The silence in the van was a physical presence, thick and heavy as the humidity that had rolled in off the East River. It pressed in on them, smothering the usual post-dig chatter about where to grab a beer or whose turn it was to write the daily report.
Maya drove, her knuckles pale on the steering wheel. The city lights streaked past, smears of garish color against the deepening twilight, but all she could see was the afterimage of that dark, polished slab burned onto her retinas. The clink of her trowel against it still echoed in her bones.
In the passenger seat, Leo was a statue, staring straight ahead. His tablet was dark on his lap. He hadn't said a word since they'd left the site.
From the back, Jax finally broke the quiet, his voice too loud in the confined space. "Okay, seriously. What the hell was that?"
"It was a mineral composite reacting to an EM pulse," Leo stated, the words flat and automatic, like he was reading from a textbook. He didn't turn his head.
"A mineral composite that hummed, Leo?" Jax leaned forward, his head appearing between the front seats. "My gear isn't cheap. It doesn't just pick up 'mineral composites.' That thing has a power signature. Faint, but it's there."
"It's a residual charge from subsurface piezoelectricity, or maybe…"
"Or maybe it's exactly what I said it was," Chloe's voice was small from the darkness of the back seat. She was curled against the window, looking out. "It has an energy. A life. You felt the air get heavy. You can't science that away."
Leo finally turned, his composure cracking. "I can, and I will! There is a logical, rational, testable explanation for everything we witnessed. The moving symbols were a combination of pareidolia and the changing angle of the light. The hum was subsurface vibration amplified by Jax's equipment. The 'heavy air' was a drop in barometric pressure coinciding with a perfectly normal anxiety response to finding something unexpected."
"Unexpected?" Maya murmured, her eyes still on the road. "Leo, it's a sealed, worked stone door eight feet down in the middle of Manhattan with glyphs no one can identify. 'Unexpected' is finding a Spanish doubloon. This is… this is paradigm-shifting."
"It's a anomaly," Leo insisted, clinging to the word like a life raft. "Until we have data, it's just an anomaly. We report it to Professor Evans in the morning, the city halts construction, and a team from Columbia or the Museum comes in. That's the protocol."
"And what if they just pour concrete over it?" Chloe shot back, sitting up straight. "What if some guy in a hardhat sees a weird rock and decides it's not worth the delay? It'll be buried again, forever."
"That's not how it works, Chloe."
"Isn't it?" Maya said softly. She flicked on her turn signal, the click-click-click filling the van. "You know how budgets are. You know how deadlines work. If it's not immediately, obviously historically significant, it becomes a problem. And problems get solved the fastest way possible."
She pulled the van up to the curb outside Chloe's apartment building, a pre-war brownstone squeezed between two glass-and-steel giants. The engine idled, a low, rough purr.
"So what are you saying?" Leo asked, his voice wary.
"I'm not saying anything," Maya said, finally turning to look at him. In the dim light from the dashboard, his face was all sharp angles and shadow. "I'm just… thinking. That's all."
Chloe pushed the van door open. The sounds of the city—a siren several blocks away, the thump of bass from a passing car—rushed in. "I'm going to look through my books. There has to be something… a reference, a myth, anything." She hesitated, one foot on the pavement. "Be careful going home, guys." Then she was gone, swallowed by the dark entrance of her building.
Jax was next, clapping a hand on Leo's shoulder. "Look, man. I'll run the data through some other filters tonight. See if I can clean up that GPR image. We'll figure it out." He hopped out, his usual bounce subdued. "Night, Maya. Night, Leo."
The van door slid shut with a solid thunk, leaving the two of them alone in the sudden, ringing silence.
Maya put the van in drive. "I'll drop you off."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
They drove for a few blocks without speaking. The tension was a live wire between them.
"You're thinking about going back, aren't you?" Leo said, not looking at her.
Maya's grip tightened on the wheel. "I'm thinking that we found the most important thing any of us will probably ever find, and that by the time the bureaucracy wakes up, it might be gone. Or worse, it'll belong to someone else. We'll be a footnote. 'Initial discovery by interns.' Is that what you want?"
"I want to do this right!" Leo's voice rose, edged with frustration. "I want proper lighting, a full archaeological team, conservationists on standby. Not a bunch of kids with a trowel and a bad feeling."
"A bad feeling?" Maya glanced at him. "So you felt it too."
He deflated, slumping back in his seat. He ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, messing it up. "I felt… something. A pressure change. It was… disorienting."
"It was more than that, and you know it."
He didn't answer. He just stared out his window as they crossed into Queens, the shining spine of Manhattan receding in the rearview mirror.
When she pulled up outside his neat, modern apartment complex, he didn't get out immediately. He sat there, his hand on the door handle.
"Promise me you won't do anything stupid, Maya."
"Define stupid."
"Going back there tonight. Alone."
She met his gaze. His brown eyes were earnest, worried. He was the anchor, the voice of reason that had kept her from flying off on half-baked theories a dozen times before. But this was different. This wasn't a theory. This was a door.
"I'm going home, Leo," she said, and it was the truth. "I'm tired, I'm covered in dirt, and I smell like a subway tunnel. I'm going to take a shower and go to bed."
He searched her face for a long moment, then nodded, seemingly satisfied. "Okay. Okay, good. We'll… we'll figure it out tomorrow. As a team. The right way."
"The right way," she echoed.
He got out and closed the door. She watched him walk up the path, a solitary, logical figure in an increasingly illogical world. She waited until he was inside before she pulled away.
Her own apartment was a third-floor walk-up, small and cluttered with books and artifact reproductions. It usually felt like a sanctuary. Tonight, it felt like a cage.
The silence was deafening. She dropped her grimy backpack by the door and went straight to the shower, turning the water as hot as she could stand it.
Steam filled the tiny bathroom, fogging the mirror. She stood under the spray, letting the water pound the day's tension from her shoulders, but it couldn't wash away the feeling. The hum was in her teeth. The weight was on her chest. She closed her eyes and saw the symbols, writhing.
It was the light. It had to be the light.
She got out, wrapped herself in a towel, and padded into the living room. Her laptop sat on the coffee table, a dormant source of all the world's knowledge. She could look up the symbols. She could run image searches, scour archaeological databases.
But she didn't. She was afraid of what she might find. Or worse, afraid she would find nothing at all.
Instead, she did what everyone does when they don't want to think. She turned on the TV. The local news was on, a blonde anchor with a perfectly symmetrical smile talking about traffic.
"—and in a odd story out of Lower Manhattan, residents reported a minor, localized tremor this evening, centered around the construction site at Spring Street and West Broadway. Seismologists say it registered a magnitude of 1.2, likely caused by subterranean shifts or a passing subway train. No damage has been reported."
The air left Maya's lungs in a rush.
The remote slipped from her numb fingers and clattered to the floor.
The screen cut to a commercial for a shiny new car, but Maya wasn't seeing it. She was seeing the dig site. The slab. The hum. The heavy, pressing air.
A tremor. Localized. Right there.
Leo's words echoed in her head. Subsurface vibration. A drop in barometric pressure.
Coincidence. It had to be a coincidence.
Her phone, charging on the kitchen counter, buzzed once. Then again. And again.
She walked over, her legs feeling like wood. She picked it up.
The screen was lit up with a cascade of notifications from their group chat.
Chloe: 'DID YOU SEE THE NEWS?'
Jax: 'Okay, 1.2? That's not a subway train. That's NOT a subway train.'
Chloe: 'It's a sign. It woke up. We woke it up.'
Jax: 'Leo? Maya? You seeing this?'
Leo: 'I'm seeing it. It's a coincidence. A geological one. Go to sleep, everyone. We'll assess the site in the morning.'
Maya's thumbs hovered over the screen. She could back Leo up. She could be the voice of reason. She could tell them all to calm down.
Instead, she typed three words and hit send before she could change her mind.
Maya: 'Meet me there. Now.'
She stood in the middle of her quiet, warm apartment, the towel around her going cold, and knew with a certainty that chilled her to the bone that nothing was ever going to be the same again. The door was open. Not in the earth, but in the world. And they were the ones who had to walk through it.