It was a cave, and she knew they needed to enter it.
Amaru apparently guessed what they were doing. “No! You are not trained to dive in a cave! That is very dangerous!”
Eleanor knew he was telling the truth. But she could barely hear him anymore, the hum consuming all her senses. The Concentrator was in there, and she had no choice.
She moved toward the entrance, which was about four feet across, and shone her flashlight down the cave’s throat. The illumination did not go far, for the tunnel twisted and turned out of sight, constricting to a very narrow passage. Now, the thought of going in there raised a deafening alarm in Eleanor’s head. The panic rising in her chest chilled her, even within her insulated dry suit. Her breathing was a windy storm in her ears, and her heartbeat thundered away beneath it. She had never been particularly claustrophobic, and she’d been stuck in a tunnel before, back at Polaris Station in the Arctic. But this was different.
The hum, meanwhile, continued to radiate from the cave. Eleanor could sense the Concentrator within, draining away the earth’s energy, sucking it dry.
She felt a hand on her arm and turned toward her mom. A part of Eleanor hoped she would pull her away, take her back to the surface, and tell her they would find another way. But that wasn’t what her mom did. She nodded. So did Luke.
Eleanor didn’t know if the trembling in her limbs was visible through the layers she wore, but she tried to still herself, slow her breathing, and make herself do what she needed to do.
“Please,” Amaru said with plaintive finality as Eleanor ducked down and pulled herself into the cave.
Her unsteady flashlight threw chaotic shadows about her. She bumped into the sides of the narrowing cave, felt the sharp rocks through her suit, and her tank clanged against the ceiling.
“You must be careful!” Amaru said. “If you damage your tank, you will suffocate. If you rip your suit, it will fill with water and you will freeze.”
The ways Eleanor could die were not what she wanted to be told in that moment. She heard the sandpaper sound of the rubber shell of her suit rubbing against the rock, and the panic she had only begun to suppress returned. If she could have turned around, she would have. But the passage was too narrow for that now. All she could do was press forward. The cave angled downward and around a bend, squeezing inward, and Eleanor had to become a snake, twisting and rolling her body around the edges and turns.
“Your mother is now behind you in the cave,” Amaru said. “Luke will go next, and then I will follow him.” He seemed to have accepted that they were doing this over his objections.
Eleanor felt her head getting fuzzy and realized her breathing had become very quick and shallow, just what Amaru had warned her against. She focused on taking deeper breaths, but this took her concentration away from the cave, and her tank banged into the wall again. Her progress became measured in careful inches, and in the times she had to close her eyes and throw all the weight of her resolve against the fear.
Every so often, her mother touched her foot or her flipper, gently, reassuringly. Eleanor needed that contact as the cave tightened to a mere crack she could barely fit through. She then had the chilling thought that perhaps this cave didn’t go anywhere, or perhaps it would eventually grow too narrow to move forward. They would have leave the way they had come, only backward, and Eleanor didn’t know if she could.
That would take so long.
She could run out of air.
She had to get out. Now. She had to stretch and kick, but she could do neither, nearly pinned by the rock as she was.
Forward.
That was the only way.
A few more feet in, and she felt her mother tug on her flipper, but not in the gentle way. She shook it. Vigorously. Something was wrong.
“Eleanor,” Amaru said. “Luke’s tank isn’t working.”
A sudden fear for Luke flooded and drowned Eleanor’s fear for herself.
“He isn’t getting enough oxygen,” Amaru said. “He is blacking out. We need to find an opening.”
Eleanor shone her flashlight ahead. She still could not see an end to the tunnel, but they had to keep going. There had to be something up there. The humming had only grown stronger. Her movement lost its hesitancy. She propelled herself forward as fast as she could, wincing at each collision with the cave wall.
“Yes,” Amaru said. “Keep going. Look above you for air pockets.”
The course of the fissure seemed like that of a crack in a cement sidewalk, a winding zigzag path.
Hold on, Luke, Eleanor thought, wishing she could say it to him aloud. Stay with us. Keep moving.
Shortly after that, the glow of her flashlight vanished up ahead. The tunnel simply sucked it up, returning little of it to her in reflection, which could only mean an opening of some kind lay ahead of them.
Eleanor scrambled the last few feet and burst from the tunnel into a chamber. She gave no thought to it yet, but turned back and helped pull her mom through the last stretch, and then Luke, who came out of the passage a bit listless and limp. But bubbles still rose from around his head. When Amaru reached the chamber, he hooked an arm under Luke’s shoulder and immediately swam upward.
“Come with me,” he said.
Eleanor and her mother followed him, and the combined light of their flashlights illuminated the chamber around them. It was the size of a classroom at her school, but with a bowl-shaped floor and a ceiling with only three corners. The fourth was a seam of shadow that Eleanor now recognized as another tunnel.
“He has lost consciousness,” Amaru said. “Help me.”
Eleanor’s mom kicked up to Luke’s side and took his other shoulder. The four of them moved ahead into the darkness, until their flashlights seemed to strike an iridescent mirror.
“There is air ahead,” Amaru said.
Hope and relief proved to be better fuel for driving Eleanor forward than fear had been, and she raced toward the wavering mirror until her face broke the water’s surface. They were on a kind of rocky shore, but still underground. The regulator fell from her mouth, and she breathed earthy air as she helped Amaru and her mom drag Luke from the water.
“I know CPR,” Eleanor’s mom said, and she started in on the chest compressions, alternating with mouth-to-mouth breathing. This continued for a few moments, and then Luke’s chest heaved slightly on its own.
“He’s coming around,” Amaru said.
Luke’s eyelids fluttered open, and he coughed, and breathed, and then he swore.
“Oh, thank heavens!” Eleanor’s mom said.
“Luke,” Eleanor said.
He turned his head toward her and coughed again. “Kid. You’re as brave as they come.”
“And as reckless,” her mom added.
Eleanor bent down to hug him, feeling the scratch of his beard against her cheek. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Now does somebody want to tell me just where the heck we are?”
Eleanor sat upright. Their flashlights danced around the chamber, crisscrossing one another’s beams.
“I think we are under the Isla del Sol,” Amaru said.
The chamber was larger than the one they had just swum through, with formations along the ceiling and floor, stalactites and stalagmites, and curtains and ribbons of mineral deposits draped along the walls. They were sitting at one end of it, while the opposite end exceeded the reach of their light.
“Can you walk?” Eleanor asked Luke.
“I think so,” he said, laboring to his feet. “If I can lose this tank.”
Armaru helped him unstrap it and shrug it off. The metal cylinder fell to the ground with the hollow toll of a bell, and the cave rang with the echo. Amaru inspected the tank and kneaded his forehead. “The pillar valve is damaged. I don’t know how we’ll get you out of here.”
Luke stared at the tank. “Well. We’ll deal with that later, I guess.” Then he turned to Eleanor. “You want to lead the
way?”
He was referring to her ability to sense the Concentrator, but Eleanor couldn’t think about that now. She was too worried about him. It would be impossible for Luke to swim back without a dive tank.
“Is it here?” Luke asked. “Can you feel it?”
“Luke, I—”
“Can you feel it?” he asked.
Eleanor stopped and tuned her mind to the hum. “Yes.”
“Which way?” he asked.
Eleanor pointed into the darkness at the opposite end of the chamber. “It’s that way.”
“Then let’s do this thing,” he said.
“What are you speaking about?” Amaru asked.
Eleanor looked at her mom. There really wasn’t any way to keep Amaru from finding out. It wasn’t like they could just ditch him down here. But she figured it might be better to just let him see it for himself than try to explain, and deal with the aftermath of that later.
“You’ll know soon enough.” Eleanor unbuckled the dive tank from her back and lowered it to the ground, and so did her mom and Amaru. The cavern felt quite cool, so Eleanor left her suit on, and together they picked their way slowly across the uneven floor. Their flashlights turned the dripping stone formations into glossy, melted wax.
“This is beautiful,” her mom said. “I’ve never really studied caves like this one, but I can see the appeal.”
Eleanor felt the hum passing through her, reaching the point where she could almost feel it on her skin. They were very close now.
“What the hell?” Luke said, aiming his flashlight at another tunnel ahead of them. This one, unlike the other, had obviously been carved. Its opening was a square rectangle, slightly taller than Luke, and its floor had been smoothed.
The three of them stared at it for a few moments, trying to make sense of it.
“Maybe it was the same people who built the temple,” Eleanor said.
“There are legends about this,” Amaru said. “They say the Inca had miles and miles of tunnels where they hid their gold, connecting their whole empire.”
“Let’s see where this one goes,” Luke said.
Eleanor led the way forward through a corridor much more comfortable than the one she had just passed through. A slight draft blew by her cheeks, the air cool and humid. The tunnel was not uniformly square and in some places opened wider with the natural, rough cave walls, but it never became narrower than its size at the entrance. It curved and turned, and at times it seemed to be ascending, and other times descending. When the corridor intersected with another tunnel, Eleanor had to use the direction of the hum to guide them down the right path.
“I wonder how many tunnels are down here,” Luke said. “You could get lost.”
“Let’s hope not,” Eleanor’s mom said.
“The Concentrator is close,” Eleanor said. The hum felt and sounded as though it were right in her ear, setting her jaw throbbing.
Another few turns, and then the tunnel opened into a room that had been similarly shaped by ancient hands. The carved walls bore more of the same faces from the underwater temple, and several monolithic statues stood in a circle, facing an object at their center.
The Concentrator.
The alien device rose to the height and size of a large tree. Halfway up its length the black metallic trunk divided into the chaotic branches that so defied human perception. Eleanor could feel them working, could sense the Concentrator’s roots reaching deep into the earth’s crust, gathering up telluric energy, which it folded and twisted into the dark energy the rogue planet needed.
“I always believed you,” Luke said. “But I had no idea.” He twisted the top off his flashlight and set it on the ground, like a lantern.
“It’s monstrous,” Eleanor’s mom said. “I wish I had my instruments.”
“No time for that,” said Eleanor. “I’m going to shut it down.”
“No, sweetie—” Her mom reached out as if to grab her, but caught herself and pulled back. Eleanor could see the conflict going on inside her, beneath the surface, the skin around her eyes tight and quivering. She didn’t want Eleanor connecting with the Concentrator, but she also knew that was the entire reason they had come.
“Mom, it’s okay.” Eleanor smiled and stepped toward the device, searching its trunk for the same interface console she had used to stop the other one in the Arctic. Before she’d stepped between the ring of statues around it, she heard a click behind her.
“Please,” Amaru said. “Stop.”
Eleanor turned toward him. He held a pistol. Pointed at her.
“Amaru!” Eleanor’s mom said. “What are you doing—?”
“Stay back,” Amaru said. “Or I will shoot her.”
“What the—” Luke began.
“Believe me, I don’t want to hurt any of you,” he said. “And I won’t, if you do what I say.”
This was the second time someone had pointed a gun at Eleanor. The third if she counted the G.E.T. agent on the runway. But she felt curiously calm about it this time, and yet she knew how strange it was that she wasn’t scared.
Amaru pulled out another device, a small silver disk, and pressed a button on it. A green LED light blinked on, and kept blinking. Amaru watched it for a moment before slipping the disc back inside his suit.
“What was that?” Luke asked.
“A locator,” Amaru said.
“For whom?” Eleanor’s mom asked.
“The Global Energy Trust.”
Luke took a step toward him, and Amaru swung the barrel of the pistol toward him. “Stay back. And please keep your hands where I can see them.”
“You’re with them?” Eleanor’s mom asked.
“Course not,” Luke said. “He’s just working for them. A mercenary for hire.”
“I am not a mercenary,” Amaru said.
That much was obvious to Eleanor. She wanted to know something else. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. Amaru had apparently been spying on them the entire time, and now that they had found the Concentrator, he’d used the locator in his pocket to send the coordinates right to the G.E.T.
“Dr. Watkins, the head of the Global Energy Trust . . . he promised he’ll take care of my family,” Amaru said. “I watched the ice take everything my parents had. I won’t let that happen to my wife. My son.”
“It won’t,” Eleanor said. “I can stop it. I can shut it down.” She turned her back on him and took another step toward the device.
“No, sweetie,” her mom said. “Don’t—”
The gunshot was deafening in the stone chamber. Eleanor froze, her shoulders tensed, her ears ringing. She slowly pivoted back to face Amaru.
“That was a warning,” he said. “If you go near the Tree of Life, I will kill you. I don’t want to. But I will.”
CHAPTER
13
“TREE OF LIFE?” ELEANOR SAID.
“That is what Dr. Watkins called it,” Amaru said. “He’s been looking for this for a long time. But now you found it. Just like he said you would.”
“Do you know what this does?” Eleanor asked.
“It provides energy we will need to survive the Freeze,” he said.
“That’s what Dr. Watkins told you,” said Eleanor’s mom.
“Yes,” he said. “He also told me you destroyed another one, in the Arctic, and might be coming here to destroy this one.” He shook his head. “Why would you do that?”
Eleanor had thought they were escaping the G.E.T., but it seemed that Watkins had suspected where they were heading all along, and he had let them go. He had used Eleanor to find the Concentrator, and she had led Amaru right to it. But something else confused her. Skinner hadn’t known about the Arctic Concentrator before he saw it, which meant that Watkins had been behind this from the start and had kept secrets even from the company’s CEO. Eleanor had thought Skinner was in charge of the G.E.T., but it seemed he had only been its public face. Watkins was the real authority. And it seemed he knew everything.<
br />
“Amaru, this isn’t what you think,” Eleanor said. “This . . . this Tree of Life isn’t giving us energy. It’s taking it.”
“Dr. Watkins told me you’d say that—”
“Dr. Watkins is wrong,” Eleanor said.
“And the kid is right,” Luke said.
“Look at it, Amaru.” Eleanor pointed at the Concentrator, stuck in the ground like a harpoon. “That thing should not be here. You can see it’s all wrong. I know you can. It’s hurting the earth.”
Amaru swallowed.
“The G.E.T. didn’t put that here,” Eleanor said. “No person did.”
“What are you saying?” Amaru asked.
Eleanor’s mother spoke slowly and calmly. “Think about it. Who built that tunnel we just came through? And that temple out there on the bottom of a lake? How long ago? How long has this Tree of Life been here?”
“That is . . .” Amaru readjusted his grip on the pistol.
“Look at that thing, bub,” Luke said. “That look especially human to you?”
Amaru squinted at the Concentrator for a few moments. “Are you . . . are you saying aliens?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “And Watkins knows it. He thinks he can control it. But he can’t. That thing is what’s causing the Earth to freeze. And it’s going to keep doing it unless we shut it down.”
She could see the doubts racing through Amaru’s mind, the confusion weakening his resolve, and she decided to risk another step toward the Concentrator. “I can stop it,” she said. “If you let me.”
Amaru raised the weapon. “I told you to stay away from it.”
Eleanor stopped moving.
“Please, Amaru,” her mom said. “If we can shut these things down, we can set the earth right again. Things can go back to the way they were. No more Freeze. No more refugees. The best thing you can do—for your wife and son—is let us do what we came here to do.”
“I will not listen to terrorists telling me what is best for my family,” Amaru said.
“We’re not terrorists,” Eleanor said. “We can help you. We can save your family.”
“Can you?” Amaru said. “And what if you’re wrong? What if the Freeze doesn’t stop? Can you promise me that my family will survive when the ice comes? Can you guarantee we will have food and warmth, as Dr. Watkins has? Can you?”
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