Amber glared at him, then turned to Cade with a reassuring smile. “What are you thinking?”

Cade’s heart twisted. If only he could tell them what he was thinking. He didn’t care about the treasure. If it was up to him, they’d make a beeline for the nuclear bomb, drag it back, and be done with it.

“Our end goal is the tombs. Abaddon placed all these tombs together for a reason. He wants us to explore them, and I bet there’s treasure inside.”

“That’s like … the second farthest thing,” Scott moaned.

“Well, I doubt that monk’s treasure is still around, and I don’t see any guns either. The only thing that’s useful is that nuclear bomb.”

Amber scoffed.

“You don’t think so?” Cade asked.

“Have you seen a nuclear bomb?” she asked. “They’re huge.”

“Yeah, and who knows how long it’s been there—at least a few years, right?” Grace said. “I bet it’s rusted as hell. Might even be radioactive.”

“Codex, how much does the bomb weigh?” Amber asked.

“Two thousand sixty-one pounds.”

Cade’s stomach twisted. He felt like throwing up.

“Well, that’s out, then,” Scott said. “That’s like moving a car, only without wheels, through a jungle, surrounded by predators. Oh, and the car has a rusted nuclear bomb inside it.”

Cade closed his eyes, letting the nausea fade. He had mentioned it offhandedly, but he should have put more thought into his argument. Worst of all, they were right. How the hell was he going to get it back here?

“And how do we set it off?” Yoshi asked. “Smack it on the nose until it blows up? And say that works: Won’t we blow ourselves to kingdom come?”

Cade held up his hands, a fake smile pasted across his face.

“All right, all right. But say we do manage to set it off, remotely. Maybe we trade some treasure for a remote timer, right? And pay Abaddon to teleport it where it needs to be? It’s game over for whatever we face then. They send an army? We blow them to kingdom come.”

Amber bit her lip. “Either way, we need treasure,” she said, though Cade saw his logic was not holding water. “So the tombs are the plan, no matter what. When we see how much treasure is there, then we decide what we do with it.”

Cade held his tongue, knowing there would be no winning them over right now. He needed to convince them to do the expedition first. The bomb could come later.

“If we’re going to travel into the jungles, we need to plan a route. We can’t camp in the open, so we need to use the remnants the Romans found as places to camp,” he said.

The others nodded along.

“We could take the river—it would be faster and safer from predators. But we know the slavers hunt on that route. I vote we walk instead.”

“Agreed,” Amber said.

The others blanched, fear stamped across their features. Yoshi, Bea, and Trix in particular.