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They would need to skirt it. He picked a side and tugged Ellie with him. He kept his eyes on their goal—the darkly promising trees that rose on the far side of the seats, rustling with the uneasy wind.
A dark silhouette rose from behind the time-stained stones. Jacobs stepped into view and leveled his rifle neatly at Adam.
“Best step back down now,” he ordered calmly.
Adam whirled to see Mendez, Pickett, Buller, and Price burst from the tangled growth of the ball court. The four guards quickly took up positions around the amphitheater, blocking any other possible route of escape.
Dawson jogged out a few minutes later, red-faced and breathing heavily. He carried a lantern. The light of it illuminated just how much trouble Adam and Ellie were in.
Adam tried to calculate the odds of getting both himself and Ellie out of this without getting shot.
They weren’t good.
Hands raised, Adam stepped back down to the ring of ground that encircled the sinkhole. Ellie inched right up to the edge of the pit as though trying to put as much distance between herself and Jacobs as she could.
Adam considered joining her there… and immediately felt dizzy. He reminded himself that it was dark. The hole might not even be all that deep.
His guts remained unconvinced.
Ellie’s boot scraped against a few pebbles and tipped them over the edge. Three seconds later, Adam heard the soft plonk of a splash.
An idea snapped into place inside his mind.
It was a very, very bad idea.
“Excellent work, Mr. Jacobs,” Dawson called out, still huffing with exertion. “Now perhaps we might take a moment… Come to some sort of… agreement…”
“Take a breath,” Adam said quietly.
“Why?” Ellie demanded, startling.
“Because I’m about to do something stupid.”
“Shoot them,” Jacobs ordered.
Adam yanked Ellie into his arms and threw himself backwards—over the edge and into the pit.
They plummeted through a terrifying darkness as gunshots cracked overhead. Then Adam hit cold water with a painful, skin-stinging slap.
He let it take him, still clutching Ellie to his chest. Their momentum broke, gentling to a drift just as his back came up against rubble. Adam shifted, circling one arm around Ellie’s waist as he used the other to reorient himself in the water. He pushed his boots against the tumbling, uneven ground and thrust himself up to the surface.
They broke into the air. The darkness around them was nearly complete. Adam could barely make out the shape of Ellie’s face as she gasped in a breath and then shoved back from him, water streaking down from the plastered locks of her hair.
He made a hurried study of their surroundings—or what he could see of them in the thickly shadowed gloom. Stone walls rose in a slick, concave curve roughly twenty feet overhead to the gap that had made up the center of the amphitheater. The opening framed a neat circle of roiling, lightning-haunted clouds.
It was a cenote, Adam thought to himself as he recognized the pattern. He had thrown them into a cenote—a natural well created by the long-ago disintegration of some ancient cave.
Lantern light spilled into the opening, illuminating the slick, glistening sides of the well.
Jacobs looked down at them from the edge.
“Finish them off,” he ordered.
Pickett appeared, his pale eyes bulging down at them. He was joined by Buller and Price a moment later.
“Get ready,” Adam ordered Ellie urgently—and then shoved her into the water.
He dove with her, pushing her down even as she struggled against him. He pulled with his free arm, dragging them deeper as low, muffled drumbeats thrummed against his ears—the impact of gunshots distorted by the water.
