Page 44 of Us in Ruins

“Hurry!” she yelled at Van despite the way her throat scratched against every syllable. “I’ll hold off security!”

Margot scooped up her backpack and scrambled across the floor, her lungs groaning in protest, and peeled up the statue’s sword. She carried it with two hands, the tip scraping along the tiles. It must have weighed half as much as her.

Down the hall, the guards yelled something, but it didn’t matter what they said to Margot. There was no way she was letting them in here right now.

The arched double doors had been wedged wide open with a doorstop, and Margot kicked it out from underneath the left side. She did the same on the right, and when both doors closed, she jammed the sword between their handles. That ought to hold them for a little bit.

She spun on her heels just in time to see Van’s lance slice through the statue’s neck. Halfway. It got sort of lodged there in the middle. He shifted his weight, and the blade finished the job. The soldier’s head separated from its shoulders. It almost crashed against the tile, but Van slid, catching it in his arms like a basketball.

“Oh, my god,” Margot said. Elated and jittery from adrenaline. Horrified at the consequences of their actions. The headless statue stared back, once again just unmoving stone. “Oh, my god. Who sculpted this?”

Van peeked at the gold plaque marking the statue. “Uh, Michelangelo.”

“We’re doomed. Doomed. What do we do?”

Security pounded, fists against the locked doors. The hinges rattled like hissing snakes.

“Here,” Van said and pushed himself upright. “Help me get this back where it belongs.”

Margot’s arms quaked, steadying the statue’s head on its broad neck while Van bolstered its torso. It looked totally believable. As long as no one looked too closely. Or wondered why a half-naked legionary statue was in the middle of a medieval weapons gallery.

The guards burst through the door, shouting a stream of frenzied Italian. Margot flashed a nervous grin, too big, and with the motion her hand slipped. The statue’s head lolled to the floor.

15

Astrid wore a smug grin when security escorted Margot and Van back to the rest of the class. “Nice work, Rhodes. You put the entire museum on lockdown.”

“Not now,” Margot said, firm. Van must have been rubbing off on her.

While the guards argued with Dr. Hunt in rapid Italian, presumably about which jail they’d cart them off to, she and Van hunched over the page from the ledger. Their cheeks were so close, she could feel warmth radiating off him. Her heart pounded loudly in her chest, but she blamed it on the leftover adrenaline.

Margot yanked a yellow highlighter from the depths of her backpack—they’d already destroyed museum property, so a little color-coordination wouldn’t kill anybody. She painted neon streaks across every instance of Atlas Exploration Company. Seven total.

“You know you were in the completely wrong wing of the museum to find worksheet answers,” Astrid said, poking her nose back in their space.

“I said not now, Astrid. Obviously we’re busy with something,” Margot said stiffly. She shifted away from Astrid’s prying gaze.

Astrid clenched her fists by her side. “Unless what you’re busy with is the worksheet we’re supposed to be finishing, it can wait.”

Margot ignored her. She skimmed her finger down the date column. The first trade happened at the start of July, just weeks after Van’s disappearance, and the last one at the end of September. Three months post-Van for Atlas to track down the Vase shard and trade it away. Her finger rested on the first museum.

“What kind of exhibits do they have here?” Margot asked Van.

“What do I look like, an encyclopedia?” He huffed a frustrated breath out through his nose. “Can’t you ask your flashlight or something?”

“My—?” Oh. Margot tugged her phone out of her back pocket. She googled Museo Storico Navale di Venezia, and the website pulled up a digitized record of their collections, but when Margot scanned their pottery, nothing resembled one of the shards. It was mostly naval instruments and shipwreck findings.

Suki hurried over. When she saw Van, her eyes went as wide as one of Miss Penelope’s teacup saucers. The legionary had split his lip, red running through the creases. “Are you okay, Chad?”

“Fine,” he grunted without making eye contact. His focus was solely reserved for the ledger, soaking in every line like there must be some secret code he could crack.

“I’m not clueless. None of this looks fine,” Suki said.

Margot’s blood ran cold as she watched Dr. Hunt chat with the security guards and a man in the most expensive-looking suit Margot had ever seen. The curator, maybe. She only had a few hours left before her flight, and getting arrested wasn’t exactly on her summer bucket list. She focused, trying to read Dr. Hunt’s lips, but unless she was actually talking about naked mole rats eating guacamole, Margot was clueless.

Dr. Hunt bade the security guards farewell and shuffled toward them. A stray curl draped over her eyes, and she smoothed it back behind her ear. Her expression wasn’t angry. She almost looked... concerned.

“Margot, Chad,” she said as she sidled up next to them. “The museum extends its apologies.”

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