{ "item_title" : "The Tithe of Atlantis", "item_author" : [" Keithal Baird "], "item_description" : "# The Tithe of Atlantis They pay me to steal from the dead. Shipwrecks, mostly. Gold doubloons off the Florida coast, porcelain off junks in the South China Sea - the ocean floor is the biggest unguarded vault on Earth, and I am very good at picking its locks. So when Vance Holloway offered me two million dollars to rob a city that doesn't exist, I laughed in his face. Then he showed me the sonar scans, and I stopped laughing. It was down there. Two miles below the surface of the Atlantic, west of the Azores, in water so black it eats light. Rings of stone streets. A harbor. A central tower that had no business standing after eleven thousand years - and at the top of the tower, a vault. Sealed. Untouched. Holloway's geologists said the metal readings coming off that vault door were off every chart they owned. We go down in the bell, Holloway said. We cut the seal, we take what's portable, we're gone in six hours. Nobody ever knows. That's the thing about crime nobody tells you: the perfect score isn't the one with no witnesses. It's the one where the witness has been dead for eleven thousand years. There were four of us in the diving bell. Me. Holloway. A cutter named Reyes who could burn through anything. And Dr. Ines Marek, the archaeologist Holloway had blackmailed into Holloway told her to keep reading. She did, in a voice like a woman reading her own obituary. 'Here is bound the Tithe. What the sea was owed, the sea was paid. Do not-' She stopped. It doesn't say 'do not open.' It says 'do not *owe*.' The vault door was thirty feet of black stone and a metal that sweated in our lights - actually sweated, beading with water that ran *upward*. Reyes set the torch to it and the flame died. Not blew out. Died, the way a candle dies in a room where something has just stopped breathing. He tried three more times, and on the third try he was shaking so hard he dropped the rig, and when he bent to pick it up he put his bare palm flat against the door to steady himself. He screamed. The bell's medical readout said his hand registered a temperature of four hundred degrees - and forty below - at the same time. When we peeled him off, the skin of his palm had come away in the shape of the carving on the door. A spiral. It was on him like a brand, and it was *growing*, slow as frost on a window, all the way up his arm while we watched. That's when the door opened. Not cut. Not forced. Opened - inward, politely, the way doors open when whatever is inside has been waiting and finally heard you knock. Inside were the riches. I want that understood. There were ingots stacked like cordwood, orichalcum the color of a coal fire's heart, cups and crowns and a throne of whalebone and gold. Everything Holloway promised. Enough to make four people rich forever. All of it arranged in a perfect spiral on the floor. And at the center of the spiral, the Tithe itself. A figure, seated, knees to chest, wrapped in chains of that same sweating metal. It was not a statue. Statues don't have fingernails grown long and curled through the links of their own chains, from eleven thousand years of a body trying and failing to be dead. Its head was bowed. Marek was reading again without being asked, reading the floor, and her voice had gone flat and far away: 'The city owed the sea its king. The sea took him in installments.'", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/698/9798166989734_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "10.99", "online_price" : "10.99", "our_price" : "10.99", "club_price" : "10.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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