Antigone jumped to her feet. “You said our dad had an older brother, too. What was his name?”
“Daniel,” Rupert said. “Your uncle’s name was Daniel.” Ducking his shorn head out the hole, Greeves disappeared. Planks rattled beneath his weight.
“Cyrus …” Antigone turned slowly to face her brother. Her eyes were wide.
“What do you want me to say?” Cyrus asked. “No wonder that kid in the hall called us primitives.”
“Should I douse the lights?” Rupert’s voice echoed through the hole.
“No!” Antigone sat back down and her legs began bouncing.
“Go ahead!” Cyrus yelled.
“Fine!” Antigone yelled. “Thanks for the blankets.”
The lights throughout the Polygon punched off. Only the little lanterns in the center of the small crypt remained, glowing dull orange.
The big door boomed shut.
Antigone stood and tucked a fresh pillow beneath Nolan’s sweat-soaked head. Then, grabbing Cyrus by the arm, she pulled him to his feet.
Together, wordless, minds chewing, they emptied two of the other alcoves as completely and as neatly as they could. Blankets were folded. Blankets were spread. Pillows were placed, and two new beds were born. With the piles of pillows from Greeves and Nolan, cold stone became comfortable. Antigone turned off two of Nolan’s three lanterns.
Out in the darkness, Whip Spiders roamed free, clicking as they crept, clattering as they fell from oiled walls. Beneath his blanket, Cyrus stared at the ceiling.
“Cy,” Antigone said quietly. “We’re not from California.” She rolled up onto her side, facing her brother across the room. “We’re from here.”
Cyrus felt anger surge through him, but he clamped his mouth shut. He wanted to be tired. He didn’t want to think.
“Cyrus? Seriously, two aunts, an uncle, grandparents? This is where we’re supposed to be.”
Cyrus forced his jaw to relax. “Night, Tigs,” he said, and he turned his face to the wall.
“Cyrus, you are not going to sleep right now, and you are going to talk about this. This isn’t a math test that you won’t show me, or an English paper that — for some absurd reason — you feel the need to sink in a creek.”
Nolan snored. Cyrus heard Antigone sit back up. A shoe bounced off Cyrus’s shoulder blades. He didn’t move.
“Will you sit up and stop acting like you do at school, please? This is me, not some grief counselor. All this stuff … Cy, it changes who we are.”
Cyrus pressed his forehead against the stone and let the cold tighten his skin. “No, it doesn’t, Tigs. I am who I am. I’m not changing, and I’m not talking about it.”
His sister sputtered and her blankets rustled. She was giving up.
“You shouldn’t have lied to Greeves about the tooth. Do you even want it? What good’s it going to do?”
She was right. Why did he need the tooth? For a trade? No. He’d passed on that already. Did he want to raise the dead? No. Yes. But he didn’t know how he would even start. His father had been lost at sea. Beneath his blanket, he gripped the keys against his wrist. The metal sheath was warm. He clicked it open and closed his hand around the tooth. A cold current shot up through his arm. Frozen bone.
“I’ll tell him,” he said quietly. “Okay?”
“When?”
Cyrus inhaled slowly. “Tomorrow. Next time I see him. Good enough?”
“Tonight would have been better.”
“Want me to go after him now?”
“Yeah.” Antigone exhaled and began to yawn. “You do that. Fix everything. In the dark. With spiders.”
She was relaxing. Her breathing evened out, blending with Nolan’s.
“Night, Tigs.”
“Night, Cy. Russell.”
“Tigger.”
He waited for the counter, but it didn’t come. Antigone groaned softly. The crippled clock counted off five minutes, and then ten. Cyrus listened to its beat mingle with Nolan’s painful moanings and his sister’s muddled whispers. He listened to the click of spider whips and distant echoes through the stone. He slept. And he woke. And he slept again. He turned and he rolled and he tangled his feet in his blankets.
Dan was gone. Gone. And he, Cyrus, was doing nothing.
He sat up, swinging his bare feet down to the tassels of a Turkish rug.
In the dim orange light, he could see that Antigone was still. Nolan was stirring. Cyrus held his breath and waited. The boy’s red welts had almost disappeared, replaced with empty blisters of scaly skin. Cyrus unwound Patricia from his wrist, and she looked at him with bright emerald eyes. In the low light, her silver body actually glowed. He stroked her head with his thumb, and she slid forward, rubbing her whole body against it.
He eased the key ring down to her tail. Solomon Keys dropped into his hand.
twelve. BURIAL
CYRUS DUCKED OUT of the door. Inching along the shadowy planks, he stopped at the showers. The faint glow from Nolan’s lantern barely reached his feet, giving him just enough light to see what he was doing. Gripping the three charms and the key ring tight, he stuck the shafts of the two keys into the nearest falling stream of water. He could see nothing in the splashing, but his arm grew suddenly heavy. Breathing hard, he slid back from the edge and looked at the keys in his hand.
Greeves hadn’t lied.
One gold, one silver, but shaped like no keys he had ever seen, and heavier than they had any right to be. The gold one had a hollow triangle at its head, a square in its center, and a circle at its end. Smooth teeth lined its shaft on every side. The silver one was thin and bent like an elongated and slightly corkscrewing crescent moon. Some kind of writing, shaped like Arabic, had been etched into its surface, but Cyrus wasn’t going back to the light for a closer look.
Dropping the heavy keys into his pocket, he made his way into the deep blackness of the Polygon.
Once Cyrus had managed to open the door and hop barefoot over the flooded threshold, he had enough nervous energy to rush the stairs, skipping slippery steps as he went. The hallway above was dimly lit, and he found his way quickly back into the big blue-glowing room beneath the water maze. From there, rather than trying to retrace Mrs. Eldridge’s route, he headed for the iron spiral stairs he’d seen earlier, cobwebbed into a dark corner. His bare feet scuffed through heavy dust on the cold stone floor and found the metal stairs. The treads were rough with rust blisters, and Cyrus climbed slowly, his heart pounding against his molars.
He wound his way above the thick glass ceiling and into a tall shaft. Two of the walls were glass, with views into the maze, and the higher Cyrus climbed, the more terrifying the maze became. It was as tall as it had been wide — a full cube — with underwater tunnels tangled in an impossible three-dimensional knot of drowning potential.
Cyrus reached the top and stepped out into a high-ceilinged room with a single dangling light in its center, glowing like the moon. The floor was tiled around the edges, but the entire center was glass, sealing the water maze in all but two small open hatches in opposite corners — an entrance and an exit, with a whole lot of wet death in between.
Cyrus moved toward the closer one, trying to imagine what it would be like to drop in and swim into total confusion. The water rippled slightly at his feet, and his chest tightened. What would it feel like to have panicked lungs fill with water? His father knew.
Something moved beneath the glass. A quick shadow. And then water erupted at Cyrus’s feet, and arms slapped at the tiled edge. Cyrus yelled, jumped backward, slipped, and sat down. Puddles raced toward him, and he scrambled up onto his feet.
Gasping, Diana Boone pulled herself up out of the maze and rolled onto her back. She was wearing a black suit with leggings that reached her ankles, but her tan arms and freckled shoulders were bare. The stitches were gone from the gash at the base of her neck. Spitting to the side, she reached up and pulled her hair loose from its ponytail.