“What? Seventy-three?” Nina snapped incredulously. “What the hell kind of system would use seventy-three as an important number?”

“Nina? Seriously? We don’t care,” said Chase. “We’re here-now let’s do what we’ve got to do before we all get killed, okay?”

“Okay,” Nina pouted. “But it still doesn’t make any sense…”

Behind the massive statue was an opening leading to a flight of stairs. They ascended to find another chamber, smaller than the main temple, but even more elaborate-and extravagant. Although it was lower, the ceiling was vaulted to match the temple outside. But where that had been made from stone, this was something else.

“Ivory,” said Kari as Chase directed the torch upwards. She frowned. “According to Plato, the roof of the entire temple was meant to be lined with ivory…”

“This isn’t the Temple of Poseidon,” said Nina. “It’s a replica, a copy. The Atlanteans tried to re-create the citadel of Atlantis in their new home. I guess ivory was harder to come by here, so they made do with what they had… Whoa.” She came to an abrupt stop. “Eddie, give me the flashlight.” She snatched it from his hand. “We’ve found what we came for.”

She aimed the beam at the chamber’s rear wall. A warm reflected glow filled the room. Orichalcum.

The entire wall was coated with the metal, thin sheets inscribed with line upon line of ancient text. Nina quickly saw that it was another variation on the language, older, but no less advanced.

But that wasn’t what transfixed her attention. She played the torch over the large illustration dominating the wall, following the distorted but very familiar lines…

“Is that a map?” Chase said in disbelief.

“It’s the Atlantic,” Nina whispered. “And beyond.”

Although inaccurate in detail, the shapes of the continents were impossible to mistake. The eastern coasts of North and South America on the left, Europe and Africa on the right. And past Africa, the map continued around into the Indian Ocean, tracing the shape of India itself and even parts of Asia. Lighter lines connected various points, apparently charting courses between ports and marking routes to settlements inland.

Most of the lines converged on something in the eastern Atlantic, the shape of an island found on no modern map…

“Jesus.” For a moment, Nina felt as though her heart had stopped. “We’ve found it. Atlantis. Right where I said it was.”

“My God,” said Kari, stepping forward for a closer look. “You found it! Nina, you found it!”

“We found it,” Nina replied, sharing her delight. “We did it, we found Atlantis!” For a moment she almost whooped with glee-until the reality of the situation returned to her. “Eddie, how long have we got left to get back?”

“Fourteen minutes. The only bit that’ll be tricky will be getting back through those poles with the spikes-we can do it in eight, if we shift.” Chase moved away from the map, spotting something in the rear corner of the chamber.

“So we’ve only got six minutes left to explore? Shit. Shit!” Nina banged her clenched fists against her thighs in utter frustration. “I need more time!”

Kari held out the orichalcum artifact. “Let’s find where this goes. If we can get back to the village in time, we might be able to convince them to let us back into the temple if we promise we won’t take anything. All we need are photographs…”

“It’s not enough,” Nina moaned, feeling everything she’d worked for slipping away. She knew there was no chance of the Indians allowing them inside the temple again-assuming they weren’t killed just to keep its mere existence secret.

“Hey.” At first Chase thought he’d found another exit, a chute leading downwards from the chamber. But a quick glance told him it was blocked, clogged by rough chunks of rock. That the debris was far from the exacting standards of the rest of the temple didn’t escape him, but then he saw something more interesting nearby. “Over here.”

Nina and Kari hurried over to find an altar, a high slab of polished black stone. On it rested several objects, all made of orichalcum.

“That must be the other part of the sextant,” said Kari, pointing at a flat pie-slice-shaped piece inscribed with Atlantean numerals. Nina quickly took off her pendant and held it against the bottom of the sextant. The curvature was an exact match.

“God, I had part of one like it all along,” she said, putting the pendant back around her neck. “Give me the arm.”

“How come the Nazis got away with that piece, but not the rest of them?” Chase asked.

“Maybe the men carrying the others were the ones we saw on the river.” Nina quickly placed the nub on the arm’s underside into the corresponding hole at the top of the triangle, swinging it around so the arrowhead scribed into its surface lined up with the mark above each number. “It works,” she said, with a mixture of vindication, and sadness that she wouldn’t be able to show anyone else her discovery. “Whatever they used as mirrors are missing, but you can see the slots where they’d fit. God, they really could calculate their latitude, over ten thousand years ago…”

“Okay, the thing’s home, let’s go,” said Chase.

Nina waved her hands. “Wait, wait!”

“Nina, they’re going to kill Hugo and the others, and us too if we don’t move our arses!”

“One minute, just one more minute! Please!”

“Let her,” said Kari firmly. Chase reluctantly acquiesced, but pointedly held up his watch hand.

“The map,” Nina said, almost gabbling in her haste to get the words out. “Look, the destinations at the end of the trade routes, or whatever they are, they’ve got numbers and compass directions marked next to them. The mouth of the Amazon, here,” she pointed at it, “it says seven, south and west, just like it does on the sextant arm.” She moved across the map to the distorted representation of Africa, indicating the continent’s southern tip. “But look at this! The Cape of Good Hope ’s marked as well-it shows its latitude relative to Atlantis!”

Chase shook his wrist, waving the watch at her. “Point, Nina! Get to it!”

“Don’t you see? We already know how far south the mouth of the Amazon is relative to Atlantis, seven units of latitude, and now we know how far south they said the Cape is as well-so since we know their positions relative to each other in modern measurements, we can use the difference to find out exactly how big an Atlantean unit of latitude is, and then work back north from the Amazon to find Atlantis itself! We can do it! Now that I understand their system, we don’t even need the artifact any more-all we need is time to make the calculations!”

“We’re out of time, Nina,” said Chase, his tone making it clear that there would be no further discussion. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now!” He took the light from her. “You too, Kari! Let’s go!”

They ran out of the chamber, passing the colossal statue of Poseidon. Nina strained to listen over the sound of their footsteps echoing through the huge room. “What’s that noise? I can hear something!”

Chase could hear it too, a low-frequency rumble, growing louder with every second. “Shit, sounds like a chop-”

The entire temple shook as an explosion blasted a hole in the roof.