9. Riley
RILEY
The road quits a full mile short of the monastery we're headed to, so we climb the rest on foot — up through olive trees gone feral and grass nobody's cut since somebody decided God had moved out. Nico goes ahead of me, no sound, no effort. I hate it a little.
"You could fake being tired. For morale."
"We don't get tired like humans do."
"Must be nice." Every bruise I collected in Vienna has its own pulse tonight, and the strap of my bag has worn a groove into my shoulder I'll feel for a week. I keep three steps behind him on purpose. Far enough to bolt. Close to see his hands.
He stops at a gate that used to be iron and is now mostly rust, hanging off one hinge.
Beyond it, the monastery sits low against the hill — gray stone the color of old teeth, a bell tower with no bell, windows that are just holes now.
A garden once. I can see the bones of it: dead hedges, a fountain choked with leaves, a stone saint snapped off at the knees, his face worn smooth.
"Charming," I say. "Real honeymoon spot."
"Quiet." Nico's voice drops to something I feel more than hear. "Stay behind me until I know what's awake in there."
"Awake." I let the word sit. "You're going to keep doing that. Saying things that make me want to run."
"Then run."
"And give you the satisfaction of being right?" I push past him through the gate. The rust flakes under my palm, cold and damp. "No thanks. You said the relic pointed to a monastery. So here we are. I want answers before I start making bad survival choices."
He doesn't grab me. He could — I've seen how fast he is, my brain still refuses to confirm it as real — but he just breathes out through his nose and follows, close at my back.
Inside, the air goes wet and heavy, thick with rot and old incense that should've burned off centuries ago.
Our footsteps echo, and swallow too quickly, like the building is listening.
Frescoes peel off the walls in long curls.
A painted Madonna watches me with half a face.
Everywhere, the saints are broken — hands gone, heads gone, gold flaked down to nothing.
Then the relic moves. Not moves. It can't; it's a chunk of carved obsidian sitting in a padded bag against my hip. But the cold comes off it suddenly, and my breath fogs, and the candle Nico's lit bends sideways though there's no wind.
"It's doing the thing again," I say.
He's already watching the bag. Watching me. "Take it out."
I do. The relic sits black and heavy in my hands, the carvings on its surface drinking what little light we have. I turn toward the far wall, and the chill spikes. Turn away, and it eases.
"That wall." I'm walking before I finish saying it.
A row of carved figures covers the stone, monks or saints, each in its own shallow niche. Nico kneels in front of them, quiet and useful for once, his fingers tracing marks I'd taken for water damage.
"These aren't Christian," he says. "This script is older. Ours." A pause. "This place wasn't built by the monks who lived here. It was hidden under them."
"Hidden how?"
"A way station. For people like me, moving where they shouldn't be seen." He frowns. "There's a door. The marks name it. But I don't see —"
"Stop talking." I'm already on my knees beside him, and the relic throbs once, low, like a struck bell. I count the figures. Eleven niches. Ten saints face forward, hands folded the same way. The eleventh faces a different direction — turned just slightly inward, hands crossed the other way.
Something old turns over in my chest. A kitchen table. A man with patient hands laying out puzzles that looked like mistakes until you understood the mistakes were the message. Find the wrong one. That's always the door. I shove it down. Grief plays tricks.
"This one," I say, touching the turned saint. "He's deliberate. He's pointing."
"At the wall."
"At the floor in front of it." I press the figure's crossed hands and feel them give — a hair, no more. Then I find the seam I'd missed, a hairline crack where the niche meets the stone, too straight to be age. "There's a release behind him. Mirror the others. Whatever they do, he does backwards."
Nico says nothing. But he's gone motionless beside me, and I can feel him recalculating — the way you feel a lock recalculate when the last pin finally lifts.
I work the saint's hands the wrong way, on purpose, while I press the seam. Stone grinds somewhere deep. The floor ahead of us drops two inches and slides aside, breathing up a draft so cold it tastes like a grave.
"Huh," I say. "Strength wasn't going to do that."
He doesn't answer. The steps down are narrow and slick.
The relic burns colder the deeper we go, until we reach a round chamber, low-ceilinged, every inch of the walls carved.
A single black disc sits in the floor — and when I near it the relic flares so hard the symbols light from within, throwing a line of glowing script across the stone above us.
Nico reads it under his breath and stops. "A saint by the sea. A drowned one. And a road — an old route along the coast." He shakes his head once. "That's all I can make out. The rest I don't —"
The disc clicks. Then the walls do. A grinding starts behind us — the stairs we came down folding flat, the ceiling lowering a hand's width, dust raining gray. The chamber means to bury whatever it just told us.
"It's sealing." My hands are already flying over the disc, finding the cog beneath it, the false tooth I felt catch on the way in. "Something metal, now —"
He puts a knife in my hand without a word. I jam it into the gears as a slab drops where my head was, and Nico's there before I see him cross the room, shoulder under the descending stone, holding what should not be holdable, every muscle in his arm gone to rock, buying me the half-second I need.
The blade bites. The cog screams and stops. The ceiling shudders to a halt inches above us.
We climb out the way we came into the clean cold night, both of us breathing hard — well, one of us. Above the gate, where no dust should be, a fresh boot print sits pressed into the moss. Recent. Not ours. Nico sees it the same instant I do.
"We're not the only ones who found this," he says.
I look down at the artifact, still humming, still cold, still answering to me like it knows my name. The monastery was never the prize. It was a finger, pointing.
And every step I take down this trail, it feels less like a job I chose and more like one that's been waiting for me.