“Of course,” Damian says.
I hear footsteps and a soft click. Suddenly the hall is bathed in flickering torchlight—very medieval.
“My apologies. I was so focused on getting to the vault that I did not take into account that you have never been here before.”
“No problem. I’ve taken worse tumbles in my life.” Really I’m just thankful to see that the dampness on the walls is just condensation and not something more disgusting like slime or mold. “We’re going to a vault?”
“Yes,” Damian says, turning and continuing down the corridor. “I removed the record from the archives last fall.”
“Why did you send me the call number if you knew it wasn’t there?”
“Because I—”
“Wait. The distraction. I get it.” I may not like it, but I get it. “So you moved it . . . ?”
“Yes. Several inquiries into Mount Olympus documents came across my desk and I grew concerned that someone might stumble upon your father’s record. I moved it to the vault to protect you.”
“To protect me?” I ask, practically jogging to keep up now that we can actually see where we’re going.
“I didn’t want you to discover the contents of the record carelessly. I wanted to present them to you myself.” He pulls up his hurried pace as we reach the end of the corridor. “You were not ready to learn the truth. I now believe you are ready to make that determination for yourself.”
Before I can get offended that he thought I couldn’t handle the truth before—we went through all that last year with the Greek-gods-are-more-than-myth thing—I notice where we’ve stopped. The corridor dead-ends at a small chamber with twelve doors radiating out in a semicircle. It looks like some sort of medieval labyrinth, with walls of massive dark stone blocks and giant-size doors that look like they’re made of high-rise-grade steel. Above each door, carved into a giant slab of stone that spans the entire doorway, is a very ancient-looking symbol. The symbol above each door is different.
“What are these?” I ask nervously.
“Dodecathuron,” he replies. “The twelve doors of Olympus.”
“Of Olympus?” I repeat. “As in Mount Olympus? Do these doors lead there?”
Damian shakes his head. “When the Academy was built, the gods fought over the right to patronize the school. After many weeks of violent battles, Themis finally proposed a compromise. Each Olympian would be the school’s patron for one month of the year. None of them was entirely happy, of course, so each demanded a separate access portal.”
“But you said they don’t lead to Olympus?”
“They don’t,” he explains. “They lead from Olympus. If we were to open one of the doors, we would find an empty room on the other side.”
“If they’re empty,” I point out, “then where is the vault?”
Damian turns back toward the corridor we just left and points. “There.”
“Where?” I ask, spinning back around and expecting an empty hallway. Instead, there’s a giant steel door filling the entire space that we just walked through. “H-how?”
Whirling in a three-sixty, I confirm that I’m not crazy. There are the twelve doors of Olympus, the vault door, and solid stone walls. What happened to the corridor we just came down? And how are we supposed to get out?
“There is a safeguard on this room,” Damian explains, stepping to the steel door and deftly spinning the combination lock above the handle. “Once someone enters the room, it shifts, turning on a smooth and silent revolve to reveal the vault.”
“How is that a safeguard?” I ask.
“If someone enters who does not know the combination . . .” He sounds a little smug as he grasps the handle and twists. A loud click echoes in the chamber just before the door creaks open. “. . . they will not be able to get out.”
“So what?” I ask, glancing around the room to make sure I hadn’t missed spotting the skeletons of unwitting students who had been trapped here. “They would be stuck here and die of starvation—” I suddenly realize there are no air vents or anything. “Or suffocate when their oxygen runs out?”
“You should consider a career as a writer of fiction,” Damian says, stepping into the massive vault and scanning over the shelves of books that line one side. “You have a very vivid imagination.”
“No,” I explain, stepping closer and peeking in at the vault’s contents, “I’ve just read enough myth to know better.”
Damian laughs.
The vault itself is the size of Cesca’s walk-in closet—in other words: huge. As tall as the corridor ceiling, it’s at least six feet wide and so deep I can’t see the back wall. I am not about to step inside—I’ve seen enough after-school specials about kids getting accidentally locked in a safe—or maybe that was a refrigerator—to know better. But even from my position of safety, I see tons of stuff.
The entire left wall is lined with deep bookshelves, full of leather-bound books that look even older—if possible—than those in the secret archives. On the right, there are even deeper shelves, like the ones you use in your garage to organize junk. They’re jam-packed with boxes and baskets and see-through storage containers. Each one seems to be carefully labeled in Greek letters, but I bet it’s a nightmare to keep track of everything.