“Where’s the siren statue?” asked Enrique, turning around. “It … it should be here.”

Laila drew her shawl tighter. “What was this place?”

Séverin glanced down. They were standing in the remains of a former room. Or perhaps a courtyard, judging by the bleached rubble of a fountain. Thin, metal beds lay in various stages of ruin. Along the broken semicircle of the wall, black ivy clambered around the stone, slowly choking the pillars that might have once adorned the circumference.

“I think it was a convalescence room…” said Séverin, toeing a piece of broken glass. It was uncommonly large, more like a panel that would have belonged in a skylight rather than a window. “Whoever hid the entrance in ancient times would not have used something that could be easily removed … so what happened when it was found again once people started building stations here? Did they find the statue bust and try to hide it? Or celebrate it?”

Séverin picked his way toward the wall. The more he spoke, the more he imagined the room as it had once been. The early sunlight streaming through the glass, the gurgling fountain, and the rasping breaths of a patient fighting to see the light.

He stretched out his hand, his fingers sinking into the wall of ivy. He kept his eyes on the ground. He remembered a detail about the statue … something about the shape of the pillar’s base.

“Perhaps the builder would’ve found it strange that he could not move the statue,” said Séverin. “Maybe he even tried to cover it up with plaster or paint that has worn away by now.”

As he walked, he brushed back the dirt with his shoes until an odd shape caught his eye: a pair of clawed talons.

At the same time, his fingers hit something cold and rough.

“Zofia?” he said quietly.

Zofia appeared at his side. She snapped a small pendant off her necklace and held it to the leaves. Tendrils of smoke curled into the air as the ivy smoldered and fell to the ground. As the blackened leaves cleared, a scorched face appeared in the leaves. The siren.

Séverin felt Hypnos, Laila, and Enrique drawing closer. Enrique sucked in his breath.

“You found it,” he said softly. “But how do we get it open?”

Séverin frowned, staring at the statue. “In the image, the siren’s mouth dropped open … triggering the entrance.”

He reached out, tracing the exquisitely carved feathers that sprouted along the siren’s cheekbones and melted into her hair. Her mouth had been shaped into a pursed, angry line. Her eyes were closed shut.

Séverin paused. Lightly, he touched the statue’s eyelids.

“A siren sings to lure in sailors … but to do that … they must spot you in the water,” he said.

“So?” asked Enrique.

“This statue’s eyes are closed … which means she cannot see us,” said Séverin. “Not yet.”

He pressed his fingers into the statue’s eyelids. The stone gave way, a lost mechanism creaking loudly as the rocky eyelids pulled back.

“What is that?” asked Hypnos, stumbling backwards.

Beneath them, the ground quivered. Séverin flung out his arms, steadying himself. Laila stumbled, and he caught her around the waist, clasping her to him just as milky, quartz stones rolled into the siren’s eye hollows.

“Everyone hold tight to one another—” Séverin started to say, but his words were drowned out as the siren’s jaw unhinged with a sound like growling thunder. The earth around them lurched and fell away, and Séverin barely had time to reach for Enrique’s hand before a clammy darkness swallowed them whole.

25

ZOFIA

Zofia could not comprehend the space around her all at once. Instead, it came in blips of awareness:

The descent—so long she had counted all the way up to seventeen—and the thud. In the end, she did not fall, but stumble, as if she had missed the last step on a staircase.

Something cold touched her toe. Her shoes squelched. A sharp rock had torn a hole through the leather. Beneath her boots, Zofia could faintly make out the damp silt ground, the kind that belonged to the shores of a lake.

Her ears buzzed. She blinked and blinked, but she could not see anything beyond a circle of light, the circumference of which was hardly more than three meters. Its source came from hundreds of meters above them, which Zofia recognized as the opening from which they had fallen. To cross that much space and feel it as nothing more than a stumble indicated they had fallen through several Tezcats to arrive here.

But what was here?

Zofia could hear her friends calling and shuffling around her, but she tuned them out. One thing at a time, she told herself. She had to parse this sense by sense … starting with sight.

Cloying darkness pressed all around them. Zofia felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Dimly, she heard her mother’s voice.

Be a light, Zosia.

With trembling hands, Zofia tore off one of her pendants and reached for a match. Even before she could see what lay before her, she did not like what she smelled. The cave was earthen and sweet, but musty. Like summer ponds full of sickly green water and buzzing flies. A faint, coppery note lingered beneath it all. It reminded her of blood. A damp chill settled into her clothes.

Zofia struck the match, raising it to the pendant. Light flared around her, and with it came a new calm. Her breaths loosened. Séverin appeared at her side. He smiled. “Mind sharing the light, Phoenix?”

She nodded, holding out the pendant. One by one, Séverin lit their torches and handed them off to Enrique, Hypnos, and Laila.

“No one move,” said Séverin, holding up his torch. “We need to compare what’s before us to the mind Forged map. Beyond what research we’ve gathered, we don’t know anything about how the cave will react to our presence, so stay alert and stay close.”

Huge stalagmites—Zofia counted fifteen—jutted up at the edges of the cave, and dozens of mushrooms bloomed in the crevices. Not three meters away, a dark lake stretched out at least half a kilometer long. It was silent except for the occasional plink of water droplets beading off the cave ceiling and hitting the lake. The water lapped against a wall of shining black rock on the far end. She remembered from the mind Forged map that there was something behind the wall … a gleaming, amber light and automatons the size of buildings.

“We need to move closer to the lake,” said Enrique. “I thought the gilded skeleton would be here, but I don’t see it…”

They each took one step forward. At the front, Séverin held out his torch. The light traveled over the uneven ground before catching on a mottled piece of marble poking out of the silt about two meters away. Zofia recognized it as the paper-thin marble sign that had once been in the jaws of the skeleton.

But the skeleton was gone.

“That can’t be right,” said Enrique.

He moved to take a step forward when Séverin caught his hand. “Careful.”

Slowly, Enrique crouched on the ground. He pulled out a pair of gloves from his pocket and drew out the plaque before walking back to them.

“It still reads Forgive me,” he said, tilting his head and examining the marble. He turned around. “But how could the skeleton have vanished already? There’s no signs of rockfall that would have disturbed its place. And the lake must have been covered up until now.”