The door lay just beyond—locked, as Wolfe had said. Jess never left without his handy set of picklocks—the lesson of a devious childhood—and pulled them out of the pack and set to work as quickly as he could. He heard the sounds of fighting behind him. Wolfe and Glain must have met with resistance.

He’d just pushed the last tumbler in the lock when Khalila dropped down beside him and said, “How can I help?”

“You can get out of the light,” he said. “Are they coming?”

“Yes. Dario went to help them.” She stood up and looked back over the lion’s shoulder. “How did you know to do this?”

“What, lock picking? Comes naturally. I’m a criminal, remember?”

“I meant the lion, Jess.” She was waving now, giving urgent hurry signals. “Get the door open—they’re coming!”

They were. He heard the footsteps. Glain, ever the athlete, chose to throw herself under the lion, as Jess had, and slid neatly through, then rolled back to her feet and leaned on the still metallic body to aim her weapon back down the hallway. She fired, and Jess recognized the sound: stunning rounds, not lethal. She didn’t intend to kill her fellow High Garda soldiers, no matter what their orders might be.

Dario came next, and behind him . . . behind him came Santi, and . . . Scholar Wolfe. Wolfe, like Dario, wore Scholar’s robes, and his shoulder-length hair had been tied back in a tight knot. “Wolfe?” Jess spared a precious, astonished second to stare at him. Khalila jabbed him in the shoulder to remind him to keep working. “How did he get here?”

“Translation,” she said. “Santi wouldn’t leave him alone in Alexandria. That would have been a death sentence. Jess, are you sure you can—”

“Got it,” Jess said, as the last tumbler clicked and fell away. “Is he all right to be here, do you think? Wolfe?” He couldn’t shake the memory of Wolfe’s swallowed screams as the Mesmer tried to calm him. Whatever was buried under that calm, Elsinore Quest had been right: it was poisonous and powerful. Must have been hard to keep it locked away.

“I don’t know,” Khalila admitted, as Jess rose and pulled on the door’s handle. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to . . . go down there. But it’s Wolfe. We can’t leave him behind for the Archivist, can we?”

She was right. They were all in it together and would rise or fall together. And Santi was staying close to Wolfe, only a step or two away, as if well aware of the risks.

Jess slammed the metal door back against the wall and took the lead, heading down a ramp into the dark. As his eyes adjusted, he realized there were lights, just low ones that blazed brighter as he approached—sensing his presence somehow. There’ll be three more automata, he remembered. The Alexandrian sphinxes would be smaller than the lions, though no less dangerous. The Spartan . . .