The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us 3)

Jack spread his hands as if to say my point exactly.

Stellan sat back heavily against the bench and gathered his hair up in the hand not holding the candy. It was long enough now he could have tied it back. He stared off into the middle distance, not acknowledging what I’d said, but not fighting it, either. I knew he agreed. I’d seen his face in the tunnels when we’d realized what had happened. I knew he wouldn’t leave the Saxons with something that could kill Luc and Colette, or any number of other Circle members we cared about.

“At the least, can we agree that arguing about it is a waste of our time and our sanity?” Elodie gestured to me. “This one’s having panic attacks. The two of you have your pouty faces on. Not that your pouty faces aren’t adorable. But it’s not helping.”

Stellan leaned across me to Elodie. “I think we can all agree that you’re not allowed to pretend everything’s the same as it always was and that you can joke your way back into us trusting you. You can’t.”

Elodie’s face fell. I sighed and pushed up from the bench, wandering a few feet away to lean on a lightpost. The crinkle in my back pocket reminded me that I’d taken a pamphlet from the first little museum. I pulled it out and perused it absently. I flipped it over to the back, where it talked about the museum courtyard, which we hadn’t even realized was there. There was a close-up of flowers, and then a shot from above.

I froze.

The courtyard contained ruins from circa 300 BC, the brochure said. The ruins were just bits of stone, now made into a garden. I picked up my locket, and rubbed my thumb over the symbol there. The symbol had thirteen loops, with the thirteenth at the center.

So did the garden.

The ruins in the courtyard were in the exact shape of the locket around my neck.

CHAPTER 10

The museum was closed. A heavy iron gate had been pulled down over the entrance we’d used just a couple of hours earlier. We peered around the back and saw a drive gate, but it was locked, too, and guarded.

“We could bribe the guards,” Elodie murmured.

“Wouldn’t it be better if no one knew we were in there?” I whispered. “This museum is state run. It probably wouldn’t get back to the Circle, but anywhere that has guards at a gate cares if random people traipse in and attempt an archaeological dig in their garden.”

As we watched, a tall, brightly painted truck rumbled up to the entrance. The guards opened the gate, and he drove right through.

“Maybe we could sneak through when he drives out,” I whispered, but realized as I was saying it that there would be no possible way for us to get through unseen.

Unless . . .

Jack thought of it at the same time. “A delivery truck,” he said. “Them we’d be able to bribe.”

We hurried to a major road a couple of blocks away and surveyed our options. Cars would be too obvious. A pickup truck piled high with melons wasn’t ideal for camouflage. And then I saw it.

Like a lot of the places we’d been, this city was a mix of the modern and the far less modern.

A donkey stood placidly, chewing on a piece of straw. He was attached to a flat-bottomed cart carrying a pile of something covered in cloth tarps. The driver was bantering with a taxi driver and spit some kind of dark liquid out of the corner of his mouth into the gutter.

“The donkey cart,” I said.

Elodie sighed. “Why do these plans always involve ruining my clothes?”

Jack spoke to the driver, and when he said I could, I peered under the drop cloth, relieved to find baskets instead of raw fish or garbage.

I looked back to see the driver grinning widely at the bills in his hand, and gesturing for us to do whatever we wanted.

Stellan held up the cloth, and we all wedged ourselves in among the baskets. When Stellan had draped the cloth over us and gotten in on the far side, I felt the driver climb onto the seat over our heads and click his tongue at the donkey.

We jolted violently when the back wheel came off the curb. Jack’s arm wrapped tight around me, and I clung to the edge of the cart, wincing when I heard a spitting noise and something hit the cloth just over my head. A dark stain spread, and with it, the smell of what had to be some kind of chewing tobacco. Gross. Luckily we weren’t far from the museum at all, and I could tell when we turned into the dirt alley. Now we just had to hope the guard wouldn’t look under the cloth. But when we rolled to a stop, the voices were joking, and no one approached where we hid.

There was a screech of the gate opening, and it was only a couple minutes before we stopped and the driver swept the cloth off of us. He chattered nervously in Arabic, and Jack jumped up. “He says to hurry.” We righted the baskets we’d knocked off, and huddled behind a truck parked against a far wall until the drive gate slid shut.

I peered around the truck’s rear fender. We were in what looked like the museum’s loading area. I could see the gardens ahead. They were far more impressive than the inside of the museum was—all those bits of stone inside were pieces of the rubble, I realized. These ruins could have been a whole building, with each of the loops in the symbol being a room. There were no guards inside the walls.

We crept out and made our way carefully across the ruins. Elodie leaned down and touched the stone reverently. Now we knew why she’d always been so interested in Olympias.

I wasn’t sure we’d be able to tell when we’d gotten to the center, but moments later, it became obvious. Right in the middle of the courtyard, there was a fountain. It had three tiers, all intricately carved with scenes of people, leading to a woman at the top, presiding over them.

“Could that be Olympias?” I said.

“No one knows exactly what she looked like,” Elodie answered.

I gazed up at her, and then squinted. “Is that—” I climbed onto the fountain’s rim to look more closely, and sure enough, carved around the woman’s neck was a necklace just like mine.