by Tony Abbott
He pushed forward, swatting the water behind him, no breath left. Except now he wasn’t sure he actually was going forward. It was like being in a coffin. His arms seemed like lead pipes. His lungs felt as if they were turning to water. Where did the light go? In his mind he screamed, Becca, go back! We’re trapped. I’ll go on, but you go back! Save yourself! Save—
The passage angled up. There was the light again.
With one final push of his leaden arms, he burst up inside a cavern that seemed as bright as the sun. Becca splashed up beside him, desperate for breath. They hung there in the water, their fingers clutching the rocks, gasping and coughing for minutes. They finally crawled up and flattened themselves on a stone floor, staring upward.
When he spied a small opening at the faraway top, Wade surprised himself by starting to laugh. The cavern’s light was actually dim, but it seemed brilliant. They could feel raindrops falling in the opening, through the vault, and down over them, sprinkling their faces. It was as quiet in there as if they had surfaced on another planet, and he laughed and couldn’t stop laughing.
“Wade . . .”
Becca pointed at the walls. They were carved and painted with hundreds of symbols. Stars. Constellations. A blue hand was printed on the wall in the midst of the stars, its fingers pointing down.
Becca slapped his arm gently. “We found it.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Wade stood, still breathing hard, his legs like rubber, boneless.
The cave walls formed an irregular cone of rock that had kind of the feeling of an ancient cathedral or temple, a holy place of stone.
The perfect place to hide a priceless artifact.
“If Shoichi knew this cave, he may have watched the stars through the hole in the ceiling,” he said. “Maybe he added some of these drawings himself.”
“Except . . .” Becca was up now, searching the walls, the floor, the high vault, everywhere for a sign. “I don’t see a blue stone.” She glanced back at the pool. “Could it be . . . hidden underwater? Did we pass it on our way here? I mean, maybe over the years since Magellan the passages filled up with water. Or maybe the cave collapsed, changed its shape.”
Wade stepped over to the blue handprint. “But Laura Thompson must have seen the relic, right? Janet told us about her last trip here. That wasn’t that long ago.”
“I forgot that.” She scanned the walls up and down. “Then I have no clue.”
No clue. Except maybe there was a clue.
Studying the upside-down handprint, Wade realized that it not only vaguely bore the shape of a sea star, but that the palm and fingers formed a distinct geometric shape. “Bec, what does it remind you of?
She stood back. “An upside-down hand?”
Wade laughed again. “And . . .” He traced his finger in straight lines around the angles the hand made. “It’s kind of a triangle, isn’t it? With the wrist as the top point. The same triangle as in Pigafetta’s drawing. The same shape as the lateen sail. All pointing to a location. Up the cave wall.”
They followed the point of the imaginary triangle up the wall. About ten feet from the floor was a narrow horizontal shelf of rock, an outcropping of volcanic limestone.
Becca looked at Wade. “You don’t think . . .”
“I’ll give you a boost.”
“You’ll . . .”
“Come on.” Wade wove his fingers together, and she stepped in with her left foot, holding on to his shoulders. Wade lifted, and she set her right foot on his shoulder, then her left, bracing her hands against the cave wall. She steadied herself, reached up, and felt over the ledge.
“Anything?” he said.
Becca stiffened.
“What is it? What do you see?”
She drew her arm slowly away from the wall, gripping something in her hand. She made a choking sound. “Oh, Wade.”
When he saw the wavy blade of the dagger, his knees nearly buckled. “Magellan’s dagger! The one Copernicus gave to him with Vela! Is there anything else?”
Quickly slipping the dagger into her belt, she reached up again. “The dagger was stuck partway into the cave wall. Taking it out revealed an opening, a kind of compartment.” Wade held her calves as she raised herself up on her tiptoes. One foot left his shoulder. Then her arm swung back and she lurched away from the wall. He twisted, catching her clumsily, and they fell to the floor together.
“Wade—” Becca opened her hand.
In her palm was a nearly perfect triangle of dazzlingly blue stone.
Roughly four inches long on two sides and two inches at the base, it was a smooth piece of lapis lazuli with a slight curve in one side. It was in a shape very similar to a lateen sail.
“Argo Navis Vela,” Wade said in a whisper.
It instantly seemed as if all the air in the cavern, and all the light in the air, drew itself into the stone.
Vela pulsed with a kind of life, he thought, though he knew it wasn’t possible. It seemed to him as if time and space combined and—he didn’t even know what else—people, maybe, or family, or blood, or love, or something—were all joined inside the contours of the blue stone.
And it breathed.
It breathed and whispered secret after secret, but only to the two of them who were there.
This was before he even held the stone! Vela was luminescent, beautiful, and alive, and then Becca slipped it into his trembling hand, and he felt what he thought was the weight of history in his palm, as if the stone weighed a thousand pounds or was as weightless as light.
“Becca . . . ,” he murmured, tearing his eyes away from it to look into hers for only seconds before the stone drew him back to it. He slumped on the floor of the cave, his brain clicking away with a kind of clarity he was certain he’d never known before.
“Becca . . . ,” he said again, discovering something amazing, yet painful, about the stark syllables of her name. “More than all the craziness, the running, and the places and the arrows and the hiding and everything, through all the stuff we read and the sketches and equations and everything we found out, this blue stone proves there’s a time machine. It’s not like a math proof, but I . . .”
As he trailed off, Becca wiped a tear from her cheek, nodding.
“I guess what I’m saying is that holding it in my hand makes Copernicus’s astrolabe as real as if it’s right here, and we’re traveling back in time right now, you know?”
“I know.”
“And no matter how impossible it is to do that, this is a part of a time machine, a relic of Copernicus’s astrolabe, the astrolabe that could travel in time, the thing was a time machine, that actually existed, and this is a relic of it and we’re holding it and it’s real . . .”
Becca smiled. “You realize that’s kind of a wormhole of a sentence.”
“Yeah, I guess it is.” Wade started laughing again, and the echo of his laughter coiled up the sides of the stone room, coming back down from the top and going back up again.
He didn’t know how many minutes passed while they simply stared at the stone as if they were waiting for something to happen. It was like time itself had stopped, which is a thing only time machines can do.
Becca took it gently from his palm and turned the stone over.
On its back were a faint but perfectly engraved spiral and two small notches at the base of it that held minute traces of something dusty and red.
“Rust,” Becca said. “Where the stone was in contact with metal.”
Wade wanted to laugh again. He knew instantly where the rust marks had come from and began to feel the sketch of the device come whirring to life right there. “That’s where Vela was attached to, what did he call it, the ‘grand armature’ of the astrolabe. Becca—”
The water bubbled suddenly, the silence broke, and Darrell and Lily splashed into the cave. “They’re here! They’re right behind us—”
The pool exploded. Four divers climbed out and stood on solid ground. Two men armed with underwat
er pistols. A pale man who lifted his scuba mask and dried his spectacles.
And the beautiful young woman with the wickedly ugly crossbow.
The Knights of the Teutonic Order.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The young woman was impossibly beautiful. Otherworldly, Wade thought. Like a cross between a supermodel and a futuristic automaton. And her hair. Even dripping wet it was awesome.
He glanced over at Lily, Darrell, and Becca. They had to feel it, too. The woman wasn’t much older than they were, but she had some kind of crazy kinetic energy running through her.
And that crossbow she held. What was that thing? An artifact from some ancient future? A weird robotic extension of her arms?
“You have witnessed the reach of the Teutonic Order,” she said with a trace of accent he couldn’t identify. It was almost hypnotic how her voice echoed up the walls of the cave. “You know our power. Let it not be the last thing you know. Give me the relic.”
She took a step toward him, as did the three men, but Wade raised his hand. “I’ll smash it!” he cried. “I will!”
She stopped. Everyone stopped.
Dangling around her neck, just visible in the opening of her form-fitting outfit, were two ruby stones, an identical pair of sea serpents with several arms. Krakens.
The hunched man beside her adjusted his thick-lensed spectacles. His suit was baggy in the chest, stretched in other places. He looked other than human in the opposite way. A misshapen little gnome.
“Since Berlin, you have taken us on quite a journey,” the man said weakly. “It ends here. In this forsaken cave.” His voice was halting, his words overenunciated.
“You killed Heinrich Vogel,” Becca said, shifting to stand next to Wade. “And Bernard Dufort in Paris.”
“Among others,” said Galina, her eyes staring not at her but at Wade’s hand, as if to burn it away and free the relic for herself.
“Countless others,” the gnome added proudly.
“You’re all horrible creeps,” Lily said softly. Her eyes were pinched and fiery. “Every one of you.”
“Why don’t you give me the relic,” Galina Krause said. It was not a question. Removing her left hand from the shaft of the crossbow, she held it out. The barrel barely moved. The weapon must either be lightweight, Wade thought, or she’s very strong. It was still pointing steadily at his heart.
“The old man is your father?” she said. “Thanks to the Guardians, he escaped our grasp in Berlin. He will not come for you now. You are alone.”
Wade felt his breath die. Had they shot him? “You . . .” was all he could say.
“He’d better not be hurt,” said Darrell, shifting from one foot to the other, ready to spring into action.
Wade pulled himself from the thought of his father hurt. He tapped Darrell’s left foot with his own, and he stopped moving.
Wait, Darrell, wait for it . . .
“Save yourselves a lonely death,” the gnome said, stepping forward once more. “Give us—”
Wade backed up. “Not an inch!”
The thousand thoughts flashing through his mind balled up into a single one. Passing through that underwater tunnel, he and his friends had become different people.
How else to explain his own behavior with these killers, holding the relic high, ready to shatter it to dust on the cave floor?
The water had changed them. The light in the cave had changed them. The relic—the blue stone in his palm right then—had changed them, was changing them that very moment.
We’ve become Guardians, he thought. That’s what it is. We’re members of the secret society from Copernicus to Magellan to Enrique and Pigafetta and Shiochi and Laura Thompson and her granddaughter and all the countless others, on and on, through the centuries, with one goal—to protect the Copernicus Legacy.
The garbled sound of shouting echoed in from outside, and Galina Krause flashed her strange eyes at them. “You cannot stop time. We will have the relic. Will you make it easy?”
“No,” Wade said, and Becca stepped back with him.
Galina exhaled a sigh of regret. “Wrong answer.”
With no more than a flick of her wrist, the two armed divers holstered their pistols and leaped. Wade tapped his brother’s foot, and Darrell sprang forward into one man’s knees, screaming as he did. The second man lunged at Wade, who managed to toss the relic to Becca before he went down. She snatched it from the air, crouched, and rolled to the edge of the pool.
“Not in the water!” the pale man shrieked, as Becca slid into the pool, gulping in a big breath. Dropping his pistol, the gnome clamped his two thin hands on her free wrist and pulled.
“Don’t you touch her—” Lily was on his back like a cat, clawing his face and yelling “Creep-creep-creep!”
The gnome must have been all bone and wire, because he shook Lily off and was still able to keep Becca from diving away. Dragging her back up, he wormed her fingers open. “I’m getting it, I’m getting it!”
“Back away to the wall!” Galina trained her crossbow on Wade and Lily as one man pinned Darrell to the floor, though he was squirming like an eel. The other goon helped the runtish German drag Becca roughly from the pool. Something flew down through the ceiling. It slapped on the floor near Lily’s feet. A rope, dangling from the hole at the top.
A shout came from the surface. “Kids, get back!”
Connor was on the rope, edging down. Galina shot her crowsbow up at him—thwack! He stopped his descent.
While the first thug kept Darrell pinned to the wall, Wade bashed at his knees, and he fell like a ton of bricks. There was a crack and a groan. “Go!” Wade gasped. Darrell and Lily both rushed to the rope. Connor was coming down again.
“Grab hold, and give me a clear shot!” He aimed a pistol at Galina.
While the second thug still had Becca, the gnome jumped at Wade, pushing him into the wall, but he twisted sideways. The gnome smashed his forehead into the stone, shrieking.
Wade spun around. “Becca—”
Galina was standing over her, the crossbow aimed at her throat. The thug had twisted Becca’s arms behind her. A scream exploded in Wade’s chest. He charged the woman. Her muscles were hard as stone. She barely moved, but her crossbow clanked to the floor.
When the goon dragged Becca away by her throat, Wade drew the dagger out and jerked it into the man’s thigh. He cried out and released her. Gasping, she slunk to the floor.
Crack! A shot from above. Galina backed away. Wade tugged Becca to her feet. They grabbed the rope beneath Lily and Darrell.
“No—you—don’t!” The pale man’s face was smeared with blood. He snatched up the loaded crossbow and pulled the trigger. Galina knocked his arms, and the shot flew to the ceiling and clattered back down. “Fool! They will drop the relic. It will shatter!”
Becca began to slip. “I . . . can’t . . . hold on . . .”
A slender thread of blood dripped down her arm.
“You’re shot! That creep shot you!” Wade coiled his arm around her waist and half carried her as the rope rose higher.
“We will win this race!” the pale German squealed from below, swinging his fists in the air. “We will force you to give us the relic—”
Galina Krause slapped him across the face.
“But the first will tell them where—”
“Silence!” she cried. “Bring her to me. Only she can help us now!”
Near the top of the cave, the children felt the strong arms of Sgt. Connor pulling them through the opening and found that the storm had passed. When the hole was clear, he slid down the rope. Shots were fired, but a series of splashes followed. Looking down, they saw only Connor in an empty cave.
Galina Krause and her thugs were gone.
An engine sounded off shore. Seconds later, a motorboat roared out from the base of the cliffs. On its deck, the young woman, staring up at them.
“They escaped through the underwater passages,” Lily said.
> “Something tells me we’ll see her again,” said Wade. “Too soon.”
“Kids! Kids! Are you all right?”
They whirled around. Roald Kaplan ran stumbling toward them, his face smeared with mud, but unhurt.
Wade hugged him tight. “Becca’s wounded.”
“Connor radioed the base,” his father said, kneeling to her. “A helicopter is on its way.”
Minutes later, the sharp thunder of rotor blades filled the air. Connor emerged from the cave, and the whole group was choppered to the naval base. On the way, a report came over the helicopter’s radio. The motorboat was chased straight out to sea, but found bobbing empty in the water. No trace of Galina Krause. The Order had vanished.
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Show your dad,” Becca said, clutching her arm, but nodding to her pocket. After reaching his hand out instinctively, Wade decided to let Lily fish in her pocket and remove Vela.
Roald took it silently, traced his fingers over it.
“Uncle Henry didn’t die in vain, Dad,” Darrell said. “We found it. The first relic. We kept it from the Order.”
Roald simply nodded, his eyes far away, then hugged them all again. At the base hospital, Becca was bandaged up by a navy nurse named Chris, receiving a tetanus shot to guard against infection from the crossbow’s razor-sharp arrow.
Lily was as pale as she could be and still stay standing, which she did as close to Becca as she could. “I can’t believe you actually got shot,” she said, squeezing in closer. “Your mom’s going to kill me!”
“Hey, it’s what we Guardians do,” Becca said, trying to smile.
When the nurse excused himself for a second, Wade said, “It’s kind of incredible, isn’t it? We found Vela, a piece of Copernicus’s time-traveling astrolabe. Us. We kept it out of enemy hands.”
“For now it’s out of their hands,” his father said. “We have to decide what to do with it and where it will be safe from the Order.”
