As we neared, we saw that the light source was larger, but farther than it had seemed. My shoulder cracked against a rock wall.
"You okay?" Lilly asked.
"Fine," I muttered. We rounded the little wall and found ourselves in another curving pa.s.sage. The light was coming from its end. Electric light, spilling down this tunnel from a round opening.
We crept up to it and ducked in the last triangle of shadow. Ahead was a wide pa.s.sage. It was also rounded, carved out of the rock, but its floor had been covered in smooth concrete, and a line of naked lightbulbs had been strung along the ceiling. I leaned out. To the right, the lights ended at a steel ladder that led up through a hole in the rock, toward more bright light above. The tunnel continued into darkness past that. To the left, the lights stretched away as the tunnel sloped steadily downward.
"Which way?" Lilly asked.
I looked for the siren"s light, but couldn"t see it. And yet, I could feel a steady tug inside, seeming to lead me in the right direction. "Down," I said, and headed left.
We half ran down the tunnel, our bare feet slapping on the concrete. It went and went, other tunnels, unlit, branching off to either side. The rock walls were red.
"Look," said Lilly as we started down a new pa.s.sage. She was pointing to the wall. There was a shape carved in it.
"I"ve seen that before," she said.
"Me too. On the Aasgard sign at Craft House."
"Is it water?" Lilly asked. "Mountains?"
"Not sure." I turned and kept moving. I had a feeling we were going to find out.
We"d been going a few minutes when we heard footsteps coming toward us. I squeezed Lilly"s hand and pulled her into a dark side tunnel. We retreated into the shadows and crouched, her slightly behind me, and I thought for a second about the fact that suddenly I was leading the way on this adventure. Owen Parker, first a turtle, then a fish, now some kind of action hero, like Tech Raider from those films we got from the ACF, the guy who always went into the flooded technopolises in search of treasure. He"d battle radiomutants and chem-zombies and always find some unbelievably attractive girl who"d been hiding out there with the bones of her dead parents, and then she"d join him and he"d take her by the hand and lead her to safety, and along the way it would turn out that she was good with a pulse rifle, too.
The footsteps were getting closer, two sets, and a dragging sound. Now voices: "Don"t know why these fry-brains would want any of that junk down there," said one. "Taking hostages, I get. But a bunch of Viking junk? What kind of sense does that make?"
"Can"t very well ask "em now, can we?" said the other.
"Shoot-to-kill orders were a little odd, don"t you think?"
"Cartier said that Mr. Jacobsen was p.i.s.sed about them knocking out the cameras down here. Apparently it"s going to take a while to fix all the wiring. Anyway, it was fun, right? Poppin" some fry-brains. To do what we were trained for."
"Yeah. Fun enough. And word is, once this Elysium thing is ready, we"ll be doing that a lot more." I wondered what he was talking about. It sounded like shooting more people.
"Sounds good to me," said the other. "Finally, some of the action they promised us."
The two officers pa.s.sed our tunnel, dragging a body. It had the dyed brown Nomad clothing. I wondered if this was a member of the Skull Team.
We waited until their footsteps had faded away and then kept going. The hallway continued angling downward, the air getting cooler and more moist.
As we walked, I felt like I was getting heavy, my legs slow. All my muscles felt like they were being buzzed somehow, like I was walking through an electrical field. I had a feeling like I was close to something, something big, calling to me, drawing me in like a magnet. And it felt like I couldn"t not not go to it. go to it.
We used the string of lights as a guide, following a tunnel to the right, then left, and right again. It ended at a hole in the floor that had been braced with a metal ring. A steel ladder led through it. We climbed down, followed another pa.s.sage to another ladder, down again, a pa.s.sage, another ladder hole, all the while the magnet pull in my chest increasing. The fourth ladder hole was different. The light glowing out of it was brighter. I lay on the floor and inched forward, peering down.
"It"s a room," I said, pulling myself back up. We climbed down, and as soon as we cleared the ceiling, the humming of energy became a low whine in my head. My foot slipped off a railing. My palms had gotten slick with cold sweat. I reached the floor and bent over, panting. The air smelled old, dry and sweet, and I felt like I couldn"t quite breathe in all the way.
"You okay?" Lilly asked, arriving beside me.
"I don"t know. Yeah, I guess."
"Look at this place," Lilly said quietly.
I slowly stood up. The walls made a perfect circle. More lights had been strung around the perimeter, but it was almost like they weren"t needed. The place seemed to light itself, as if all of its smooth surfaces were luminous. It had a domed ceiling, but unlike the caverns above, this time there were mathematically perfect arches built out of stone blocks, reaching from the edge of the wall up to the center of the ceiling, where a huge round stone, a ball of rose-and-white marble maybe two meters across, was lodged in what looked like it had once been an opening.
Directly beneath that ball, on the floor was a narrow, chest-high hexagonal pedestal made of tan stone, lighter than the color of the caves we"d come through above. Balanced on the pedestal"s flat top was a perfect sphere of black crystal.
"Obsidian," I said, nodding at it. "Volcanic gla.s.s."
"Check out these floors," said Lilly, gazing down by her feet. We were standing on smooth, polished tiles. There was a design on them, something in blue-and-white blotches with gold borders. It looked like a giant map of landforms and oceans, but I didn"t recognize any of the shapes.
"And these walls... Owen, what is this place?" Lilly was walking slowly forward. The walls were covered in chipped and fragmented mosaics, their colors faded and in most places gone, though in what remained there seemed to be cities, stone pyramids and obelisks, coliseums and spiraling towers, arched bridges, and then ships, all similar to what I"d seen in the vision. There were also creatures, things with giant tusks, a striped catlike one with saber teeth that reminded me of the siren"s necklace.
I joined Lilly in the center of the room, still looking around. "I don"t know," I said, "but I think it"s old. Really old." Beside the pedestal was a simple rectangular folding table covered with papers and video sheets, and a lamp that was turned off. I looked up and spied the cameras around the ceiling. I hoped they were still disabled.
"Look," said Lilly, pointing to the wall, at a section where someone had etched letters into the mosaic. They were crude symbols in comparison to the artwork behind them.
"Vandals?" I asked.
"Those symbols are Norse," said Lilly.
"How do you know?" I asked her.
She laughed. "I"ve been coming to this camp for six summers. That whole Camp Aasgard thing is based on how Vikings came here once. And we learn about it in school over in EdenWest. There are other sites with artifacts around the lakesh.o.r.e. But, these Viking symbols are on top top of the mosaics, which means they didn"t build this temple. So who did?" of the mosaics, which means they didn"t build this temple. So who did?"
"Paul said these copper mines are over ten thousand years old," I said. "Maybe whoever was mining here back then built this temple, too."
I looked beyond the map-covered table, and that"s when I spied the other Nomad body. She was lying over by the wall, her head at a wrong angle, her arm extended out so that it was leaning up on the wall. There was blood on the floor. On her hand too. Her palm was covered in it. I looked around. What had they been after? The skull that the Nomads mentioned? Could that be the same as what I"d seen in the vision?
"So, that would mean that before EdenWest, before America, before the Vikings, someone was coming here, and they built this place," said Lilly, looking around. "Wait." She gazed at me with wide eyes. "What the Free Signal said, about the Eden domes being near ancient sites. Do you think EdenWest was built in this spot because this this place is here?" place is here?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe that"s why the Vikings came here, too. Searching for this place. And now the siren brought us here."
I scanned the piles of papers on the table. They were all large, their edges curled inward like they"d been rolled up. I stepped over and twisted the top one so I could see it, pressing it flat with my hands.
"These are maps," I said. They were skillfully hand-drawn in black ink, but not ancient. "I"ve seen others like this."
"Where?"
"On the wall in Paul"s office. Maybe he drew them." I looked down at the floor. "Like he"s trying to decipher this room, or something." The paper had faint blue lines creating a grid. While the floor map looked like it spanned the world, these maps were zoomed in to coastlines and islands. In the large stretches of blank ocean were little sea monster sketches. Things with serpent backs or giant mouths. Paul didn"t seem like the type to waste his time doodling. Maybe he had brought in a cartographer or something. Maybe the monsters were because it got boring sitting down here drawing for hours on end.
I flipped through the stack. On some of the ones deeper in the pile, a second set of grid lines seemed to have been drawn atop the first, at an angle to the blue ones. Sometimes there was a word or two scribbled in the bottom corner. I caught: Matches Malaysian changes? Matches Malaysian changes? Another read: Another read: Easter Island? Easter Island? And also: And also: Recheck alignment to Hudson Polar. Recheck alignment to Hudson Polar.
A flash of light burst in the corner of my eye.
"Whoa!" I looked over to see that Lilly had placed her hand on the black sphere, and it had come alive, tiny pinp.r.i.c.ks of light shooting out of it, hundreds of little beams. .h.i.tting the walls.
"Stars," said Lilly, gazing around the domed ceiling.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"All I did was put my hand on it."
The lights coming out of the sphere had made the dome above us into a map of the night sky, though it was dimmed by the electric bulbs strung around. It was funny to think that someone had made a dome here, complete with a fake sky, long before Eden. Lilly looked from the stars to the floor, with its land and water shapes. "So, this room is like a giant map."
"Yeah," I said. I let the pile of maps fall to the table and started toward Lilly. There was a clink of gla.s.s and then a rolling sound. I looked down to see that I"d kicked something on the floor: a gla.s.s cylinder. It rolled in a slow circle, stopping against the outstretched fingers of the Nomad woman.
"What was that?" Lilly asked. She took her hand from the obsidian. The stars went out.
I bent down. It was a vial, missing its top. It had a yellow-and-white label and was mostly empty, except for a few leftover drops of blood. I picked it up and looked at the code printed on it: YH4-32.1 I felt a burst of adrenaline, my head spinning. "Uh-oh," I said.
"What?" Lilly arrived beside me as I stood up. I looked down at the Nomad. Her dead eyes stared up at the ceiling like she"d seen something awe-inspiring up there, or awful. There was a bullet hole in her chest. A pool of blood with crusted edges spread out from beneath her back. I looked at her outstretched arm, leaning on the wall. The palm up, covered in blood. Not a smear, but instead evenly covered, almost like it had been painted on.
Lilly stepped past me and reached down to the body. There was a long, narrow knife in a sheath on the woman"s belt. Lilly unsnapped the b.u.t.ton and took the knife. She stood up and slipped it into the waist of her shorts. "Just in case," she said.
I nodded, my mind on other things. "The blood," I said vacantly.
Lilly looked down at the body and exhaled slowly. "Yeah, gross."
"No." Things were spinning into webs. Dr. Maria taking my sample the day before yesterday, those looks she"d given me, given the bodies, up in the Preserve. "My blood," I said. blood," I said.
"What?"
"The-" I was going to explain what this had to mean. Dr. Maria was working with the Nomads. She"d given them this vial of my blood, but to do what?
I looked around. There. A few feet back up the wall from where the Nomad had fallen was a small recess, a little triangular alcove carved into the wall at chest height. It was just above her feet, like that"s where she"d been standing when the bullet hit her.
"Over here." Inside the recess there was a depression carved out in the shape of a hand. It almost looked smooth in the shadows but, peering closer, I saw the spikes. Tiny little pins made of something white, maybe bone. They were polished to perfect points. There were maybe twenty, s.p.a.ced out around the handprint.
Lilly peered in at it. "Yowch," she said. "That would be like putting your hand on a cactus."
"Yeah," I said. I moved my shaking hand toward it.
"What are you doing? Owen!" She grabbed my wrist.
"It"s my blood, on the Nomad"s hand," I said. "She covered her hand with my blood to use this. The siren said the key was inside me."
"What?"
"Back in the tunnels," I said.
"Oh," said Lilly. "But, so... you think the key is your blood."
I nodded, but it was more like I knew. knew. Almost like that boy Luk was watching me and smiling. Almost like that boy Luk was watching me and smiling.
"The key to what, though?" Lilly asked.
I took a deep breath. "Let"s find out." I tried to ready myself, to tense all my muscles as I put my hand over the spiked impression. I was shaking, but it seemed more like antic.i.p.ation of what was about to happen than for the pain. I lowered my hand, the magnet pulling.... I pressed down, felt the resistance of my skin, bending against the little spikes.... And the popping as needle after needle broke through my armor, pierced me like a piece of fruit. Each stung, the pain a quick jolt, and then my whole hand began to come alive with screaming. My arm shook. I squinted against tears.
"Breathe," Lilly whispered, rubbing my shoulder.
I hadn"t realized that I wasn"t. I was wincing, gritting my teeth, my body like a stone. I pressed harder. The spikes dug deeper, and around me I began to notice that nothing was happening.
I pulled my hand off. It felt like it was burning from the inside out. The holes were bright red, drops of blood bubbling out of them. They grew fat and then started dripping across my hand, making streaks. I rubbed it on my shorts and looked back at the handprint. The little spikes were coated, the blood dripping down, collecting around the base of each and seeping into narrow s.p.a.ces around them.
The room started to shake.
"Owen... ," said Lilly.
I glanced around. The walls were vibrating, dust falling from seams. A loud crack sounded from behind us and we turned to see the black sphere and its pedestal lowering into the floor. More sharp sounds, a deep rumbling, growing louder, and the floor around the pedestal began to lower too, but in segments, each lower than the next, forming a spiral staircase that led downward.
"Okay..." I watched, stunned. My blood had done this-opened a staircase into a floor, deep in an underground temple. "What is this?" I mumbled.
"The table!" Lilly darted forward. The floor was lowering beneath its far legs and it was starting to lean into the hole. Lilly grabbed its edge. I lunged for the papers, somehow remembering to slap my nonbloodied hand down on them. As we pulled the table back, its legs squealing, I considered that if it was positioned over these stairs, then that likely meant that Paul didn"t know that the floor opened. That this was a secret he knew nothing about.
The rumbling ceased and the floor stopped moving. A wide ring remained around the edge of the room, and the whole middle had sunk. We peered down. The staircase spiraled two times, narrowing as it went. The black sphere seemed to be suspended about halfway down, and below that, something flickered like metal.
I looked at Lilly. Her eyes were wide, but she waved her hand. "Lead on. Whatever this is, it"s for you."
I almost didn"t want to. That vibrating inside me had reached a steady hum that made it hard to think. How could this actually be for me? And yet, was there really any doubt?
I started down the stairs. Each was wider at the edge, tapering to the center. We pa.s.sed below the obsidian star ball, the pedestal, and saw that it was suspended in s.p.a.ce by thin copper rods that stretched out from the wall. A dome of copper hung beneath the bottom of the pedestal, like a giant metal umbrella.
Below, we could see down to a stone-block floor. There was something on it, kind of a triangle shape. It looked almost like the hull of one of the little sailboats up at camp.
The stairs ended above this. A catwalk led over to the wall, to a narrow platform that ringed this lower chamber. Everything was carved from stone. We walked slowly across, arms out for balance. In the dim light spilling down from above, I could see that the boatlike object was about five meters below us. A final set of stairs continued down to it from the far side of the platform. The stairs above us kept the walls all in shadows.
I moved around the platform, keeping my back against the wall, until I got to the far staircase. I climbed down. The little craft was lying on a stone floor. It had more geometric sides than a sailboat, and could probably hold about four people. I stepped in. There were flat seats along the sides. It had a copper mast near the front, and a series of little metal poles, like the ones in a tent, that arched from one corner of the craft to the other, outlining a little dome over the front half of the craft.
In the center of the vessel floor was a triangular block of sleek black metal, and sitting on top of that was an oval-shaped clay object, like a pot. There were three more of these pots strapped inside the bow. Closer to me, I spied a tiny metal pole sticking out of the floor and ending at a little gold b.u.t.ton. It had a curved depression in it about the size of a fingertip. In the middle of that depression was a little round hole. Its edge stuck up a little. It looked sharp. I wondered if this was another switch for my blood key.
"What is it?" Lilly asked from above.
"Some kind of boat," I said, but I felt like there was more to it than that.
"Are we supposed to do something with it?"
"Don"t know." If we were, I had no idea what. It wasn"t like there was any water down here to sail it on, and it seemed way too heavy for us to lift. I looked around at the walls.
Blue flickered up on the walkway.
"There," I whispered, pointing.