Six.
I read the message twice like the number might change if I looked at it long enough.
It didn't.
"We have to go back," I said.
"We have to go forward." Sebastian was already looking at the open seam in the pyramid stone, the darkness beyond it, the ancient air breathing out of it like something exhaling after a very long time. "The trial is open. It will not stay open."
"Luna is back there with six Crimson Society agents."
"Luna is a trained hunter who has been doing this since she was fifteen." He looked at me. "She told you to run. That means she has a plan and you being there disrupts it."
I hated that he was right. I hated it in a specific, physical way that sat in my chest and made it hard to breathe properly.
Lunox touched my jaw with one small hand. "She is moving," she said quietly. "I can feel her. She is not cornered."
"You can feel her?"
"I can feel those close to you. It is faint but it is there." A pause. "She is running. Fast."
"Toward us or away?"
"Toward."
I looked at the open seam. Then at the dark behind it. Then back the way we'd come.
"We wait," I said.
Sebastian looked like he had approximately forty objections to this. He kept all of them to himself, which told me he'd also done the calculation about Luna and come up with the same answer.
We waited.
---
She came around the edge of the pyramid wall three minutes later at a pace that was not quite running but was definitely the thing just before running. Jacket slightly torn at the left shoulder. A cut above her eyebrow that had bled and stopped. Otherwise completely intact and looking more focused than frightened.
She reached us and immediately clocked the open seam in the stone. "Good. You found it." Then she looked at me. "I told you to run."
"I don't actually do that."
"I've noticed." She touched the cut above her eyebrow without looking at it, checking without fussing. Hunter habit. "There were six. Two were positioned at the airport. Four had been here since before we landed — they knew exactly where we'd go."
"They knew about the pyramid entrance?"
"No. They knew about the Sphinx."
Sebastian went very still.
Luna pulled a folded paper from inside her jacket. Small, creased, the kind of thing you take off someone in a hurry. She held it out. In the dim light from the map I could just read it — a diagram, hand-drawn, marking the Giza plateau. The pyramid base was circled. But the main mark, the one drawn in heavier ink, was at the Sphinx.
"I took it off the one who talked," Luna said.
"Someone talked?"
"Everyone talks eventually. I just move the timeline forward." She said it completely without drama. "They weren't there to stop us. They were there to redirect us. They wanted us at the pyramid entrance, not the Sphinx."
I looked at the open seam in the pyramid stone. Ancient air still breathing out of it. The map still warm in my jacket, the dot still pulsing.
"It's a decoy," I said slowly.
"The pyramid entrance is real," Lunox said from my shoulder, studying the diagram Luna held. "But it is a threshold only. A marker." She looked toward the plateau, toward where the Sphinx sat beyond the pyramids in the dark. "The trial itself is beneath the Sphinx."
"They knew that," Sebastian said. Not a question.
"They've had centuries," Luna said, folding the paper away. "Question is why they wanted us going in through the pyramid instead of the Sphinx."
"Because whatever comes out of the pyramid entrance doesn't come out the same way it went in," Sebastian said quietly.
We all looked at him.
"The pyramid entrance is a trap," he said. "Old one. Built into the original structure. Anyone who enters looking for the trial gets redirected. Lost in the between-space." He paused. "Permanently."
The ancient air coming out of the open seam suddenly felt considerably less welcoming.
I stepped back from it. "How do you know that?"
"I have read everything written about this site in the last nine hundred years." Flat. Factual.
Luna was already looking at him with the particular expression she'd been wearing increasingly often — the one where she was doing a calculation behind her eyes and hadn't shown her working yet. She didn't say anything. She just turned toward the Sphinx.
"Then we go to the Sphinx," she said.
---
The Sphinx at night was something else entirely.
In photographs it looked weathered, diminished by centuries of erosion, a little sad at the edges. Up close, in the dark, with the plateau lights throwing shadows across the stone face, it felt different. Older than its measurements. Like it was watching rather than being watched.
We came at it from the south side, away from the tourist viewing area. The stone around the base was rough and uneven, excavated over the years and then left, trenches and low walls marking where archaeologists had been and stopped being. Nobody here at this hour. Just stone and dark and the weight of the thing above us.
The map went hot in my pocket.
I pulled it out. The dot had moved — sitting now directly beneath our feet, pulsing fast. Lunox had already left my shoulder, hovering in front of the southern base of the Sphinx's body, her small form barely visible in the dark. She pressed one hand against the stone.
A symbol appeared on the surface. Not carved — illuminated from within, faint amber light tracing lines that had been there all along, invisible until touched.
The same mark that had been on the map.
I pressed my hand beside Lunox's.
The ground moved.
Not the stone, not the Sphinx above us. The ground beneath us, a section of ancient bedrock, sliding aside to reveal stairs going down into the dark. Cut stone, perfectly even, the kind of craftsmanship that no longer existed because the people who could do it no longer existed.
"Down," Sebastian said.
We went down.
At the bottom, the stairs opened into a chamber.
In the center of the chamber stood a set of scales.
On one side sat a white feather.
On the other side sat nothing.
And from the darkness at the far end, something spoke. Not a voice exactly. More like the idea of a voice, pressing directly into the mind.
*Place your heart on the scales, Eli Cain.*
*And we will see what you are made of.*
Behind us, the stairs sealed shut.