Ethan sketched a map of the house as he and Olivia explored. It was challenging given the blind angles and inconsistencies between floors, but he quickly discovered that he had a head for translating three-dimensional space into two-dimensional maps. Even Olivia commented on his talent.

  “Maybe you’re an architect,” she said, leaned over his shoulder to get a look at his amazingly clean sketch. He’d only had to erase and redraw a few sections so far.

  He paused in filling in a gap between rooms to show the negative space. “Maybe. But if I was, you’d think this place would make more sense to me. I can capture it on paper, but I have no idea how a building like this could possibly be structurally sound.”

  “Let’s just hope it actually is.” Olivia bit her lower lip at that and he regretted adding one more concern to her list.

  Olivia struck him as the sort of person who didn’t let go of worries very easily; she catalogued them and held them close, as if documenting her fears somehow stripped them of their power. It wasn’t the worst strategy, he supposed. His attempt to map out the house came from a similar place. He wanted to have a complete sense of the place, where all the exits were, the hidden corners. Where would be a good place to hide and where was the closest escape from any given point? Although he remembered next to nothing about himself or his life, he knew intuitively that he was the type of person who never goofed off when the flight attendants were giving their safety lesson on the plane. He searched for an noted the nearest exit and even mentally mapped out a plan for escape should the worst come to pass. He didn’t think he was anxious about everything, but it seemed that having control over his space was high on his list of needs.

  Sighing, Olivia sat down on the chair beside him. “I keep expecting to find a trap door or a secret room somewhere.”

  “This definitely seems like the type of place to have them,” he agreed, looking at the strange angles in his map and noticing all the places where there would be room for a hidden room. He’d actually found the sketchbook and pencils in his own room, so he had known even before he started drawing that he would know how to use them. “But they’re probably pretty hard to find.”

  “We’ve been to every floor and opened every door—that we could find, at least.”

  She glanced out the window. It was about noon now and they’d stopped for a light lunch while Ethan put the final touches on his map. Jade had wandered down while they were eating dressed in a bikini and draped in a garish towel, grabbing a few bites for herself before announcing that she was heading for the beach. She was wearing sunglasses already, but it was obvious by the way her lip curled at some of the food they were eating that she was still feeling the effects of the wine from the night before. Waving over her shoulder as she disappeared through the sliding glass door, she invited, “Join me later if you get tired of working so hard.” Olivia and Ethan had exchanged a glance and simply gotten back to their work.

  Olivia sighed again. “Should we start over at the top and work our way down again, looking for secret rooms along the way?”

  Considering this, Ethan tapped the end of his pencil against his lips. “Honestly, the room I’m most curious about is the library. There’s something strange about it. I think we should concentrate our attention there.”

  She nodded. “Sounds good to me.” Olivia was amazingly agreeable and easy to work with. Ethan appreciated that she didn’t second guess everything he said and she was sharp enough to catch things he missed as well. They made a good team.

  “How do you want to tackle this?” she asked when they returned to the library.

  The room itself felt like a contradiction with the garden in the middle and the skylight, it seemed like a design that would inevitably do damage to the books on the shelves around the perimeter, but the spines were surprisingly dry when he brushed his fingers over them. Oblong and asymmetrical, there was not obvious beginning or end to the room, so it made it difficult to choose a place to start.

  “No idea,” he admitted with a shrug. “I think we just look around and see what we find.”

  Olivia frowned, but nodded, picking a corner and starting to scan the books on the shelves. He did the same, realizing that either he wasn’t much of a reader or these were all pretty obscure books because he didn’t recognize a single title. He flipped through a few of them just to make sure they were real books and discovered that only half of them were written in English. He didn’t recognize all of the languages, but he identified, Russian, Korean, Chinese or Japanese and all of the romance languages. But there were many others.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “Eclectic selection,” he commented when he’d finished searching a section. “Are you finding as many different languages as I am?”

  Olivia looked up from a volume that was clearly written in French. “It’s strange right? Surely the owner doesn’t speak all of these languages?”

  “Or maybe they’re for people like us who have been brought from all over the world?”

  "Maybe. And there are a lot of books on supernatural topics. At least over here.”

  Ethan scanned back over the shelf in front of him and found books with topics ranging from the Bermuda triangle and antipodes to Stonehenge and Egyptian gods. Picking up a volume titled Unmapped Islands he began flipping through the pages. It was a bilingual book in both English and some language he couldn’t recognize. The name seemed like an oxymoron to him. If these islands were unmapped, then how could a whole book be written about them?

  “Here’s a book about tropical birds,” Olivia said, taking the book and sitting down in a leather chair with her legs pulled up beneath her. He thought it was an odd book to decide to dig into, but he hadn’t quite figured her out yet. She hadn’t been eager to forge paths into the wilds along with the others, but she’d also pointed out various plants and animals on the property with surprising specificity. While she was interested in nature, she seemed like the type to prefer observing it from the other side of a glass wall.

  Taking his own strange book, Ethan sat down on the stairs leading to the sunken garden and decided to dig in as well. Glancing at the surface of the library wasn’t giving them many clues, but he suspected that he’d uncover more by learning more about the actual knowledge preserved on these ultramodern shelves.

  Unmapped Islands turned out to be a catalog of areas of the world that were still relatively unknown. It was divided into regions of the globe and judging by the worn edges of the volume it had been well read at some point in its life. Turning it on its spine, he studied the dirt smudges on the pages to see if any section in particular was dirtier than the rest. When he failed to see a pattern, he decided to try a trick he suspected he had learned from some cheesy detective novel or show and let the book fall open naturally to see if it opened to a specific section more than once. The pages fell open around a map of the Atlantic ocean several times and he looked closer to note a handwritten dot in red ink in the middle of the ocean. Thinking of the the other books he had seen on the shelf, he realized with a sinking feeling that the dot was right in the middle of what he was pretty sure was the Bermuda Triangle.

  Squinting at the note beside the dot, he read the word out loud. "Ibis."

  "What?" Olivia asked, looking up from her own book.

  "It's written in this book on unmapped islands.”

  "Really? Weird." Brows furrowing, she returned to her own book and began flipping through the pages. "Woodstar," she muttered under her breath as she flipped, "Spindalis, Shearwater, Petrel, Kingfisher…Ibis." She stopped with a gasp as a folded slip of paper fell out of the book and landed on her lap.

  Shooting to his feet, Ethan shut his book around a finger and then crossed the room to Olivia's chair to see what she'd discovered. She was unfolding the paper gingerly on top of the book that was splayed open to display an elegant white wading bird with a long, curved beak. The paper turned out to be a finely detailed pen and ink map.

  "It's an island," Olivia said unnecessarily.

  “Thoth island," Ethan clarified, pointing to the label in the top left corner.

  “Thoth,” Olivia said thoughtfully as if the strange word meant something to her, but Ethan was more interested in the map.

  Leaning closer, he searched the map for anything recognizable. Then he saw the strange shape that he was beginning to recognize as the overhead view of the house now that he had tried to sketch it out. And not far away a strip of lighter land that was probably the beach. “This is the island we’re on,” he said, pointing to the house and the beach with excitement. Dragging his finger over the worn paper, he noted the mountainous region at the center of the island and the cliffs Miles had described where he had woken up. Peering closer, he noticed a spot along the cliffs that had been circled.

  “Thoth is an Egyptian god,” Olivia said suddenly with satisfaction as if she had been rifling through a catalog in her head and finally found the right entry. “And he has the head of an Ibis!”

  “God of what?” Ethan asked, giving her a skeptical look. He wasn’t into mythology and knowing where the Bermuda Triangle was located was about the extent of his supernatural knowledge as well.

  “Don’t know. I can’t remember. But he had something to do with the Eye of Horus, I think.”

  Ethan shook his head. “The what?”

  Olivia blinked and then pointed to a hieroglyphic on the corner of the paper. “That.”

  It looked familiar, but Ethan couldn’t remember anything specific about it. “Fascinating. But I’m more interested in that,” he said, pointing to the spot in the cliffs.

  Bending over the map, Olivia studied the spot. “Is this a treasure map?”

  “You’d think it would have an ‘x’ there instead if that were the case.”

  “I wonder if Miles or Jade noticed something odd in the area. That’s close to where they woke up, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll ask Miles when he gets back.”

  “What about Jade? She’s at the beach right now.”

  Ethan took the map off Olivia’s lap and returned to his spot on the steps. “You can ask her. I’m going to keep looking for clues in here.”

  Frowning, Olivia closed the book on birds and returned it to the shelf. She had a wounded look in her eyes and he realized that she probably felt like he’d dismissed her. Looking up awkwardly, he revised, “You don’t have to leave. I just don’t want to talk to her.”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said coldly, glancing at the map he had taking from her—the map she had discovered. “I could use some fresh air anyway.”

  He didn’t remember that they were supposed to be sticking together until she had left the room. But it wasn’t like it really mattered. Jade had already gone off on her own, after all.