Page 148 of The Lost Guardian

Realization caught inside him like a match to kindling.

Of course!

“It’s Saturn!” Santiago called out.

“Saturn?” Torres repeated doubtfully.

Santiago nodded furiously. “The deliverer of celestial fire. The planet with the longest cycle of recurrence. It was how the ancients tracked the passage of time.”

He looked directly at Ali. “And what is the passage of time associated with?”

She frowned at him, her face wan and gray.

“Growth?” she guessed weakly. “Aging?” Then her eyes grew wide. “Death…”

Santiago grinned at her.

“Death,” she repeated, more confident now.

“Then isn’t that precisely the path we should avoid?” Leo asked.

Santiago shook his head.

“The dead are precisely who we’re looking for,” he responded.

And then launched himself toward the chasm.

51

Nothing but empty air stretched beneath Santiago’s body. He watched himself die again and again.

He imagined himself slipping off the platform and endlessly falling to the center of the earth. He saw himself overshooting the rope entirely, grasping and missing and falling and falling again. Or discovering that he had been mistaken, that he had chosen the wrong path, and that the stone would immediately give out from under him.

And falling.

The falling was the persistent theme in his intrusive imaginings.

Falling and screaming.

The moment couldn’t have lasted more than a fraction of a second, but Santiago had always been a quick thinker. The deathly images his brain conjured felt like they stretched on for eternities.

When his hand curled around the smooth rope and his right foot landed on the stone step, he was sure that he had aged at least a decade.

The fire platform held.

Santiago spun on the stone, the rope taking him in an arc widthwise across the room, though not transporting him much closer to the exit.

“Well done, Sr. Rios!” he heard Torres remark from a distance. “But you are still far from the other side. Do continue, won’t you?”

“You try doing this,” Santiago grumbled under his breath.

From his new vantage point, he could see the trajectory of the spinning ropes, moving in narrow, elliptical orbits, overlapping in some points like a Venn diagram. Santiago understood.

He needed to find the correct platform in the next section of the obstacle and spring forward at the right time to cross the divide. It was like a step bridge, with moving rather than stagnant steps. Worse, however, was that the platforms did not stay at the same level as they spun. The ropes lifted and lowered, making it hard to accurately view each image on the stone. Santiago crouched, then stood on his tiptoes periodically, trying to document each symbol.

“Have I mentioned that I am in a hurry?” Torres barked.

“Why are you in a hurry?” Ali huffed. “You don’t even believe in the curse we’re actually racing against.”