Lazarus set Fiona on her feet and then guided her forward through the settling dust until they reached Pierce and Gallo.
“It wasn’t me,” Fiona croaked. “I didn’t cause this.”
“I know, Fi.” Pierce gave her shoulder a pat, but Lazarus detected a note of uncertainty in his tone. Something had caused the cave-in, and the timing of it was an uncomfortable coincidence. “All the same,” he added, “Let’s…ah, watch what we say down here.”
Fiona frowned but nodded her assent.
“How far down do you think we are?” Gallo asked.
“I’d say we only moved about fifty yards…” Pierce glanced at Lazarus for confirmation.
“Fifty max,” Lazarus said. “Maybe less.”
“Given the slope of the passage, I’d say we’re thirty feet down.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad when you say it like that,” Gallo remarked. “I suppose we’re going to have to burrow our way out like gophers.”
“If we have to,” Pierce said. He surveyed the area. The dust was settling, revealing a rubble-strewn passage that continued deeper into the earth. “Since we’re here, we might as well take a look around. Maybe there’s a back door.”
Gallo raised a dubious eyebrow. “You ever heard the saying: ‘If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’?”
“Will Rogers.” Pierce managed a grin. “But I’m an archaeologist, Gus. ‘Dig deeper’ is always the right answer.”
Gallo rolled her eyes, then turned to Fiona. “Fi, honey, you said this passage spoke to you. What did you mean?”
“It was like a…gut feeling. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“How about now?”
“It’s still down there.”
“Dig deeper,” Pierce said. “This is what we came for.”
Whatever the cause, the effects of the cave-in seemed less pronounced the deeper they went, but there were still sections of the passage so choked with rubble that they had to crawl on hands and knees, single file, to get through. At each obstacle, Pierce shot Fiona a questioning look, and the answer was always the same.
Down.
As the young woman’s certainty about what lay below them increased, so did Lazarus’s apprehension. The safety of the team was his responsibility, and the deeper underground they went, the harder it would be to do his job.
The curvature of the passage was gradual but constant. They were in a descending spiral, orbiting the center of the old city above. The air was musty, the walls still damp from being submerged. Then some two hundred yards from the site of the cave-in, the passage turned inward and opened into another open chamber, more than a hundred feet in diameter.
“If my mental GPS is still working,” Pierce said, shining his light up at the vaulted ceiling. Despite being riddled with cracks, it was mostly intact. “We’re right under the center of Arkaim.”
Gallo was more interested in the walls, specifically, a uniform line ringing the chamber, about eight feet above the floor. Below that line, the walls were still wet. “Where did all the water go?”
Lazarus looked around for the answer to that question. The room had been flooded with enough water to fill a short course swimming pool. For that much fluid to drain out so quickly would require a sizable opening, maybe another tunnel leading to a more extensive cave network, which in turn might mean a path back to the surface. But there did not appear to be any other exits from the chamber.
Fiona said nothing, but walked out into the middle of the vast hall, as if drawn to an invisible beacon in the exact center of the room. “Here,” she called out, kneeling and gesturing with palms down. “It’s here. I’m going to try something.”
“Fi, are you sure that’s wise?” Pierce said. “After what happened earlier—”
“I told you. That wasn’t me.”
“Let her try, George,” Gallo said. “It’s not like our situation can get much worse.”
Pierce’s frown indicated that he disagreed, but he took a step back and nodded to Fiona.
She turned slowly, as if trying to find a precise position, then her lips began moving. At first, Lazarus couldn’t hear what she was saying, but after a moment, he began to feel a deep hum, like the notes of a bass violin reverberating out from her chest cavity, building in intensity.
Then the floor began to move.
He shifted his stance, spreading his feet apart, as if he was standing on the deck of a storm tossed ship. Pierce and Gallo did the same, but after the initial lurch, the motion smoothed out.
The stone floor began rotating and descending at the same time, like a bolt slowly screwing itself deeper into the Earth’s crust. After a full turn, the movement ceased. The passage through which they had entered was now about ten feet above the floor, but several more openings were revealed, spaced out evenly around the edge of the chamber.
Fiona was grinning. “Told you.”
“Well done.” Pierce stepped forward and gave her a nod. “Sorry I doubted you.” He turned, probing the enlarged chamber with his lamp. “I think we can safely say this architecture is not consistent with the Sintashta culture.”
“Just as we suspected,” Gallo said. “Arkaim was built atop the ruins of a much older civilization.”
“The Originators,” Pierce confirmed. “The Sintashta must have known about it. It would explain Arkaim’s circular design. But I doubt anyone has been here in thousands of years. That earthquake probably shook things up, activated this elevator mechanism and drained the passage.”
Fiona shone her light down one of the passages. “That’s the one.”
There was nothing different about the opening, but she had not led them astray yet. “We need to hurry, though. I think this place has an automatic reset.”
As if on cue, the floor shuddered and started to move again, rising this time, as it rotated in a counter-clockwise direction.
“Go!” Lazarus shouted. He scooped Fiona up in his arms and sprinted across the turning surface. Pierce and Gallo were right behind him, following his lead as he adjusted course every few steps to keep the correct passage in view, even as the rising floor began to eclipse the opening.
He reached the entrance with plenty of time to spare, but in the brief moment it took him to set Fiona down, the opening moved sideways several feet and closed another six inches. Fiona dropped flat and scrambled forward, plunging head first into the passage.
The floor kept moving beneath him and Lazarus had to keep walking forward just to stay in front of the opening, which appeared to be sinking as the ground rose beneath him. The top of the passage was like a slow motion guillotine, a rough stone blade that would slice through anything caught between it and the floor of the chamber.
Gallo arrived next.
“Dive for it,” he shouted, guiding her headfirst into the passage.
The opening was just three feet high, the gap shrinking by inches with each passing second. He took another step forward, reached back for Pierce and propelled him through. The moving floor caught Pierce’s shirt in a scissor pinch, but Lazarus gave him a hard push that ripped him free of the trapped fabric, and Pierce vanished into the passage.
Two feet now.
Pierce’s face appeared in the shrinking gap, his headlamp shining into Lazarus’s face. “Hurry.”
But Lazarus knew the chance to slip through had already passed. He shrugged off his backpack and shoved it into the opening. Twelve inches. Not enough.
He dropped flat and kicked the pack. The contents shifted, and the heavy duty nylon scraped through. He snatched his foot back as six inches became five…four.
“Erik!” Pierce cried out.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll find anoth—”