Bendia Bones walked around the central signpost in the middle of the fountain. She wasn't quite sure how to proceed. She wondered if there was some kind of secret door that opened when you pushed on the thing.

It wouldn't be the first time she ha found such a device. The ancient world loved their secret passages and traps that were good enough to sit for centuries waiting on someone to trigger them.

She looked around. She didn't want the local police to get in her way. They might not like a woman fiddling with a local artifact. If she was arrested, being foreign would just add to her troubles.

And she couldn't expect Mr. Biles to bail her out. Maybe he would send someone to find out where the door was. Breaking her out of prison seemed a little much to ask.

If she knew who her enemies were in the field, she might be able to trade with them for temporary help. She doubted they would let her keep the artifact once she found it. A double cross would always be the next step as far as some of the people she dealt with went.

And that was a desperation move in her opinion. Holding someone at gun point to get their help would be too much trouble in her opinion. It was better to let them think they had dropped her so she could follow and hope to swoop down and take the artifact from them before they could escape.

She examined the sign again from the edge of the fountain. She wondered if the builders had placed the door inside the fountain itself. How did she test that idea?

She searched the bricks with her hands, looking for a secret switch, or a lever of some kind. She grimaced when she didn't find anything. She would have to touch the sign to see if it moved, and the floor with it's shallow sheet of water at the bottom of it.

If she couldn't find anything, she might have located a signpost, but not the one she needed.

How much time did she have to search the fountain without someone telling her to stop?

She decided the best thing she could do was a quick lean over and try to push the sign in different directions with the hope of not being seen. If she couldn't move it, she might have to look at the network of signs again to find some other options. And the longer she was on the move, the harder she would be to pin down.

She doubted she could keep hiding in the graveyard while she was looking. Eventually someone was going to find out her place, and then it wouldn't be safe to use any more.

She dreaded another gun battle while just doing her job.

Bendia leaned over the fountain wall and pushed on the signpost. Nothing happened. She grabbed it with both hands and twisted. The stone pillar refused to move. She frowned.

A flash blinded her for a second. She stepped back. Something on the sign had reflected the sun into her face. She blinked as she considered her surroundings. Why was there a small mirror hidden on the top of an ancient sign in the middle of the desert?

What she supposed to do?

She decided to walk to the other side of the sign and see if there was a light spot on the buildings, or ground. She might have been blocking the light without realizing it.

This might be the key she had been looking for to solve her problemt

A light spot did appear. It moved in a line as the sun moved in the sky above. Was she supposed to be at the fountain at a certain time? That would fit in with the hidden aspects of things. You could only see where the light touched at certain times. She imagined that when the sun was done, the bright spot would vanish until dawn of the new day.

Did she have time to watch the light in the morning?

The light had moved in a straight line. She could at least mark that. Then she could check along its length for the door she needed. She had a feeling that it wasn't going to be on the other side of the buildings surrounding the dry fountain. It had to be somewhere in the courtyard in line with the building.

She sat down and considered the courtyard between her and the building of clay brick in front of her.

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She doubted the building was the key to her problem. The light stayed below the second floor, chased across the bricks away from her, and didn't stop moving as the sun advanced. Maybe she should look at the courtyard bricks in line with the sun beam.

As the sun passed overhead, another glint attracted her attention. It pointed back to her. She stood and walked away from the fountain at an angle. The second spot hit a hole in the fountain wall, and passed through a small tunnel to light up a rock on the other side of the fountain. She had thought it was a random rock, but it looked more like a chair that had been roughly carved out of the stone.

Ancient letters marked the base of the chair. And the light shined on one of the raised symbols. She wondered if this was what she was looking for in the courtyard. If she was wrong, she would have to figure out a way to get her notes and look at them again. This had to be the spot she wanted.

She walked over and examined the raised letters. She knelt and looked at the letter marked by the sun. Should she try to open the thing with the little bit she had on her person? That would be acting too rashly in her opinion. She needed at least some water, and some snacks, so she could keep her energy up while she tried to figure out her next step.

She had a headstart over her competition. She could assemble some gear and act like she was on a small expedition in the dark. She didn't even have a compass to keep from being lost in the underground.

She hated to waste time when she was so close, but she could take the rest of the day to assemble what she needed. Then she could go in and look around for whatever she wanted to find. As long as no one caught up with her, she should be safe once she was off the streets.

How far behind her were the other forces in the field? Did she really have that much time to invest in equipment? She decided she had to do it because if she was right, she wouldn't be back to the surface for hours, maybe days.

And when she got back to the surface, she would have to leave the country with her prize as soon as she could. After that it would be Mister Biles's problem.

And she decided that she would be fine with that.

She marked the courtyard in her memory. She could find her way back when she was done with her shopping. She wondered what she should bring with her. She needed the bare necessities. She didn't have time to bring a lot of weight along while she was trying to explore and map out the best route to her goal and back to the door she had found.

She didn't want to be lost forever underground with no way to get back to the surface, and no way for any ally to find her.

Once she was ready to go, she could come back and make sure that the raised letter she had found really opened a door to the underground. She might as well do it tonight. The evening darkness should conceal what she was doing long enough for her to figure a way to open the door and enter.

She hoped she was doing the right thing being silent about the possibility of being at the end. Someone had been tipping off the people she had run into. She didn't know that for a fact, but she believed it. Only the people Mister Biles talked to could have passed information along to try to stop her.

As long as he didn't know where to find her, neither would her enemies.

He had been a good ally in the years she had been treasure hunting, but someone knew what was going on. It didn't have to be Mister Biles personally. One of his people could have been bought and asked her itinerary. Naturally they would pass the information on to their side employers.

It wouldn't be the first time one of her searches had been leaked. Once, the government had told some arms dealers so they would try to stop her from digging around some facility. She had to leak the presence of the place in the middle of a small town, and show people what was being researched.

This could be more of the same.

Bendia walked away from the signpost. It had stood there for centuries. It would probably still be standing there the few hours she needed to get ready to explore the underground. Once she had the artifact, she could plan some way to leave the country.

Once she was ready, she had to go full bore into the underground and hope she could find what she was looking for. She might have done all this work, only to find someone had beat her to the prize and taken it away.

Ancient grave robbers had picked more than one tomb clean before any archaeologist could reach the scene and catalogue anything. She admitted that most early archaeologists were scholarly grave robbers themselves, no matter how they justified it.

And she was following in their footprints without any way to defend her actions other than she was going to give her find back to the local scientific community after she was sure she had found what she was looking for.

She just had to keep it out of the hands of the people following her around.

She gathered what she thought she would need and put the things in her backpack. She slung the bag over her shoulders as she went back to the courtyard. Everything looked the same. So she should be able to poke around and then move on if she was right. If she was wrong, she would have to reevaluate her research.

She was fine with that if that's what had to happen. Nobody was right a hundred percent of the time.

She waited for the sun to go down before she tried to figure out what the piece on the altar meant. She didn't want a local to try to stop her while she was trying to figure out the secret lock and then enter the world under the desert city.

She scanned the street before touching the carving. It twisted under her probing fingers. She smiled.

It was time to get to work.