I skimmed the lines of speculation filling the dialogue bubbles from the past hour.
SpaceGuy69 had a friend who knew a guy whose cousin’s sister had worked on the original Thor’s Hammer game, and she’d heard through the grapevine that the sequel was in development.
MisterSisterKister heard the original game’s head writer had just quit his job as one of the writers for a new, secret Bethesda game franchise, which according to the five active chatters in the room, meant that now he had to be working on the Thor’s Hammer sequel. It was the only explanation.
I rolled my eyes.
The laptop’s speakers emitted the sound of a door creaking open, and Fiona’s gamer tag, IceQu33n, appeared on the list of active participants in the left-side panel. She didn’t waste any time, beating me to a greeting. Her words appeared in the group chat, alongside those of SpaceGuy69 and MisterSisterKister, and the like.
Are you all right? It’s been days! When you never logged back on, I thought . . . I don’t know. Crazy things. I thought you were abducted. Or dead. But you’re here, so you’re all right, right? RIGHT?
I started typing a response several times, but had to delete it as Fiona continued on. Finally, when no new words appeared, I figured it was safe to reply.
I’m fine . . . ish. Or I will be. Hopefully. *sigh* It’s a long story. Listen, Fio, I need your help.
My message appeared after two others: WTF and Huh? We were confusing the locals. Too bad.
Fiona’s response was immediate.
Anything.
I smiled reflexively. Maybe I’d never met Fiona in real life, but that wasn’t what made a friendship real. Dependability—being able to count on the other person, no matter what—that was what defined a true friendship.
Remember last month when you were telling me about mapping out parts of Rome for that game - didn’t that include the tunnels beneath the city?
The other gamers piped in again, this time with more interest than confusion. They asked if Fiona was working on the Thor’s Hammer sequel, and if this meant it would be set in ancient Rome instead of Scandinavia. Fiona ignored their chatter.
The catacombs? Yeah. Why?
My heartrate picked up speed, and I leaned in, typing fast.
Say, hypothetically, someone needed to find a way to get into the catacombs beneath the Vatican from underground - would that even be possible? Like, do the catacombs outside the Vatican and those inside ever meet up?
The chat room went quiet, all chatter stalling as we waited for Fiona’s response. I could only imagine what the other gamers were thinking. Was this a staged stunt meant to build hype for the sequel? Did this mean that the Holy Roman Empire would be the antagonist of the new game? Would the premise feature an epic battle between the old gods and the new?
“It’s never going to happen,” I murmured. “Just let it go.”
The bathroom door opened, and I looked up, watching Raiden emerge wearing nothing more than a towel wrapped around his waist. His shoulder, arm, and the left side of his chest were covered in a mass of black ink, the designs intricate and exotic. Tiny droplets of water dripped from the ends of his hair onto his muscular arms and chest. He didn’t look real. He was an action figure brought to life. GI Joe’s Pacific Islander buddy. He was powerful. Imposing. Deadly.
“Just let what go?” Raiden asked. Stripped of everything but him, he was downright beautiful.
I couldn’t look away.
Oblivious, Raiden headed for his backpack tucked up against the wall on the far side of his bed, picking up the bag and setting it on the mattress.
The moment his near nakedness registered in my mind—and the realization that I was gawking—my stare snapped back to the computer screen. My neck and cheeks were on fire, and the heat was spreading. Soon, I would be a sweaty, flustered mess.
I cleared my throat. Raiden had asked me a question, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. “Um, what?”
“Just let what go?” Raiden repeated as he dug through his backpack. He pulled out a pair of boxer briefs, some socks, and a rolled-up T-shirt, all in black.
I stared at the screen, not blinking and not looking at Raiden. “Just these gamers,” I told him, voice coming out a little husky. I cleared my throat.
I wished Fiona would respond, already. At least then I would have something else to focus on besides all of that maleness unwittingly flaunting itself on the other side of the room.
With a faint ding, a chat bubble headed by Fiona’s gamertag appeared at the tail of the string of excited chatter.
There may be a way . . . give me a sec.
I blew out a breath and sat back in my chair. That hadn’t exactly been the response I’d been hoping for. But, at least it hadn’t been a no.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Raiden drop his towel and pull his jeans on over his freshly donned boxer briefs. I couldn’t help it. Thankfully, he didn’t seem remotely aware of how his near nudity was affecting me.
Still bare from the waist up, he reached across the bed for the cell phone on the nightstand, then turned his back to me and sat on the edge of the mattress.
A deep, purplish bruise fanned up his hip and side from the waistband of his pants. It hadn’t been visible when he’d been facing me, but from this angle it was impossible not to notice. The bruise looked incredibly painful, and I could only imagine how our little middle-of-the-night tumbling act had aggravated the wound. I knew he’d reinjured his leg in the crash and that his ribs had been bugging him—that he may have broken one—but this overt evidence of his injury was unexpected.
“Do you need to get that checked out?” I asked. When Raiden looked up from the phone, eyebrows raised in question, I added, “In case you’re bleeding internally, or you, like, punctured a lung, or something . . .”
A crease appeared between Raiden’s eyebrows, and he shook his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It looks worse than it is. I’ll be fine.”
I frowned. “Well, how’s your leg?” He’d brushed his limp off as simply an aggravation of the older injury, claiming it would be better by morning. While his limp really didn’t seem as pronounced as it had yesterday, it also wasn’t entirely gone.
Before Raiden could answer, my eyes traveled up to his face. There was a faint, reddish-purple splotch where my elbow had connected with his jaw. That hadn’t been visible during our late-night, post-fight chat. “And your face,” I added. “Sorry about that.”
Raiden stretched out his jaw, rubbing the joint with his fingertips. “You got me good, I’ll give you that.” He set the phone back on the nightstand and grabbed the rolled-up T-shirt, gingerly pulling it on over his head. “What are you working on?”
I bit my lip, averting my gaze to the window and watching someone walk into the grocery store across the street. “I, um, maybe sorta kinda thought of a way to get into the Order’s vault without actually going into Vatican City. At last, not the above ground part.” I glanced at him sidelong, gauging his reaction. “That was the deal, right? Find another way in?”
The corners of Raiden’s mouth tensed, and he grunted, his irritation palpable. “I see. And what is this other way in, exactly?”
The chill to his tone drew my eyes back to him. “Through the catacombs,” I said. “My friend’s been doing research for this game developer, and one of her projects was to map out the tunnels and catacombs beneath Rome.”
Raiden was already shaking his head.
“If there’s a way in, she can find it,” I said, growing defensive.
“Reaching out to your friend is a terrible idea,” Raiden said. “If the Order’s monitoring her—”
“Why would they be monitoring her?” I said, interrupting him. “If my mom’s journal is anything to go by, they only just became aware of my existence as anything more than an ancient, frozen embryo. How much could they have learned about me in the past few days? I highly doubt they would’ve hacked into my gamer profile and
tagged all of my contacts.”
“You don’t know what these people are capable of.”
I scoffed. “They’re a bunch of priests, Raiden. They’re not Anonymous,” I said, blurting out the first hacking group that popped into my mind.
“Jesus, Cora!” Raiden exploded. “They’re not just a bunch of priests.” He was on his feet and striding across the room toward me, no hint of a limp.
I shrank back in my chair as he drew closer.
Raiden planted one hand on the back of my chair, the other on the table, his fingertips nudging the side of my computer. He loomed over me, enraged and menacing in a way I’d never experienced before, not with anyone. This was totally different from his sleep-induced fight instinct from the night before. This was Raiden fully awake. Fully aware. And fully pissed off.
“They were your mom and my mom,” he ground out. “They recruit the best of the best at whatever skill they think will benefit them most.” He leaned in.
I shrank back until my shoulder touched the window sill.
“We have to assume the Order is better than Anonymous,” he said. “It’s the only way to stay ahead of them. So, don’t contact anyone without running it by me first. Am I clear?”
Eyes opened as wide as they would go, I gulped and nodded. “Crystal.”
A faint ping alerted me to a new message from Fiona in the chat room.
My tense staredown with Raiden broke, and we both looked at the computer screen. At the six words that had the potential to change everything.
I found you a way in.
26
Fiona was waiting to send the image file to a dummy email account that took me all of thirty seconds to set up.
Kneeling behind me, Raiden watched over my shoulder as I typed the brand-spanking-new email address out for Fiona in the chat room, then clicked on the email tab and stared at the empty inbox folder.
Raiden exhaled, long, slow, and very controlled. No words necessary. He wasn’t happy that I’d made contact with Fiona, but at least he wasn’t going into uber-controlling lockdown mode. He was playing along. Going with the flow. For the moment . . .
Now, it was simply a matter of waiting and hoping that whatever underground route Fiona had come up with didn’t just work on paper, but worked in the real world, too. The tunnels and catacombs beneath Rome were notoriously neglected, many having been reported as irrevocably damaged or flat-out collapsed over the past few decades.
For nearly a minute, I stared at the computer screen, barely breathing. Not even blinking. I didn’t want to miss it.
I was so focused, that it startled me when the email appeared in the inbox. My heart gave an excited thud-thump, and hand trembling, I clicked on the email. I skimmed the single line of text written by Fiona.
Here you go. I don’t know why you need this, but whatever the reason, be careful . . .
I took a deep breath, anticipation mounting, and clicked on the email attachment.
Within seconds, Raiden and I were staring at a black and white street map of modern Rome. The image file was multi-layered, with a second, semi-transparent layer on top of the map marked up with zigzagging lines drawn in bright colors. A key in the bottom right corner of the map denoted historical and cultural eras to each line color, following the traditional ROY G BIV rainbow scale.
Red lines belonged to the ancient times, indicating tunnels created by the Etruscans prior to the second century BC, while yellow lines indicated tunnels belonging to the first large scale excavation and construction of Roman catacombs during the second century AD. These were mostly located in the outer portion of the modern city, just beyond the outskirts of ancient Rome’s walls. This didn’t surprise me, as it had been against the law at the time to bury the dead within the city.
Violet indicated the most recent time period, those few tunnels scattered throughout the city belonging to the final era of Christian catacomb creation during the fifth to seventh centuries AD, with the other colors representing tunnels created at other time periods in between.
Some of the tunnels appeared to be freestanding, not connected to any others—this was most common closer to the center of the city, where the ancient Romans had never entombed any of their dead. But thankfully, Vatican City fell outside the ancient city walls, and the Romans had excavated tunnels underneath and around the area.
A bold, black asterisk had been drawn over a star-shaped landmark due east of Vatican City, on the western bank of the Tiber River. According to the scale beneath the key, the starred location was less than half a mile from the Vatican.
From the asterisk, Fiona had drawn a line connecting a hodgepodge of tunnel systems creating a slightly indirect route that eventually ended at a second asterisk on the southern border of Vatican City. Each transition between tunnel systems had been marked with a perpendicular line crossing through the route path. At two different transition points, about halfway along the route and about two-thirds of the way, the path split, and Fiona had drawn in an additional, dashed line. I took those to be alternate routes, should we find the main path impassable. Each detour took a longer path than the original but eventually returned to the main route before reaching the end point.
“That’s Castel Sant’Angelo,” Raiden said, pointing to the starting asterisk.
I glanced at him over my shoulder, throwing him some serious side eye. “How exactly do you know so much about this city, anyway?”
He shrugged, his stare never leaving the screen. “I spent some time here a few years back.”
I narrowed my eyes, wanting to know more. But my curiosity about Raiden’s past was quickly overshadowed by my excitement about the map. We had a way in. Or, at least, a potential way in. It was better than nothing, which was what we’d had before Fiona’s map landed in our inbox.
Focus returning to the map, I tilted my head to the side and squinted, just a little. “Does this look familiar to you at all?” I asked Raiden.
“Well, it is a map of Rome . . .”
“Not that part,” I said absently, ignoring the heavy dose of sarcasm Raiden had laced through those words, and continued to stare at the map. Or rather, at the randomized pattern of tunnels drawn onto the map.
Wanting to get a better look at the pattern without the distraction of all the streets and sites of modern Rome, I hid the street map layer so only the catacomb tunnels were visible.
Oh yeah, the pattern was definitely tickling my brain. I’d seen it—or something too similar to it to be a coincidence—before. I chewed on my bottom lip as I searched my memory.
On a whim, I made the image black and white.
My mouth fell open, and I sat back in my chair. “Oh my God,” I breathed. I knew exactly where I’d seen this pattern before.
I tore my stare away from the screen and hunched over to dig through my backpack, searching for my mom’s journal. I pulled it out of the bag and pushed the laptop back a few inches on the table to make room for the leather-bound book. I leafed through the pages until I found what I was searching for.
The unlabeled two-page spread was marked with a spiderwebbed pattern of lines and symbols I hadn’t been able to decipher. It was more detailed and marked with more crossing and interconnecting lines than Fiona’s map, but there was no denying the similarity. I could’ve laid Fiona’s map over the pattern drawn by my mom, and they would’ve matched up perfectly.
“It is a map,” I said softly, suspicions confirmed from the first time I’d studied the two-page spread on the plane.
My mom had drawn her own map of the Roman underground—the whole thing, including the part under Vatican City. Moreover, she’d created a far more complete map of the tunnels and catacombs than Fiona had been able to construct during her months of research. This must have been the backdoor my mom had used to get to the vault. Which meant there was a way for us to get to the vault through the catacombs, too.
My heart rate sped up, and my foot tapped anxiously on the floor.
I found th
e starting point Fiona had starred on her map on my mom’s counterpart. My mom had marked it with a tiny circle crossed through with an X. The location Fiona had marked as the end point of our route was marked with another crossed circle on my mom’s map. My mom had drawn other tiny circles all over the map, some with X’s, some with a single line crossing through them, some without any lines, along with circle-free X’s.
“I wonder if a circle indicates an exit or entrance,” I thought aloud. “But what about the X . . .?”
Behind me, Raiden stood and headed toward his bed on the far side of the room.
I looked up, following him with my eyes.
He reached into his open backpack and pulled out the zippered pouch that contained our cash reserve. He unzipped the pouch and pulled out a stack of American bills, quickly counting the money before returning it to the pouch, dropping the pouch on the bed, and picking up his phone. His thumbs tapped out a message, no doubt to his mom—the only other number programmed into the phone besides the number belonging to my temporary phone. When he was finished, he set the phone down on top of the money pouch and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I need to run a couple errands before we head to Castel Sant’Angelo,” he said, his body language telling me he was expecting me to argue. I could hardly blame him. I wanted to argue that errands would be time wasted and that we should be heading out right now.
I stilled my foot and took a deep breath, consciously inhaling and exhaling. “What errands?” I forced myself to ask, swallowing back the protests attempting to claw their way up my throat.
Raiden relaxed a little, though his arms remained crossed and his gaze hard. “I need to go to the bank.” His eyes flicked down to the pouch of money. “We need cash.”
I raised my eyebrows. Money hardly seemed like our most immediate concern. “For . . .?”
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