Chapter 20

Margot jolted awake when the train lurched to a stop, somewhere deep in the hills of Lazio. Her cheek was still warm with the impression of Van’s shoulder—where she had apparently dozed off sometime between boarding the train in Rome and now. She could only hope she hadn’t drooled.

“Did I miss it?” she asked, frantically brushing wild curls out of her face.

“Not yet,” Van said. His scowl carved deeper into his forehead today, and his voice was gravelly. Margot wasn’t sure if it was because of their early morning wake-up call or the distance from the shards. “Next stop is us.”

While the rest of the class was going to get carted back to their dig plots in Pompeii, Margot and Van needed to make a quick pit stop. And pray that Enzo hadn’t made it there first.

Margot kept telling herself that there was no way he had—Enzo would have had to solve the legend’s riddles to decode the trial’s location and survive the trial with no existing knowledge. It was a fool’s errand. But as far as Margot knew about treasure hunters, they didn’t really like to lose their treasures after they’d hunted them. Enzo had been a dragon watching over his trove, and Margot was quite certain they’d awakened the beast.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

Van answered with a grunt that sounded kind of, maybe, like he’d said words, but frankly it was so grunty that she could barely tell.

“That doesn’t sound okay.”

“I said it’s fine.”

Margot refrained from reminding him he hadn’t actually said anything at all. He refocused out the window, watching the sun-gold scenery drift past. Across the aisle, Astrid caught Margot’s gaze.

Lapideum, she mouthed.

Margot rolled her eyes. It didn’t matter what Astrid thought—Margot knew she could trust Van. Even if he was clearly not a morning person.

Astrid, on the other hand, had apparently had the time of her life last night. A few specks of leftover mascara dotted her cheeks like freckles, but she’d popped out of bed like a toaster pastry this morning and buzzed like her blood was made of espresso. Some date.

Margot melted deep into the outdated fabric folds of her seat. The tips of her fingers traced the shape of the jade beads around her wrist, and she was acutely aware of the space Van took up next to her—the way his knee almost rested against hers, the shape of his spine as it curled toward the window, how his head leaned against the pane, tilting toward the light.

Next to her. But also somewhere far away.

As hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop thinking about last night on the rooftop. It takes courage to let people see you for who you really are. Her whole body thrummed with the memory, electrified by the way he’d looked at her. Like he meant it. Like she could believe him.

In a feeble attempt to make sure he didn’t catch her staring at him, she reached into the canvas tote she’d grabbed at a corner gift shop to replace her stolen backpack and wriggled out Relics of the Heart. It hadn’t bounced back after its trip through the Nymphaeum. Ridges and valleys curled the paper unnaturally, leaving it stiff and cracking, but she opened it anyway. She smoothed her hands over the coarse pages—briefly, she wondered if she really needed the book if she already had every line memorized.

Gingerly, she separated the pages, taking care not to tear them. As she thumbed through the chapters, she caught glimpses of Isla and Reed’s journeys as they transitioned from rival archaeologists to begrudging colleagues to soulmates, tangled in the thread that tied their lives together before they even knew it.

Margot paused at the opening of her favorite chapter. Thirty-one. Isla and Reed were so close to finding the Vase of Venus Aurelia, but Reed had just been outed as a double agent working with the evil Edgar Alfred Durham to double his profits. Isla hadn’t forgiven him yet, but he had a grand gesture up his sleeve.

Isla’s feet led her to the wetlands at the mouth of the Tiber. A boat was coming, and it would take her away from Reed for good. She’d never have to see him or his goofy smirk or his round brown eyes ever again—even if it broke her heart.

Margot turned the page, and Reed arrived in the scene, his back to Isla and dripping with river water. What are you doing here? Isla spat. He’d betrayed her when she needed him most. Margot knew what happened next—Reed would turn, get down on one knee, and propose to Isla with an emerald gem. He wasn’t a double agent but a triple agent, and he’d only made that deal with Durham to afford the ring Isla had swooned over during their detour in Florence.

But when Reed turned, it was Van instead, green eyes gleaming in the saffron sun.

Snap out of it, Margot. This wasn’t helping. He wasn’t Reed Silvan, and she wasn’t Isla Farrow. No matter how much she might have wanted to be.

For starters, Van’s idea of a romantic gesture was petty theft. Never mind the whole turning-back-into-a-statue thing. Even as the train rocked gently around a corner, sunlight caught on a trail of marble that seeped down Van’s skin, crawling out of the gash on his arm. Spreading with every second they spent away from the Vase. When he turned to watch the rolling countryside, it peeked out from underneath his sleeve and webbed up the side of his neck.

She couldn’t lose him. Not before she had the chance to have him.

“Walk me through the plan again?” she asked, closing her book.

Van pressed a finger into his temple and loosed an irritated breath. “We go to the trial of Terra, we solve it, and we leave.”

“Okay, why are you acting like you’ve got a major wedgie?” Margot asked. “Mad I took away your suspenders?”

He didn’t look at her. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went back to the archives at the museum.”

The museum was totally closed by that time of night, but Margot decided it was best not to ask how he’d managed to get back inside. She’d seen him cheat and sneak and steal enough times to know he had his ways. And she’d take plausible deniability while she had it.

“And?” she prompted at the worried slant of his mouth.

He retrieved a sheet of paper from his pocket. It had been crinkled and clenched, indentions of Van’s fingers molded into the parchment. “The curse, it’s still spreading, and—”

His sentence ended abruptly, but like she had an atlas of his mind, she knew where his thoughts had led him. “And this is the longest you’ve been without one of the shards nearby, but you don’t know exactly how long it takes to turn you all the way back to stone.”

Van swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “There’s no guarantee that no one else discovered the last two shards in the hundred years I’ve been gone.”

“They’ll be there,” she said. “And they’ll lead us right to Enzo.”

“He might not come.”

“He will,” Margot said.

“You don’t know that!”

Margot reeled back, stunned. A few classmates swiveled in their seats to see the commotion. Van gulped down a breath that did little to flush the color that had risen to his cheeks. She wanted to press an affirming hand to his shoulder, but her hand hung halfway there. It wouldn’t have done much anyway. Van jerked upright and squeezed past Margot into the aisle.

She rushed after him. “Where are you going?”

Their stop wasn’t for another twenty minutes, fifteen at least.

Without glancing back, Van said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does,” Margot pushed.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It does because we’re partners.” Margot reached toward him, this time refusing to shy away. He shook her hand off his arm like she was nothing more than an annoying fruit fly.

Stomping down the aisle, he jiggled the handle on the bathroom, despite the sign clearly indicating it was occupied, and kept marching when it wouldn’t open. One shoulder sagged, heavier than the other, and one leg lagged, throwing off his gait.

Van’s foot snagged against a man’s briefcase, and he stumbled forward. He caught himself against the armrest of the next seat—but not without startling a bottle-blonde twentysomething clearly on vacation. Her coffee-cart cappuccino spilled down the front of her white dress, leaving a brown Rorschach spot on the bodice.

The girl’s gasp was a shotgun start. Van muttered an apology before making a break for it down the aisle. Fortunately—or, unfortunately—his legs were slow, laden with stone. Each move he made was rigid.

“Stop, Van.” Margot caught up with him quickly, but it did nothing to deter him. “Stop. Stop.”

Van turned on his heels. Angry red rimmed his eyes, their usual hardened peridot gone glassy. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

An older woman and her all-fluff white dog, both wearing matching blue sunglasses, stared up at them. All she was missing was popcorn.

“You don’t even know what I want to talk about,” Margot said innocently. “Maybe I want to talk about the renaissance of the thirty-minute sitcom or Atlantic gigantism or any number of unrelated things.”

“Don’t do that,” Van seethed.

“Do what?”

“Pity me.”

A voice buzzed over the speakers, fuzzy and distorted. “Arrivo a Napoli, dieci minuti.”

It cut the tension between them but did little to calm Van. He stormed toward the end of the train car.

Down the aisle, Dr. Hunt stood out of her seat and stretched her arms overhead. If she turned around, she’d see the remnants of chaos they’d left in their wake and order Margot and Van thirty rows back to their assigned seats. But here, they had a straight shot off the train at the next platform. By the time anyone noticed they were missing, they’d already be back in Pompeii. All they had to do was not get caught.

Margot and Van made it to the back of the train, but that only meant there was nowhere else for them to go. With Van on the brink of a nuclear meltdown, they needed cover, and they needed it fast.

The woman and her pooch looked up at Margot. Their blue sunglasses.

“I just need to borrow these for a second,” Margot said before stripping the eyewear off their faces.

“Fermati!” the woman shrilled.

The dog barked as Margot closed the distance to Van. Wrapping her arms around his torso like a linebacker, she dragged him into the last seats in the aisle.

“What are you doing?” He fought against her grasp. A stone-hardened elbow dug in between her ribs. Ouch.

“I’m—trying—to help—you.” Each staccato word was interrupted by a thrashing limb as Van tried desperately to eradicate himself from her vise grip. No way. Not when they were this close to Naples, to the next shard.

She wrangled the woman’s sunglasses over his face through sheer force of will, and then sat up, triumphant.

The dog’s tiny sunglasses barely covered Margot’s eyes, making her look like a John Lennon knockoff. She ducked behind the row in front of her, only peeking out far enough to watch as Dr. Hunt glanced toward the woman and her disgruntled Maltese, both now squinting in the sunlight. Decades could have passed by the time Dr. Hunt finally slid into the bathroom stall.

An exhale peeled out of Margot’s lungs. Except that the person who left the bathroom was beelining for their seats. He paused before them, clearing his throat.

“We were just, um . . . leaving.” Margot scrambled up, dragging Van with her. He wasn’t putting in his fair share of effort, basically reducing himself to defiant deadweight.

“Margot, knock it off,” he snapped. “I know what you’re trying to do but don’t. You’re just making everything worse.”

The jagged edge of his voice ripped through her. Elephant heavy, a weight pressed against her esophagus. But Dr. Hunt could come out of the bathroom at any moment. Margot was too stubborn to stop now. She strong-armed him into the luggage room and slammed the door shut behind them.

The closet was not . . . big. Or even close to being appropriately sized for two people.

Suitcases had been piled on shelves that rose toward the top of the train. A single bulb was plastered on the ceiling, and Margot tugged on the chain dangling between them. Harsh light filled the narrow room.

Van whipped off his sunglasses. Tension strained his neck, tightened his shoulders. “You’re relentless.”

“Thank you,” Margot said, flipping her sunglasses on top of her head.

A hoarse noise emanated from Van’s chest. He clearly hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

With every breath, her chest rose to meet his. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, so we won’t.”

And they didn’t. For a moment, they just stood there. Margot watching Van, and Van watching her right back.

“I wasn’t trying to ruin everything.” Her voice was annoyingly soggy.

“You didn’t. I just feel like . . . like I can’t breathe.” Each word cracked like chipped marble. He pushed slow, purposeful breaths out through his nose, and Margot recognized it immediately—the way someone tried to hold back tears.

“You’re afraid,” Margot said, taking his hands in hers. They were colder than she remembered and that scared her, too. “Honestly, I’d be shocked if you weren’t. But you don’t have to do this alone. I’m right here.”

The rest of Van’s resolve shattered. His head sank against Margot’s shoulder, burying his face in her neck as shallow breaths racked through him, shaking and sputtering. Margot’s hands found his back and pressed flat, firm. Her fingers felt each groove of his ribs, every notch of his spine.

“I’m right here,” she repeated, a mantra until the train slowed and Van’s frantic breathing slowed with it. Even if she wasn’t sure she could do anything else right lately, she was right here.

The gold compass around his neck had wrestled itself loose from its usual confines beneath his shirt in all the hubbub, and he clutched it, the movement second nature. She could just see the lines of the etching beneath his grasp. The very familiar lines.

“The emblem,” she said. “It’s the same one that was on Enzo’s hoodie.”

“Yes,” Van croaked. “The logo for Atlas Exploration Company. A hundred years later, and Atlas is still finding ways to mess with me.”

Margot clasped her hand around his. The compass had warmed from his touch. “We’ll find this shard and catch Enzo. I promise.”

The train halted. Napoli Centrale.

Margot donned her doggy glasses once more as she pried open the luggage room door, and Van tucked his compass back beneath his shirt.

The station was a glass and steel behemoth nestled between the Naples hillsides and a cerulean sea. When the doors slid open, Van stepped onto the platform next to her. Even though she could see the effort it took him, he held his head higher, determined. The train zipped off without them, sending wind through Margot’s curls. Next stop: the trial of Terra. Whether she was ready or not.