Island of the Sun

by Matthew J. Kirby

  Luke said the flight to Miami would take them a little over nine hours. During the first part of the flight, Eleanor slept some more, as did the others in the cabin. When she woke up, she snacked on some potato chips and another granola bar, wishing she had something to read.

  Eventually, she found herself up in the cockpit with Luke.

  “Don’t you ever get tired?” she asked him.

  “I’ve never needed much sleep,” he said. “Back when I was a kid, I had the worst insomnia. Always restless. My grandma used to say I was half firecracker.”

  “Is that why you became a pilot? So you could keep moving all the time?”

  “No,” he said. “I became a pilot because I hate people, and up here is about as far away from them as I can get.”

  “You don’t hate people,” Eleanor said.

  He opened his mouth as if he were about to argue, paused, and then nodded. “Maybe it’s just most people.”

  “So nice of you to give some of us a chance.”

  “I never said I was perfect,” he said. “What about you? Things any better with your mom?”

  “I don’t know. I think the whole thing still freaks her out.”

  “Well, now that I’ve seen it . . .” But he didn’t finish that, and instead asked, “What’s it like when you connect with that thing?”

  Eleanor stared out the window at the ocean below them, endless in every direction. “It’s hard to explain. It’s kind of like when you learn something, and it makes so much sense to you, it’s like you already knew it, you just didn’t know you knew it.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “That kinda makes sense.”

  “Really? It doesn’t to me. I just want to know what makes me different.”

  “That’s natural,” he said. “But you ask me, the rest of us should simply be grateful that you are different. If it wasn’t for you, we’d still be up in the Arctic right now, trying to figure out what that thing did. Or, you know, dead.”

  “Thanks, Fournier.”

  “You’re sounding like Betty.”

  Eleanor smiled and laid her head back against the seat.

  A few hours later, they landed in Miami. While Luke refueled and swept the plane for tracking devices as best he could, Eleanor’s mom decided to run over to the airport terminal to buy some new clothes for herself and Eleanor. They both still wore the thermal suits from their diving equipment, and the only clothing they had on the plane was their polar gear, the rest of it either lost in the Arctic or left on Amaru’s boat. Eleanor wanted to go with her, but her mom worried it would be too risky and insisted she go alone. A short while later she returned with sweatpants, sweatshirts, and T-shirts, the only things she could find, all of them branded Florida: the Sunshine State!

  For the length of their stopover, Finn sat off by himself, and though Eleanor could guess what he was thinking about, she knew she didn’t really understand what it was like for him. After she’d changed into her new clothes, with their new-clothes smell, and they boarded the plane once more, she went over and sat down next to him, much in the same way he had sat next to her in the cargo hold.

  “Are you okay?” She knew what a dumb question it was, how annoyed she’d be if someone asked her in the same situation. But she didn’t know what else to say.

  “In general, or considering what we’ve been through?” he asked. “In general, life sucks. But considering in the past couple of weeks we’ve nearly frozen to death, been shot at a couple of times, and lost my dad and brother, I’m doing pretty well at this precise moment.”

  “Point taken. I deserved that.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said. But he didn’t apologize, either.

  “Do you still think you should be with them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so. But I know how that sounds. My dad would say I’m being irrational.” He deepened his voice when he said it, imitating Dr. Powers.

  “I don’t know about irrational,” Eleanor said. “But I think I kinda get it.”

  “It’s not that I wish I got caught. I just . . . I wish I was with them, I guess.”

  Just then Luke rushed on board. “Everybody ready?”

  They all took their seats and buckled in, Luke performed his flight checks, and thirty minutes later, they were once again in the air with nothing below them but ocean. Before long, they flew over the United Lucayan Archipelago—a sprawling, dense network of islands, land bridges, saltwater lakes, and waterways. Eleanor’s mom said the region was once very different, decades ago, with much smaller islands, like the Bahamas. The falling sea levels had reshaped it.

  Their journey across the Atlantic took them nearly ten hours, and during that time they flew in and out of night, so that with the change in time zones they finally reached Barcelona early the next morning. Eleanor, like most of the kids she’d known back home, had never been to Europe before, but she had learned about it in school.

  The European ice sheet now completely covered all of Scandinavia, most of the United Kingdom, Germany, and some of France. Spain, still generally free of ice, had received many of the refugees, as had Italy and Greece, though most were now spilling down into Africa, but also the Middle East, where Eleanor’s mom believed a war would soon break out between the refugees and the nationals living there. A devastating conflict had already swept through central Africa, ending with the formation of the Union of the Congo Republics, but not before a lot of people had died.

  The last thing the world needed was another war.

  They didn’t stay in Barcelona long—just enough time for Luke to refuel Consuelo and take care of some routine maintenance. There was no sign of the G.E.T., and no indication that they were being followed, but that didn’t stop Eleanor from worrying. Then they were back in the air, bound for Cairo. They flew over the Mediterranean and its many islands and peninsulas, but when they reached northern Africa, the view below changed from a sea of blue to a sea of beige desert. It wasn’t until they neared Egypt that Eleanor saw any green, a long, wide swath of it.

  “That’s the Nile floodplain,” her mom said. She sounded exhausted, which wasn’t surprising. “This region has supported human societies for a hundred and twenty thousand years, longer than any other place on earth. Africa is the birthplace of humanity.”

  Eleanor remembered that the Arctic Concentrator had been in place for at least fifteen thousand years, based on what Amarok’s tribe had known about it. “That means the ancient Egyptians might have been around when the Concentrator was . . . installed, or whatever. They might have known about it.”

  “It’s possible that people here did, yes,” her mom said. “Though the ancient Egyptian empire as we know it didn’t emerge until five thousand years ago.”

  “So what are you saying?” Eleanor put on mock heartbreak. “That aliens didn’t build the pyramids?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” her mom said, but with only a weak smile behind it.

  Luke decided to land Consuelo at an airstrip outside the Sixth of October City, a little over twenty miles southwest of Cairo. Much like the area surrounding Mexico City, this part of Egypt had become a refugee settlement, mainly for Europeans, and it appeared from the air as if conditions here weren’t any better than in Mexico City. There were millions of refugees, densely packed in ramshackle houses that were small and close together. But at least they weren’t tents.

  “So what’s the plan when we land?” Luke asked from the cockpit.

  Eleanor’s mom pulled out the Sync to look at von Albrecht’s map. “The nexus of the ley lines is right over the Giza Plateau, near the pyramids. If what we’ve come to believe is true, the Concentrator must be somewhere around there.”

  Everyone agreed, nodding, but said nothing. As Eleanor looked around at her mom, and Betty, and Finn, she noted circles under their eyes, their rounded shoulders. Their journey, from the Arctic to Peru and now here, was taking a toll.

  They landed late in the morning without incident. Lu
ke said cargo planes came in all the time to that airfield, because of the refugees, so theirs wouldn’t stand out—at least not until someone came looking for them specifically. They deplaned onto the sandy tarmac, the air dry, the sun warm on Eleanor’s skin, the horizon flat and featureless in every direction she looked, a mix of sand and grass and fields of grain.

  At the airport terminal, they arranged for a taxi van to pick them up and then waited outside. When it arrived, they piled in and Luke asked the driver, a very friendly, middle-aged man named Youssef, if they could be taken to the pyramids.

  “No, no.” He waved both hands across the air above the steering wheel. “Closed.”

  “Closed?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  “Yes, closed.”

  “Why?” Luke asked.

  “The G.E.T.,” he said, and did not sound happy about it. “They block off the whole area. Why? I don’t know. No oil there!” He stuck his open hands out in front of him, over the dashboard, his shoulders raised.

  If the G.E.T. had closed off access to the pyramids, that surely meant they knew about, and had possibly found, the Concentrator. This was exactly what Eleanor had worried she would find when they arrived. She wiped some sweat from her forehead. Youssef’s van was getting uncomfortably warm. He didn’t have the air-conditioning turned on, and the windows were all up.

  “Could we get close enough to see them?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  Eleanor didn’t know what good that would do. If the G.E.T. had taken control of the site, would it even be possible to get close enough to the Concentrator to do what she had come to do?

  “Yes, yes,” Youssef said, and turned the key. “I take you to a good place. Good view. Good food. You will like it.”

  He pulled the van away from the terminal and onto a two-lane road. As they drove across the desert, they passed several cars, as well as groups of people leading camels. Before long, they reached the refugee community and skirted along its edge, the small, severe structures made of cinder block and seemingly constructed only for basic shelter without giving any thought to comfort. From the look of it, they had no power or running water. People loitered outside them and stood in the doorways, staring at the cars driving past.

  “Germans,” Youssef said, pointing at the tract, with evident irritation in his voice.

  “You don’t like the refugees?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  He shook his head and pointed a finger at the roof of his van. “They do not respect Islam. We let them come here, we say you are welcome, we give them what they need to build houses, but we say you will respect Islam. They say they will respect Islam, but they do not.”

  “You want them to convert?” Betty asked.

  “No, no, no,” he said, waving his hand. “We do not force on anyone. But this our way.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Friday is a holy day. We close our shop and business. Refugees want to open business on Friday, and this is not pleasing. They eat and drink in the open during Ramadan. This is not pleasing. They do not respect Islam. And they have many crimes, also.”

  “It’s worse in Syria and Iraq,” Betty said. “Now that Israel has closed its borders.”

  “Yes.” Youssef nodded his head deeply enough that Eleanor worried whether he could still see the road. “That is very bad situation. That is not Islam.”

  Eleanor didn’t understand all the politics, and she didn’t understand how some people couldn’t see they were all one planet facing the same threat—that they needed to work together. But maybe that was actually why things were so contentious here. If people were scared they might lose what they valued the most, maybe that made them try even harder to protect it, drawing lines along the edges of ancient conflicts and resentments. No wonder most people hadn’t figured out what was really going on with the Freeze. They were too busy contending with one another.

  They left the refugee tract behind and drove into an urban area, lined with shops, restaurants, and movie theaters, with palm trees leaning gently over the street. Youssef took several turns and pulled onto a road that ran along the edge of an open expanse of desert. He then stopped in front of a café and pointed across the front passenger seat.

  “There, you see?”

  Eleanor followed the invisible line from the tip of his finger, between two buildings, to several triangles stabbing upward from the horizon. She hadn’t noticed them, but there they were. Right there. The pyramids.

  “You want to eat here, yes?” Youssef got out of the van and walked around to open the sliding door for them. “Good food. Good view.”

  “Okay,” Luke said.

  They piled out of the taxi and followed Youssef into the café, where another middle-aged man greeted them with a smile and a slight bow of his head. He wore a black apron around his waist and a white button-down shirt open at the collar, and he and Youssef embraced and kissed each other on both cheeks. They spoke together in Arabic, with smiles and laughter.

  Then Youssef turned back toward them. “This is Samir, the brother of my wife.”

  Samir nodded again. “Welcome. You are hungry. Come, please.” He opened his arm inward to his café.

  “I’ll leave you now,” Youssef said. “But Samir will call me if you want a hotel. I will take you to a good one. Anywhere you want to go. You are very nice.”

  “Thank you, Youssef,” Eleanor’s mom said.

  He left, and Samir shepherded them through the café and settled them at a table on a back patio, shielded from the sun by a white canopy overhead. The spot did have an amazing view of the pyramids, off in the distance, and it occurred to Eleanor that the image before her had likely changed very little in the last five thousand years.

  “One moment,” Samir said, and after he’d left them, Luke leaned over the table.

  “What do you want to wager that hotel Youssef mentioned is owned by his uncle?” he said.

  “No bet,” Betty said.

  “Stop it—it’s fine,” Eleanor’s mom said. “I get the feeling that’s how it works here. He seemed like a nice man.”

  Luke frowned. “So did Amaru—”

  “Amaru was a nice man,” Eleanor said, almost challenging him to dispute it. “He made a bad choice.”

  “If you say so, kid,” Luke said. “That argument doesn’t make me feel any better about nice-guy Youssef, though.”

  “Can we eat something?” Finn asked. “I’m starving.”

  He sounded like Julian, though Eleanor refrained from making that observation out loud. A moment later, Samir returned with menus, and also two pairs of binoculars.

  “For the view,” he said, and pointed toward the pyramids.

  “Thank you,” Eleanor’s mom said.

  Eleanor grabbed one of the pairs before anyone else could claim it and aimed it out across the sand. It took her a moment to adjust the dial and bring the view through the lenses into focus, and then another moment to land them on something to see.

  But she wasn’t hoping to get a better look at the pyramids, or the Sphinx. She was looking for the G.E.T.

  They were everywhere. Vehicles. Tents. Agents. Every road leading there was blocked off, and dozens of structures had been built throughout the area, like a small city. It was a massive operation, all in and around the bases of the pyramids.

  Eleanor brought the binoculars down and looked at everyone else around the table. “We’re screwed,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  17

  THEY LOOKED AT ONE ANOTHER IN SILENCE, HAVING EACH taken a turn with the binoculars and seen the state of things around where the ley lines intersected. They didn’t know exactly where the Concentrator would be, but the fact that a small army of G.E.T. agents swarmed the entire site meant they wouldn’t even be able to search for it, let alone get close enough for Eleanor to shut it down.

  Samir returned, smiling. “What can I bring you?”

  “We, uh . . . ,” Eleanor’s mom began. “We haven’t had a chance to look at the menu. What would you recommend?”
<
br />   “You want me to bring my specialties?”

  “That’s fine,” Luke said.

  “Of course,” he said, and hurried away.

  “Boy,” Finn said. “Good thing we abandoned my dad and brother to stick to the mission.”

  “I’d rather be here,” Betty said, “than be back there in G.E.T. custody, thank you very much.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re happy,” Finn said.

  “Hey,” Eleanor said. “That’s not what she meant. I’m pretty sure your dad would thank Betty and the rest of us for getting you out of there. So we hit a snag—”

  “A snag?” Luke pointed across the desert toward the pyramids. “You call that a snag, I don’t even want to see what you’d consider a crisis.”

  “We’ll find a way,” Eleanor said, though she had no idea how or what it might be. She looked to her mom for support, but she was looking down, brow furrowed, idly scratching the vinyl tablecloth.

  Samir returned bearing a tray of iced magenta drinks. “Karkade,” he said. “Hibiscus tea.”

  He next brought platters of flatbread, hummus, baba ghanoush, with some white crumbly cheese, and falafel, and for the next several minutes, no one said a word. They ate and they drank, and when Samir came back to check on them, the food was already nearly gone.

  “You enjoy it?” he asked.

  “Very much,” Eleanor’s mom said.

  He smiled. “Very good. I bring you dessert?”

  “I’m afraid we’re on a budget,” Luke said.

  “Then please,” Samir said. “Dessert is on the house.”

  “Well, that’s very kind of you,” Betty said.

  He left again, and Eleanor’s mom sighed, as much from being full as being discouraged, it seemed. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “We can’t get anywhere near the site.”

  No one answered her. The exhaustion Eleanor had sensed in them back on the plane lingered around the table, made worse by the bleakness of their predicament. But she would not be defeated.

  “I think we should at least check it out,” she said. “Get a bit closer.”