“No way I’m leaving you alone to face a bunch of giants.”
Walter reached back and tapped Excalibur’s hilt. “I have an ugly giant skewer. I’ll be fine.”
“But someone has to help you get Karen up the stairs.”
“We’ll take it easy. We’ll get there eventually.”
Ashley wagged her head. “There has to be another way.” Tapping her finger on her chin, she scanned the wall of giants. “No scientist would create such an elaborate system with a timed shutdown and not include a manual override, so there has to be a way to do it. Then we could all leave with Karen and not worry about these gorillas.”
Sapphira raised a finger. “There is a way.” She hustled to the end of the line of wall cavities, disappearing for a moment in the darkness. A few seconds later, she returned with a scroll. “Mardon documented everything he did,” she said, unrolling one of the dowels. “I think he left a code that describes the shutdown procedure. I tried for years to figure it out, but I gave up on it and stuck the scroll in the corner.”
Ashley took the other dowel while Sapphira continued unrolling. “It’s near the end.” She set her finger on the yellowed parchment. “Here it is. It’s seven lines of numbers. I tried matching them to letters a thousand different ways, but nothing made any sense.”
Leaning over their shoulders, Walter let out a whistle. “That looks like a job for Larry.”
“Maybe.” Ashley frowned at the scribbled entry. “I can’t pick up any obvious pattern. Even the number count in each row isn’t consistent.”
Sapphira touched Ashley’s shoulder. “Mardon used the combination six, nine, and thirteen to unlock a door and a gate. Does that help at all?”
“It might. It could be an encryption key.” Ashley tapped on her jaw. “Larry? Are you there?”
A garbled reply buzzed through her tooth.
“I guess we’re too deep now. There’s no way we can verbally communicate all these numbers through that static.”
“How about scanning it?” Walter asked. “It worked great with that writing on the wall.”
Ashley shook her head. “The wall script was a lot neater. Larry would spend too much time just reading these numbers accurately. If he got even one wrong, the code would be unusable.”
Walter nodded toward the ceiling exit. “Then I guess I’ll have to wait for Karen while you and Sapphira start climbing out of here.”
“No,” Ashley said, tightening her grip on the dowel. “I can figure it out. I’ve cracked lots of codes tougher than this one.”
“How do you know how tough it is? You haven’t cracked it yet.”
Ashley took the other dowel from Sapphira and spread the scroll out on the floor next to the lantern. She knelt in front of it and, pulling her hair back, studied the code. “Walter, this Mardon guy was just trying to hide a secret from any ordinary Joe who might be lurking in his laboratory. He’s not going to stump me with a bunch of numbers he chicken-scratched on a roll of parchment.”
Walter pointed at Sapphira. “She’s been trying for years, and she hasn’t figured it out. Are you going to do it in a few minutes?”
Ashley spoke through her teeth, barely moving her lips. “Walter, I’m not Sapphira.”
Sapphira stared at Ashley, without a blink or a twitch of her lip. Her hands and cheeks began to glow, and tendrils of fire rippled over her skin, like flaming grass in the wind. Her eyes sparkled, and twin beams of iridescent blue poured forth, expanding as they crossed Ashley and covered her body.
Ashley shot to her feet and backpedaled, swatting at the beams. “What are you doing to me?”
Sapphira clenched her eyes shut, extinguishing the blue light. “I’m sorry.” She rubbed her eyelids with her knuckles. “Something came over me. It’s only happened once before.” She opened her eyes again and took a step closer, but Ashley backed farther away.
A tear trickled down Sapphira’s pale cheek. “I … I saw this strange, dark shadow inside you. It looked like a dragon.”
Ashley’s chin trembled. “You … you saw a dragon inside me?”
“It was sort of like a phantom, a shadow that filled your body.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Walter said. “She’s the daughter of a dragon.”
Sapphira shook her head slowly. “That couldn’t be the reason. Bonnie is also the daughter of a dragon, and when I saw her shivering in the snowstorm back when the slayer killed her mother, the same thing came over me. I looked inside her and saw an angel