Read Chapter 5: Old Wounds

The corridor curved back toward the main hall, and Eamon walked it on unsteady legs. His hands were still trembling. He stopped, pressed his palms flat against the cool marble wall, and forced himself to breathe in a slow, counting rhythm—one, two, three, four, hold, release. The technique had saved him before. It didn't feel like it was working now.

The woman's voice still rang in his skull. *Close the gates. Before the city burns.*

"Mr. Cole."

He spun, fists raised before he could stop himself. Maggie stood at the junction of the corridor, arms crossed, her dark uniform immaculate, her grey hair pulled back tight enough to smooth every wrinkle from her face. She held a flask in one hand and looked at him the way a hawk might look at a field mouse that thought it was hidden.

"Easy there, soldier," she said. "You're not on the front lines."

Eamon lowered his hands. His heart was slamming against his ribs like something trying to get out. "Maggie. I didn't—I thought you were on the east wing tonight."

"I was." She uncapped the flask, took a sip, and offered it to him. "Then I heard the Rosetta Stone screaming through three floors of concrete, and I figured I'd check on the only other soul in this building."

He took the flask. It was tea, hot and strong, and he drank it like it was the first liquid he'd had in a year. "It wasn't screaming," he said, when he could speak again. "It was—"

"I know what it was." Maggie took the flask back, screwed the cap on, and tucked it into her vest pocket. "I've worked here for twenty-one years. You think I don't know the difference between a display glitch and something waking up?"

Eamon stared at her. The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant hum of the climate control and the faint, ever-present rumble he'd been trying to ignore. Below them. Getting louder.

"You need to sit down," Maggie said, and her voice was softer now. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

He almost laughed. He had done more than seen one. He'd spoken to one. She'd touched his arm, and the cold of her had sunk into his bones like river water.

"Just a panic attack," he said, and the lie came out as easily as it always did. He'd told it a hundred times. To commanders, to medics, to the woman he'd dated for eight months before she'd left him because she couldn't take it anymore. "It passes. I'm fine."

Maggie didn't move. She looked at him with those pale, unblinking eyes, the way she'd looked at him every night for the past six weeks when she'd clocked in, nodded once, and gone about her rounds. But now something in her expression shifted. She knew. She'd always known.

"You were in Helmand," she said. Not a question.

Eamon's throat tightened. "Who told you that?"

"No one." Maggie turned and started walking down the corridor, and after a beat, he followed. "I read your file. When you applied. I read everybody's file. It's my job to know what I'm working with."

"And what are you working with?" Eamon heard the edge in his own voice and couldn't smooth it out.

Maggie stopped in front of a maintenance door. She pulled a ring of keys from her belt, heavy brass things that looked older than the building itself, and held one up. "I'm working with a man who's seen things. Things that don't fit in the boxes the army tried to put them in." She looked at him over her shoulder. "I'm working with a man whose file says 'incident, friendly fire, soldier unaccounted for' and then doesn't say anything else, because the people who wrote it didn't know what to write."

The corridor seemed to narrow. Eamon's pulse pounded in his temples. "That's not—"

"I'm not asking you to talk about it," Maggie said, and her voice was gentle, the way you'd speak to a horse that was about to bolt. "I'm telling you that I'm not made of glass. And neither is this place."

She slid the key into the lock. It turned with a heavy click that sounded like a door closing somewhere far away. But the rumble beneath their feet didn't stop. If anything, it grew louder.

"The maintenance tunnels run under the entire museum," Maggie said, pushing the door open. A dark stairwell yawned beyond it, concrete stairs descending into blackness. "Old ones, from when the building was first put up. They connect every wing, every gallery, every basement. If you need to get somewhere without being seen, that's how you do it."

Eamon looked at the darkness. A cold draft rose from the stairs, carrying a smell of dust and old stone and something else. Copper. Iron. Blood.

"Why are you showing me this?" he asked.

Maggie pulled the key from the lock and pressed it into his palm. It was warm from her hand, impossibly heavy for its size. "Because you're going to need it. What's down there—" She nodded at the stairs. "—it isn't the kind of thing you can fight through the front door."

"What's down there?"

Maggie was quiet for a long moment. The rumble under their feet pulsed again, like a heartbeat. Like something rolling over in its sleep.

"It's been under the museum longer than the museum's been here," she said at last. "Longer than London's been here, if you believe the stories. My grandmother used to tell me about it when I was a girl. She said there were doors under the ground that shouldn't have been opened, and it was our job to keep them shut." She met his eyes. "I thought it was a fairy tale. Then the scarab started moving again, two nights ago, and I knew it wasn't."

"You know about the scarab?"

"I know about all of them." Maggie smiled, and it didn't reach her eyes. "I'm the one who's been keeping this place quiet for the past twenty-one years. You're not the first night guard to hear things, Mr. Cole. You're just the first one to hear them this loudly."

She looked down at the stairs, and something crossed her face—something old, and tired, and afraid.

"There's a stone door," she said quietly. "In the lowest chamber. It's been trying to open for a long time. I've been slowing it down, but I'm old, and I'm not strong enough anymore, and I don't know how much longer I can keep it shut."

The air in the corridor changed. It grew colder, pressed against Eamon's skin like a hand. The rumble beneath them rose in pitch, and he felt it in his teeth.

"That's not a panic attack," Maggie said. "That's something else. And you're the only one in this building who's going to do something about it."

She turned and walked away down the corridor, her footsteps echoing in the silence. Eamon stood at the top of the stairs, the key heavy in his hand, the cold draft pulling at his uniform like fingers.

And somewhere beneath them, the stone door slid open another inch. The rumble grew stronger. And from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, a voice whispered his name.

Not the woman's voice. Deeper. Older. Hungry.