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"I thought we did, too," Theo agreed wryly, "but I'm not the one freaking out and acting weird."
"I'm only acting weird because of the book," I muttered.
"Good," Theo said. "Then we've talked about everything and you don't have to be weird anymore. I mean, more than your base level of weirdness, anyway. Which is already pretty high."
I stuck my tongue out at him, and he threw a noodle at me, and I felt more like myself than I had in days.
11
I couldn't remember my dreams the next morning, but I woke with a sense of foreboding tingling down my spine, like there was a memory just beyond my reach. I took a quick shower and tried to shake off the feeling while Vanessa dragged herself out of bed. It was going to be a good day, I told myself firmly. The sun was shining, things were back to normal between Theo and I, and I was going to put my head down and spend the whole day helping Raheem excavate the outer chapel wall. Less drama, more archaeology, exactly what I'd come to Velarta for in the first place. Nothing could go wrong.
My first inkling that maybe things weren't quite as sunny as I’d hoped was Vanessa's irritated look as I walked back into the dorm room with my pink towel wrapped around my hair.
"You know there's no cleaning staff here in the summer, right? We're all supposed to be picking up after ourselves," she said, scowling at me.
I eyed her askance as I unwrapped my hair. "What?"
"The mud in the hallway?" she said, raising an eyebrow. "It's clearly from your boots. You could have at least wiped it up."
I crossed to the door and pulled it open. "What are you talking a—"
My jaw dropped as I stared down the hallway. Thick, muddy tracks marred the tile floor, leading straight from the stairwell to where my boots lay in a heap outside our door.
Quite aside from the fact that I never would have tracked mud through the dorm, the more important thing was— "That's not where I left my boots."
"What?"
I pulled my head back in the door. "That's not where I left them. They were in here, under the bed. And they certainly weren't covered in mud when I took them off."
Vanessa shot me a strange look. "Well, who the hell else would have done it? No one else here fits into your tiny shoes."
“I…” But there was nothing to say. Vanessa wasn't that good a liar; if it was a prank, she wasn't in on it. And she was right. Who else would have done it, and why?
My palms felt clammy, and I wiped them on the towel still clutched in my hands.
She shrugged and made her way into the bathroom. I cleaned the floor while she showered, then took my boots outside to knock the worst of the dirt off. A shiver ran down my spine as I slid them on and laced them up.
We met Raheem at the car and all went to the site together, the two of them joking in the front while I sat in the back desperately trying to regain the firm optimism with which I'd started my day. By the time we pulled into the gravel lot, I was feeling marginally better. It was a beautiful morning, and there was a rational explanation for my boots, and every other weird thing that had happened. Just because I didn't know what the explanation was didn't mean it didn't exist.
Raheem seemed to be in a good mood as he dragged the tarps off of the section he'd been excavating. "Check it out, so here's the remains of the chapel wall. See the corner there? It turns north, and if Luca's readout is accurate, I'm guessing another twenty feet over there."
"It's really clear," I said brightly, nudging a pile of dirt with the toe of my boot. "Have you found anything interesting yet?"
He shook his head. "Mostly just pottery sherds, some nails, bits of window glass. But it's not impossible that there would have been some burials here. Probably on the far side of the east wall."
Awesome, I thought, my stomach sinking. Human remains—just what we needed to make the site less creepy.
Raheem laughed at my expression. "Don't worry, we'll be working over here today."
We both got to work, carefully excavating level by level, and I lost myself in the repetitive tasks: taking photographs, filling out my field log, screening bucket after bucket of soil. The sun was warm on the back of my neck.
"Where is everyone today?" I asked as I dumped a trowelful of dirt into my bucket.
Raheem wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of one gloved hand. "Well, Vanessa’s in the lab with the grad students, I think. Probably getting into trouble. Not sure where Luca is. Theo and Neath are translating the book, and Blanton should be here soon."
"They're translating the book?" I asked. I still hadn't gotten to see inside it.
"Yeah, there aren't many pages where the text is still legible, but they're documenting what they can. I think that's probably the last step before Blanton brings it to the lab to store with the other artifacts."
