Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,84
the lobby.
“I didn’t think we should leave this in the room for sneaky ninja guys or Henriksen’s thugs to find if they searched it. Also, y’ know, maps.”
Sully frowned. “What the hell good will those do us? None of them are for this place. No one’s been here in forever.”
“He’s right,” Jada said. “My father was working with Maynard Cheney, studying labyrinths in general, including the design of what had already been uncovered at Crocodilopolis. His sketches in the journal refer to the maps in some places. It might not tell us every turn to take, but it could be the Rosetta Stone as far as figuring out the logic of this place.”
Sully shone his light on the journal while Drake flipped pages. Jada unfolded a map and then a second, finding what she wanted.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a junction in the labyrinth map that mirrored the one they were standing in. “It’s not the middle door. That’s going to double back into one of the other two. We’d be going in a circle.”
“If you’re right,” Sully told her.
Drake flipped another page, then went back three. “She’s right,” he said. “Luka has half a dozen variations on this, and only one of them has the middle door being the right one.”
“How do we know this isn’t one of those instances?” Sully asked.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Drake replied. “And neither did Luka. If it’s gotta be trial and error, then that’s what it’ll be.”
Sully nodded. “Okay.” He went over to the corner of the right-hand door, where the stone seemed worn by time, and kicked at the rough edge of the frame, knocking several chunks of rock to the floor.
“Just in case,” he said, holding up the biggest shard of stone. “Which way?”
“Let’s try this one first,” Jada said, shining her light into the left side tunnel.
Holding the journal open in his hands, Drake followed her. Sully seemed thoughtful but said nothing as he took up the rear. Drake studied the doorway, then looked along the corridor, which seemed to turn left again just ahead. Behind him, Sully paused to scratch something into the wall just inside the doorway.
“Your initials?” Drake asked.
“Hey, at least I didn’t write ‘Sully was here.’ ”
“But you were tempted.”
Sully shrugged. “Of course.”
Drake started to turn, but something caught his eye. He reached out for Sully’s arm and pulled him over, making him shine the flashlight beam at the wall just above the door. Something else had been inscribed there, and it wasn’t Sully’s initials.
“Jada!” Drake called.
She hurried back to join them, merging her light with Sully’s. In the bright splash of illumination, they could all see the small diamond shape engraved into the stone above the door.
“Do you think that means we chose right?” Jada asked.
Sully stepped back out into the junction, but Drake had a glimmer of memory. In the light from Jada’s flash, he scanned pages of Luka’s journal again, and a smile crept across his face. He tapped the same page he’d looked at before, showing several variations on the three-choice junction. In each instance, Luka had drawn a small diamond shape on two of the possible avenues but not the third.
“Look at the map,” Drake said quickly.
Jada set it on the floor and unfolded it. They huddled over it, studying it in the light.
“The middle path isn’t marked,” Sully called from the junction.
“He’s drawn them here, too,” Jada said, tapping a fingernail on the map, where her father had inscribed tiny diamond shapes in many places.
Drake got up and went out to the junction with Sully. He snatched the flashlight away and went into the middle tunnel, searching the wall above the door. Then he went into the third tunnel.
“Yes!” he shouted in triumph.
Sully and Jada stood in the junction watching him.
“So the diamond marks the path?” Sully asked.
“No,” Drake said, gesturing to the stone above the doorway. “It’s here, too. Only on the inside. No way to see it from out there.”
“But if it’s on two of them, how do you—” Sully began, and then he grinned, nodding. “Oh, I like that. The right way is the one that isn’t marked.”
“Exactly,” Drake said, glancing excitedly at Jada. “Your father had it figured out. But we never would’ve realized it if we’d only run into forks in the labyrinth. If it was one or the other, the diamonds wouldn’t have helped. But this has three choices, and if two are marked, that’s gotta mean that the absence of a