Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twenty-Five

As the gloom of the deepening evening settled in, Ellie sat inside the tent and plotted furiously.

She needed to talk to Adam Bates. It was absolutely essential that they coordinate their plans for escape.

The thought made her stomach twist uncomfortably. Ellie had no doubt that Adam would still be willing to save her from Dawson and Jacobs. He would never abandon her to a pair of thugs… no matter how poorly he thought of her after learning that she’d lied to him.

The interior of her canvas prison was sadly short on potentially useful supplies. Dropping to her belly at the side wall of the tent, Ellie took advantage of the growing gloom to lift the canvas ever-so-slightly and peer out.

Mendez still slouched by the front flaps, holding his rifle. He looked desperately bored.

She tilted the little gap she’d made in the tent flap and twisted to get a peek at the back.

Flowers gave her a cheerful wave from where he sat on a stump.

Ellie pulled herself back into the tent, cursing softly.

She might be able to slip past her guards once it was truly dark. After all, two men couldn’t possibly keep their eyes on every angle of the tent at all times. If Ellie waited long enough—and used a less noticeable spying gap—she could probably find an opportunity to slide out and escape… but then what?

The camp was crawling with men, and it was madness to think that Adam would be left conveniently unguarded.

Ellie needed a way to make sure that she wouldn’t be spotted before she reached him—and that she would find him alone when she did. She needed a distraction.

The obvious solution lay in the steam barges that she had seen floating on the river a short distance from the shore.

The temperature at which water converted into steam changed based on atmospheric pressure, and steam engines were pressurized. Were that pressure to drop precipitously—perhaps from a fracture in the boiler caused by overheating—the remaining water in the system would instantaneously convert to gas.

Gas took up more space than water. In a confined environment, a rapid increase in mass had to find a way out—ergo, explosion.

An explosion would be a perfectly adequate distraction.

Ellie pressed her face to the canvas tarpaulin covering the floor. Through a much smaller gap in the side of the tent, she peered out at the watercraft.

“Maybe if I drained some of the water from the cooling system,” she muttered to herself under her breath as her mind worked furiously, “then added a few paraffin canisters to the firebox…”

“Added paraffin to what?” a voice behind her demanded with obvious alarm.

“Bates!” Ellie cried out as she whirled around.

He was just visible across the shadowy interior of the tent where he stood by the entrance. His expression was slightly aghast.

“Hold on—cooling system? Firebox?” he said. “Sweet hell—are you talking about blowing up a boiler?”

“Well, not anymore,” Ellie retorted as she climbed to her feet. “Not now that you’re here.”

“What a relief.”

Adam did not sound the least bit relieved. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose as though fighting a headache.

“Please promise me you’ll stick that plan on the shelf,” he said. “No—burn it. Just erase it from your brain. Pretend it never existed.”

“The plan was perfectly sound.” Ellie crossed her arms in irritation. “Entirely based on hard science.”

“Blowing up a steam engine?” Adam shot back as his voice rose.

Ellie stepped closer, dropping her own words to a fierce whisper as she glanced at the tent flap—beyond which Mendez was almost certainly trying to eavesdrop.

“I would have had at least six minutes to get to shore before the system overheated,” she insisted.

“After you threw the explosive stuff onto the fire,” Adam filled in flatly.

“In a sealed tin!” Ellie protested, still working to keep her volume down. “I have calculated it would take at least four minutes at the standard ambient temperature of an idling steam boiler to melt.”

Adam leaned against the tent post tiredly.

“And why were you planning to blow up a boat, Princess?” he asked patiently.

“To create a distraction, of course! I needed to talk to you,” she replied.

“Well, here I am,” Adam said, spreading his arms.

Ellie eyed him skeptically.

“How are you here?” she demanded, and then brightened. “Did you overcome Mr. Dawson and tie him up in his tent?”

“I just asked,” Adam replied. “Jacobs didn’t tell anybody I couldn’t, so they let me in. Apparently, he doesn’t see the two of us talking to each other as any kind of threat. Probably because he’s got this camp surrounded by a dozen or so guys with guns, and all I’ve got is a match tin.”

Ellie narrowed her eyes thoughtfully.

“A match tin, did you say?” she prompted.

“No,” Adam countered flatly. “Don’t even think about it.”

He dropped down into the chair by the empty desk and rested his head in his hands.

“So what’d you want to talk about?” he asked.

Ellie’s stomach sank. She knew what she should be talking about.

“How did things go with Dawson?” she asked instead.

“He stood around and complained while I fixed his route,” Adam replied. “Presumably, they’ll want me to keep doing it until they find whatever’s at the end of that map.”

“Yes, I see,” Ellie said.

She sat down on the edge of the cot. Though only a few feet of packed earth separated them, it felt like miles.

“You should escape,” she declared.

Adam stiffened in his chair. He raised his head to glare at her.

“Excuse me?” he demanded angrily.

Ellie lifted her chin, refusing to flinch.

“You should slip away as soon as you have a chance. You can simply disappear. You’re entirely capable of it.”

“And what will you be doing while I’m disappearing?” Adam shot back darkly.

“I’ll figure something out,” Ellie asserted with a wave of her hand.

She had meant for it to sound confident. It didn’t.

“You really think I’d do that?” Adam retorted fiercely. “You really think I’d run off and leave you here with a guy who’s threatening to cut you to pieces?”

“No,” Ellie admitted glumly. “I don’t. But it would have been the reasonable thing to do.”

“I guess it’s a good thing for you that I’m unreasonable, then.”

“Honorable,” she returned automatically. She closed her eyes for a moment against a well of emotion that rose up inside of her. “The word you are looking for is honorable.”

Adam went quiet. She could still feel the weight of his gaze through the near-darkness.

Ellie took a breath.

“If I had trusted you with the entirety of the map from the beginning, we would have been here days ago,” she spilled out. “We might have found the arch and moved on before Dawson and Jacobs ever arrived.”

Adam rubbed his face. “Yeah, well… if I’d hazarded more of an educated guess about where the rest of your landmarks might be once I did have the whole thing, I might’ve saved us the trouble anyway.”

“I suppose Dawson and Jacobs would simply have caught us in the city, then,” Ellie mused awkwardly.

“I dunno. That guy Dawson is godawful at reading a map,” Adam returned dryly.

A smile pulled at her lips involuntarily at this hint of his old humor—and then died fairly quickly.

“I… owe you an apology for the rest of it as well,” Ellie said carefully.

Adam’s silence had weight. Ellie forced herself to push past it, knowing that it was the right thing to do.

“There might have been some sense to it in the beginning—concealing my name,” she continued. “Before I really knew who you were. I should have corrected it long before now… along with everything else.”

“Everything else?” Adam echoed a little dangerously.

“I stole that map,” Ellie blurted out. “The circumstances were admittedly unusual, and I told myself I was only really borrowing it… but borrowing something without telling anyone about it is stealing. Dawson and Jacobs are thieves as well,” she hurried to add. “Jacobs was trying to purchase the map and the medallion off my supervisor, Mr. Henbury, who had absolutely no right to sell them. When Mr. Henbury no longer had the items to sell, Jacobs tried to throw him through a door.”

She forced herself to say the rest.

“But I haven’t any more right to it than they do. I took it with me because I knew it shouldn’t belong to them, but I could quite easily have turned it over to a reputable authority. I kept it for myself, and I was far from transparent about that with you when we agreed to undertake this expedition together. I was afraid if I told you the truth about where the map had come from, you’d decide the whole business was more trouble than it was worth.”

“Princess… you fell on me from a balcony with a gag on,” Adam pointed out. “I’m pretty sure I knew how much trouble I was getting into.”

“You helped me,” Ellie countered firmly. “You came to my aid, and I repaid you with falsehoods. You deserved better than that.”

She could see his shrug through the gloom.

“You wanted to follow your map. I had an opening in my calendar. Don’t see that you owe me much for that,” he replied flatly.

The reply stung, even as it offered Ellie a convenient way out. She could accept it, and the matter would be settled. They were more or less strangers—their relationship one of convenience. What else should it be?

“No,” she burst out roughly. “You protected me from Jacobs. You took a chance on my map. You—you lost your boat, and you never once made me feel like it was my fault. You treated me like an equal partner—like… like a colleague when you were the one with all the knowledge of how to get where we were going, and all I brought to the table was… well, a respectable knowledge of current scholarship on Mesoamerican civilizations… but you hardly required that. Perhaps I was simply an opening in your calendar, but you have been a very great deal more than that to me.”

Ellie uttered the words in the same low tones that she had used since Adam had entered. They still seemed to ring in the silence of the tent in a manner that left her feeling terribly exposed.

“The least I could have done in return was grant you the truth,” she finished.

“It would’ve been nice to know who I was really traveling with,” Adam finally said. His voice carried to her softly through the shadows that cloaked them.

There was nothing of accusation in his voice. What Ellie heard there sounded more like hurt.

She winced against it, knowing what must come next.

“Yes. Well. About that…” she began awkwardly.

Adam slumped back in his chair.

“Awww hell,” he said. “What is it? You’re actually an escaped felon? You’ve got a trigger-happy maharajah for a boyfriend?”

“Not exactly,” Ellie returned carefully. “It is rather that I am… er… related, in a manner of speaking… to Mr… ah, Fairfax. I mean… Neil. I’m related to Neil.”

Adam’s head shot up with alarm.

“You’re what?” He blinked as his focus sharpened. “Ellie… Eleanora. Fairfax’s sister is an Eleanora. But your name is Mallory!” He shook his head. “Except Fairfax’s dad passed when he was a kid. His mother remarried. Some nice insurance clerk… Daniel?”

“David,” Ellie corrected him weakly as she forced a grimace into an approximation of a smile. “David Mallory.”

“Your dad,” Adam filled in bluntly. “Because Fairfax is your brother.”

“Technically my stepbrother,” she hedged in return.

Adam stared at her, paling.

“Because you’re Peanut,” he said numbly. “You’re Fairfax’s Peanut.”

Ellie’s irritation flared.

“I will not endorse that wretched nickname,” she pronounced.

“You’re Fairfax’s Peanut,” Adam repeated stubbornly. His expression shifted to one of deeper dawning horror. “And I’ve ruined you.”

Ellie’s jaw dropped. She snapped it closed again.

“You most certainly have not!” she protested.

Adam pushed to his feet, agitation animating his frame.

“We’ve been alone in the bush together for a week. You think anybody is going to believe I kept my hands off you?” He laughed a little madly as he pushed his hands through his hair. “I mean, for all anybody knows we might’ve been—” He caught himself, choking back the words as he flashed Ellie an uncomfortable look. “Just… things. Extremely inappropriate things.”

A bolt of indignation straightened Ellie’s spine.

“I am not ignorant of the conditions required for sexual congress, Mr. Bates.”

Adam made a strangled noise, and then dropped back into his chair, lowering his head. He raised it a moment later, looking stricken.

“We’re gonna have to get married,” he declared.

Panic drove Ellie to her feet as the response spilled out of her.

“Absolutely not!”

Adam jabbed a finger at her.

“Word of this gets back to London, what do you think is going to happen?” he demanded.

“Maybe word of it doesn’t need to get back to anyone,” Ellie suggested uneasily.

“So—what? We just lie to everybody for the rest of our lives? One of my best friends? Your brother?” he emphasized.

Ellie ground her teeth against the conundrum.

A falsehood would certainly be easier. They were on the other side of the world. The chances that anyone would ever find out about it were practically nonexistent… as long as she didn’t mind living a lie for the rest of her life, and obligating Adam to do the same.

She let out a growl of frustration and fell back onto the cot, sprawling out her arms. She stared up at the blank canvas roof of the tent.

“I don’t want to be married,” Ellie protested. “To anybody.”

There was an alarming wobble to the words.

“I’m not exactly crazy about the idea myself,” Adam retorted.

His reply stung… and then a less logical response bubbled up inside of her. A laugh slipped out of her, edged with hysteria.

She heard Adam shift across from her. The cot jolted as he sat down on the ground beside her and leaned back against the frame.

A head of unruly sun-stained hair rested by her right hand. It would be the simplest thing for Ellie to reach out and run her fingers through it.

The impulse was wildly inappropriate. Ellie resisted it. After all, she had no reason to think it would be welcome. Instead, she continued to stare up at the ceiling as the sounds of the camp filtered softly through to where they sat. The low conversation of the men by the campfires mingled with the snorting and shuffling of the mules in their pen.

“I swear I didn’t know,” Ellie quietly confessed. “Not until you told the story about the emu when we were on the boat.”

“I thought you were worried about the bird,” Adam replied.

“If I had just told you then, you would certainly have made us turn back,” she said. “All of this could have been avoided.”

“Maybe,” Adam agreed. “We would’ve missed out on a lot of fun, though.”

“Fun?” Ellie sat up and looked down at him. “Nearly going over a waterfall was fun?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it,” he retorted as he glanced up at her with a wicked glint in his eyes.

She flopped back down and shook her head at the ceiling. “You’re impossible.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is right,” he countered.

Ellie didn’t reply. For a moment, she let herself simply be, soaking up the rumble of laughter, the soft rush of water from outside the tent, and the easy presence of Adam leaning beside her.

She took a breath as she steeled herself for what must come next.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way. You’re a very nice person—” she began.

“I’m a what?” Adam sounded offended.

“…But surely there must be some way out of our situation that doesn’t involve legally binding ourselves together for life!” Ellie finished.

She felt his sigh through the frame of the cot.

“I am a suffragist!” she continued. “I have been arrested. I went to university, for goodness’s sake! It’s not as though I have any reputation worth speaking of.”

“This is different, and you know it,” he replied. “Look—I’m the last guy to lecture someone on sexual mores—”

“Are you?” Ellie asked, suddenly curious.

“But this isn’t about you,” he pressed on, deliberately avoiding her question. “It’s about everybody else. Your dad. Your stepmom. Your brother. I know how the world treats people who don’t follow the rules. It’s why I got out. They don’t just go after you. They punish everyone you care about like it’s contagious.”

He was right, and Ellie knew it. She hated that she knew it, but that didn’t make it any less true. Raising a spinster was one thing, but a whore…

Ellie perseverated over it in grim silence until Adam finally spoke again.

“Why didn’t you fix it?” he asked.

The words were unusually tentative.

“I mean the… things you hadn’t been completely honest about,” he added awkwardly. “Once you realized I wasn’t the kind of guy who’d just leave you in the wilderness over them.” He frowned and turned toward her, resting his arm on the cot. “You did realize I wasn’t the kind of guy who’d leave you in the wilderness, right?”

“Of course I did,” Ellie replied. She kept her gaze on the ceiling. It was easier than looking at him.

He turned away again. “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

Ellie’s heart clenched inside her chest. She came upright and swung her legs over the side of the cot so that she sat beside him, albeit at different levels.

“Ask the question,” she ordered gently.

He took a breath as though gathering himself before he answered.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He swallowed, obviously uncomfortable. “You knew I wouldn’t ditch you in the swamp over it, and you keep saying you felt like you owed me, so…”

There were things he wasn’t saying. Somehow Ellie sensed that those things were what really mattered—and that they were fragile. That if she answered wrong, something desperately important might simply break.

There was only one way to respond to that. She had to tell the truth.

“I didn’t want the way you looked at me to change,” she quietly confessed.

Adam didn’t move… and yet it still seemed as though the air of the tent had shifted.

“How did I look at you?”

His voice was soft and deep. It carried to her through the darkness as though it could’ve crossed a hundred times that distance, even at a murmur.

Ellie let the answer fall from her lips, even as her voice broke a bit on the words.

“Like I was your friend.”

Birds called softly through the night air. Footsteps crunched beyond the walls of the tent, blending with the crackling of a campfire. Someone laughed a little distance away.

“Ah hell, Princess,” Adam replied softly.

The cot jolted again as he moved. He rose from the floor, and then plopped down beside the place where she sat. The springs creaked under his weight.

His arm came around her. Ellie let it. She leaned into his side, and her head fell to his shoulder.

His chin came down to rest on her hair.

Emotions tripped and thundered inside of her… and then stilled. A warm, solid sense of calm moved through her. It was all wrapped up in the steady rhythm of Adam’s breath, which Ellie could feel rising and falling through the place where her cheek rested against his chest.

“I’ll find us a way out of this,” Adam declared. “I’ll need to get my hands on a knife—it’d be nuts to try to slip away without one—but I can work on that.”

“Bates, there are a lot of armed men running about,” Ellie cautioned.

“I’ve gotten out of worse scrapes before.”

“Have you?” she pressed.

“Er… maybe not, but it can’t be that different. It’s all about waiting for the right opportunity and then improvising.”

Adam’s cheerful reply sparked a flash of concern.

“What about a plan?” Ellie countered urgently.

“Sure,” Adam agreed with a shrug. “We can make one of those too.”

The way he said it gave Ellie the distinct impression that Adam’s regard for plans fell significantly short of her own… but it was not his alarming faith in his own improvisational skills that made her go quietly still under the weight of his arm.

“What is it?” Adam asked, sensing the change.

Ellie hesitated.

“Princess,” Adam pressed warningly.

“I’m not sure that we should go,” Ellie blurted in reply. The rest of it spilled out of her. “I just keep thinking of that terrible rubble in the cave on the way here. If we run, there will be no one to stop Dawson and Jacobs from doing exactly the same thing to whatever is at the end of that map. When I think of how much might be lost…” She looked up to meet his eyes. “But it’s madness. Even if we did stay, how could we possibly expect to stop them? There’s just the two of us.”

Adam went quiet beside her.

“Staying would be dangerous,” he finally said.

“More dangerous than running off into the bush with only a machete for equipment?” she retorted.

“Yeah,” Adam replied flatly.

Ellie’s heart sank.

“Definitely life threatening,” he added.

His tone made her look back up again. His eyes glinted dangerously at her in the near darkness.

“Probably incredibly stupid,” he said.

His mouth split into a grin.

Ellie’s nerves jolted uneasily in response, but the feeling was mingled through with something warmer… something that felt like hope.

“Sounds like my cup of tea,” he finished.

Her own smile rose in answer, beaming out through the gloom of the tent.

Adam’s expression grew serious again.

“The only part I don’t like about it is that there’s a guy out in that camp who’s made it clear he’s got no problem cutting you up if he thinks we aren’t playing along,” he cautioned.

“Then we’ll play along,” she concluded. “Trying to lead them astray wouldn’t work anyway. Jacobs will be watching for that. I have an… uncomfortable feeling that he has an uncanny ability to see through a deception.”

Ellie’s resolve firmed.

“We will simply have to find a way to stop them once we have reached the city,” she determined.

“You and me,” Adam replied. “Against ten guys with guns. A murderous bastard with an infallible nose for lies.”

“An imminent monsoon,” Ellie added, barely fighting back a giggle.

“And one really sweaty professor,” Adam added wryly.

The giggle burst out. Ellie clamped her hand over her mouth to contain it, conscious of the men just outside the tent.

“No problem,” Adam whispered confidently.

Ellie rose from the cot and brushed off her trousers.

“I shall start making a plan,” she declared.

Adam rose as well.

“You do that.” His expression shifted, going over a bit cautious. “Just… promise you won’t try to blow anything up without checking with me first.”

Ellie frowned.

“What if the circumstances are such that an explosion is very clearly called for?” she demanded.

“Maybe… try to plan your way around any circumstances like that?” Adam suggested.

Ellie considered it.

“I suppose that is fair,” she allowed.

She looked up at his face. It was familiar even through the deep shadows, and at the sight of it, something in her chest started to glow warmly.

Without further warning, the tent flap flew back. Ellie startled as Mendez stuck his head inside with a lantern in his hand.

“Oye—you!” he said, waving a hand at Adam. “Boss had them rig a hammock for you.”

Adam paused at the threshold to glance back at Ellie. The look he gave her made the hairs on her arms tingle.

“Try to get some sleep, Princess,” he said.

“You as well, Mr. Bates,” Ellie returned evenly.

And then he was gone.