“Keep searching,” he says. “There has to be something else here.”

We abandon the journals and start digging through Rion’s things, all of us silent as we scan through papers, opening drawers and cabinets. Rion seems to have kept everything he’s ever signed. Probably some kind of paranoid evil villain thing.

I see a crumpled ball of paper on the floor and reach for it. I pull it open and am smoothing it out when Nadir cries out, “Here!”

He’s holding another piece of paper. It looks like an official document, but scrawled in the corner is a block of handwriting. “Look at this.” He shows us the scribbled ramblings. The writing is shaky, like he’d been drinking when he wrote it, further evidenced by the dried wet marks on one corner.

Herric. Herric . . . Has her. Has her. Has . . .

The lines are written over and over, tipping at an angle like a descent into madness, becoming more and more illegible.

And then something clicks.

“What if Herric still wants to become a god?” I ask.

The words send a shiver over my skin as our gazes meet.

“Can we be sure he’s still alive?” Amya asks.

Nadir rubs his chin. “What if Father was communicating with the Lord through the Torch?”

“Do you think he went . . . to the Underworld?” Amya asks. “Is that even possible?”

“Maybe if you know where to look,” I say, holding out the crumpled piece of paper in my hand.

Nadir reaches for it. “Is that a map?”

“It appears so.”

He studies the page before looking up and pointing to a spot. “He went under the mountains. Is this a door of some kind?”

“A door to the Underworld?” Amya asks, her eyes wide.

I retrieve the map from Nadir. “What if Herric asked him to get the ark?”

“But what good would the ark do him?” Nadir asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “If he’s still planning to kill Zerra, he’ll need all of them, right?”

Neither Nadir nor Amya answers as I continue, “Or rather, he’d need to destroy them, just like we’ve been doing. What if we’ve been . . . helping him all this time?”

Cold dread spreads through my chest, trickling down my limbs.

“That . . . can’t be,” Nadir says, but the words sound uncertain.

“Herric must have promised him something,” I say. “Who is the ‘her’ in those notes?”

Nadir and Amya share a look.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But something tells me we need to get the ark back immediately.”

“At least we finally know where we might be looking,” I say. “And we can assume he can’t do anything with it until he has me.”

“So we get the Torch, we perform the bonding, and then use the map to . . . travel to the Underworld,” Nadir says, swallowing hard, like he can’t believe he’s just uttered those words.