CHAPTER 45

Call us crazy, but Beck and I decided to run.

Luckily, the cave ceiling became higher up ahead. We didn’t trigger any more booby traps—probably because whoever installed the dart launchers and the gas pumpers figured those two items would be more than enough to take care of any and all grave robbers.

And because they also probably knew we’d run into a wall.

Which is what we did. There was no rear exit. Just a tall stone wall.

“What’s that?” said Beck, shining her flashlight on a carving at the base of the wall.

“Some kind of Incan art,” I said. “Too bad we don’t have time for an art-appreciation class right now, Rebecca. We need to find a way out before that poison-gas cloud finds its way into this room.”

“Fascinating,” mumbled Beck, sounding like Mom when she’s in an art museum admiring a masterpiece.

“Hello? Earth to Beck? We’re about ten seconds away from dying a horrible, miserable death. I’m talking choking and gagging and bloodshot eyeballs.”

“It’s Incan art,” she replied, because, as the family artiste, she pays more attention during Mom’s art history lectures than I do. “Very curious.”

“What?”

“Storm and Dad said these tombs were built by a pre-Incan civilization.”

“So?”

“Pre-Incan means it came before the Incas. So why is there Incan art decorating this wall?”

Okay. She had a point. She might not have had very long to live, but she had a point.

“It looks like a solar disk,” she went on while I waved at the foul air tickling my nostrils. The stinky gas was seeping into the back chamber where we were trapped. “The sun, of course, is a very important symbol in Incan mythology.”

“Of course,” I said, coughing a little. My eyes started stinging.

“Beneath the solar disk, we see two kneeling figures on either side of a diamond-shaped object. It’s almost as if they are worshipping the diamond.”

“Well, maybe it’s some kind of sacred stone,” I said without thinking.

“Exactly,” said Beck, smiling, which I thought was a very odd thing to be doing ten seconds before you died dramatically and horribly in a poisonous-gas attack.

Then she did something even weirder: she placed her thumb against the carved image of the sun.

I heard another clunk and clink of stone sliding against stone.

Finally, I figured out what Beck already had. “The Sacred Stone!”

“Exactly!”

We heard more grinding. And rumbling. Centuries-old dust puffed out of cracks in the trembling walls. We both looked up at the ceiling, terrified it would collapse on us.

The floor flew open beneath our feet.

We both screamed as we disappeared through the trapdoor and into the darkness below. We fell, weightless, for a few seconds, then landed hard on our butts and flew down a slanted stone chute. It was like riding along on a slippery waterslide but without the water, just a thick layer of dust.

“At least the air smells better in here,” shouted Beck as we swerved through a curve and skimmed through what might’ve been the dry and dusty sewer pipes of the City of the Dead.