Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What on Earth are you wearing?” 

Ruby turned around, and revealed the hat, and the cork she was holding. Hitch altered his original statement. He hadn’t quite seen the full extent of it with her back turned. 

“What in Hell are you wearing?”

Ruby hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of beige cargo shorts that ended in a cuff just above her knee. She had a white T-shirt tucked into her shorts, with the hemming and neck a bright red colour, to match the text that declared “DIGGING MYSELF INTO A HOLE”. She was wearing her usual Yellow Stripes, and the hat looked like something a professor of archeology would wear on a country-wide hunt to find the Ark of the Covenant or some equally strange artefact. Hitch didn’t know. He liked his Westerns– a not-too-far-away past he could wish for as a child and rue being born in the wrong generation– not archeology and Nazis. Ruby was trying to affix Sabina and Brant’s winecork from last night to the brim, like a fisherman. 

It was a sorry state, all in all. 

“In order of how much I care,” Hitch started, knowing he had to pick his battles. “You’re going to get T-shirt tan-lines, you’ll wreck those shoes, and you look as though you’ve just stumbled out of an archeological dig.” 

“That’s the point,” Ruby drawled, and Hitch gave her an unimpressed look because he was under the impression she had been called upon for a mission to deal with the latest threat to the United States of America. 

“I borrowed the shorts from Clancy,” She added before Hitch could say that though. The aforementioned shorts were hitched at the waist by a belt with a metal eagle belt-buckle. “Why do you care so much about my tanlines?” 

“Because you look stupid,” Hitch told her, like he didn’t get the same tanlines around his shirt sleeve cuffs and look even stupider. He thought briefly about whether he could win the fight he had started, and decided firmly that it was not a hill to die on. “Leave the cork off, and we’ll go right now.” 

This, mercy of mercies, won Ruby over. She threw the cork back in the bin where she had found it, hugged Mrs Digby goodbye, acquired two beeswax-wrapped sandwiches, and was buckled into Hitch’s front seat with minimal fashion disasters. 

“So what’s the sitch, Hitch?” Ruby asked. She had been trying very hard lately to make it her new catchphrase. Hitch was still holding off on telling her that it sounded like the sidekick’s catchphrase, and was waiting for her to say it when he was very annoyed at her. Now was not that time. 

“Some archaeologists have been let loose in a field in Turkey and they found out the hard way that there’s nothing fun down there. They’ve discovered some frescoes that they promised LB are super interesting, but they can’t decipher what they say. It’s not as degraded as you might expect, or written in a new language, so because we’re connected with Harvard University, they’ve asked us–” 

“I hate Harvard university,” Ruby muttered and Hitch gave her a sideways squint. 

“You’re turning down the job offer because Harvard was too desperate for you? They’re not asking you to go to school for four years and share dorms with some spotty teen, they’ve come crawling back to you begging you to help them.” 

Ruby spent a moment in silence contemplating that. 

“Harvard has contacted the government for their leading codebreaking expert, so really they’re just borrowing you for a couple of hours to have a look over it.” 

“You said it was in Turkey?” Ruby asked finally. “Where do you find a fresco nowadays?”

Finally, they were getting back on track. They were approaching the aerodrome now, so Hitch knew he had to rip the bandaid off sharpish. 

“They’ve been excavating a series of tunnels and catacombs for the past few months, as part of a joint effort from Harvard, Turkey and Italian archaeologists. As I understand it, the fresco in question is the largest niche, and they believe that makes it more important than the others–”

“Oh no, no, no,” Ruby interrupted. Hitch tried hard to keep talking over her, which was a necessary skill with Ruby sometimes to allow himself to get to the point of the conversation, but eventually gave up. 

“What is the matter?” 

“No way am I going in,” Ruby stated. “Horror movies happen down there. Nothing good has ever gone into, or come out of, a catacomb. I won’t go down there.” 

Hitch slowly turned from the main road onto the short path that led to the aerodrome, scanning the parked aircraft for their chopper. He didn’t know how to tell Ruby that not only did she have a limited choice, she also was dressed perfectly for the occasion and it would be a waste of a good outfit. 

“It’s only a catacomb, most of the bodies have been lifted out already.” 

“I’m not scared of the bodies,” said Ruby, who was a little bit scared of the bodies. “It’s a tiny, horrible, dark space. It’ll fall on me, and your archeology friends won’t be able to dig me out quick enough.” 

“Not even for some 2nd century frescos of Jesus?”

“If they’re all of Jesus then no,” It’s like Hitch didn’t even know her.  

“This suggests a chance that you would go in for non-Jesus frescos.” 

“It’s still a no. It’s a horror show.” 

“Ruby, you can’t know what genre you’re in,” Hitch explained patiently. “Of course it won’t be a horror movie, it’s taking a squint at some frescos and then deciding whether they could spell doom for humanity.” 

“I don’t even speak Latin,” Ruby’s defiant head flick sent her hat flopping about and if she had succeeded attaching the corks to the brim, they would have taken Hitch’s eye out. 

Hitch pulled a small phrasebook from his jacket pocket and threw it at her. She caught it and stared at it. Maybe he did know her. 

“You go in catacombs all of the time,” Hitch spoke quickly, watching a man cross the aerodrome to enter the helicopter for pre-flight safety checks. This was now eating into his Zuko time. Hitch himself didn’t call time with his husband ‘Zuko time’, but he was really running out of it now. It wasn’t very efficient and spy-like to have an argument in the car before even arriving. 

“Your basement isn’t even–”

“Spectrum,” Hitch interrupted her for once. “You go underground in tunnels constantly without complaint and even fight tooth-and-nail to get in there. And I take you to the one place that literally no one has been for hundreds and hundreds of years with a top-secret code and you don’t even want to peek?” 

“You lost me at ‘hundreds and hundreds of years’,” Ruby said moodily, but he had her. “I just thought they would cut the painting off the wall and stick it in some nice air-conditioned museum for me to sit and look at it for a bit.” 

Hitch flicked her hat affectionately, and reached for his door handle. Ruby let herself out, and pulled her hat securely onto her head, tying the little ribbon under her chin, like preparing herself for battle. Even a helicopter ride wasn’t enough to clear her mind from being far, far underground in just thirty minutes time. 

Hitch shut his door, and Ruby coughed until he turned back to her. 

“I have to tie my shoelace,” She said, still half in and half out of the car. 

“Remember to double-knot it,” He told her seriously, and strode ahead to the helicopter, sliding the cockpit door shut behind him. 

Ruby made sure she double-knotted it. 

Claudia was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a linen shirt that was buttoned nearly to the top, with open cuffs. Her nails were trimmed, but covered in the ashy soil that surrounded them. Maybe her hands were covered in dead people dust, Hitch just didn’t know. 

“Hello,” She called, standing in a knee-deep trench in the dirt. A glance at Ruby suggested that she thought Claudia was underdressed for the occasion. A glance at Claudia suggested that she thought Ruby was overdressed for the occasion. Both reactions were funny to Hitch who was melting quietly and stoically in his suit. “Cool shirt, agent.” 

Ruby pointed at the text and grinned. “I know you guys are the ones digging holes, but it was the best I had on short-notice.” She was a little let-down by Claudia’s lacklustre outfit, but the older woman did have a magnifying glass hanging from a cord around her neck. She wondered if her missions would ever be cool enough to need a magnifying glass. 

“She’s not an agent,” Hitch said, eyeing the cold dark gaping cold hole. He bet it was way cooler down there. He wondered if he should’ve put some sun-cream on and then remembered it was the 1970s. 

“Some kind of bring your kid to site day?” Claudia asked wryly. “We are really trying to limit the footfall to the site until we can remove all of the important artefacts.” 

“Not quite,” Hitch said, fighting the urge to fan his face. “She’s with us on a consultancy basis, she’s our best…” Here, he almost called Ruby an agent himself, then nearly called her ‘kid’, and settled on, “coding consult for this.” 

Claudia accepted this readily enough, which was surprising to Hitch, but he supposed that Claudia was only overseeing their visit to the hole, her bosses and his bosses had all decreed that that child would be there. She stepped carefully out of the trench, and led them to the nearby canvas tent that sat still and unflappable in the windless sun. In the shade, Hitch patted his forehead dry briefly, and surveyed the options lying out on a wooden folded table. Torches, trowels, brushes, a small pick-like object, and a set of measuring tapes and calipers. 

Ruby and Hitch were both handed a torch, and a small tag that clipped onto their waistband that flashed and emitted a loud noise. 

They were led back over the gaping hole, punctuated with a metal ladder like a cocktail umbrella hanging jauntily in a glass. Hitch grabbed Ruby’s shoulder as soon as she started to look like she was backing out. She’d gone silent after checking out the set of soft bristled brushes, and was now holding her torch very tightly. 

“You have your watch, you have your hair clip,” Hitch listed their emergency kit clearly, fishing in his inner pocket for a small head torch.

Claudia looked around with some surprise. “Ah,” she exclaimed in accented English. “I was asked to copy one of the maps that we had been been drawing.” 

She produced this from her back pocket, and showed it to Hitch who motioned for Ruby to look instead. “This is our entrance here, the red square. These others are not manned for today, so there are no ladders to exit,” these closed entrances were just red outlines, and were scattered at each compass point of the entrance they were using today. The thin black-inked lines showed miles upon miles of catacombs and Ruby felt dizzy at the prospect of being down there, tangled up in dark narrow tombs. “Our main niche today is west of us right now, with the oldest bodies and frescoes, before the catacombs began to spread out further over time.” 

Ruby clutched the piece of paper tightly, wanting to track their steps against it when they descended into the darkness. Hitch strapped his torch to her head, flattening her side-part with no regard to the style of a teenage girl, and smiled at how uncool she looked. 

 “I will be with you the whole time, Claudia knows exactly where she is going. We can take as many breaks as you need.”

“Anymore cool gadgets?” she asked him. Claudia was clearly listening, with how she was supposed to be their tour guide, but half-heartedly picking dirt out of her fingernails. Hitch wasn’t quite sure why she bothered. 

“One more I’ll show you down there,” he promised her. “You go down, I’m not convinced you won’t make a run for it if I go down first.” 

“I’ll descend first,” Caludia said, and the ladder made a creaking noise as she stood on it, but it didn’t seem to bend or sway too much. 

Ruby laughed, but she didn’t seem to actually find it funny, staring at the ladder like it was going to eat her alive. Hitch reached out and firmly pressed the button on her headtorch with his thumb. She swayed under the pressure. 

“It’s reinforced, you are not the first person to go in there, it is tall enough for you to walk around comfortably,” He gave her a big smile, and squeezed her by the shoulders before guiding her to the hole. 

“All clear,” Claudia called, and her waving torch below finally got Ruby to grip the ladder handles and lift her feet onto it. 

“Remember that drain you crawled through last year?” Hitch asked, and she sputtered something rude at him, and slowly descended into the earth.  

Chapter Text

Claudia smiled at Hitch when he joined them at the bottom. The air was dry but cool, and it smelled like dirt and something stale. His shoulders relaxed just a fraction when he realised it did not smell like death, a scent he was not unfamiliar with. 

Ruby held tightly onto his elbow and Hitch pretended he did not notice. Now, underground, Claudia seemed to come alive, her torch bouncing off of holes in the wall and up ahead in the corridor and then above them to show how high the ceiling was. 

“Bodies were placed up to three abreast in those niches,” she took on the role of tour guide waving at the wall. They looked like bunk beds, body shaped holes that were stacked above each other maybe three or four columns high. Every few feet a small long-life torch shone a muddy red light that barely seemed to illuminate their surroundings. 

“It must have taken weeks to remove all of the bodies,” Ruby said softly, surprised at the sheer scale of the tunnels. 

Claudia looked back at her, with a faintly guilty look on her face. “Not all of the bodies have been removed,” She said carefully. Ruby stopped dead. “There was a lot of mapping to be done, lots of paperwork to ensure that every artefact was accounted for. It is a lot of work to keep the skeleton whole and lift it out of the shaft.” 

Hitch looked behind them, and his own head torch (put on after Ruby descended, so she didn’t laugh at him) showed him how long the corridor was, and how far they could wander without ever seeing sunlight again. His own chest clenched for a moment and he dug in his pocket for a small bulb. He dropped a ‘find your way home’ light right in front of his and Ruby’s feet. Ruby gave a tiny sigh of relief. 

“New and improved,” he murmured to her. Claudia gave a little groan, and two head torches immediately lit her face up. 

“Leave no trace?” she asked him grumpily. “We can’t have cross contamination between the artefacts and modern traces.”  

“These were cleared by higher ups,” Hitch said smoothly. “One of our conditions for working here. I’ll count them all out and back in again.”

Claudia accepted this, and turned away to continue their journey, Ruby just a step or two after her. The floor sloped ever so slightly upwards, causing Ruby to scuff her sneaker every other step. She counted her steps carefully, trying to remember exactly where she was going. It was dark and dry, but cooler than the sunscorched fields above them. In terms of early Roman art that provided a glimpse into life hundreds of years ago, the walls were packed earth, brown and strangely dappled by tools that had shaped them. 

“The fresco we want you to look at is in the largest room, perhaps where the bodies were blessed before being interred to the niches. Other catacombs in Italy from this time held mostly Jewish dead, Christians were buried later. We thought that the tunnels initially could be a city, a similar one to the one found at Derinkuyu, the Matiate of course.” 

“Nasty shock when you stumbled across all of the bodies,” Hitch was trailing his hand along the wall as they walked, creating the gentlest rasping news that followed them through the passage. 

Ruby wrinkled her nose. She had a feeling that Claudia had been rather pleased to see all of the dead bodies. “Matiate?” She asked, to fill the sudden silence. Sudden silence was not a good feeling down here. 

“A huge city in the tunnel network below Cappadocia, they found coins, bones, statues,” Claudia sounded wistful. “Miles upon miles of rooms of all uses, of great cultural importance. You’re lucky really that these are catacombs–” Ruby doubted that deeply. “The tunnels at Derinkuyu are very low, you must walk,” she stooped herself over, which looked eerie in the bouncing torchlight. “One at a time, and you cannot stand up properly.” 

Ruby did not like the sound of that at all. At least with the stacked coffin-holes on each side of her both her and Hitch could stand tall, and that relieved at least a little of her claustrophobia. 

“I thought that I would study my doctorate there, but with this new opportunity here, I couldn’t miss it,” She waved at the space around them with her torch and Ruby caught sight of a carved drawing on the wall that stopped her in her tracks: a simple iconic bird that perched on a leafy branch, engraved lines etching out its wings and the feathers in its tail. An imagined piece of the sky in the darkness below. Claudia shone her light to better illuminate it. 

“Perhaps Christian imagery of the dove after the ark, or of the spirit of God, or of peace,” Claudia listed.

“Or it’s just a bird,” Hitch said thoughtfully. 

“It’s just a little further,” Claudia said diplomatically.

“Your doctorate?” Ruby asked desperately. 

“I’m actually doing my PhD in the gender studies of Mediterranean art, specifically in the techniques of fresco painting,” Claudia explained. “Unfortunately, there weren’t many frescoes in Derinkuyu, until someone fell down one of the shafts of this catacomb.” 

Ruby didn’t have to say anything in response to that because the next corner of the passage turned into an arch that carved out a vaulted hall. Claudia’s torch bobbed about as she walked the perimeter, audibly flicking switches of large battery-powered torches, illuminating the room in large swatches of light that blinded Ruby immediately. Hitch made a pained noise, and stepped on the back of her shoe. With her hands clapped across her eyes, she didn’t mind– at least she knew he was there. She had seen just the quickest flash of a hall painted brightly, not at all the sooty, muddy cave she’d expected to be standing in. Now peeking between her fingers at the widest point of the hall, she could see a large painting – the fresco– of a scene that she couldn’t parse at first. Several people, some with their hands raised in the air, and dressed in draping robes and togas were arranged in a liminal white space. The central figure appeared to be speaking, his hands raised, in a bad 2-D rendition that probably should have been practiced on paper instead of wet plaster. At the far right, a man in a pale toga leaned into the figure next to him, his hand up to cover his mouth as he whispered into his ear, like a professional gossiper. Or a spy maybe. 

On the opposite side, a figure that approximated a woman with long hair stood — the only women in fact– turned towards the door that they had all entered through, like she was waiting to greet guests. She was holding something in her pale hands, and it took Ruby a long moment to recognise the object: a papyrus scroll, the sort they used back before the advent of typewriter and college-ruled notebooks with nice pens. 

Bordering the wall, interlocking terracotta-red patterns followed the curve of the ceiling, which arched above them nearly beyond the glow of the lights. In niches along the walls, there were statues of women and men, dressed in similar togas to those on the wall, with some –to Hitch’s great dismay– not dressed at all. The statues were painted brightly too, and Ruby remembered theories that the statues scattered and smashed across the ancient empire of Rome were actually decorated in gaudy royal colours instead of remaining pale marble. They were beautiful, and Ruby almost didn’t mind the tens of eyes trained on their entrance with their strange clothes and bright lights. She could imagine entering this hall thousands of years ago as part of a funeral procession, or a priestess. She would have made a good Vestal Virgin, she thought. 

There were the holes hewn in the walls like there had been in the tunnels, and Ruby looked away very, very quickly when she saw a shape curled up, lying in wait in the shadows thrown by the floodlights. If she didn’t look any closer, she didn’t have to find out if it was a trick of the light, or really a dead body. 

Claudia was watching them, her eyes having adjusted a lot quicker, and smiled when she saw the awe on their faces. 

Hitch whistled lowly behind her, and moved his loafer-ed foot off of Ruby’s Yellow Stripe. Ruby walked over to the wall, brushing the chalky paint very gently with a finger before anyone could stop her. Hitch groaned. 

“You are representing the United States of America,” He reminded her. Ruby shot him an apologetic smile, and tilted her head back with its now defunct headlamp to look at the foot-high letters that spelled out possible doom for humanity high above her. They were angular in the way that Ancient Roman lettering was, no soft shapes except in the ‘O’, in the same red paint that made her think of clay or terracotta. And blood. They were grouped loosely in what may be words, and interspersed with sigils that she didn’t recognise as any modern alphabet. 

“So you want this into Modern English?” she asked, and took a couple steps back to better size up the challenge. Claudia had perched herself on one of the hulking light-boxes, watching her carefully. 

“As close as, yes.” 

“Just to let you know, in movies, the translated sentence always rhymes and is usually funny as well. This probably isn’t going to be like that.”

Claudia nodded. “Archaeology is rarely funny.” 

Ruby sat down on the floor, behind another one of the lights so she didn’t throw Plato-like shadows onto the cave wall, and used the structure as a make-shift table. Hitch produced a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket, folded carefully and pinned together with the clip of a pen. He presented these to Ruby, who was squinting with her head turning this way and that, like Bug when he was trying to work out if you had said ‘treat’ or ‘flea-treatment’. 

“One last thing,” he said quietly, because in the great hall, it only seemed right to whisper, and pulled out a pair of headphones that folded up over themselves, attached by a long wire to a small plastic box. His suit jacket now fitting much better to his body without all of the detritus of hauling items around for a child, he showed Ruby the little cassette tape tucked inside the player, and let her arrange the headphones on her head, pulling her head torch down to hang around her neck. 

He briefly thought about winding her up, reminding her not to think about all of the hundreds of tonnes of cold rock and mud and bones that pressed in on her head and could cave at any moment, and remembered the age-old spy tradition of not tempting fate. 

Ruby beamed at him, and he definitely wouldn’t have had that reaction if he had said any of that. “You bought me my own music?” she asked, grateful for the distraction of the eerie silence in their own grave. If she really got stuck into the code and her tunes, she might even forget that they were metres and metres underground and really no one knew where exactly they were. 

“Enough tunes for a couple of hours,” Hitch said graciously. 

Claudia was looking at their little interaction, lit from underneath by the floodlights. The crease in her brow was thrown into stark relief, and she suddenly looked a lot older than she really was. “You are what, fifteen?” 

Ruby looked down at her paper, pretending to focus on sketching out the first glyphs that were right at the top of the barrel-vaulted ceiling. If she copied the symbols as accurately as possible, maybe they didn’t need to spend the day down here, maybe she could escape to that air-conditioned museum she had wished for. “Yeah, pretty much.” 

“Fifteen and two governments are vying to keep you here to figure this out for us?” The painted figure– now Ruby was beginning to think that perhaps it was Jesus, she was raised non-denominationally, god damnit!-- raised his hands in surrender. Another figure looked vacantly out of the wall, skin lumpy and marred by the rock below.

“The American government is working hard to take her home again,” Hitch added and there was a note of protectiveness in his voice. He didn’t want to be underground, trapped in a warren like a rat either. He had a book tucked under his arm, clearly hoping to pass the time on his extended shift by reading. 

“I’m good at code-breaking,” Ruby said dismissively, like it was an extra-curricular to be crossing the Turkish border and then tunneling underground all in a Saturday afternoon. “I won a competition for it when I was younger, and Harvard has been scavenging ever since.” 

Hitch made a coughing noise, like he was laughing at her. “Humble of you, Ruby.” 

Ruby’s withering look missed the butler, because she was sat in the shadows, only the reflected light illuminating her small silhouette. 

“And you?” Claudia pressed. She had a leather-bound book on her lap, and Ruby looked curiously at it, but her attention drifted surely back to the code. Harvard geek freak or not, she did love a good puzzle. 

“Linguistics,” Hitch lied like he didn’t even care that he was in an early Christian chapel. “As a professor at the University, I was invited to accompany Ruby. I dabble in code-breaking too,” He added, as though an afterthought. “I doubt Ruby is going to need any of my help.” 

“Anyway, what is going on with the gender of fresco painting?” Ruby asked, to deflect attention from their unplanned cover story.

“Fresco specifically survives over time because the walls are much less likely to get damaged or rot over time. Canvas, tapestry, and even statues over time have become damaged. These frescoes were done while this plaster wall was still wet, so you have to imagine a very talented painter being paid a lot of money to crawl down here and paint quickly and well before the plaster dries out. Look around you, all of the statues, the gifts given to the bodies, their meaning is lost to time. All we have left of these catacombs are the messages left on the walls and the paintings.” 

Ruby listened carefully, her pencil poised over her papers. The floor was dusty, dirty definitely, but she managed to shuffle her feet under her, almost kneeling in front of the fresco. Pointing to the woman bearing the scroll, she asked, “And what do you think about her?” 

Hitch looked at the figure with surprise, like he hadn’t noticed she was there. Claudia smiled. “I think she’s important,” she said simply, jabbing a thumb at the larger group of men. “I think she is the one doing all of the work, keeping track of the dead perhaps, while everyone else stands around chatting.” 

Ruby smiled back. “I think so too.”

Hitch had been on many a stake-out before, but never before had he been able to look in such detail at the space around him, usually slinking into the shadows or acting like he belonged in the moment so much that he couldn’t spare a glance at anything that may undermine his act. He had examined every dark corner of the space with his torch where the modern lights would not reach, he spotted the same bundle of brown fabric on the bed-like shelf that Ruby had but unfortunately got close enough to see that it was in fact a skeleton, and he had privately named every one of the frescoed figures on the wall. 

He wasn’t allowed to lean against the walls, and there was nowhere to sit that he could not convince himself wasn’t a partially-buried spine. He had leafed through his book, had peered over Ruby’s shoulder while she listened to her music until she shooed him away, ran through his mental check-list that he kept running for house managerial work at the Redforts, thought about what he remembered from history at school (very little, thanks to a crocodile taking a bite out of much of his long-term memory) and positioned himself at the looming dark opening into the tunnels. If he looked out into it long enough, his eyes adjusted again and he could see the little mushroom-like lights glowing a straight line back to the entrance. The part of his brain that had been shot at and held hostage and thrown out of a plane imagined with distressing detail all of the danger that could approach them in the corner they had backed themselves into, and with his back to it, he kept hearing scraping and whispering noises that could only be the wind murmuring through the honey-combed caves. 

This way, he could keep an eye on Ruby who was working admirably hard on copying unfamiliar icons, head bobbing to the music in her ears like she was doing her homework at the kitchen island and not… where they were. Claudia was also writing in her book, archaeological journals about the findings of the past few days, although she was checking her watch every ten minutes or so, and in the silence (except for Ruby’s Carole King buzzing through the headphones), he heard faint metallic tapping down the tunnel like a man buried alive trying to escape his tomb. 

Hitch took a deep breath through his nose, and clicked his headlamp on again, holding his book open at the right page and tried to sharpen his hearing, straining to hear anything beyond their little hallowed corner. 

When Ruby spoke, nearly two hours after their descent, he stiffened, utterly on edge. 

“I’m getting the feeling that actually really, this isn’t life threatening.” Ruby hissed. 

“I never said it was life or death,” Hitch allowed himself a snicker, dropping his shoulders again. “I told you, you’re here decoding whatever that thing says.”

“I was hoping something extra would happen,” There was a definite whine in Ruby’s voice. 

“What, the skeletons would come alive and tell you about Mediterranean gender?”

“It’s just a code,” Ruby sat back on her haunches, still making marks with her pencil after copying the symbols as accurately as she could. “Like what if it’s just a prayer? What do we write on walls nowadays? There’s graffiti in Pompeii recommending sex workers.” 

“There’s an advertisement in Pompeii of a female business owner looking for tenants for her new complex,” Claudia interrupted with a little more respect for the situation. If she was upset at the breakthrough of her career being a teenager's boring code, she didn’t show it. “She had her own private baths for people who were lower classes than the usual Roman bath-goers. She owned property, she was a businesswoman, and her frescoes,” Here Claudia sounded a little bitter. “Portrayed the city’s forum on Market day. Therefore, if it’s just a prayer we will learn more about their priorities, what they wish for their dead.”

Ruby paused, thought about it, and then sighed, twirling her pencil around her fingers. “Yeah, great historical and cultural breakthrough,” she said mournfully. It’s just… she’d spent a year breaking codes that would save lives, and thwart plans. At least Pompeii had been funny: her favourite had been one graffiti that exclaimed “Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are, may you sneeze sweetly.” This was not shaping up to be anywhere near as interesting. 

Claudia checked her watch, and stood up, stretching her arms out. She had unrolled her shirt sleeves after a little while in the coolness of the catacombs, and now her cuffs flopped around her wrists. “If you are both comfortable here, I am going to continue cataloguing the artefacts in the other rooms,” She gave Hitch a self-conscious smile. “I am no code-breaker myself, so this is not quite as interesting as I’d expected, and there is much work to be done elsewhere.” 

Ruby nodded, and waved with her free hand. Interesting code or not, she could feel the threads of the alphabet pulling together, and with the little Latin phrasebook Hitch had procured her, she was almost sure she could finish it. 

“You’re not worried about leaving us alone here?” Hitch asked, moving to one side to let Claudia exit. She switched her torch on her way past, readying herself to leave the brightness.

“I don’t think you’ll touch anything you’re not supposed to,” She said, giving Ruby an amused look. “You only need to shout for me, I know my way around well here.” 

“We’ll call when we’re done,” Hitch told her, with an uneasy feeling in his stomach. Ruby didn’t say anything further, foam headphones now firmly on her ears. 

Three steps out of the door, Hitch couldn’t see her anymore. 

Another hour passed, Hitch stood sentry at the door with his knees softened, when Ruby nudged her headphones down again. By now she had listened to the tape three times through. The kid was working like an ox, utterly focused on whatever nonsense she was gleaning from the rocks. 

“I’m thirsty,” She said finally, and her voice was dry. Between the Walkman and his haul of torches, he had forgotten water. 

Hitch shifted his weight, making a mental note of his page and closing his book. He squinted at her shape in the dark, trying to work out a plan of action. 

“Come with me,” he did not not phrase it like a question. 

“Hitch I’ll be fine, please just go and get some water at the tent,” Ruby said, her phrase book in her lap and a rudimentary sketch of the glyphs in front of her so she could scribble arrows out to possible meanings. 

“You don’t mind staying down here?” he asked carefully. 

Ruby looked over at him, and saw for just a moment the vision of the fresco over the real solid Hitch, like a palimpsest. One figure near the middle had his hands clumsily drawn over his chest, almost as though he had his fists up ready for a fight. She blinked a few times, and waved at him. 

“I’m on a roll,” she said, with a familiar gleam in her eye. “I’ve nearly got it, the symbols are almost like an even more ancient alphabet, like you know how our English letter ‘A’ is actually a simplified form of the proto-Sinaitic letter ‘aleph’ that looks like a bull’s head–?”

Hitch did not know. Hitch did not care to know. “Water, coming right up. I’d left Mrs Digby’s sandwiches in the tent too, if we’re going to be here a while I’ll fetch them for you.” 

Ruby waved at him, absent-mindedly wiggling her fingers, and Hitch hurried the best he could on the uneven ground, wanting to return before her big brain reminded itself that it was trapped alone in a big, scary warren that held hundreds upon hundreds of dead bodies. He was at the foot of the ladder when he remembered the skeleton that was lounging about with Ruby in the chapel, and hoped that she was too invested in her puzzle to go exploring without adult supervision. 

Hitch climbed the ladder again, squinting at the brightness of the sun overhead and took a moment at the top to re-orientate himself with the canvas tent. That moment of hesitation ended up costing him a lot: a gun with a tasteful walnut handle appeared behind him, the small steel hammer on the back hitting him very hard across the back of the head. 

When he fell in a heap, face-down in the dusty earth of a foreign country, he was glad he hadn’t toppled back down the shaft to become yet another skeleton rotting in the catacombs. 

His last thought before darkness unlike anything down below rushed in to take his consciousness was Ruby, alone and in danger and not even knowing it.

Chapter Text

Ruby didn’t know how long she had been alone for when the tape wound down slowly in her ear, and she thumbed the eject button without looking away from her notes. 

Hitch had been very cool to bring her music to distract her, but she’d flipped the tape four times now, and she was beginning to tire of the music selection. Just before she clicked the flipped tape back into place, she glanced away from the fresco, to the open doorway at her left. 

Hitch had been gone a long time. The glow-in-the-dark numbers on her watch told her that it was nearly six in the afternoon, maybe even dark outside. 

She tried to work a little longer, chewing the wire of her headphones, and lost herself in the music for a little bit longer, until her attention suddenly snapped and she glanced back at the doorway again. There was a nagging anxiety in her stomach that maybe Hitch had gotten lost on his way back into the catacombs, and was stumbling around in the dark. Her message stated: “Heaven-sent” with a jumble of vowels that she hadn’t been able to stitch into further words. 

She left her papers on the floor, with the phrasebook placed securely on top, and walked carefully over to the door, tip-toeing like she was in a church. 

Claudia hadn’t returned either. Ruby tried to open her mouth to call out for the student, but found something stopping her shouting in the room, a fear of disturbing someone, or waking something up, or causing an avalanche-like cave-in. It took her eyes a long time to adjust to the dark even with her head torch, but she could see the small glowing trail of lights if she didn’t look directly at the floor. Photoreceptor rods in the retina were better at seeing objects when they were in your peripheral vision, like how stars disappeared when you looked directly at them.

With her map clutched tight in one hand, she glanced into each archway that she passed, but none of them had lights on like in the largest chapel. Claudia had said she would be nearby, hadn’t she? 

She was sure she was nearly by the ladder now, following the glowlights home – right, straight, left, skip two rooms, and right and it should be straight ahead–

A man’s voice suddenly rang out in the silence of the tunnels and Ruby swore it echoed down the walls to her. She didn’t recognise the voice, didn’t even recognise the words he was saying, it wasn’t Hitch. The voice repeated itself, and her sensitive eyes caught a flash of light at the far end of the tunnel, and she realised that whoever it was must have seen her light. 

She slapped her hand against the switch on the flashlight, and turned to flee down the way she came, trying to reverse the lefts and rights in her head to lead her back to the chapel. No HItch, no Claudia and now no way out of the wretched place. 

No time to think about being trapped in a graveyard when she had to get herself somewhere safe. There was definitely someone behind her, a dimmer light bouncing around the walls in front of her, and she moved as quickly as she could, seeing the find-your-way-home lights clearly suddenly in a little will-o'-the-wisp trail. 

“Little girl,” the stranger called in English, and Ruby nearly bit her tongue when she stumbled against the wall, her hand going into one of the shelves. “Come here, we won’t hurt you.” 

Another man laughed, and it echoed down the chamber to her. She passed the first doorway, was pretty sure she had passed the second and flung herself down the right-hand turn. 

“We’re not here for you,” he called, but it sounded fainter than before. “Come quiet, and we can finish our job.” 

The bright floodlights of the chapel room, the smiling faces of the group of men on the way, the solemnly watchful eyes of the woman holding the scroll, they were familiar to her now, even though the sudden light stung. She stumbled with one hand out, stooping like the intruders of Derinkuyu, groping blindly for the large box-like light that she’d stacked her papers on. 

Her knee clanged against it again, and she hissed, reached for her translations and the Latin phrase book and fell over the other side of the box, into the shadows. If she couldn’t see, the men couldn’t see in the illuminated room either, and if she pressed her back to the sooty wall, she was sure that they couldn’t spot her. The floodlights buzzed gently and Ruby felt like she could open her eyes after a few seconds of her eyes closed tight twilight-purple. The woman with the scroll watched the door carefully, like she could stop the men entering and grabbing the statues, the offerings, the decorations on the very walls themselves. 

Not all of the artefacts had been taken, Claudia had said. A nearly fully-closed site to allow Ruby and Hitch to work without interruption must have looked a whole lot like an unguarded treasure trove of skeletons of saints to sell to Christians. 

Two sets of boots stepped up to the archway, and Ruby clutched her papers tight to her chest, making direct eye contact with the painted woman with the scroll. One man hissed, but they must have been trying to peer inside the best they could. 

“Ugly work,” One muttered. 

“Expensive, if we can catch this one,” the other replied, and their footsteps left again, their calls for her to come out fading further up the tunnel, heading away from the entrance. 

She had no messages on her watch from Hitch, probably hadn’t connected to a satellite or a radio wave to be able to receive anything. Maybe he hadn’t had time to warn her. Maybe she would get out of the catacombs and find out he was still stuck below somewhere and she’d have to go find him again–

Rule 8: Don’t let your imagination run away with you, or you may well lose the plot. 

Everything is Ruby’s gut was telling her to get out. So she did. 

Hitch opened his eyes and squinted painfully around himself, finding himself somehow tied to the centre pole of the canvas tent erected close to the entrance of the catacombs. The sky was turning a deep orange in the east as the sun edged towards the horizon, but he couldn’t tell how long he’d been unconscious without seeing the sun’s position. 

His hands were secured behind him, and he swore he could feel grit in the open wound on the back of his head. The tables holding the archaeological equipment were just a hair too far away for him to snag the table leg with his foot, but thankfully, after the year he had had, he’d asked Hal to install a sharp edge on his Spectrum-issue watch to aid his escape plans when this inevitably happened. Here in the far west countryside of Turkey, he was tied up with rope, not handcuffs or chains. 

He was utterly alone in the tent, and that realisation curled fear at the back of his skull. No Ruby, no Claudia? Were they both still working down in the catacombs, unknowing of the danger above? 

There were at least three voices speaking Turkish just outside of the tent, and he listened carefully over the rhythmic sawing noises as he cut through the thick rope. His Turkish was rusty– following a trip to Turkey in 1960, where he had to pick up very quickly in Spectrum’s classic thrown-in-the-deep-end learning style to assist in the power struggle after the coup– but he was beginning to put the picture together.

The men swarming the entrance to the crypt were speaking sharply and shortly in Turkish. The unknown attacker who had ambushed him at the catacomb entrance was part of a larger group, with a rumbling vehicle that was parked outside, all discussing the plan. Hitch thought of the kid who he had coaxed underground and just about shut the tomb lid on her himself. Soon they would be chipping paintings from walls and bones from niches. Soon they would pass up a child’s body from the earth to be sat with them until hell arrived. Unless the child got herself in trouble first. 

“If you don’t go down there, you don’t get your share,” the loudest voice was saying, easily heard over the idling vehicle. 

“Don’t we need someone to pack everything into the truck?” Another asked in a quieter, wheedling voice. 

“For the moment, there’s nothing to bring,” the first voice said and Hitch could hear the frustration in his voice. “I wouldn’t even trust you to drag the child out of the tunnels unsupervised.” 

Hitch’s hands didn’t freeze, but he took very careful note of that. They knew Ruby was down there, they were wanting to remove her from the catacombs. Why didn’t they storm the tunnels when all three of them were down there, and trap them until they had recovered their ‘share’?

Why hadn’t they mentioned Claudia? “The girl is no trouble,” a female voice said, in the same Italian as the other two. “A teenager, small, and very scared of the dark. You could say boo to her and she’d cry.” 

Claudia was working with them. Claudia was giving them information on Ruby, and what was in the tunnels, and probably lecturing them about the high price tag attached to frescoes from 200 BCE. Stupid grad student, stupid set-up that put him and Ruby right at the centre of a grave-robbing operation. 

“Go watch the professor,” the loud voice said roughly, and Hitch could hear footsteps trudging over the scorched earth towards his location and re-doubled his efforts to free himself, straining his arms against the fraying strands that still held him. “When Levent and Orkhan find the girl, you can go and help them pull her body up.” 

The coward didn’t reply to that, so Hitch had no idea how close to the tent he could be. Finally his hands sprung free from the ropes, and he snatched a wooden-handled tool from the bench, rolling forward quickly to the entrance of the tent, and knelt, waiting for the man to enter to babysit what he thought was an unconscious body. 

The man was busy adjusting the strap on his gun, holding it loosely in the crook of one elbow when he entered the tent, and therefore didn’t see a conspicuous lack of linguistic professor tied to the centre pole before said professor charged him from the right, slamming the blunt handle of a trowel into the base of his skull. He did not make a single sound, no recognition of his fate on his face. Hitch caught the gun with one hand to stop it clattering to the ground, and fumbled with the trowel to try to catch the grave-robber as he fell. 

The man hit the ground with a thud, and Hitch winced at the noise, and the visible cloud of dust that rose around his body. 

“Yakup?” the man outside the tent shouted, and Hitch managed not to wince again, looking instead at the gun, a rifle that had a cotton strap that allowed it to hang around one’s neck. Thank God it wasn’t a whip or something equally stupid. If Yakup had a gun and he wasn’t even in the team to find Ruby, it was safe to assume that everyone had a gun. “Yakup?”

“That professor causing you trouble, Yakup?” Hitch steadied his hands on the barrel of the rifle, hearing a pair of boots land in the dirt and the crunch of footsteps towards them.

Hitch cracked his neck once, to the right, and stepped over Yakup’s body to the entrance of the tent. He cocked the gun and stepped out into the sunset, muzzle leveled at the presumed-leader of the little band of grave-robbers. He hadn’t had time to reach for his weapon, a pistol in a shoulder holster that Hitch’s head throbbed at the sight of, and raised  his hands in surrender easily.

“Professor,” he said in English, placatingly like a man who knew his back-up was going to be on-hand at any moment. “We will not hurt you, we are just fetching a few items of little importance.” 

Claudia was sitting sideways in the front seat of the Jeep that was parked nearby, her legs dangling out of the open door, but with the air-conditioning blowing over her face and arms. She had a cold bottle of water that was dripping with condensation in one hand, and although she looked shocked to see him upright and armed, she did not look like she had received the same rough hostage treatment as him. 

Hitch waved the barrel of the gun at the man, encouraging him to back up alongside the Jeep too, so he could have both Claudia and him in his sights. “Easy,” the man said softly. “Educated man, you don’t shoot.” 

“Why are you here?” Hitch asked in rough Turkish and the man looked surprised. Claudia had her hands in the air as well, her bottle spilled and dripping onto the hot earth. Hitch adjusted his grip as slowly as he dared, holding the trigger and base of the rifle as steady as he could and removing his other hand from the barrel, moving it to press a button on his watch. 

“We are picking up a few items that belong to us,” the tomb-raider said easily. He was smiling somewhat: he knew proper gun management, and he knew that Hitch would not be able to shoot in this grip-position. 

Hitch pressed the button. “You can’t extract,” he said  in English while the comms line was open to Agent Zuko. “All of the valuables, they don’t belong to you.” 

“You Americans,” the tomb-raider sneered, but he matched Hitch’s English. “They belong to you instead? Who should grow rich on this discovery? We, the descendants, or you the colonists?”

“Help me,” Hitch enunciated clearly, radio channel live. “Help you. There is something we can do to work this out.”

“Harvard University has stolen so much from so many,” the other man continued. “Our artefacts, our holy items. We were not even going to hurt you. A few dozen items go missing when Harvard professors visit? That is… the usual! No one would even ever notice. We could sell the goods, and nobody would have to be in trouble.” 

“We won’t hurt you, still,” Claudia added, bone-dust covered hands held above her head. Her magnifying glass was swaying on its chain, reflecting the sunlight in Hitch’s eyes. “I didn’t want for you to be in the middle of this, I thought you and the girl would stay in there until dark.” 

So they hadn’t just gone easy on her because she was a young girl. She had planned this, called in the tomb-raiders on a day when the catacombs were almost empty, and was happy to pin the missing items on him and Ruby, possibly causing an international incident. All over some bones, and a bit of wet plaster on a wall. 

There was no reply from Zuko through the radio channel in his watch, but Hitch knew his husband had heard. It wouldn’t be a mission to the other side of the world without Zuko having to fly in with his ‘copter and rescue him. The tomb-raider took a step forward, believing he was negotiating with an academic who had never fired a gun before, and HItch replaced his hand on the barrel of the rifle, and shot the man in the lower leg, without even blinking. 

They had trapped his kid, his sidekick, in the worst place on earth for her to be. The tomb-raider fell to the floor screaming and Claudia screamed too. 

“You killed him!” She shouted at him, but Hitch had been very careful: he hadn’t. “You are not a linguist.” 

Hitch cocked the gun again, aware that if any of the men in the catacombs had heard the gunshot, they would be swarming their way up right now. 

“No,” Hitch said simply. “I am not.” 

The find-your-way-home lights had disappeared. Ruby switched her torch on for a few precious seconds, knelt down to scan the floor better in case they’d been kicked aside, or trodden on, or somehow unbelievably, gotten wet, but they were well and truly gone. 

The men must have collected them as they went, and now she had no way of knowing what way to go. Her map, her memory of the last two trips, she wasn’t sure and it was starting to claw deep fear in her chest. She had been sure that it was a right turn out of the doorway, but now she didn’t trust her memory. Balancing the torch’s switch between on and off, she looked at the map in quick flashes of light, stepping carefully but as quick as she dared. Even five minutes off-course could lead to her taking double as long to get back, and there was no telling when the men would give up searching for her in the other direction and return. 

She had stuffed her notes down the front of her shirt, trying to protect them from the soot in the tunnels, and now she rustled quietly as she crept low to the ground. 

The catacombs were near pitch black. Claudia had said that there used to be skylights and oil-lamps some two hundred years before Christ, but these skylights had been shored up somehow and the only light came from the super-long-life torches held in what had once been oil-lamp holders. These shone a sickly dim light that almost looked no different to having her eyes closed. This was great news in Ruby knowing where she was going: always towards one light at the end of the very dark, very uneven, very cold tunnel. This was terrible news in that Ruby was in the easiest to access area of the ‘combs. 

As she moved, she began to hear a thumping noise, louder even than her own heartbeat in her ears, and she jumped every time the impact came. Her mind conjured unwanted images of skeletons trying to escape their resting-places, but then she remembered that the skeletons were not trapped in coffins, they were all lying in their nooks in the walls like kids at a summer camp squabbling over bunk beds. 

She should have brought a piece of chalk to mark her way, she should have brought a skein of yarn from Mrs Digby’s craft basket to tie to the ladder to follow all of the way back to the sunlight with. The Ancient Greeks had sussed this out thousands of years ago: Adriadne had given Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the labyrinthe alone– 

The labyrinthe had a monster, the Minotaur, the taurine beast that had been given sacrifices– 

Ariadne, another woman whose work was ignored and forgotten by the men she struggled for—

Maybe it was a cave-in, maybe it wasn’t the skeletons come to life again, but Hitch trapped in a crepuscular crypt trying to fetch her lunch so she didn’t have to leave her puzzle, and he was trying to get out, trying to get her attention so that she could help him–

A figure staggered slowly out of a room further ahead of her, monstrously large and bulky. Its silhouette was blacker even than the tunnel around it, and it panted roughly as it moved, two arms– no, horns –  outstretched above its two heads, and a curved back and when it turned around, took a halting step towards Ruby, its inhuman eyes were protruding and reflected the light from the sconces, and it grunted, its horns lowering, and it made a deep guttural groaning noise and…

Encountering the Minotaur in the catacombs below Turkey was too much for anyone to handle, let alone a claustrophobia thirteen-year-old. 

Ruby turned, darkened torch clutched tight in one hand and her silenced Walkman headphones hooked around her neck, and fled deeper into the twisted labyrinthe, and the unfathomable earth opened its yawning mouth to swallow her. 

 Against all of her better judgement, she ran.

She knew what she had to do. She didn’t want to do it, but it was her only choice that maybe had a chance of her ever seeing daylight again. Her eyes had sharpened to the darkness now, had picked out the detail of the monster in haunting detail, and recognised more frescoes on the walls that she was sick to the back teeth of. 

She threw herself down the first turn she saw, veering right as the opportunity arose. A man shouted behind her, and maybe it was Turkish or maybe it was the guttural shout of a polluted beast, and Ruby jumped like he was a ghost from beyond the grave. Her own pounding footsteps followed her, chased her down the tunnels until her groping hands met a wall to bounce off of and keep running. 

Another turn, more shouting and she couldn’t tell her footsteps apart from those of her pursuers, another turn and Ruby knew what she had to do.

She twisted around the corner of the tunnel, and ran two, three, four niches along, before turning close to the wall, hauling one leg up on the first death-shelf, and then the next, stretching her arms– useless torch still clutched in her hand– to feel for the highest shelf. 

The walls had four niches carved out of it, each about two feet high, and she used them like a ladder to heave herself higher, head finally bumping against the ceiling. She rolled into the highest niche, finding herself too far down, too close to the middle of the shelf, and she stretched her arms above her head to centre herself better. Her glasses were hanging off her nose now, the hooked arms just managing to stay on her ears because if she lost these now, the clatter would give her away, she’d never be able to find her way out. She kicked against the wall with her legs to push into the niche, making a horrible scraping swishing noise that she hoped the monster could not hear. 

Near the far wall, she curled up on her side, clutching her torch to her stomach to cease any possible glimpse of light, hand pressed over her mouth to muffle the noise of her ragged panting. Her belt buckle had become bent in all of her scrabbling, and the wing of her eagle dug into her stomach. She did not even care that in rolling onto her side, her hip was just brushing the top of the grave, that she had scraped her elbow along the hewn clay, that in the dark she might forget which way she had turned and when she tried to jump down her hands would only meet cold, ashy dirt in all directions. 

 Despite her pounding heartbeat, she heard footsteps run right up to her corridor, but they slowed and lingered at the intersection where she had made the turn. 

Two voices held a very fast conversation in laboured Turkish, which Ruby couldn’t parse. Were they the same two as before? Had they seen the monster too? Were they not scared of it, like she was? 

“Harvard girl,” one called out between trying to catch his breath. The reminder of her cover story, of what her and Hitch were here for, stopped her breath altogether, and she lay perfectly still in her cubby like a child awoken from a nightmare and certain the monster was in the closet. Like a dead body, unmoving and stuck for centuries. “I know you are here.”

“My boss has your professor,” Fear had frozen every muscle of Ruby’s body, and this did not even shock a gasp out of her. Hitch had been captured, he hadn’t abandoned her to the crypt alone. 

One man wandered a little further along the tunnel, but even his sweeping torchlight wouldn’t have illuminated Ruby’s tiny body curled in the foetal position in a niche high above his head, and he turned back to his partner eventually. They left together, footsteps ringing off of the hard-packed earth, until she could no longer hear them. 

Ruby lay in the niche for a long time. Long enough for her heartbeat to slow, for her breath to even out and finally catch her breath again, to feel normal enough to centre her glasses, check her papers were still tight in her waistband. Her watch, the gently glowing numbers that always reminded her of Bradley Baker now, said it was nearly seven. 

Monsters were not real. She didn’t know what she had seen in the tunnel with the thumping noises, but the men had not seemed to fear it at all. 

She reached up and touched the ceiling of her niche. Her arm was barely extended, and in the darkness she could not even see how close the dirt came to her face. She flattened her hand, feeling the cool earth that no one had touched in millenia. 

She wanted to go home, but she still had to find Hitch. She straightened her headphones hooked around her neck, patted her barrette and the eagle at her waist, and dangled her legs out of her temporary, but not final, resting place, kicking in mid-air to find the lip of the shelf below her. 

Ruby found her way to the intersection where the grave-robbers had paused, and looked long and hard at her map. Her panicked retreat had turned corners, even if she had maybe doubled back on herself when she was heading away from the chapel and towards the entrance. 

While the tunnels were quiet, she flicked her torch on and drank in the spaces around her, trying to match the curves in the tunnels to the gradients on the map. The beam of light fell on a large marble stone that blocked one fork of the chamber. She looked back and forth between her map and the makeshift door, and finally pinned down her location, just a few turns and then she was free. With twilight falling outside, she may even be able to creep unnoticed out of the shaft, retreat and regroup until she could send a message out with newfound radio waves. 

With a plan, she couldn’t help looking closer at the marble block, seeing how its shape created just the smallest gap where it lay against the arched doorway. It was too heavy to be moved without a few people rolling it, maybe that was why it hadn’t been removed yet. The twiggy academic Harvard students couldn’t shift it. 

She knelt quickly, with the adrenaline from the run still rushing through her, telling herself this was probably a bad idea–maybe it was just an extra storeroom for bones all mosaic-ed together like in the Capuchin Crypt– but she put her arm up to the gap, felt how the space opened up beyond her searching fingers, then up to her shoulder and then it was just a quick wiggle and a squeeze before she was sat on the floor, on the other side of the tombstone. She had never been able to resist a shut door. 

Slowly standing, she shone her torch all around her, and the marble-lined walls reflected bright white light back at her. The walls were inlaid with jewels and gold, and they were painted richly, a little cracked a little flaky perhaps, but the buon fresco style made the painting part of the wall and ceiling itself, and it didn’t expose the white plaster easily. 

And the ceiling. A tall, domed ceiling that belied the fact it was underground and not about to open up onto the sky, that held the largest fresco Ruby had seen outside of her encyclopaedias on the Sistine Chapel. 

A woman in the very centre, arms held out in benediction, a long flowing dress around her legs and the detailed white angel wings behind her. A symbol of Heaven, of the sky even this far below ground. 

And in a wide halo around her, a rainbow enveloped her, every shade that Ruby had grown used to in the catacombing halls of Spectrum, bordering the whole dome.

Ruby stared up at the angel, and then reached her arms out, stretching them fully after hours spent huddled over her work and then trapped in a grave of her own digging. She did not even touch the walls with how big the space was. In the glowing marble, the rainbow that stretched above her, she did not feel like she was trapped underground. 

She was the first person to look at this in hundreds of hundreds of years. She’d been chased by the Minotaur itself through the labyrinthe, hunted like a rat in a burrow, and shared a very bumpy niche with what was probably not a skeleton anymore, but she had been the first to discover this little marbled hall. 

She’d get Harvard to stick her name on it, Ruby thought as she wiggled back through the gap, leaving it just as she found it. Just as soon as she got out of here. 

She had a sidekick to find and rescue. And Mrs Digby’s sandwich to eat. 

Escaping the labyrinthe had been almost easier than she had been expecting. With the marble hall showing her the way back to the skylight, just as easy as though the angel had pointed her in the right direction herself, she had heard a very familiar noise echoing down the shaft to a starry sky. 

She watched for a long moment at the base of the ladder, listening to the blades slow down and finally stop, and when she felt that it was quiet, she snapped her headlamp back onto her head, and ascended the ladder as smoothly as she could. If Zuko’s chopper was here, surely she would be back in the US of A in no time. 

A gun cocked behind her, and she flinched so hard she nearly fell back down the ladder. She had misjudged everything so terribly–

“Ruby!” Zuko shouted, and the gun was just as quickly un-cocked. Ruby’s head had snapped to the sound of the gun so quickly, she’d only recognised Zuko, in his pilot’s jacket and false prosthetic that was adapted for flying his beloved chopper, at the same second he had recognised her. 

His pistol disappeared, safety-on and tucked somewhere into his uniform, and he extended his flesh hand out to Ruby to help her jump off of the ladder and onto solid earth that was somehow more comforting than the dirt downstairs. 

“Ruby! You look like Hell,” Hitch appeared alongside Ruby and he held her at arms-length, taking in her dirty and ripped clothes, her bent belt buckle, and the layer of dust that had settled over her face and hair. Her elbow was bleeding from her struggle into the niche, and the plastic screen that held the cassette tape of her Walkman had cracked. 

“Hitch!” she smiled with relief into the cool, fresh night air. “Boy, do I feel like death.” She grabbed the hem of her shirt and withdrew the papers, waving them excitedly at him. Zuko took them, folded them carefully into yet another pocket, steadfast in securing the information he had been sent to retrieve. 

“I was just coming to get you,” Hitch said quickly and earnestly, not even glancing at the code. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest that he hadn’t had on earlier, and he had a sleek pair of night-vision goggles pushed up to his forehead. Their glint in the moonlight reminded Ruby of something she had seen in the tunnels, something she was beginning to piece together… “Zuko had just arrived, he was going to wait for the local police and catch the tomb-raiders as they exited.”

Hitch was trying to catch her eye, holding her arm to see the damage she had done to her elbow, the dried blood that had pooled onto her T-Shirt when she had curled up and waited for death in her niche, but Ruby’s head was spinning. If the monster’s eyes hadn’t been reflecting the long-life torchlight in its horizontal pupils, if the monster had been able to see in the dark to spot her… maybe even if it looked like a monster, and moved like a monster, and sounded like a monster, it wasn’t a monster?

“Tomb-raiders, huh?” she said instead, Hitch’s fretting was too much for her to focus on at that moment. They were alive, she had seen the moon one more time in her short life, why did she never take time to look at the moon?

“Claudia stitched you up,” Zuko explained, walking a few feet to the helicopter which had its cargo doors open and all of the equipment that Spectrum stored in the floor of the cargo bay opened and being picked through for a first aid kit. That explained Hitch’s new vest. “She wanted to make money to pay for her PhD by auctioning off art pieces that weren’t relevant to her degree. Called in a charming band of rogues to do her dirty work for her, and planned to blame it all on the visiting Americans.” 

“They were carrying statues up before I caught them,” Hitch said conversationally, waving at the tent they had stored Mrs Digby’s sandwiches in, where about a hundred years Ruby had inspected the grad student’s collection of brushes and trowels. Ruby looked, and made direct eye contact with Claudia, who was sitting forlornly with her hands tied in front of her. One man lay on the floor, with his right leg extended above him, foot resting on a table to reduce blood flow to– oh wow that was a LOT of blood! Three more men had been secured, also hands tied, but also with duct tape over their mouths. 

“Huh,” Ruby considered. Claudia averted her eyes. “You would’ve gotten away with it too, if not for–” Hitch lightly punched Ruby’s arm, and accepted an antiseptic towel from Zuko to begin cleaning her cut.

Somewhere on the horizon, blue flashing lights of emergency vehicles approached, with some lovely cells for the tomb-raiders that didn’t contain skeletons. Zuko remained close nearby, a roll of gauze stuck onto one of the prongs of his prosthetic. Ruby hadn’t felt this fussed over since  her parent’s reaction when she last broke her arm.

“I didn’t leave you,” Hitch murmured, where the tomb-raiders could not hear. “They ambushed me when I left to get a drink, I never would have left you alone if I had known–” Ruby flicked his stupid taurine night vision goggles and he stopped himself. 

“I know, you bozo,” she said with the infinite patience of someone who had nearly died and was now graced with a second chance upon the earth., complete with stupid butlers who blamed themselves for every little ambush and near-death experience. “You won’t believe what happened down there,” Ruby said, and caught Claudia’s eye, raising her voice. “I found a room, covered up with a marble stone, and inside it was covered floor-to-ceiling with frescoes and jewels and the ceiling was about two storeys tall. Right in the highest part of the dome…” as she recounted the story of the angel, she decided she would keep the Minotaur story a secret. Nobody would ever need to know that she had spotted a tomb-raider hauling a statue around and let her adrenaline kid herself that it was a hulking bull-man monster. Nobody at all, ever.

Claudia’s eyes grew wide with jealousy as Ruby described the rainbow, and the patterns that had surrounded the room. Ruby doubted she’d get a lot of time to work on her thesis while she was in jail. 

Zuko fetched her a bottle of water, and she let Hitch tell the story of how he had been ambushed earlier. Apparently he hadn’t even told Zuko what had happened when he touched down, had just raided his equipment and spouted something about finding Ruby, before she found herself of course. 

She first swilled the taste of dirt and something that may or may not have been powdered bone around in her mouth before spitting out a safe distance away from Hitch, who was sticking a plaster to her cut. 

“And then I bravely disarmed dear Yakup over there, ” Hitch said airily, and the man on the floor grunted something rude. Hitch paused to say something that was probably ‘the ambulance is right over that hill’ to him in Turkish and winked at Ruby. 

Zuko made a little scoffing noise, at ease with how little control he’d had over the situation since being called away from his sunny beach break on the South Coast of Turkey. “And then that man caught a bullet?” he asked. 

Ruby tipped her head back to down the rest of the sorely-needed bottle of water, and caught sight of something in the sky. Somewhere to the North of them a small cluster of stars arced together, forming a semi-circular crown constellation. 

Corona Borealis, Ariadne’s crown, the one given to her by the god Dionysius after Theseus had abandoned her, shone brightly in the clear night sky, lighting her way home and out of the catacombs.