The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us #3)(32)

We jolted violently when the back wheel came off the curb. Jack's arm wrapped tight around me, and I clung to the edge of the cart, wincing when I heard a spitting noise and something hit the cloth just over my head. A dark stain spread, and with it, the smell of what had to be some kind of chewing tobacco. Gross. Luckily we weren't far from the museum at all, and I could tell when we turned into the dirt alley. Now we just had to hope the guard wouldn't look under the cloth. But when we rolled to a stop, the voices were joking, and no one approached where we hid.

There was a screech of the gate opening, and it was only a couple minutes before we stopped and the driver swept the cloth off of us. He chattered nervously in Arabic, and Jack jumped up. "He says to hurry." We righted the baskets we'd knocked off, and huddled behind a truck parked against a far wall until the drive gate slid shut.

I peered around the truck's rear fender. We were in what looked like the museum's loading area. I could see the gardens ahead. They were far more impressive than the inside of the museum was-all those bits of stone inside were pieces of the rubble, I realized. These ruins could have been a whole building, with each of the loops in the symbol being a room. There were no guards inside the walls.

We crept out and made our way carefully across the ruins. Elodie leaned down and touched the stone reverently. Now we knew why she'd always been so interested in Olympias.

I wasn't sure we'd be able to tell when we'd gotten to the center, but moments later, it became obvious. Right in the middle of the courtyard, there was a fountain. It had three tiers, all intricately carved with scenes of people, leading to a woman at the top, presiding over them.

"Could that be Olympias?" I said.

"No one knows exactly what she looked like," Elodie answered.

I gazed up at her, and then squinted. "Is that-" I climbed onto the fountain's rim to look more closely, and sure enough, carved around the woman's neck was a necklace just like mine.



       
         
       
        

Jack climbed onto the fountain's edge with me. "There's a crack here. It's man-made, not natural." He touched where the woman connected to the fountain. "I wonder whether we have to remove the statue."

"Be careful," I said.

He pulled on the top, and nothing happened. Then he twisted.

There was a click, and a groan. And then a screech from the far side of the fountain. We all hurried to it to find a trapdoor opened to a set of rough-hewn steps into the ground.

"Merde," Elodie said in a hushed voice. The rest of our faces reflected the same sentiment.

"Do you really think it's possible that the tomb of Alexander the Great has just been sitting right under here this whole time? Right in the middle of this huge city?" I whispered.

"If it's this close to the water, that might be why radar hasn't found it," Jack said.

"If it's this close to the water, whatever was under there might have been washed away," Stellan countered, but he peered inside. He and Jack and Elodie had put aside their argument in the square when I made the discovery about the gardens, but I could still feel the hair trigger.

Stellan started down the steps. Elodie stopped him. "We're still your Keepers. At least let the two of us go first. It could be dangerous."

Stellan's jaw twitched. I wasn't sure whether it was because he was still annoyed at anything Elodie said, or because he still wasn't used to being the protected rather than the protector. But he stepped back and gestured expansively toward the hole.

Jack and Elodie clicked on their flashlights and disappeared down the stairs.

"Anything?" I called after a minute.

"Not dead yet," Elodie replied, her voice reverberating out of the tunnel.

Stellan glanced at me and I nodded, then slung my bag around my back. We took the first step down into what might very well be the biggest archaeological discovery of all time.

We assembled at the bottom of the stairs. I skirted a mud pit, and looked around as Jack shined his flashlight on the walls. We were in a wide dirt tunnel, stretching as far as we could see in either direction.

Elodie jogged off far enough that I couldn't see her flashlight anymore, and came back reporting more of the same.

I scraped my feet along a patch of dry ground to dislodge some of the mud, and clicked on the flashlight app on my phone. "Should we split up?" I said. "Cover more ground?" 

Elodie shined her flashlight on the walls. "Splitting up in the creepy underground tomb is how horror movies start." We set out together, the only sound the tramping of our feet on packed earth.