Page 10 of Us in Ruins

Think, Margot, think. Van had criticized his fellow excavators for not seeing what was right in front of him. What was she missing? He’d said all he had to do was ask.

“Hey, Venus,” Margot said, whisper quiet. “Any chance you want to tell a girl where your temple is?”

Only the wind answered. So much for a voice-activated homing device.

There were a few other crooked stone structures jutting out of the earth—remnants of pillars, a patch of tiled floor, half walls and hearths. Margot snuck through the courtyard, investigating. If she were the goddess of love, where would she hide her temple?

Another flashlight beam appeared at the edge of the courtyard. Then, another. That was so not good. Up here, there was nowhere else for her to run except down. The guards patrolled the hill’s base in a lazy arc—routine movements, but with every step, they inched closer.

Margot ducked down behind a wall of smooth, sunbaked stones. The center had been cut out. Almost like an oven or a fireplace. A hole not quite big enough for her to shove herself into, but definitely big enough to try.

Her head knocked against the ceiling as she curled into a ball. Something jammed into her spleen. Summering in Italy was supposed to be about a trillion times more glamorous than this.

By the time she dared to glance around the pillar, the guards had grouped together at the bottom of the hill, but it was too dark to tell if they were looking straight at her or something else entirely. Her heart thrummed like it knew the answer and was afraid of it. Prison orange was not her color.

Margot inched back into the shadows, but the stones jabbed her side again. Twisting, she realized one of the stones had pushed itself out. She knelt down to nudge it back into place, knees pressing into the alcove floor. The pressure shifted beneath her. The ground shook, moaned.

Uh...

Looking behind her, Margot gulped. The center of the meadow opened like a yawning mouth. Her head whipped between the stone pillar and what was evidently the doorway to the literal underworld.

Perhaps love truly isn’t surface level, Van had written. She didn’t know to take it so... literally. I could nearly hear the ardent prayers on the wind. All I had to do was ask at the temple door.

Margot hadn’t said a peep. But she’d knelt. As if in prayer. The weight of her knees must have tripped a lever, which had Rube Goldberged the entrance.

She leaned over it now and peered into the unyielding black. A breath of stiff air blew her hair back from her face, laced with floral perfume and smoke. Below, there was a stairwell. Super creepy and foreboding.

But she’d come all this way. She couldn’t turn back now.

4

The stairwell could have used some serious Swiffering. Dust swelled with every step. Margot pressed the satin sleeve of her pajama shirt over her nose and mouth, relying on the faint light of her phone’s flashlight to lead the way forward. Her battery was at 7 percent.

Make that 6 percent.

With a totally-not-heart-attack-inducing thump, the door slammed closed behind her, suffocating any trace of moonlight. If Van were here right now, he would have lit a torch and speared down into the darkness, slashing through cobwebs with a flickering flame. Margot just kept that little LED bulb pointed forward, praying that all the spiders were dead and she wasn’t going to join them.

“Okay, Margot,” she said to herself, and the cold walls soaked up the sound. Silence pressed on her eardrums, heavy from the weight of nothingness. “This is what you came here for.”

The stairwell led down and down in an endless chase, the walls grooved with timeworn etchings and flaking pigments from ancient frescoes. She imagined Van next to her, leading the way. He’d probably studied for years to become an archaeologist of his caliber at such a young age—fluent in all the classical languages, an encyclopedic knowledge of Roman iconography, a preternatural ability to sense the right places to dig.

As if she’d manifested it, a spiderweb snared Margot’s legs, and a squeal erupted from her chest. She balanced against the wall, trying to extricate herself from the sticky gossamer. Van’s exact words about the temple had been, The darkness yielded only to heavier shadows until I was sure I would never see the light again. And boy, he hadn’t exaggerated.

“God, relax.” She took a deep breath, shuddering. “If Van can do this, so can you.”

Except that maybe that wasn’t true. So much could change in a hundred years. For starters, a girl like Margot probably never would have been hired by Atlas Exploration Company. Or been able to wear pants without causing a tizzy, for that matter.

But more than that, tectonic plates could shift again—the same kind that buried Van. The walls could cave in. The rubble could block off exit routes. And her only way out had closed the moment she descended into the stairwell.

Each step downward plunged her deeper into her own thoughts. She could almost hear her dad’s disdain across the Atlantic. You’re always getting in over your head, Gogo.

And he was right.

She was a cannonball splash when everyone else was dipping in their toes. Most of the time, it meant that Margot had to work twice—no, three times—as hard just to go the same distance. It meant late-night study sessions in the library running on venti mocha frappé fumes because she spent all week deep-diving into research wormholes about unsolved mysteries that had nothing to do with passing pre-calculus or poetry.

This time, though, she genuinely was in over her head. A hundred feet of soil separated her from the surface.

Now, panic swirled through her chest, anxiety like a black tide beneath her rib bones. What had she been thinking, coming here alone? It was like one moment she felt mountaintop high, and the next? Low as Mariana Trench. A pendulum she couldn’t anticipate or navigate.

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