Page 88 of No Escape

“What does it mean?” Vittoria asked me.

“I have no idea.”

“Look,” Vittoria said, pointing at the map edges. “There’s another grid on the map.”

I bent down to look where she’d pointed. Sure enough, letters ran across the top of a small grid with numbers along the side.

Vittoria measured from my finger on the map to the grid. “Pompeii is at H15. I think that confirms our deduction. Now, we need to figure how Pompeii figures into this.”

“Who can find me a map of Pompeii?” I called out.

“Already ahead of you,” Stefan said running out of the room and presumably back to the card catalog. After a moment, he shouted, “See if you can find map 930M88-1.”

Winston, Clarissa, and Alessa began searching the tubes, while Vittoria and I searched through the pull-out map drawers.

“Got it,” Alessa shouted a few minutes later, sneezing as she pulled out a tube. “Wow, it’s dusty and heavy.”

Clarissa pointed to one end of the tube. “That’s because there is a weight attached to the end of the tube. Team, I think we’ve found our next clue.”

Chapter Forty-One

Gio

“Yes!” Alessa exclaimed, pulling the deep-purple weight with the number eight off the tube and handing it to me. “We did it!”

There were a few whoops as I handed it off to Winston, urging him and Father Armando to take it to the scale and see if they could get the scales to even out. Then I gave the tube back to Alessa to return it from where she’d got it.

“Shouldn’t we at least look at the map in case there’s another clue there?” she asked.

“Good point,” I said. I carefully slid the map out of the tube. In addition to the map of Pompeii, which I noted was based upon the archaeological record of 2015, there was an unsealed white envelope.

“I just hope it isn’t another riddle,” Stefan said sighing. “I’m pretty much done with that.”

I opened the envelope and pulled out a card written in English on one side and Italian on the other. “No such luck, Stefan,” I said before reading it aloud. “Not in the shade, but under the light / Balance the scale to come out right.”

“I think this means we’re getting close,” Alessa said. “It seems to be telling us to use the weights now.” She dashed out of the room with the riddle still in her hand.

“Let’s go check how Father Armando and Winston are doing,” Stefan said, walking to the threshold of the map room, then stopping, switching to Italian. “Aren’t you coming, Gio?”

“I guess so. But something’s telling me this has been too easy.”

“Too easy?” Stefan said in disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “It’s just a feeling.”

“Well, we still have twenty-five minutes if we run into any problems. Come on.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

I followed him into the room where everyone was working on the scales. I peeked over Father Armando’s shoulder. He and Winston had put the nine, seven, five, and two weights on the left and four, four, six, and eight weights on the right. The scale lifted slightly. Winston put the last weights on, but after a moment, the left end sank back down again.

“It’s close, but we need to swap a weight to make it balance,” Winston said.

“Try swapping a four-pound weight for a five-pound one,” Clarissa suggested.

Winston switched it around, but now the scale tipped to the right. More suggestions came as they worked it, but no matter how many combinations they did, they couldn’t get it to balance evenly.

“We’re missing a weight,” Winston said, sitting down on the couch and running his hand through his hair in frustration. “That must be it, because we’re so close.”

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