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the first tunnel Sloane had crawled through, she wondered if old Domenico had undersold the place. She’d lost count after a hundred different species—some from as far away as China’s South Sea, and some, like the deadly poisonous cousin of nightshade she’d almost stepped into, exceedingly rare. But it wasn’t just the diversity of species that intrigued Sloane; she could imagine that many seeds had been inadvertently carried on the hooves and in the coats of the various animals brought into the arena, or that the millions of tourists and spectators who’d wandered through the place over the centuries had acted as human vectors, depositing seed specimens as they went. What surprised Sloane—and bothered her, as she began to think it through—was the diversity of time periods the various species represented. Plants with DNA ages hundreds to thousands of years apart growing right next to each other in seams in the tunnel walls, sometimes woven together in impossible tangles.
    It was just this sort of mystery that had led her to the Colosseum in the first place. The envelope that was now sitting on the tiny desk in her hotel room had been sent to her by an Italian professor of botany she’d met online in a plant DNA chat room. (That such a place even existed would have given Christine a month’s worth of material, but Sloane couldn’t have cared less.) The envelope the man had sent her had contained a single seed he’d collected at the opening of one of the runoff drainage tunnels deep in the second level of the hypogeum—a single seed that Sloane had analyzed down to its DNA core.
    A single seed that contained proteins much older than it should have, older than the Colosseum itself. In fact, that single seed had contained DNA fragments that—if Sloane’s science was correct—predated the construction of the city of Rome.
    So Sloane had immediately begun the process that had led her, three weeks later, to a narrowing tunnel in the depths of the hypogeum. She was certain that analyzing the DNA history of this bizarre seed, and the plant it must have come from, would be just the sort of research to secure continued funding for her work—and maybe jump her right to that full professorship.
    Her calves still burning from the trip across the ditch, she came to another bend in the tunnel and another gradual slope downward. The roof seemed to be getting lower as well; she had to bend a few inches at the waist to keep the top of her high ponytail from touching the curved stone panels, or catching on what was left of the rusting iron clamps that held them in place. This was the fifth, maybe sixth turn in tunnel since she’d entered the runoff channel pictured on the back of the envelope, the place where her Italian colleague had found the strange seed. The fact that she’d entered the tunnel in the first place had surprised her; the Italian professor had been content with the single seed, rather than chancing what could very well have been an unexplored section of the hypogeum. But Sloane was determined; a seed was one thing, a living plant would be her own Holy Grail.
    As she turned the corner and shined the miniature flashlight down into the narrowing space, she saw something that made her forget about the heat tearing through her calves.
    The vine twisting and tangling across two connected slabs of stone was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Red-tinged, almost leafless, it was covered in thorns, many as big as her thumb. She racked her brain for any memories of anything even remotely similar as she quickly covered the distance. There was a vine she’d seen in a textbook, incredibly rare, something that had been discovered growing at some sort of religious shrine near an Egyptian village along the Nile, that had a similar red tinge to it. And another vine, with thorns of a similar shape, that she’d read about explorers documenting during a trip through Equatorial New Guinea.
    But now that she was only a