by A. G. Riddle
“In 1943, Kraus led an expedition to the Cave of Altamira.”
Yuri had never heard of it.
Whitmeyer shuffled some papers. “We only know because it was mentioned at Nuremberg in the trial of another Nazi scientist. He claimed to have been with Kraus during the period, but Kraus denied it, and Kraus’s trip was confirmed by a border guard called to testify.”
“Interesting. What’s in the cave?”
“Cave paintings. Some of the oldest ever found in Europe. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site now.”
“That’s it—that’s where she’s going. Figure out a rally point somewhere outside the site. Be discreet. And send everyone we’ve got in the region. This is a fight we have to win.”
Chapter 33
Lin stepped inside the hidden room in the Cave of Altamira, holding her electric light out in front of her. From behind her, Peyton saw stacks of metal crates—just like the ones they had found on the Beagle, with round metal discs on the end that provided a view inside.
Lin stooped and slid one of the discs aside, then moved to several more, peering in each crate for only a second or two. “Bones,” she whispered.
Peyton saw a glimmer of excitement cross her mother’s face, like a child on Christmas morning. Lin Shaw had been searching for this room for thirty years. It was the culmination of her life’s work. The missing piece.
One by one, the others slipped through the crevice and deployed their lights around the small room, which Peyton estimated to be no larger than fifteen feet across. The walls were stone, and she could see now that the stone door had been added to this natural alcove to close it off.
“Should we carry them out?” Adams asked.
“No,” Lin said quickly. “We need to find the inventory. There should be a list of everything that’s here.”
Nigel glanced around. “Maybe it’s in one of the cases.”
Lin took out the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and set it on one of the crates. “Kraus left five pages of trace paper in the book. We’ve only used two.”
“After Alice is carried away by the pool of tears,” Avery said, “she washes up on a bank. She and her random group of companions do a Caucus race to get dry.”
Chief Adams scrunched his eyebrows. “What’s a Caucus race?”
“One of Carroll’s inventions,” Lin said, her eyes focused on the book. “It means they ran around in circles with no clear winner.”
“Well, I don’t favor us running around in circles,” Nigel said.
“Thank you, Dr. Greene. We’ll keep that in mind.”
Lin turned the book to the beginning of the third chapter. The opening illustration showed a mouse standing on his hind legs, hands held out. Alice and twelve animals, including a Lory Parrot, a duck, a Dodo Bird, a lobster, and a beaver, stood around the mouse in a circle.
Lin pulled out the page of trace paper.
She overlaid it with the cave map, and the lines intersected.
“Another hidden room?” Avery asked.
“Doubtful,” Lin murmured.
“Why?” Peyton asked.
“Because he wouldn’t have done that.”
Peyton got the sense that there was a deeper relationship between her mother and Dr. Paul Kraus.
Lin flipped through the book, speed-reading it. She skipped over the other sheets of trace paper, leaving them in place. The others stood silently, waiting, awkwardness growing. Lin ignored them. It was simply the way she was made. Peyton knew her mother that well: the woman assumed—perhaps correctly—that hers was the strongest mind present and that she alone had the ability to unravel Kraus’s clues. Engaging in a discussion would only waste time and divert her focus.
Lin took the fourth piece of trace paper and held it to the map. It connected with a location deep in the cave, off a narrow passage.
“Another location,” Avery said.
“So it would seem,” Lin said, but Peyton could tell she didn’t believe the words, that the response was simply a way to avoid further conversation.
Lin placed the fifth and final piece of trace paper on the map. It intersected with a location even deeper in the cave.
“Maybe there are more clues at these locations,” Nigel said.
“Unlikely,” Lin replied quietly, still deep in thought.
She stacked all five of the trace pages together and stared at them.
Peyton could sense the group getting anxious, perhaps annoyed at being in the dark.
“What are you thinking, Mom?”
Lin turned to her and made eye contact, as if realizing the others were there for the first time.
“Carroll’s story has several meanings for Kraus. It was the allegory the Citium used in the 1950s when it embarked on the Looking Glass project. Kraus was one of the leaders of the organization at the time. He believed the nuclear bomb and the nuclear age itself were a sort of rabbit hole the human race had fallen down, that we were entering a strange, unpredictable era in which extinction was a real possibility.”
She motioned to the book. “The novel begins with Alice being bored and following a White Rabbit into the rabbit hole.”
“The atomic bomb is the White Rabbit?” Avery said.
“No. To us, it symbolized technology in general. As do the other clever characters in the story. The blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah, who questions Alice about her identity crisis, is another representation of technology—one that is impartial, but forces us to discover who we are. The Caterpillar tells her that one side of the mushroom makes her larger and the other side makes her small.”
“And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all,” Avery whispered to Adams, who smiled and shook his head.
“What it means,” Lin said with force, “is that technology both shrinks and expands our world. The telegraph and railroads were rapidly bringing people together when Carroll published the story, and the steam engine was enabling the construction of vast cities and supporting industrial agriculture that helped our population explode. When the book was written, in 1865, there were roughly 1.3 billion people in the world. Since then, the population has grown by 6.2 billion. The largest increase in history, perhaps, for any large species.”
Lin assembled the trace paper pages. “But the story was about more than that to us. We believed even literary scholars didn’t truly understand Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They thought it was simply a new type of fantasy novel, an accomplishment in the literary nonsense genre. It’s about Alice descending into a world that is very much like hers, but she is constantly changing—growing too large and small, as though she doesn’t truly understand her own capabilities or how the things in the world will affect her. She is lost and wants to get home. She is eventually put on trial for growing too large—for taking the very air the other animals breathe.”
“Like a mass extinction,” Nigel said slowly. “The Quaternary extinction. Or the mass extinction currently happening on Earth.”
“Exactly. Carroll was a polymath who was keenly aware of the changes happening on Earth.”
“So what does it all mean?” Avery asked.
“To know that, you would have to understand Kraus.”
“The way you do,” Peyton said. There was something more going on here, a piece she had missed. She was sure of it.
“Yes.” Lin held the stacked pieces of trace paper up to a lantern, her back to the group. “Kraus believed that his work was the way out of the proverbial rabbit hole humanity had fallen into. He believed the key was science, and in particular genetics: understanding how the human genome had changed over time. He believed that in our genomes, we would find bread crumbs that lead to an ultimate truth. To him, the genomes of our ancestors were like layers, and when we found the key layers, he believed they would form a picture—an answer that would be our only hope of escaping the rabbit hole.”
She turned, revealing the five translucent pages in front of the lantern. The lines connected, some darker a
nd lighter, just like the cave paintings, forming the image of a doe.
“This is what we’re looking for. The inventory will be hidden there.”
Chapter 34
Doctor Sang-Min Park had never been so scared in his entire life. Sweat rolled down his face. The heartbeat monitor was the only sound in the van, a countdown to their fiery death.
He never would have imagined himself here, of all places. He had worked hard his whole life, nearly died from exhaustion during his residency. Recovered during his fellowship and dedicated his life to medical research. He had landed his dream job at Rapture Therapeutics, a company on the cutting edge of neurological medicine. He was making the world a better place. Doing important work. Or so he thought.
When the X1-Mandera virus threatened to decimate the world’s population, he was herded into the conference room at Rapture Headquarters and told that the company had a contingency plan for such catastrophes—that employees were free to go home, but that if they stayed, they’d be evacuated to safety. It was an easy decision: be an anonymous name and number on the government relief rolls, or go to a private, company-owned island and wait it out. He thought he was saved.
He soon learned that he was trapped. And when Desmond Hughes arrived on the island—with a modified Rapture Therapeutics implant—Park became a forced participant in Conner McClain’s quest to discover the location of Rendition.
“Doctor!” Conner yelled from the driver’s seat.
Park studied the brain waves on the monitor. He opened his mouth, then stopped. The waves were collapsing. “He’s coming out!”
Conner cranked the van.
One of the mercenaries bailed out of the back and punched the garage door opener. The double door didn’t budge.
“Power’s out!” Conner screamed. “Roll it up manually!”
The man ran to the front of the van, pulled the garage door’s emergency release rope, and lifted it. A wave of heat barreled in.
Park coughed, struggling to get a deep breath. He felt like he was in an oven. Could barely think.
The soldier climbed back into the van. Doors slammed. The van’s tires barked and screeched as the vehicle swerved onto the road.
Through the windshield, Park saw a wall of black. It was night now. No, it wasn’t. The smoke from the blaze was blotting out the sun. Flames spread out thirty feet away, dancing on roofs, jumping to trees, painting the cars and driveways in black soot.
“Location!” Conner yelled. He waited a few seconds, then screamed the question even louder.
Location of what? Park thought.
“Doctor,” Conner growled. “I need that location.”
The app. Labyrinth. Conner had given Park the satellite-enabled smartphone. He opened the Labyrinth Reality app and quickly ran through the prompts.
Searching for entrance…
Conner shouted his question again.
The location appeared on the screen. A Menlo Park address. Less than three miles away.
“It’s close,” Park said, his voice coming out quietly, barely above a whisper.
Conner let out a torrent of obscenities.
Park read out the address, which was on Austin Avenue. “I’m mapping it.”
“Don’t bother,” Conner said. “I know it.”
Over the radio, he said, “Unit two, take down that checkpoint, and prepare to follow after we pass.”
“Copy that, Zero.” Orders followed over the comm line as the Citium operatives took up positions.
Park listened over the radio as Conner’s other men captured the X1 soldiers at the checkpoint. He was glad Conner’s men didn’t kill them—these people were just doing their jobs, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Citium had told him they didn’t desire any more loss of life than was necessary, and he wanted to believe that was true.
All three vans were waiting when they passed the checkpoint, as were two Army Humvees. The five vehicles fell in behind them.
They drove at high speed through mostly deserted neighborhoods. The sun grew brighter as they cleared the smoke cloud. It felt as though they were driving out of a massive tunnel.
Conner brought the car to a stop at a two-story house surrounded by yellow police tape. The walls were stone, the windows clad in steel. The roof featured high-pitched gables, and its gray slate tiles were textured and uneven, as if they had been placed on a house in Europe hundreds of years ago.
In the front seat, Major Goins said to Conner, “Same approach as the Shaw home?”
“Don’t bother,” Conner replied, backing into the driveway and severing the police tape. “We searched it two months ago.”
Goins squinted at Conner, who slammed the van into park and opened his door.
“This is Desmond’s house.”
The Citium troops bounded through the yard, over the boxwood hedges, and opened a window. A few seconds later, the black, wrought-iron gates opened onto the home’s motor court. It was paved with an exposed aggregate, making it look like small stones that had been encased in cement. The vans backed in, followed by the Humvees.
On the smartphone, Park clicked the button to enter the Labyrinth.
Downloading…
Five minutes later the screen blinked again.
Download Complete
On the computer screen, Park saw Desmond’s brain waves change. He had entered a dream state. The memory was beginning.
Desmond wiped his sweaty palms on his pants as he walked to the door. The morning sun blazed through the leaded glass, shadowing the figure on the stoop and blurring his features.
Desmond opened the door. “Hello, Conner.”
Conner extended his hand and spoke with a thick Australian accent. “Morning, Mr. Hughes.”
Desmond had asked him repeatedly to call him by his first name. Conner had never heeded the instructions.
Conner stepped inside and glanced up at the chandelier hanging in the two-story foyer. “I love your home. It’s an English manor, right?”
“It is.”
“It’s in amazing condition. You renovate it?”
“Built new actually, by the previous owner.”
“Incredible. The detail outside. Looks authentic, like it came out of the ground two hundred years ago.”
“They were meticulous. I bought the place after the dot com crash five years ago. Mostly for the land. Was thinking it would become condos in the future, or even a tear-down and subdivide.”
Conner raised his eyebrows. “You’d tear this down?”
Desmond smiled, happy for the small talk. “I figure the future is about urban density.”
Conner nodded. “Probably right. Reminds me of all the old estate homes in Australia. They didn’t quite know what to do with them after the colonial era.”
Desmond knew what they had done with some of them. One became a pediatric hospital where Conner had been taken after the bushfire, badly burned and on the edge of death. Others had served as orphanages, where his scars made him an outcast, a child constantly passed over by the parents coming to visit.
“Would you like a tour?” Desmond said.
“Sure.”
Off the foyer, they wandered left, down the gallery hall. Desmond had mostly left the previous owner’s art in place. He had hung only two photos of his own—both for this specific moment. He paused at the first, which showed him, age six, standing in front of an oil well, Orville Hughes towering over him, a mean scowl on his face.
“This you?”
“It is.”
“Your dad?”
“No, my uncle. Orville. He adopted me when I was five.”
Conner simply nodded. Desmond had hoped he would open up some, mention that he was adopted too, but only silence followed.
Desmond moved to the second framed photo, which he had also taken from Orville’s home. It was black and white and creased across the middle. Orville and his brother, Allister Hughes, stood in front of a fireplace, both in their teens, both with close-cropped h
air and hard expressions.
“Your uncle again?” Conner asked.
“Yes. The younger boy is my father.” Our father, Desmond wanted to say. He watched, but Conner made no reaction.
“They were born in England,” Desmond said. “Orphaned during the war. They came to Australia as part of a program run by the Christian Brothers. They weren’t very kind to most of the children they adopted. Forced labor. Abuse.”
Desmond waited, watching his brother through his peripheral vision. Does he know?
But Conner’s tone was expressionless, and when he spoke, his words were emotionless, as if he were reading a speech. “That’s a shame. Orphans are perhaps the most vulnerable people on earth. They have no one to defend them—except for their keepers. If their guardians abuse them, then they have no one at all—except their fellow orphans.”
Those fellow orphans had ostracized Conner. He had truly been alone.
“Well,” Conner added, his tone brightening, “it would seem,” he motioned to the home, “that things turned out pretty well for you. And I can tell you that all is well at Rook.” He placed a hand on his messenger bag. “I brought updated financials and data center reports if you’d like to see them.”
“Maybe later,” Desmond said softly.
He led Conner through an opening with pocket doors, into a paneled study. “Like anything to drink?”
“No thank you.”
Desmond motioned for Conner to sit in a club chair, and he sat across from him. “I’d like to tell you a bit more about myself.”
Conner squinted, confused, but quickly made his expression blank again.
“As I said, I was five when my uncle adopted me. I was born in Australia.” He paused, hoping Conner would react. Nothing. “My parents both died in the Ash Wednesday bushfires.” The corners of Conner’s eyes tightened, but he remained silent. He looked like a dam on the verge of breaking.
Desmond leaned forward. “I grew up on a ranch. The day of the fire, I was playing far away from the home, in the woods. I smelled the smoke. The blaze… it was like it was walking across the ridges in the distance. I ran as fast as I could back to the house. But it was already on fire. Roof burning. Fences, too. Like a ring of fire. I tried to get through it.”
