Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Wait.” Speedy clapped Mike across the top of his head. “Take a few steps to our right.”

  Mike obliged, closing the distance between them and the rock face. From this angle, the lantern was directly over their heads. Speedy stood on his hind legs, placed his forepaws on the wall, and scampered upwards, his claws finding easy purchase in the seemingly sheer cliff.

  Darling watched him, bemused. “You could have climbed up or down walls at any time, animal?”

  “Shut up and give me some more light,” Speedy said. I shone my flashlight towards him, and the koala began chuckling. “Here,” he said, drawing a claw across the rock in a vertical line. “Do you see this?”

  “Yes,” Atlas said, his voice slow and full of caution. “The scraping against the rock? As if something has been dragged up.”

  “Or lowered down,” Darling said excitedly.

  “There’s a lot of these marks,” Speedy said, as he began to descend towards Atlas’ open arms. “Lots of trips. Enough to cut into a rock face.”

  “We’re getting close,” I said. “Not exactly sure what we’re getting close to, but we’re definitely getting close.”

  I moved my flashlight down the broad path. The black chasm yawned beside us, but ahead was…more light?

  “What is that?” Atlas asked, as he noticed the glow from a few hundred feet down the path.

  Darling joined her flashlight’s beam to mine, and began to laugh.

  Okay.

  Have you ever been minding your own business, walking down a city street, and then you turn a corner and suddenly you’re in a park? Not just any park, but one that’s so idyllic, so perfect, that you expect Dick Van Dyke to show up and start dancing with some animated penguins?

  Now apply that scenario to miles and miles of dusty, dark tunnels. You’re wandering through this gross mushroom kingdom, trying your everlovin’ best to ignore the tons of rock sitting above your head and how if you need to backtrack it’ll take you at least an hour of steady jogging to reach the cave’s entrance, and then your flashlight hits something yellow.

  No, not just yellow—gold.

  Gold.

  Gold.

  An entire cave full of gold.

  Not the raw, still-to-be-mined kind of gold. No, this gold had already been removed and smelted and hewn and whatever the ancient Greeks did to turn ore into gorgeous refined gold.

  I don’t remember the walk down the path. I remember Mike’s hand around my upper arm, keeping me from breaking into a run. The reflection of our flashlights against all of that gold was hypnotic: I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. There was this richness to the light that I can’t describe. It was almost sensual. I thought I could feel the weight of all of that gold on my skin. That light promised things.

  The five of us stood in the entrance to that treasure room, staring.

  There were shelves cut into the rock walls, and these held stacks of gold bars organized into gleaming pyramids. Along the middle of the room were metal chests, their lids open to show the wealth of coins within. A little closer, and there were pottery urns, overflowing with gemstones, and old wooden tables covered in ancient jewelry, with rich rugs and fabrics spread out beneath them…

  And there, against the far wall, were the weapons.

  I realized Mike had both of my arms in a vise grip. “Don’t,” he said.

  I blinked a few times. Somehow, I had managed to take another few steps towards the room. He had stopped me a hair short of the threshold. I stared wistfully at the rack of pikes a short hundred feet away. “Thanks,” I said.

  “‘There is no wealth but life,’” he replied. I didn’t recognize the quote, but he followed it up by pointing into the room. “It’s…wrong. I don’t know how, but it’s wrong.”

  “It’s clean,” Speedy said. He had his forepaws on Atlas’ head, and was peering at the mountain of treasure.

  I started to move into the room, and Mike grabbed my arm again. “Not safe-clean,” he said.

  “Oh?” I asked, and then I stopped to think about it. “Oh.”

  The room was spotless. Not in the well-loved way of Archimedes’ library, but wholly and completely devoid of any sense of human habitation.

  “This is like the lost library,” Atlas said, as if to convince himself. “A room, perfectly preserved…”

  Speedy scoffed against his hair. “Keep telling yourself that,” the koala said. “I can see the little hairs on your neck standing up.”

  All of us knew that treasure room wasn’t like Archimedes’ library. Part of it was the dust; the rest of the Labyrinth was dirty. Not from the presence of animals and insects, but from the settling of the earth alone. The treasure room didn’t even have a skim coating of dust. It was all bright and shiny and new.

  I glared at one of the wooden tables. I don’t know what I expected—maybe that it would crumble and turn into a pile of rotting fungus before my eyes?—but it had suddenly become a very sinister table. The rug it was sitting on was all golds and silvers and blues, woven together in patterns I had never imagined, and as clean as it had been vacuumed that morning.

  “Yup,” I said with a little shiver. “We’ve all seen this movie.”

  Atlas was standing a couple of feet behind Mike, staring over his shoulder at the wealth of a nation.

  Darling was watching me.

  I stared wistfully at the weapons. “Tell me there’s no chance any of that is Damascus steel,” I said to Speedy.

  “Are you kidding?” he said, as he scurried down Altas’ body. “If this room is dated to Archimedes or later, every single weapon here might be authentic Damascus!”

  I groaned.

  Damascus steel.

  Screw the mountains of gold. Forget the king’s ransom in jewelry. Give me an authentic Damascus saber in mint condition, and you can keep the treasure.

  “I didn’t think it existed,” Atlas said. “The stories… I thought such troves were myths.”

  “Guess not,” I said. “Too bad it’s not meant for us.” And I turned to put the room behind me.

  To find Atlas pointing a gun at Mike’s head.

  “Yes,” Atlas said. “It is.”

  “Oh come on!” I shouted. “Now you’ve got to be a dick? We don’t care about the treasure! Haven’t you figured that out?”

  I was enraged. Seriously furious. He had given me permission to read him, and I had, and he had seemed honest and open and delicious and—

  Okay, maybe I was just mad at me.

  I looked over at Darling, and she was smiling. Not at me. At her cousin.

  “Oh fuck me,” I said, as I began rubbing my temples. “Smiling Goon was using a GPS to track us to the mountain, too. He got the coordinates from you two.”

  “Took you long enough,” Speedy muttered.

  “Shut up!”

  Speedy rolled his eyes. “You know,” he said, “if you weren’t such a shit psychic, maybe you could prevent stuff like this from happening.”

  “Psychic?” Darling asked, as she took the gun from her cousin’s unsteady hand. The way she held it made the gun change from a toy to an actual threat. “What is this, this psychic?”

  “Her and Mike,” Speedy said, as he climbed up Mike’s legs. Wise choice: Mike had already taken a gun from Darling once, and she was keeping her distance from him, so if anybody needed to be unencumbered by a koala to fight her for the gun, it had to be me.

  Plus, if Speedy had tried to use me as his personal mobile tree unit at that particular moment, I probably would have punted him into the chasm.

  “They’re psychics,” Speedy continued. “They can see ghosts. Everything that’s happened, every weird thing that you can’t explain? It’s because we’ve been working with ancient Greek heroes.”

  “Ixnay on the ychicpsay,” I muttered.

  “Why? Hanlon’s already told them that strange shit is afoot,” Speedy said. “Isn’t that right?”

  Darling nodded, very slowly.


  “How can you be working with Hanlon?” I snapped at her. “I had you checked out!”

  “I did not know of Hanlon,” she said. “Not until after the library at Rhodes was found. One of his men approached me—the one I killed on the mountain—and said that my cousin had called Hanlon and told him he would no longer work with him. It was my job to fill my cousin’s role, and to convince Atlas that he had been wrong to walk away.”

  “Hanlon threatened you,” I guessed.

  She nodded again. “I was not given a choice,” she said. “It was easy to convince Atlas that he had made a poor decision after you sent him that letter. He was already considering paying you one last visit before you left Greece.”

  Darling stared directly at her cousin. “He does not take it well when a woman tells him no.”

  And with that, she shot Atlas in the head.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Even Speedy gasped.

  We watched as Atlas’ hands started to come up, but the message got lost somewhere between them and what was left of his brain. Gravity took over, and his body fell to the ground.

  “I have been waiting to do that for twelve years,” Darling said, as she savagely kicked his corpse until it toppled into the chasm.

  “Oh my sweet Lord,” Mike whispered.

  I realized I was clinging to his arms, and him to mine; neither of us had ever seen something so…so cold.

  Darling glanced over at us. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. All I want is the treasure.”

  Speedy snapped out of it first. “She’s lying,” he said. “Hanlon wants information. He wants to know how you found the library. That’s why she’s here—that’s why she saved you from the same goon squad she told how to find you. She needs you to trust her so you’ll tell her your methods.”

  “Then why’d she kill Atlas?” I gasped. Some part of my subconscious noticed that Darling hadn’t put down the gun.

  “Because she wanted to, and this was as good a time as any. After we’re dead, who’s gonna know?”

  Mike and I took a few steps away from Darling. I realized just in time that we were about to cross the threshold of the treasure room, and I shoved both of us to the side.

  That put a rock wall at our backs, which was okay. Very okay. Rock was good. Rock was solid. Rock didn’t explode into chunky red mist and oh God we were breathing pieces of Atlas…

  I started to gag.

  “Calm down, please,” Darling said. “I’m no threat to you—the animal lies.”

  “Sometimes, yeah,” I said. “But he’s not very good at it, and he’s almost always right.”

  The thief let the barrel of the gun dip as she searched our faces. Whatever she wanted to find there didn’t exist. She sighed, and the gun came up again.

  “Hanlon is a very powerful enemy,” she said. “I like you, Hope, I do, but he would kill me when you would not. Tell me how you found this Labyrinth, and the library.”

  “Ghosts,” I gasped. “Helen of Sparta’s ghost, specifically. And, Archimedes’ ghost, I guess, but I’ve never actually seen him.”

  “Helen of Sparta?”

  “Helen of Troy, whatever. I thought she was Helen of Troy at first, too, but it turns out she kills deer with her teeth.” I knew I was babbling. I couldn’t help it; there were pieces of Atlas on my face.

  “She’s telling the truth,” Mike said. We were still clinging to each other, and while his voice was steady, I could feel him shaking.

  What? Mike and I are truly awesome at beating people up. We draw the line way, way before killing, which is weird if you think about it—who knows better than psychics that death isn’t final? But death is a serious change and can be a terrible tragedy, and apparently, watching it happen hits us really hard.

  Fuck you if you think this is a weakness of character. I’d rather feel than not.

  “It would be easier if you told me what is really happening,” Darling said.

  “It’s true!” I insisted. “She’s here right now. The tunnel? How I knew the route to this room? And…and Archimedes showed us his library! He’s probably here, too. I think he has another workshop here, but really we’re all just waiting for Theseus to try to kill us. Well, not the ghosts, though, since they’re already—”

  Speedy reached over Mike’s head and slapped me. He didn’t pull his claws, and put three shallow scratches across my cheek.

  It worked. I came back to my senses, one hand pressed to my cheek to push down the pain.

  “Better?”

  “Fucker,” I said to him. Then, to Darling: “Fucker.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Ben Franklin thought there might have been a temporal oddity with the Antikythera Mechanism. He sent us here to Greece to learn its history. Along the way, I picked up Helen of Sparta, and she’s put us on a quest to undo Theseus’ curse. Helen’s an absolute badass, by the way, and she’s probably really pissed at you right now, so don’t be surprised if you get crushed between two giant rocks.

  “Oh,” I added. “In case you’re wondering, we learned that Archimedes made the Mechanism without looking into the future, so our reality probably isn’t going to unmake itself. Not because of this, at least. You’re welcome.”

  I can’t describe the expression on Darling’s face. It was…

  Well. I can’t describe it.

  When her expression didn’t change for five whole seconds, Speedy began to translate what I had said into Greek.

  “No. No!” Darling shouted. “Quiet!”

  She took a breath. “Hope? Tell me what has happened—tell me how you discovered the library, and this place. This does not have to be the end,” she added, with a nod towards the treasure room. “There is enough wealth here to keep Hanlon from us.”

  “Liar,” Speedy said. “You’re planning to kill us, report back to Hanlon with some bullshit story, collect your money, and then sell off the items in this room one at a time until you die of old age. What a total money-grubbing cu—”

  “Shut up, animal!” Darling shouted, and took a menacing step towards Speedy. She caught herself just in time; she had nearly put herself within Mike’s reach. “Oh,” she said to the koala. “So clever. I think you should die first.”

  “Now we’re back on script!” Speedy chortled. “You had me worried when you shot your cousin—I did not see that coming.”

  “Enough,” she said, and gestured at the treasure with her gun. “Into the room.”

  “Um—” I began.

  “Yes,” she said. “If there are traps, I expect you to spring them for me. One at a time, please, and walk quickly.”

  She broke into a horrible smile. “Make the animal go first.”

  I shifted to the side, preparing to jump her, but Speedy made a quick hsst! noise and shook his head at me. He then scurried over Mike’s shoulders and down the front of his body.

  Mike and I exchanged worried looks, but, you know. Superintelligent koala.

  Speedy walked straight towards the treasure room. As he was about to cross the threshold, he paused.

  “I liked your cousin,” he said to Darling. “I’m gonna love watching what’s about to happen to you.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  Speedy cast a glance at the shining mountains of treasure before him. “Something nasty.”

  He broke into the theme from Ghostbusters as he strutted into the treasure room, his gait way too confident for a koala on his way to his doom.

  Speedy almost never sings, which is a pity because it’s really pleasant to hear. “He’s got a good voice,” I said to Mike.

  “I ain't afraid o' no—thank you!”

  Darling stared into the treasure room, watching the walls, the ceiling, the floor, searching for the first of the traps.

  She didn’t look over her shoulder, which was a shame.

  For her.

  Speedy, Mike, and I, on the other hand, had a very
good view of the open air behind her, and we saw that this was quickly turning a very distinctive shade of blue.

  “Guys?” Speedy shouted from fifteen feet inside the treasure room. “Get in here. Quickly.”

  Mike and I did what the superintelligent koala ordered. Darling stayed put.

  Again, a shame.

  Behind her, the blue turned from a hazy mist into vapor trails, twining together as they relearned the physics of mass.

  I bent down and scooped up Speedy, and he leapt from my arms to Mike’s shoulders. “Get ready to run,” he whispered, as he hunkered down and wrapped his legs around Mike, and we humans strapped our flashlights into their holders.

  “Hey, Darling?” I called. (What? I had to try.) “If you drop the gun and promise to play nice, we’ll protect you. No hard feelings, okay?”

  She laughed. “Thank you, Hope. I do like you, very much, but…”

  “Yeah,” I said, as the blue mist finished solidifying. “Business first.”

  Darling’s head came off of her body like butter meeting the edge of a red-hot knife.

  I didn’t scream this time, not even when her blood splashed over my chest. I was too preoccupied with what had killed her.

  One of the most powerful monsters in the ancient world was staring down at me.

  Minotaur.

  Min-o-taur.

  A bull’s head on a man’s body, and everything was scaled to fit the bull, not the man. It loomed over us, ten feet tall, with muscles on top of muscles and a set of sharp, shiny horns.

  The weapon that had separated Darling from her head was covered in blood, and I couldn’t see what it was until the Minotaur obliged me by bringing his right arm into combat position. A labrys, that wicked double axe of legend, rose up above our heads.

  “It’s blue,” I think I said. I don’t actually remember speaking, but the voice sounded like mine. “It’s completely blue. Shouldn’t a Minotaur be…not blue? Brown, maybe?”

  A voice that sounded like Mike’s said, “It’s a ghost.”

  “Oh,” said the voice that sounded like mine. “Good. Ghosts are good. Maybe…he was…protecting us from Darling?”