The Chamber of Ten

I

GEENA HODGE stood on the bow of the water taxi as it chugged toward San Marco, the colors of the Doge’s Palace brought to life by the sun, and wondered how much longer Venice would survive before it crumbled into the sea. Though the Italian government had committed to a seven-billion-dollar project to install a complex system of flood gates to hold back storm surges and seasonal high tides, it was already over budget and behind schedule. Sometimes it seemed hopeless.

But even the most optimistic Venetians were fooling themselves. The city had been built on top of wooden pilings sunk into a salt marsh, with sediment and clay beneath that, which was little better than raising palaces on top of a sponge. Venice bore down, squeezing a little more water out of its foundations every year, and sinking just a bit farther. Between that and the rising global sea level, Venice was screwed. Maybe the new tidal gate system, MOSE, would work well enough—fouling up the Venetian lagoon’s ecosystem in the meantime—and maybe it wouldn’t. Even with the best-case scenario, they would only manage to buy themselves a century.

La Serenissima, they called it—the most serene—and Venice remained a city of serenity and beauty. She was still Queen of the Adriatic, steeped in history and scholarship and art, unique in all the world. There was nowhere like it, and the world would never see its like again. But much of the population had fled the routine flooding and the absurd tourism-driven cost of living in the city, and those who remained were like the curators of a living museum.

Geena’s own project, approved by the Italian and Venetian authorities, was evidence that some people in the city understood that ruin could be slowed but not prevented.

“As lovely as ever,” said the man beside her. “She’s a gem, Venice.” Howard Finch, a television producer from the BBC, had come to her in search of a story. And though she had one to give him—as extraordinary a story of archaeology and history as he was ever likely to encounter—she wished he would go away. Reporters were bad enough, always armed with just enough research to get the story wrong. But producers could be much worse. They didn’t even try to convince you they weren’t full of shit.

“Haven’t been here in nearly twenty years,” Finch continued. “Hard to believe some of the things I’ve heard.”

“Such as?” Geena asked, and immediately regretted it.

He puffed himself up in that way that was universal among the very pompous and very rich in every culture. Geena had been born and raised in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She had met plenty of arrogant men in her thirty-six years, but as bad as Americans could be, the Brits had had much more time to perfect the art of pompousness. Pomposity. Whatever.

“Talked to a bloke last week who said nobody lives on the ground floor at all anymore. Got all the windows bricked up, just letting it go to ruin. Surrendering. And those walkways in the Piazza San Marco—”

“Passarelle.”

“They’re out all the time now, so people can get through when the canal water floods in.”

The water taxi’s engine shifted from a purr to a groan as it began to slow, gliding toward a dock not far from the trees of the Giardini ex Reali. They still had an excellent view of the Doge’s Palace, but behind his façade Finch seemed uninterested in anything except the sound of his own voice.

Geena smiled at him. She had pulled her hair back in a neat blond ponytail and had actually put on makeup this morning, asked pleadingly by Tonio Schiavo, the head of the archaeology department at Ca’Foscari University, to “come smart.” The smile had been part of her marching orders as well. Usually Geena did not have to be told to smile—most days she loved her life—but she wanted to be working, getting her hands dirty, not playing tour guide.

“Mr. Finch, not too long ago the low-lying areas of the city flooded maybe eight or ten times in a year. Now that number averages closer to one hundred. A third of the time, the Piazza San Marco is full of water from the canals, which includes raw sewage, among other unpleasant things. Everyone has Wellington boots in Venice, or they wrap plastic around their shoes, even to use the walkways put out for just that purpose.”

Finch nodded in fascination. “Christ, it’s like something out of one of those crap sci-fi apocalypse films, isn’t it?” he asked, without looking to her for confirmation. “But they’ve really abandoned the ground floors?”

“Sadly, yes. The bricks are wearing away on the outside. On the inside—what would you do if your first floor was flooded four months out of the year? They’re sealed off, left to the water.”

“And then what? It keeps rising, they move up another floor?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself,” she admitted, but didn’t dare comment further. Nothing negative, Tonio had instructed, and Geena had no wish to jeopardize her stewardship of this project.

Besides, they had other things to talk about.

Finch had come to Venice on a scouting trip to find out if the Biblioteca project might be worth some air time on the BBC, or if the whole thing would amount to as much hot air as Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault. Geena didn’t mind the idea of a film crew coming in to do a short documentary on the Biblioteca, especially if it would mean some attention would be paid to the broader aspects of her project.

As Venice sank, history was being sucked down into the lagoon. Even the oldest buildings in the city were built on top of the foundations of more ancient structures. The sinking was nothing new. Once upon a time, Venetians had simply raised the ground floors of their buildings every so often to combat the rising water. But with every inch that the weight of Venice dragged it down, and every inch that the sea level rose, more of that ancient architecture was being lost forever.

There were frescoes on walls, secret chambers, and artifacts in long-abandoned rooms and buildings across the city that were being eroded away by salt and sewage and prolonged exposure to the water. Her team—which for a time had mainly been herself and a group of graduate students—had been rescuing what they could and documenting whatever they couldn’t in some of the oldest buildings in the city. And then one day, tearing away a crumbling brick and mortar wall in a semi-hidden alcove at the back of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana—the National Library of St. Mark’s—Geena herself had noticed that the salt from constant flooding had worn tracks in the original wall. But the tracks weren’t consistent, and upon closer inspection, she discovered that they marked the seams around a secret door, long since sealed but now being undone by salt and time.

Behind the door, they had found a hidden staircase. Some of the graduate students had been amazed, but Geena had taken it in stride. In centuries past—perhaps in Italy more than anywhere else in the world—secrecy, betrayal, and paranoia had been the order of the day, and hidden passages and chambers had been commonplace. The trope of the secret room existed in fiction because it had so many real-life examples. But people loved that crap, and if it helped to continue to get her work funded, Geena was all for having the media make a big deal out of the city’s secret history and mysteries.

The water taxi pulled up to the dock and they waited while a crewman hauled the boat snug against the bumpers before disembarking. Normally Geena used the vaporetti—the boats that functioned as buses in this streetless city—but the university would reimburse her for the additional cost of the taxi.

They set off along a tree-lined path toward the wide cobblestoned entrance to the Piazza San Marco. Small waves from passing boats rolled up onto the stones, but the plaza was not flooded today. The Doge’s Palace loomed ahead. Over the tops of buildings she could see just the tip of one of the domes of St. Mark’s Basilica. But they did not have even that far to walk.

“Before we get there,” Finch said, “I must ask … do you really believe what you’ve found is Petrarch’s library?”

They walked alongside the Biblioteca, its wall visible through the trees. When they reached the cobblestones, Geena turned left and pulled Finch along in her wake. On such a perfect day the Piazza San Marco was breathtakingly beautiful, the sun making it all seem almost pristine. An illusion, Geena knew, but a lovely one.

She stopped twenty feet from the Biblioteca’s front door.

“How much of the history do you know, Mr. Finch?”

He smiled, and a flicker of hidden intelligence shone in his eyes. “Call me Howard,” he said. “And I’ve done my research, Dr. Hodge. Petrarch had what was essentially a circus train of wagons that traveled around with him so he could keep his library close at all times. But eventually he realized how impractical that was. Inspired by ancient stories of public libraries like the one at Alexandria, he arranged to set one up in Venice. In—what was the year?—1362, I think, the poet moved his entire library here, hundreds of volumes of writing, much of it from antiquity, detailing philosophies and histories and the lives of the ancients, not to mention poetry, of course. Priceless works, many of which modern scholars consider lost, or even pure myth. The Venetians set him up with a posh house—”

“Palazzo Molina,” Geena put in.

Finch waved away the interruption, nodding. “Time goes by, he has a falling-out with the city and pisses off to Padua—a major slap in the face to Venice. A few of the items turn up later in the Vatican Library and other places. Some are in the Doge’s Palace. But the bulk of them were lost or ruined. The only thing most scholars have agreed on is that when Petrarch left Venice, his library left with him.”

By now, Geena found herself smiling. Finch might not know a hell of a lot about the current state of the high-water crisis in Venice, but he had certainly done his homework where Petrarch’s library was concerned.

“Something funny?” Finch asked, apparently irritated by her smile.

“No, no. Sorry. I’m just glad I don’t have to go through the whole backstory for you.”

“Fair enough. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, Professor Schiavo showed you some of the best preserved examples of the books we’ve already taken from the chamber. We’ve recovered hundreds of pieces.”

“And they are impressive, no doubt, and their antiquity is not in question. But how can you be certain of their origin? You’re convinced that all those scholars were wrong—that Petrarch never removed his library from Venice after all and instead just moved it into this secret chamber of yours?”

“We’ve found ample evidence,” she told him. “Records that include a catalog of all of the works collected in the library, some written in Petrarch’s own hand and noted as such. My assistant, Nico Lombardi, will give you access to all of that and run it down for you. Those records are evidence enough, but the architectural details support the finding as well.”

Finch smiled and opened his hands. “Let’s pretend I know nothing about architecture.”

Geena could not help smiling in return. Finch might be pompous, but he wasn’t utterly lacking in charm.

“While we walk?” she said.

“By all means.”

“Like most cities,” she said as they approached the library’s front doors, “Venice is far older than what you can see, going back the better part of a thousand years. Scholars have been frustrated for centuries by the lack of any written record of the city’s origins, but most agree that the bulk of its original settlers came here fleeing the constant invasions of Roman-era cities by barbarians and Huns.”

They reached the door and, though the Biblioteca was her province, Finch opened it for her. The quiet from within seemed to reach out and draw them in, and Geena lowered her voice as she entered.

“The Doge’s Palace was constructed over a period that spanned most of the 14th century and beyond, on top of what remained of much older fortified buildings that we know very little about. The years that Petrarch lived in Venice fall squarely within that period.”

A woman behind a desk glanced up and smiled at her, and Geena waved as she guided Finch through the foyer and into the vastness of the Biblioteca. They made their way to a room that had once been more a shrine to books than a library. Several people sat at long tables, studying or reading in silence, but the books they were perusing had come from the stacks upstairs. None of the books were shelved or stored on the ground floor anymore.

“This building is not the original library,” she whispered as they passed through the room. “It dates only from the 16th century. But the staircase we found and the chamber below it are much older. They had been completely sealed, and Petrarch’s collection extraordinarily well preserved. We’ve found documents that indicate the existence of the room was a closely guarded secret.”

“And no water damage? No evidence of flooding?”

“None.” Geena led him through a narrow corridor. “At some point, we theorize that all of those who knew of the chamber died and the secret of its existence died with them.”

The corridor ended at the double-doored entrance to another room that had once housed books. Two large staircases inside the vaulted room led up to the second floor. The corridor turned to the right just in front of those doors, but to the left was a little jog in the corridor, and it was through this fragment of labyrinth that Geena led Finch. There lay the small alcove room where she had discovered the hidden door.

Finch glanced around the room—the ruined fresco on the south wall, the Murano glass window that looked as though it would have been more at home in a Gaudi church than in this little corner of a Venetian library, and the carved old-wood shelves that had surrendered to rot. He paid little attention to the most interesting characteristic of the room—the remains of the early 17th century brick wall, and the ordinary stone wall behind it that dated from three hundred years earlier.

She would not be able to impress him with the ingenuity of the hidden door, for it stood open. Geena always felt a bit melancholy at the idea that something that had been so secret and had remained sealed in silence for so long now hung perpetually open and exposed, but she consoled herself that they weren’t grave robbers. Their motives were pure.

Lights had been strung through the open door and down the stairs into the chamber. Even from the alcove, she could hear the chatter of voices echoing up from below, where preservation efforts were still under way.

And then the back of her neck prickled with a once-strange sensation that had now become quite familiar. Hello, sweetheart.

Nico had felt her arrive, and now he reached out to touch her with his thoughts. From the moment they had first met, she had sensed something different about him, had felt a kind of intimacy that had seemed unlikely and inadvisable for her to share with one of her grad students. But only when they had made love for the first time and 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.

X marks the spot, she thought, but knew that was foolishness.

“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?”

“This one is the same,” Domenic called from across the chamber.

“Do you think—” Geena began.

But Domenic beat her to it. “It could be some kind of secret meeting place for the Council of Ten.”

Geena nodded, though she doubted anyone saw her. From the early 14th century, Venice had been primarily controlled by a secretive group of ten men, from whose number the next Doge would always be chosen. The group had been created to oversee the security of the Republic and protect the government from corruption or rebellion, but grew in power until, by the mid-15th century, the Council of Ten had total control over Venice.

But there had been many members of the Ten over the centuries, and many of their burial places were well recorded. If these obelisks were the tombs of Council members, the obvious question was, why these ten?

A ripple of sharp curiosity ran up the back of her neck, but it was not her own. Nico had found something. She turned, searching for him with her light. The others’ Maglite beams strobed the dark chamber.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Domenic said, his flashlight illuminating a section of the stone floor.

As Geena approached, she saw what had made such an impact on him. In the space between two of the obelisks, an almost perfectly round disk of granite had been set into the stone floor. Whether by design or over the ages, it had sunk slightly so that it sat an inch or two below the level of the rest of the floor.

“It’s almost like a cork,” Finch said, coming up behind her.

“Precisely what I was thinking,” Domenic said.

Geena glanced at them and then stared down at the granite disk, her mind racing. She knelt and ran her fingers along the edges of the stones surrounding it. They had been carefully hewn to create a circular space to fit the disk.

“How did they accomplish it?” she muttered to herself.

“What?” Finch asked.

She looked up at him, then turned to Sabrina, who was filming just behind her. “I hope you’re getting this.” She stood and gestured around the room. “I have no idea how the architects of this room kept it dry, but that’s not the biggest mystery here.” She pointed at the granite disk. “It may turn out that this is nothing more than some kind of decoration, but it certainly looks like some sort of plug.”

“To a drain, do you think?” Domenic asked.

“Either that,” Geena said, glancing again at the camera, “or there’s yet another chamber beneath this one.”

“Geena,” Nico said.

For a moment she’d nearly forgotten him. Even the comforting touch of his mind seemed to have withdrawn. She turned and found him with the beam of her light.

Nico stood halfway across the room, shining his Maglite between two of the central columns. They were too close together to have all been intended as support for the ceiling; some kind of artistic whim had been at work here. But whatever had piqued Nico’s curiosity was hidden amongst those columns.

“Coming,” Geena said, although she needn’t have said it aloud.

Nico did not look up. She shone her beam on his face and a flicker of concern went through her. He looked almost mesmerized, and had turned strangely pale in spite of his dark complexion, as though he might be sick.

When Geena reached the three marble columns, she expected to find something horrific hidden in the shadows in their midst—some ancient mummified corpse or torture device. Nico’s silence had spoken volumes. She tried to silence her own thoughts to see if he might be sending her some of his thoughts or impressions, but that familiar feeling, his touch, had left her.

Careful not to touch the marble surface, she leaned between two of the columns and shone her Maglite into the space between them. A stone jar stood on a round table carved of the same marble as the columns around it. It had been sealed with thick red wax that remained intact but otherwise was as plain as the room that surrounded it. And given its place at the very center of the room, almost guarded by the columns, there seemed no doubt that the jar was the locus of the chamber.

Ramus poked his head through the last remaining space between the columns, but then withdrew, his eyes replaced by Sabrina’s camera.

“What do you make of it, Nico?” she asked.

Nico did not reply. She flashed the beam of her Maglite up to his face and saw that his expression had gone slack. He seemed so entranced that when he spoke, it startled her.

“Do you hear it?” he asked. “Like there’s electricity in the walls.”

But Geena heard nothing of the kind.

“What’s he talking about?” Finch said, appearing just behind Nico, rising up on his toes to try to get a look at what had drawn all of their attention.

Nico slipped between the columns. Before Geena could speak, he reached out—eyes glazed with fascination—and lifted the jar off of the marble table.

“What are you—” she began.

He shook the jar like a child trying to figure out what a gift-wrapped present might contain. That alone might have destroyed whatever was inside.

Sabrina swore.

“Nico, no!” Geena cried, pushing between the columns.

She reached for the jar with her free hand, but never laid a finger on it. Nico went suddenly rigid, eyes wide, and he began to shake as if in seizure. His hands spasmed and both the jar and his flashlight fell, crashing to the stone floor. The jar shattered, shards flying, and Geena caught a glimpse of something gray and damp spilling out.

Nico’s mind touched hers. It began with that familiar prickle at the back of her neck, but then a spike of pain thrust into her head and she screamed, jerked back, and cracked her skull against a marble column.

And she saw …

This very chamber, illuminated by a ring of sconces high on the circular walls. A circle of heavy wooden chairs surrounds the three marble columns at the center of the room—ten, of course. Upon each chair sits a dark-robed man. They are not dressed identically; this is no cult. Some have jackets beneath their robes, checkered in combinations of black, red, tan, or green, while others appear far more severe, even monastic. The robes vary in length and cut, but they are all black, as are the hats the men wear, for none has a bare head.

One of them speaks in an old Venetian dialect. This is …

What is that final word? Something like “foolish.” No, not that. “Unwise.”

She sees not through her own eyes, but the eyes of another. She—he—is standing in the midst of the three stone columns at the center of the chamber, in the shifting pattern that the intrusive candlelight pushes into the shadows around her. She can feel his body, tall and thin and male. Unlike the others, his robe is stylishly slit in various places to reveal crimson cloth beneath and he wears no hat to cover his thick hair. He fixes the man who had spoken with a withering stare.

This is for Venice, he says. The Doge must be banished. And if you think it unwise, consider your fate should he ever return.

The one who had questioned his wisdom falls silent. Satisfied, he vanishes back into the shadows of the columns and begins to sing. His voice rises in what might be song, or chant, or ritual. Light begins to radiate from an empty space amongst the columns—in the exact center of the room. It is dim at the start but glows more and more brightly until it obviates the need for candlelight.

At some signal amidst that song, the Ten draw small identical blades from within their robes. Glancing anxiously at one another, each makes a cut on the palm of his left hand, la sinestra, and then makes a fist, squeezing drops of blood onto the floor.

The light emanating from within the columns is washed in pink, and then deepens to bloody scarlet.

The chamber goes dark.

Geena collapsed, spilling out from between two columns and onto the floor of the round chamber. She blinked away the vision that had filled her mind and the pain that accompanied it. Someone called her name. The light from Sabrina’s camera blinded her and she winced. Closing her eyes tightly, she felt a torrent of images sweep over her—Nico’s blank expression, the stone jar shattering on the floor, the dark-robed men slicing the flesh of their palms, drops of blood falling.

Feedback, she thought. Nico’s touch made him what, in times gone by, some had referred to as a sensitive. He’d had some kind of psychic—no, “psychometric,” that’s the word—episode. And their rapport, the intimacy of their minds, had caused it to spill over to her.

Christ, it had hurt.

“Nico?” she said, starting to rise.

She spotted her torch, frowning as her ears picked up a new sound in the circular chamber. A trickling of water. That made no sense. The room had been sealed for centuries, dry as a bone, despite the proximity of the Grand Canal and the spongelike foundations of the city.

But as she reached for her Maglite, her eyes followed its beam to the chamber wall and she saw glistening tracks of water drizzling over the stone. It bubbled from pockets of ancient air.

“What do we do?” Sabrina asked, sweeping the camera around, trying to get it all on film.

“Son of a bitch,” Geena whispered, snatching up the light and shining it along the base of the wall. The beam found a chink in the stone where water gushed in, sliding over the floor in a rapidly widening pool.

Geena?

It was Nico, but he had not spoken aloud. His voice was in her head. And it was afraid.

Howard Finch loomed in front of her, a ghost-man with wide, panic-stricken eyes. “What are you waiting for? We’ve got to get out of here!”

Only then did the real danger occur to her. But by then it was too late.

A section of wall gave way and the water rushed in.