Page 75 of Us in Ruins

Dr. Hunt clicked her tongue, disproving. “Stories are how we’re remembered. They’re the very reason we know about Venus and her Vase. Speaking of, have you found it yet?”

Startled, Margot fumbled. “Um, I...”

“I assume you wouldn’t let all of your research go to waste, and there must be some reason you insist on skipping half of my excursions.” Dr. Hunt faced her then, leaving nowhere to hide. Apparently she hadn’t been as sly as she thought she’d been.

“I’m sorry,” Margot said. Just another person to add to the list of people she’d disappointed this week.

Dr. Hunt, however, said, “I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?”

“I brought you here to learn, Margot. Nobody learns without making a few mistakes along the way.” Dr. Hunt clamped her hand on Margot’s shoulder and squeezed.

“But—”

“And, if you want, I’ll talk to your dad.”

Margot blinked. “Why would you do that?”

When Dr. Hunt shrugged, it wasn’t in an I don’t know kind of way but more of a I’m a wizard genius who knows everything way. “I won’t make you stay if you really hate it here, but if you truly didn’t want to be here, something tells me a headstrong girl like you would’ve been gone days ago. You’ve found something worth staying for.”

Margot should have thought of the Vase, but all she could think of was a pair of light green eyes, flecked with amber, one lone dimple, and a constellation of freckles over a once-broken nose.

Dr. Hunt turned toward the exit but glanced over her shoulder and nodded up at Venus’s watchful posture. “I know you’ve got what it takes to finish what you started.”

Easier said than done. Van could be anywhere in the city. He wouldn’t return to the buried Temple of Venus until he had all five shards. And it wasn’t like Venus herself was about to tell her where to find the last trial.

Actually.

Maybe Venus could tell her. Something Dr. Hunt said tripped a wire in Margot’s brain. Stories are how we’re remembered. Van had told her days ago that he’d puzzled out the trials by using the legend of the Vase of Venus Aurelia as a guidebook.

It wasn’t metaphors and imagery with him. She knew how he thought: critically, literally. One by one, she recounted the trials in the myth, and there was only one left—Mors. Even the thought of his carved bleeding heart sent gooseflesh down her arms with a crypt-cold shiver.

“That’s it,” Margot said suddenly. She jolted into motion, hightailing it out of the sanctuary. “Yes, I—oh, my god. Thank you, Dr. Hunt. You’re so right.”

Margot ran, arms pumping, toward Via del Vesuvio, sprinting until Pompeii peeled away from her and she stood at the frayed hem of the city. She could almost see the path she’d taken to sneak into the city after dark, like the earth still bore the tire marks from her borrowed scooter.

Chest heaving, she braced her hands on her knees and peered into the darkness below. The catacombs of the necropolis opened into the earth like an entrance to hell.

Each of the guardian’s trials had some correlating element, like Aqua’s underwater adventure and the way the earth closed around her during Terra’s trial. Fire, water, air, earth—and death. If Mors’s trial was going to be anywhere, it was going to be here.

She had survived the Nymphaeum, and it was her—not Van—who figured out a way through the trial of Aura. She could do this. She knew she could.

Not for Van. Not for her dad. Not to prove Astrid wrong. But for herself.

26

The necropolis wasn’t a tourist attraction. There were no gilded plaques or LED lights illuminating Margot’s way down the sloped tunnel. Only a damp dark that threatened to crawl under her skin and never let go.

She took one step and then another. Dirt walls rose up around her until the sky was blotted out by dark soil. Already, her heart thumped harder in her chest. Her arms curled protectively around her ribs, but there was a thrum of excited adrenaline intertwined with the rising anxiety.

The catacombs webbed around her, a maze beneath the city. Tunnels had been hollowed out only to be filled back up with ivory bones. Margot shone her actual, double-A-powered flashlight into the corners as she came to her first fork in the road. Left was dark and cold. Right was cold and dark. It was a fifty-fifty chance, honestly.

Vibes, don’t fail me now.

Veering left, Margot kept her breathing even, forcing inhales slowly through her nose so that she wouldn’t accidentally start hyperventilating. What she was looking for, Margot wasn’t exactly sure. Each shard of the Vase had been protected by a trial, each one deadlier than the last. She wasn’t naive enough to hope this time would be different.

The air in the catacomb halls was sticky, wet. A sheen of sweat slicked the skin of her neck. As she drove deeper, marble outcroppings jutted out from the edges of the tunnels. Names in Latin letters had been etched into mausoleums.