she sensed his thoughts in her head, shared what he felt and desired in a way she could never have imagined before, had she really understood.
After that, of course, he could no longer hide it from her. It wasn’t telepathy, exactly—not mind-reading in the simple pop-culture sense—but Nico could touch the minds of others with his own and share images, memories, and thoughts. Such things were not concrete, but rather a sense of what she felt, an understanding of what she was thinking without a need for words.
Like their relationship, his touch could not be hidden completely from others. He knew whenever anyone was about to enter the chamber—knew who it was—and the other members of their team often looked at him oddly. But, again like their relationship, Nico’s touch was treated with a respectful silence. And perhaps also with confusion. Their co-workers might gossip about them after hours, but such things went unspoken in their company.
“Dr. Hodge?” Finch prompted. “Are we going down?”
Geena smiled. “You didn’t come all the way to Venice to see an open door.”
But as she started down the stone steps, she was distracted by a kind of giddiness that swept over her. She felt as though she might laugh out loud, and it took a moment to realize that the emotion flooding her belonged not to her, but to Nico. And it was not merely her arrival that had filled him with such joy.
She felt the touch of his mind, her name in his thoughts, and she picked up her pace. Finch hurried to keep up, muttering about caution and the lack of a handrail, but Geena did not slow. Nico had found something major, but she had no idea what could have excited him so much.
The stairs curved to the right and she trailed her hand across the cold, dry wall. They had yet to figure out exactly how the chamber’s architects had sealed it off so completely, making it airtight and moisture-free. Even with the door opened there was no humidity here, and no evidence of water past or present, despite the depth of the chamber and its proximity to the Grand Canal.
At the bottom of the steps another old door stood open, and she stepped through into a warren of plastic sheeting illuminated by work lights and the glow of laptop screens. A preservation tent had been set up in the far corner of the large chamber, and members of her team carefully prepared manuscripts for transport to a room at Ca’Foscari University that had been specially built for the care of ancient documents.
“Dr. Hodge?” Finch called behind her.
But Geena was drawn through the anthill industriousness of the recovery team by the giddy urgency she felt in Nico’s mind. Several members of the team tried to speak with her as she passed, but she waved them off with a tight smile. This was not the way she had imagined Finch experiencing the size and delicacy and historical significance of the Biblioteca project, but she could not stop herself. Nico did not get this excited about just anything.
Plastic curtains covered an archway that separated the two wings of the chamber. As Geena rushed forward, Nico pushed through, and she saw the smile that she’d felt in her mind. His olive skin shone in the glare of the work lights. Mischief and glee danced in his dark eyes.
“Dr. Hodge!” Finch called from behind her.
Geena stared at Nico. “What is it?” she said, the words almost a sigh.
“We found another door,” he said, reaching for her hand. And then he was tugging her along in his wake, back through the plastic curtains, Howard Finch forgotten, and they were rushing into an area of the chamber they had barely begun to catalog.
“You opened it?” she asked.
“Of course!” Nico said, but she could feel the touch of his mind and knew he was toying with her.
“You didn’t go in,” she said.
He cast her a sidelong glance. “This is your project, Geena. We opened the door just a few minutes ago, but you should be the first to enter. I will spoil this much of the surprise, though. There are stairs, and they go deeper.”
Geena swung the beam of the heavy-duty Maglite side to side, studying each step as she made her cautious descent. Nico came right behind her, shining his own industrial flashlight over her shoulder, illuminating the darkness ahead. What fascinated her most was how dry the air remained. A subterranean chamber beneath Venice ought to be seeping with ground water, but she saw no sign of weeping between the stones in the stairwell walls.
The stairs curved to the left. If her sense of direction served her well, they were closer than ever to the canal. She ran her free hand along the wall as she took each step—eighteen, by the time they reached the door at the bottom—wondering the entire time why anyone would need a hidden room beneath a hidden room, and whether they would find yet another hidden room below that.
Her imagination ran with that question as she swept the Maglite’s beam over the door. The wood looked petrified, the iron strapping across it dull but otherwise untouched by time. It had no lock, only a heavy metal latch. And at the center of the uppermost of the iron straps across the door, a large X had been engraved.
“Ten,” she said.
“Ten what?” Nico asked.
Geena traced the number with a finger. “Let’s find out.”
Her breath caught in her throat, an almost sexual excitement filling her. The base of her brain buzzed with Nico’s anticipation; he felt it, too. These were the moments that they both lived for. Discovery. Dispersing the ghosts of the past like so many cobwebs and stepping back through time.
She turned to grin up at him, and at the others gathered on the steps behind him. Silver-haired Domenic, their expert on ancient texts; tall, grimly beautiful Sabrina, camera recording it all; and Ramus, the Croatian grad student she had promoted to site manager only three days before. She put a hand up to block the worst of the glare from their flashlights and could see one final dark silhouette on the stairs above her. Howard Finch. He had asked to be a part of the initial foray and she had agreed, knowing that if they found anything of import, BBC funding would flow.
“No one has been here in at least five hundred years,” Geena said. “It’s exciting, I know. My heart is pounding. But remember our purpose. Preservation of the site is important above all else.”
This received a round of nods and murmurs of assent. Geena took a moment to run down a mental checklist. Plastic sheeting had been hung to cover the door they had used to access these stairs. A preservation team waited in Petrarch’s library for a signal, in case their entry into this new subterranean level caused rapid deterioration of anything they might discover. Sabrina was filming.
She opened the door.
Maglite beams illuminated the room beyond. Her heart thundered in her chest and her face felt flushed. With Nico so near she felt his excitement, and it added to her own in a manner not much different from the way they shared arousal during lovemaking.
Yet as she scanned this new chamber with her torchlight, she could not help but feel a momentary disappointment. Aside from three thin marble columns at its center, it had no trace of architectural style, nor any visible art. Unless there were passages into connecting rooms, the chamber measured only forty feet or less in diameter. It had nothing of beauty or adornment about it, and reminded her more of a dungeon than of the intricate stonework of Petrarch’s library above them.
“What is this place?” Nico asked.
Geena led them in and the small exploratory group fanned out. A number of vertical stone obelisks were spaced at what appeared to be equal intervals around the chamber, which she now realized was round. That facet in itself was interesting. Why go to the trouble of building a perfectly circular room without making some effort toward aesthetics?
“How many of these obelisks are there?” she called out.
To her surprise, it was Finch who answered first. “Ten.”
She shone her light at the nearest one and saw that the black stone was engraved with the same Roman numeral as they had encountered on the door to the chamber.
“Do they all have the same number on them?” she asked, sweeping the light around, picking up glimpses of obelisks and the faces of her team. “Or are they different?”
