“The Adapter?”
“No, the Key. Shh. I’ll explain in a bit.”
There’s a long silence. Seconds turn to minutes.
Finally, the professor says in a strained voice, “Well … ?”
Madison replies, “It’s all in position.”
“But nothing’s happening.”
“I told you! The Key must be fresh!”
The Professor snaps, “Listen, sonny, it’s not the freshness that’s the problem here …”
Martineau asks, “Then what?”
She sighs, sounding tired. “It could be a number of things. Bottom line—we need to do more research.”
Their experiment didn’t work …
“Or we could just try the crystal form of the Key, as it says in the codex,” Martineau says, in a dry voice.
Irritably, the Professor replies, “Well, sure, that’s a no-brainer. But it’ll take months to make the crystal. All our attempts have failed so far—I think it needs to be made in zero gravity. Do y’all have any idea how hard it is to get time on the space station?”
Madison says nothing, but pushes past them both. He starts walking away from the bottleneck of suited observers near the room.
And straight toward us.
25
I’m paralyzed with shock; Ixchel’s just the same. We blow the fraction of a second that we have—our only chance to make an escape.
Amazingly, Madison walks right past us both. We’re pressed back against the wall, hidden in the shadows of the tunnel. But even so, I’m surprised. Then it hits me—with the protective suit and gas mask, his side vision is limited. His head is bowed when he approaches; he nurses one arm in a sling. The others walk past too—incredibly, within a foot of us.
Totally oblivious.
I’ve just begun to think we’ve gotten away with it when the last suited person passes us and then stops, turns around slowly. She must have caught something out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t seem sure. She reaches for a flashlight on her tool belt. As the light goes on, I grab Ixchel and run toward the room they’ve just deserted.
The suited woman yells, “Hey!” and there’s a panicked rush in the tunnel beyond, as the others turn around to see us. The second we’re inside the room, I press a large button in a panel against the door. We watch, our breath catching in our throats as the rock door slides closed. We’re entombed for the second time today.
I can hear them behind the door—angry voices, mostly Madison’s.
“He’s mine,” he orders. “No one touches him.”
A wave of claustrophobia hits me. For the first few seconds, it blots out everything else going on outside the stone door. I scarcely take in anything about the strange room. Ixchel’s the same. We don’t even talk. We run in opposite directions around the octagonal space, looking for any sign of a way out.
I manage to register that there’s a tall lamp near the middle. It casts an acidic yellow light into the low corners of the room, but the ceiling is shadowed. Around the room, there’s the eerie spectacle of stone sarcophagi—three against each wall except the closed entrance, twenty-one in total.
No way out.
Dominating the middle of the room is a small stone platform or altar, about waist high. The surface is covered with glyphs and wedge-shaped writing. Inserted into a groove on the platform is an object a little larger than a cell phone, with one end slightly fatter than the other. It is a sort of grayish salmon-pink. The surface looks as smooth as polished alabaster, except for some tightly packed, intricately patterned markings near the wider edge. The materials don’t look much like what I’ve seen of Muwan technology, but the way everything is covered in inscriptions seems familiar.
I immediately guess what it is from Montoyo’s description: the Adapter.
Next to it there’s a tiny plastic test tube. Ixchel is about to touch the platform when I shout out, “Don’t!”
She pulls her hand back, as if it’d been burned.
“We don’t know if it’s safe,” I say. “For you, I mean. They’re wearing suits.”
Instead of making some sassy reply, she just nods and steps further back.
“Throw me the flashlight. I’m going to check the ceiling,” I say. “Stand back. And hold your breath.”
I climb onto the platform, clutching Ixchel’s flashlight and avoiding the Adapter. I leap across from the central platform to the sarcophagi, grasp the upper edge of one, and crawl onto the top. I walk all the way around the room on the surfaces of the sarcophagi in their rows. I peer closely at the ceiling.
It’s impossible to ignore the sounds of Madison and the others working on opening the door. For some reason they can’t get their passkey to work. Madison is shouting in frustration, threatening all types of violence. I can just make out Martineau’s voice, sounding angry, as well as the professor’s. She still sounds smug, repeating, “What did I tell you about the security in this place?”