WE TUMBLED DOWN a ramp and landed in a tangle of arms and legs.

Everyone lay still, too overwhelmed to move. My thoughts were firing in short jagged clips.

We’re alive. Unharmed. The shooter can’t follow.

Slowly, my panting subsided and my pulse decelerated. Disengaging myself from the others, I rose and looked around.

The current chamber was circular, the size of a classroom. A waterfall poured from a hole in the roof to a pool in the center of the floor. I guessed the pool’s diameter and depth at about ten feet each. The water swirled, eventually draining through a chute at the bottom.

The effect was beautiful, like a graceful garden fountain. The rest of the room was empty.

“This must be ‘the dark chamber’s sluice,’” I said. “We made it!”

My gaze scoured the walls, snagged on a platform jutting from the rock. Roughly a yard square, the platform held nothing. Deep gouges marred its otherwise smooth stone surface.

My shoulders slumped in dismay.

Something heavy had once rested there.

Like a chest.

No.

“What’s that gibberish?” Shelton pointed to black letters chiseled into the wall directly above the platform.

“Another riddle?” I said. “But that’s definitely not English.”

The characters were recognizable, but I couldn’t place the language. Beside the lettering was the now-familiar symbol. Bonny’s signature bent cross.

My heart sank into my socks.

She took it. The treasure isn’t here.

“No!” Hi slapped his forehead. “Tell me this isn’t where the treasure’s supposed to be. Please.”

I couldn’t meet his eye.

“It’s gone?” Shelton wailed. “How? Nobody’s been in here before us! Those tunnels would’ve been front-page news. And the skybridge! That never came down until tonight!”

I shook my head. I couldn’t agree more.

Then the pieces fell together. I’d been a fool.

Hi must’ve read my expression.

“What?”

“They moved it.”

“Who?”

“Anne Bonny. Her people.” I punched the air in frustration. “Why didn’t I think of this before?”

Shelton waved his arms. “Explain! Right now!”

“Bonny’s crew busted her out of the dungeon, right?”

“Yep,” Shelton said. “We crawled down that god-awful hole ourselves.”

“She must’ve worried the Brits would discover her escape route.”

“But they didn’t,” Hi argued. “If they had, everyone would know about these tunnels. Her crew must have resealed the dungeon like we found it.”

“But Bonny couldn’t be sure that would work,” I said. “She had to worry that the tunnels could be compromised.”

Hi and Shelton groaned.

“So she and her crew removed the treasure themselves,” Hi said, “reset the booby traps, and took off. Mother—”

“Come on!” Ben’s bellow echoed loudly in the small space. “Why can’t we catch one stinking break!”

My eyebrows rocketed up in surprise. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?” Ben spread his hands. “Look around, Victoria! There’s no way out of here!”

I spun a three-sixty. Ben was right.

No doors, no tunnels, no cracks, no fissures. We were stuck in a subterranean aerie with no outlet.

“So no treasure?” Hi whined. “I thought we had it!”

“It’s gone,” I said. “Bonny moved it somewhere else.”

Hi sat and dropped his head between his knees. Shelton slumped beside him and grabbed one ear.

Ben started tapping the walls, searching for an exit. Clueless what else to do, I removed the treasure map and my pen. As Ben circled the room, I copied the foreign words from the wall onto the back of the map.

Ben and I finished at the same time.

“Nothing,” he said. “The only way out is how we came in.”

“That won’t work,” I said.

“Maybe the waterfall?” Ben levered himself up on the empty platform and stepped toward the wall.

Click.

Ben froze. Pulled his foot back. Looked down at the platform. Swore.

Rumble. Pop! Pop!

Shelton and Hi sprang to their feet.

“It’s a pressure switch!” Ben shouted. “I tripped it!”

Somewhere close, water gurgled, like a giant flushing toilet.

The chamber shook, then went deathly still.

“I think we might—”

“Look!” Hi pointed frantically at the ramp we’d tumbled down moments before.

An enormous boulder now blocked the opening.

“Oh no!” Ben gestured at the roof.

A sluice gate opened overhead. The waterfall surged.

The room began to flood.

Fast.