sweat was soon dripping from his brow and stinging his eyes. They were on a level section now. The seam in the rock had widened so they actually had some solid, flat stone to stand on. Just ahead of them, the tunnel branched off into a kind of oval-shaped chamber. “Can we take a break in there?” Kristin asked.

“Twist my arm,” Max said.

But as he entered the room and dropped his pack, he smelled mercaptan again. Anxiety. Big time. “Guys,” he said, “I’m nervous. What if we’re wrong about this whole route?”

Kristin’s and Alex’s faces were beaded with sweat, and they were breathing hard. “We . . . have no choice . . .” Alex said. “It was . . . this path or . . . Brandon’s.”

“Still . . .” Max said. “Something’s telling me this is a mistake. I smell gas. I think we’re going around in circles.”

Kristin locked eyes with Max. “Anxiety and claustrophobia are normal for underground explorers,” she said, holding up a squarish metallic device. “I’ve been consulting a compass and depth measurements. We have descended about a thousand meters. That is nearly a half mile, a substantial depth. We are not spinning our wheels.” She smiled. “Besides, my uncle gave you the Vegvísir, and that means we can never be lost.”

Max fingered the talisman around his neck. Holding it out, he examined the shapes. The nasty smell was dissipating, and he felt calmer. Not that he believed in magical properties. He didn’t. It was not scientific. But the design itself was comforting, like the blueprint of a cool maze you could run through and solve. He loved the beauty and complexity. The most truly magical thing about it was how Uncle Gunther had put the shape together from the vague lines they’d seen at the bottom of the Braille note.

Lines.

Not runes. Not talismans. Lines.

There were other lines under the text of Jules Verne’s message. They were under the Vegvísir. Max tried to picture them in his mind.

And as he did, they seemed weirdly familiar. He needed to see them again.

As he reached into his pocket for his phone, Alex touched his arm. “Max . . .” she said. “Your talisman? I’m seeing it.”

“Where?” Max said, scrolling to find the Braille message.

“Around your neck,” Alex said. “I’m seeing it—and you. But I shouldn’t be. No one is shining a flashlight. Why is this?”

Max looked up. Kristin held out her flashlight to show him it was turned off.

His flashlight was off too, and so was Alex’s. Yet both of his friends were faintly visible, as if they had wandered into a room on a cloudy afternoon with the shades down.

“What the—?” His eyes passed over Kristin’s and Alex’s shoulders to the walls beyond. They were glowing a faint brownish green. But it wasn’t a steady light. It moved and winked and pulsed softly, traveling from crag to crag like a mist, as if a billion tiny fireflies were flitting just over the surface.

“Where is it coming from?” Alex said, glancing up to the ceiling. “Do you see some kind of fissure?”

Above them, the roof’s ceiling seemed to be hung with a netting of moss and thick cobwebs. No skylight there.

“Whoa, that’s weird,” Kristin said. “It’s like a sagging tent top, only made of cobwebs.”

“I think the light is coming from the stone,” Max said. “It’s making its own.”

Kristin rubbed her hand along the wall. When she turned her palm inward, her fingers glowed too. “Ha!” she exclaimed. “This is awesome! Nitrogen-based bioluminescence . . . Jules Verne wrote about this. Since his time, it’s been detected—but not like this!”

Tracing his finger along the wall, Max wiped off moss and made a smiley face. It wasn’t until he turned full circle that the breath caught in his throat.

Alex and Kristin were staring at the other end of the chamber. There, where he would have expected the path to continue, was a small opening not any bigger than a basketball. “This is crazy,” Alex murmured. “Verne couldn’t have made it through that.”

Max pulled moved closer, pulling out his flashlight. Before he could flick it on, he felt something catch on his foot.

He looked down just as a taut filament snapped in two.

“Max!” Alex shouted.

A clattering echoed from above. Kristin and Alex were gaping at the ceiling. As Max craned his neck upward, the thick, tentlike netting of cobwebs split wide open.

First a white object dropped to the ground. A bone.

Then a grinning white face burst through.

As Alex let out a piercing shriek, Max dove to the ground. He covered his head as a cascade of bones and skulls rained on top of him.