Page 102 of Doyle

The doors to the dining hall opened, and the rain washed in along with big Hamilton Jones, Declan, and another guy, blond, helping a man with a head wound?—

“Keon?”

He limped over to a bench and sat down. Blood saturated his shirt. Gauze wrapped around his head, taped, bloody. The amber dust had soaked into his dark skin, turned to rust with the rain, and he looked stripped.

What on earth?

“Let’s get you to the clinic,” she said, reaching for him. He stood, and she steadied him, turning.

And stilled.

Doyle stood at the door, his hands on the shoulders of... Kemar? He’d been crying and appeared injured as a welt rose on his cheek.

But the look in Doyle’s eyes gutted her and... she got it.

“You didn’t find them,” she said quietly.

He walked in, and a second later, Jamal shouted, running across the room. She watched the reunion, the way Kemar swept him up, then began to cry, and felt...

Angry.

“What happened?”

“The... hot spot... The images weren’t...” Doyle looked at Keon, then back at Tia. “We need to get him to the clinic in town.” He walked over to Keon.

She stepped in front of Doyle, her hands out. “Doyle. What is going on?”

He took her by the elbows. “We need to talk. But not here.”

She stilled and the room went quiet. He grabbed her hand, his grip tight, and pulled her through the room to the kitchen, then along the corridor inside the building.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace quiet.”

“You’re scaring me.”

He said nothing, and she wanted to yank her hand away, but her feet simply kept moving.

They stopped at the chapel door and he opened it. Held it for her.

She walked inside. Dark, shadowy, lined with the children’s drawings, the smell of sawdust lifting from the small room.

He led her to one of the prayer pews.

“Doyle—”

“Sit.”

She lowered herself onto the bench.

He sat beside her. “It was Sebold. He was the heat signature.”

She blinked at him, trying—“What?”

“He was the voice we heard in the mine yesterday. He was trying to find the treasure. He saw Ethan come out of the mine, and according to Kemar, they went into the tunnel—which I think must have gotten blocked in that first tremor. And then came back out and went in the other way. They got trapped in the quake, or whatever it was.”

Sebold.“Where is he now?”

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