Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  They rounded a corner and found themselves staring at a dead end.

  Quin indicated a faint glow illuminating a section of wall just meters from where they were standing. “I think we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be at this point.” When they reached the place where the light had been, they discovered that the wall was intact but had sustained damage at the base.

  Jay stared at the place where the glow had been and shook his head. Setting his pack down, he pulled on leather gloves and systematically began to remove rocks. Quin pulled on her own gloves and began scraping away the smaller rubble. After only a few minutes, Jay stopped. “I’m through to the other side.”

  Jay reached into his pack, extracted a fresh set of batteries, inserted them into his flashlight, then consulted his watch. “We’ve been in here for four hours. Which means it took him between two and three hours to blast his way through to the small pyramid. It won’t take him that much time to get out. Unless Olivia has managed to lead him in the wrong direction, we’re almost out of time.”

  A muffled sound jerked Quin’s head up.

  Jay put a finger to his mouth and flicked off both their lights as the sound metamorphosed into voices.

  “…you’ve led us in a damned circle—”

  “Following your blast trail.”

  Olivia’s voice was clear and sharp, as precise as a razor, and she was cutting Hathaway to pieces with it. Quin’s heart pounded in her chest. Hathaway was only meters away, on the other side of the wall.

  The voices finally faded, absorbed by the twists and turns of the maze, and the insulation of layers of granite.

  “Way to go, Olivia,” Jay murmured, flicking on his light and rummaging in his pack. “Keep the bastard busy.”

  He pulled out a roll of duct tape, then began taping his flashlight until only a narrow strip of illumination escaped.

  Quin continued to work, removing rocks from the small hole and placing them to one side, careful not to make the hole too big in case she weakened the wall to the point of collapse.

  Removing her gloves, she sat down, her back against the wall, and shoved stray strands of hair away from her face. “What now?”

  Placing the flashlight on the ground, Jay slid the Glock out of the waistband at the small of his back. Quin watched as he checked that the magazine was secure in its housing, then pulled the slide back and chambered a round. “I’m going hunting.”

  His mouth touched briefly on hers. “Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”

  Gun first and cramping his shoulders, Jay snaked through the hole and straightened on the other side, not bothering with his flashlight, because there was enough ambient light from Hathaway’s group for him to make out the dim shape of the tunnel. The fact that there was light at all meant they had stopped either to eat or to figure out where they were, which worked perfectly with his plans. If Hathaway had continued moving, Jay would have had to have gone back and collected Quin, because there was no way he would leave her alone in the maze. This way, he could retrieve Olivia without bringing Quin anywhere near Hathaway or Ramirez.

  As he rounded a corner, he recognized the shadowy figure of Cortez at one end of the tunnel.

  Withdrawing back into darkness, he slipped the Glock back into place at the small of his back and slid a knife out of its ankle sheath. He didn’t want to use the gun unless he was pushed. By his calculations, Hathaway had already blasted away any safety margin the honeycombed structure of the maze had to offer, so silence was preferable. As he approached Cortez, who had his back to him, Jay heard a trickling sound. Cortez was urinating against the tunnel wall.

  As Cortez fastened his pants, Jay stepped quickly into him, clamped a hand over his mouth and brought the haft of the knife down sharply on the side of his neck—the blow precisely placed to shock the carotid and jugular veins. Cortez dropped like a stone. Jay picked up the man’s flashlight and turned it off.

  The light grew brighter as Jay approached the juncture Hathaway and Ramirez had chosen as a stopping-off point. Ramirez was eating, and Hathaway had a map spread on the floor. Olivia was hunched as far from both men as the light would allow.

  Bending, Jay picked up a stone chip and lobbed it. Olivia’s head jerked up, her gaze locking with his. Jay made a beckoning motion with his fingers. She nodded and slowly got to her feet, and he slipped further back down the tunnel, the Glock now in his hand.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Olivia stopped in her tracks, her back to Hathaway. “I need some privacy.”

  “You mean you need to take a piss—like Cortez. And speaking of Cortez,” he snarled, “what’s taking him so long?”

  Ramirez muttered something low and crude, and Hathaway laughed.

  “Leave the light,” he ordered. “Can’t have you running off and leaving us, now can we?”

  With stiff movements, Olivia laid her flashlight on the floor, lifted her gaze to Jay and walked steadily toward him.

  Twenty-Five

  A faint glow through the hole in the wall alerted Quin that someone was on the other side.

  Slowly, she straightened, using the wall for both support and guidance, because the darkness was close to absolute. She’d been sitting in pitch darkness while she waited, conserving her batteries.

  A faint rustling made her heart pound. Feeling around with her hands, she picked up one of the rocks she’d selected and piled beside the opening, and flattened herself against the wall. If anything came through that hole that didn’t look like either Olivia or Jay, the solution was simple: she would drop the rock.

  Two small, birdlike hands appeared, illuminated by the faint glow, and, letting out a breath, Quin set the rock down and helped pull Olivia through.

  After they’d filled in the hole and placed a marker, just in case they needed to use it again, they retreated to the last glyph Quin had noted.

  Jay set his pack down beside Olivia. “A present for you.”

  Olivia’s eyes glinted. “Cortez’s flashlight.”

  “He doesn’t need it anymore.”

  Quin looked at the light with silent fascination, and Jay caught her gaze. “It’s all right, he’s still breathing.”

  Olivia flicked the light on, testing the batteries. “But if he’d made a noise, he wouldn’t be.”

  “Something like that. Now sit down while I do something about that ankle.”

  Olivia complied, but grumpily. “You’re getting worse than Hannah. There’s nothing wrong with my ankle.”

  “You’re limping.”

  “I’m over seventy, I always limp.”

  “Not like that, you don’t.” Jay slipped off Olivia’s boot and bound her ankle tightly with an elastic bandage. “If it gets any worse, I’ll carry you.”

  Quin eased out of her pack and began handing out wrapped packages. There was nothing gourmet about peanut butter sandwiches, they were simply fuel, and they needed the calories. As they munched their way through the sandwiches and sipped water, she pulled out the diary she’d kept her field notes in, slipped out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Olivia. “I brought the map you snitched out of Cain’s pants.”

  Olivia set her half-eaten sandwich down, spread out the map and examined it. “I knew you would. Unfortunately, it won’t do us much good in this part of the maze. He never got this far.” She tapped her finger on a blank space to one side of the mapped area. “This is where I think we are—although I could be wrong. I’ve been walking in circles so long, it’s possible I’ve lost my sense of direction.”

  Jay studied the map. “Don’t worry about the direction.” He slid the compass out of his pocket and flipped it open. The dial glowed neon bright in the semidark, the needle accurate once again.

  As Jay and Olivia discussed distances and directions, Quin took another bite of her sandwich, blinking sleepily. By her calculations, she’d had all of four hours’ sleep in almost two days. If she could stay awake to get out of here, that would be the miracle. Smot
hering a yawn, she leaned back against the wall and let herself drift. Vaguely, she listened to the low, soothing tone of Jay’s voice.

  “If walking west takes us away from Hathaway and his blast area,” Jay said quietly, “then that’s got to be the safest option.”

  Smothering another yawn, Quin shifted her head slightly to ease the ache in her neck. “We can use the secret gate. The one that comes out above the cloth merchant’s house.”

  There was a small silence; then Quin realized what she’d just said. Abruptly, her lids flipped open, and she found herself staring directly into Jay’s dark, assessing gaze. The last thing she remembered, he’d been sitting on the other side of Olivia with his compass out.

  The silence stretched. Olivia folded the map and stowed it in her jacket pocket. “Don’t ask,” she said.

  Jay’s fingers laced with Quin’s. “I never do.”

  As he drew her to her feet, she was tempted to lean, tempted to wrap her arms around his waist and melt right into him.

  “And you can keep holding hands if you want,” Olivia said acerbically. “I know you two are sleeping together. By now, I’d say the whole valley knows.”

  Reluctantly, Quin relinquished her hold on Jay and shrugged into her pack. Her cheeks burned with unexpected color. Suddenly she felt like a teenager again. “You don’t mind?”

  “Why would I mind? I just wanted you to get your degree first. I thought you’d be back sooner to get him, but no, you had to go all extreme and get the doctorate, as well.”

  The way was blocked.

  Olivia leaned against the blank stone wall, resting her ankle, while they stared at the smooth surface. “Another dead end.”

  “Story of my life,” Jay murmured.

  Quin examined the glyph. A wisp of knowledge pulled at her, gone before she could grasp it. “It can’t be. This leads somewhere.”

  Jay swung the beam to the ceiling, picking out the outline of yet another glyph—this one with a crack clear through the center. “Clever. Most people don’t think to look up.”

  As Jay reached up and touched the center section, Quin studied the simple, symmetrical outline and abruptly the context fell into place. The key was numerical—a simple sequence. After a certain point in the maze, every dead-end glyph had contained the same symbol at its center—a null—while this one contained a character she hadn’t yet come across.

  A grinding, grating sound broke her train of thought. Abruptly, a section of the floor collapsed, and Quin pitched forward into a yawning black hole.

  She scrabbled wildly for the edge of what appeared to be a primitive trap door. Her fingers scraped on stone, momentarily slowing her fall; then the edge of the hole crumbled and darkness came up to meet her.

  Hathaway stared at the three-way split in the maze and the mark he’d scratched into the wall. A vein throbbed at his temple. They’d walked another circle, and there was no sign of Olivia, which meant that somehow the wily old bitch had escaped. She’d found a way out.

  And someone had knocked Cortez out cold. Olivia didn’t have either the stomach or the expertise for that, which meant someone else had entered the equation. Hathaway’s teeth clamped. No prizes for guessing who that might be: Lomax.

  He swore softly. They were out of food, nearly out of water, and their batteries were running low, and now Lomax was creeping around in the dark. It was quite a predicament.

  Calmly, Hathaway lifted his gun and shot Ramirez twice in the back, the concussion of the shots deafening as the soft-nosed nine millimeter rounds punched through Ramirez and shoved his chunky body forward into the wall.

  He teetered upright for a second, by Hathaway’s calculation now minus his heart, most of his left lung and a good deal of his liver; then the weight of the pack that Ramirez had slung over one shoulder pulled him backward, and he crumpled and slid to the floor.

  Well, that solved the supply shortage.

  Powdery stone dust shivered down as Hathaway examined the wide-eyed blankness of Ramirez’s face.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” he murmured as he bent to release the catches on Ramirez’s pack, holding his nose against the stench of burst entrails. “Nobody liked you.”

  As Hathaway extracted the gold artifacts Ramirez had been carrying, a further shower of dust jerked his head up. He had a moment to reflect that maybe firing the gun hadn’t been the best idea he’d ever had. Cursing beneath his breath, he heaved the gold at the far wall and threw himself after it. A split second later, an explosive crack was followed by a grinding rumble.

  Twenty-Six

  For a dizzying moment Quin lay on her back on the unyielding floor of the sublevel she’d just fallen into, unsure whether she was conscious or dreaming. A tunnel swam before her—not the impenetrably dark hole she’d fallen into, but a neat, clean corridor lit by the golden glow of a primitive torch burned low. Directly opposite where she lay, a symbol was incised into the wall.

  They had finally worked out the puzzle of the maze. No wonder it had been so difficult to get anywhere. They’d all been stumbling around on one level, but the maze was three-dimensional—operating on who knew how many levels, and it was formed in the shape of a glyph: the glyph that symbolized the name of the Sun God.

  A sound drew her attention. Carefully she moved her head, wary of the stinging ache, and to her surprise saw Jay, biceps flexing as he worked the mechanism that closed the trap door she’d just fallen through, sealing it shut. In that case, she must have been knocked out, because she didn’t remember him following her.

  Her heart thudded in her chest as he turned and she saw him face-on. The glow from the torch spilled over coppery tanned skin and cheekbones that were a little sparer than she remembered. His black hair was long and caught back, making him look even wilder. He held his hand out to her, a fierce demand in his gaze as he spoke in a language that was both liquid and abrupt, and sharpened by urgency. She didn’t understand a word, but, as alien as the language and the intonation were, she understood the basic meaning.

  “Get up. We’ve got to keep moving.”

  She reached out to clasp his tanned, scarred hand, the wrist thick and muscular from wielding the sword that hung at his hip, and the vision wavered as her head spun and she found herself clutching another broad, callused hand and staring into eyes that were just as dark, just as demanding.

  “That’s better,” Jay murmured. “For a minute I thought I was going to have to carry you out of here.”

  He shone the light into her eyes, making her wince. “Ouch,” she muttered. “Do you have to do that?”

  He held her wrist, checking her pulse. “Would you rather I just told you to get up?”

  She blinked, for a moment having trouble separating this Jay from the one she’d just “seen.” The physical similarity, while uncanny enough that they could be twins, was just that—a similarity—but their practical warriors’ minds and that acerbic brevity of speech—as if they were both used to snapping out orders—was exactly the same.

  “That,” she said, pushing the flashlight away while she eased to her feet, using both the wall and his shoulder to steady herself, “would work for me.”

  Olivia’s voice sounded, thin and echoing from above, and seconds later, her legs appeared over the edge of the trapdoor opening.

  While Jay helped Olivia down, Quin probed the tender spot at the back of her skull, where her head had come into sharp contact with the stone floor. Her gaze caught on the glyph on the wall, and the skin all down her back went goosey.

  A brief examination of the corridor revealed her flashlight, tumbled among the crumbled and mummified debris of what must once have been a wooden ladder. Retrieving the light, she examined the simple outline of the glyph, and her stomach clenched. It was the same one she’d just seen in the vision. “This is the way out.”

  Jay turned, and the light caught on high taut cheekbones, the straight blade of his nose, that dark, direct look that always sent a shiver down her spine—and the name
that had eluded her for so many years surfaced, as ancient and mysterious as that other Jay in the vision: Achaeus.

  Hathaway coughed and wheezed, blinking stinging dust from his eyes, as he crawled through the pitch black on his hands and knees, feeling for his flashlight. He had saved the gold; he hadn’t stopped to think about what would happen to the light.

  His fingers came in contact with still-warm flesh—Ramirez’s arm—and relief flooded him. He’d never thought he would be so glad to find a corpse. If Ramirez hadn’t been buried, chances were neither had his flashlight.

  He patted the ground, working systematically, cursing when the sharp edge of a piece of granite took a chunk out of his palm.

  “Bloody granite.” He hated the stuff; it was like razors when it broke.

  He kept feeling for the light, working a grid pattern in his head. He would find it; he had to find it. He would use Ramirez’s body as his reference point and work from there.

  He felt his way back to Ramirez’s leg. His flesh felt a little cooler now, as if rigor was setting in, and panic spasmed through Hathaway. How much time had passed while he’d searched? He would probably never know, because he couldn’t see his damn watch.

  “Stop,” he muttered to himself, and the faint echo was reassuring. If there was an echo, even though he couldn’t see jack, it meant there was empty space out there, and air—not tons and tons of granite locking him beneath this stinking mound of dirt. “Think, think.”

  He couldn’t remember what he’d done with his flashlight; he must have put it down while he was getting the gold out of Ramirez’s pack. But Ramirez had also had a light, and he’d been carrying it when he’d been shot, therefore…

  Hathaway crawled over Ramirez’s legs, ignoring the sickening stink, and began patting the ground. His palm landed on something wet and squishy, and as he recoiled, his fingers brushed an object and closed on the curved shape of the flashlight. Ignoring the sticky wetness of his fingers, Hathaway depressed the button. A beam of light lanced the darkness, bouncing off a towering wall of rubble only feet away.