“What was it?” Phoebe asked, her lips now parched.
“No one’s really sure,” Orlando said, after it was apparent Temple wasn’t going to speak. “At the time, they thought it was a meteor. But after several scientific teams got there and searched, they found no impact crater and no evidence of meteorite elements. But something sure hit that area with a force like a meteor.”
“Good enough for me,” Temple said. “You passed the quiz. Now back in the plane and let’s get to work.”
“So we’re in?” Phoebe voiced. “Past the bullshit? No more secrets, no more games?”
“Or freakin’ quizzes?” Orlando added.
Temple grinned. “No more quizzes. But as for the secrets… In time I’ll let you in. Don’t want to blow your minds all at once. Then you’d be no good to me. Or your friends.”
“Our friends,” Orlando whispered. “How are they?”
“You can find out soon. Get on the plane and let’s head back to our facility.”
“But…” Phoebe looked back to the ruins, silent and desolate. “But this city was so ancient. And Tunguska was only a hundred years ago. What’s going on?”
“They’re both related.”
“And Mars?”
“We’ll get to that.” He stepped back into the plane. Orlando met Phoebe’s eyes, and saw all her confidence fleeing. Saw her teetering on the edge of exhaustion, overcome by the weight of such visions and responsibility.
He felt the same things, but right now he feared something far more personal. If he didn’t get her out of this, she might never come back. So he did the only thing he could think of.
He took her hand, pulled her close. And kissed the dust from her lips.
11.
Alexandria
Caleb hadn’t been back here, to the modern library, for almost five months. The last time, he and Alexander had spent a couple days in the city, visiting all the tourist spots and sailing in the harbor, where Caleb had pointed out the place where he had nearly drowned that fateful day he had his first vision of the Pharos. They visited Qaitbey’s Fortress, and Caleb had a difficult time keeping Alexander from finding the secret lever that would open the door to the sub-chambers… and the great seal guarding a now-empty vault. The boy wanted to see, and Caleb couldn’t blame him. Someday, he promised, they’d come back when it was safe, when they wouldn’t get caught.
He had vowed that they would do it together, with Lydia. The next time all three were in Alexandria together. The next time…
Caleb had to stop and hold onto a pillar as a rush of images burst into his skull. Like she was still there, still waiting.
“Let’s take him,” Lydia says while propped up on her elbow on the bed beside him. “Tomorrow. He’s ready!”
“Isn’t one vault enough? He’s got enough to do here.”
“What are you worried about? The danger down there…”
“Is still real. It’s not like the traps don’t work anymore.”
“He just wants to see. He’s proud of you. Proud of us—what we did. It’s something before his time, and he feels left out.”
“Well, he wasn’t. He was a big part of it. If it wasn’t for him…”
“You and I would not have been apart. And you might not have found the way in with me holding you back.”
Her eyes are so profoundly large, green like the Emerald Tablet, so deeply resonant and magnetic. It’s as if she knows he’s lied to her. Knows he’s hidden it away, told her it was lost. Should he tell her? Is now the time?
He opens his mouth, but she’s leaning in. Her lips against his, silencing his voice. She pulls back, only for an instant. “Just think about it. We’re running out of time. A boy’s only a boy for so long.”
Caleb caught his breath and looked up to see Alexander and Rashi staring at him, both concerned. They stood between a gap between two enormous rows of shelves. Books as far as he could see in any direction.
“I’m okay. Just had a moment.”
Alexander moved forward. “Was it Mom?”
Caleb smiled. “Yeah… just, I haven’t been here since…”
A flash, an explosion of fire. A charred body, spinning around, and facing him, two green orbs in a blackened skull boring down at him, recriminating…
“Dad?” His hand on Caleb’s shoulder, Alexander pulled him up. His grip was strong, firmer than Caleb had ever remembered. It’s already too late. He’s not a boy anymore. And it’s my fault. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
And Alexander shook his head. “No reason to be.”
“I did to you what my mother did to me. She stole my childhood, and I never forgave her for it, not until the end.”
Alexander rolled his eyes. “I’m still a kid. I’m—what’s the word? Resilient. After we stop the bad guys and save the world, I’m still going to want to watch cartoons and play that 3D PlayStation you’re going to buy me for Christmas.”
A laugh mingled with a choking sob as Caleb stood up and hugged his son under the watchful gaze of the Keeper, Rashi. When they were ready, they made their way through the stacks and the shelves, the seemingly endless texts, volumes and tomes. While they walked, he took a moment to gaze fondly on all these works, and looked up at the sunlight-kissed levels above, all those treasures preserved here, hopefully for a long time to come.
At last, they made it to the elevator and accessed the locked sublevel. As the doors closed, Caleb glanced away from his son, out the doors and saw-
In the center of the library, on the marble floor in a shaft of light, Lydia stood alone, head bowed in silence.
#
The once metal-walled hallway was now decorated with ancient artwork: Sumerian friezes, Babylonian bas-reliefs, Egyptian murals… Caleb had walked this hallway more than a hundred times, and each time he felt as if he were coming home.
Into the vault, Rashi joined several other Keepers: two men and a woman busy at work at their stations. Hideki Matusi, bone-thin, yet regally elegant in a way Caleb always associated with ancient scholars, stood over a glass table, lit from below, as she analyzed scroll fragments with a microscope. She took a break from translating the ancient texts and came down to greet them.
She nodded sympathetically to Caleb. “We mourn for Lydia. But the work must continue, as she would have wanted it.”
Caleb looked down at his shoes, choked up.
But then Hideki smiled at Alexander. “Ah, the precocious child returns.”
“Hello Hideki!” Alexander waved, beaming at her. “Can’t wait to help out again.”
“Yes, yes, so long as you promise not to spill chocolate milk on any more priceless fifth-century BC papyri.”
“I promise.”
“I mean it.”
Caleb found it surprisingly comforting to laugh, to be distracted from the finality of loss. “She means it, Alexander. And so do I. Socrates would have been pissed.”
Rashi took a seat at the conference table, the very same one used by Nolan Gregory years ago when he had confined the Keepers down here for their protection. That day was the last great crisis for the Keepers. But now, they had lost two key members in the past week. One to tragedy, the other to greed. With Lydia and Robert gone, the Keepers needed a leader, and despite the regard they all held for Caleb, they knew he couldn’t step into the role held by his wife. Not under these circumstances.
Rashi took the reins, and she’d moved quickly but deliberately. They had to be extra careful, but they still needed to replenish their ranks. Hideki had a son, fifteen, who unfortunately showed no promise, or interest. Alexander was almost ready and could soon fill one of the gaps, but Rashi felt deep regret that she had never succeeded in bringing a child into the world. There was always adoption, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to that stage where she would have to admit it was physically impossible for herself.
But now, she had a new focus. Leadership.
Their enemies were closing in. What Caleb had discovered, what
Robert Gregory was a part of… it stretched back to the dawn of human history, to the very origins of civilization. A conflict, dormant for millennia, about to be rekindled.
“If what we’ve discovered in these texts is true, then we have no time to waste. No time to grieve. No time at all.”
Hideki joined them at the table.
“All these scrolls…” She looked around at the hermetically sealed cabinets, the honeycombed alcoves, filled with the contents of the vanished Alexandrian Library, the most esoteric texts, some so ancient they had yet to decipher the language. “Everything you found, Caleb. And yet…”
“And yet,” said Rashi, leveling her gaze at him, “the one thing that could have helped us most prepare for this moment…”
“You kept from us,” Hideki finished.
Caleb swallowed and looked in turn at the Keepers. He met their stares of recrimination. “I can’t apologize. I didn’t trust you, it’s true, but…”
“You were right not to,” Rashi said, raising a hand. “We are not condemning. We’re merely stating fact, preparing the setting, so to speak. The foundation for what we must do next. We are not judges.”
“How could we be,” Hideki said, “when one of our own, our very leader, was corrupted?”
Rashi leaned in. “If you had not kept the Tablet from us, Robert would have had it, and he would have used it.”
“That,” Caleb said in a low voice, “is what I need to understand. How would he have used it? What are they planning? Xavier Montross saw something. And I did too.”
Rashi nodded. “I can guess. Destruction. You saw it on a scale unimaginable.”
Caleb felt Alexander’s eyes on him. Large, almond-shaped, glassy. A hint of jade, like his mother’s. “The Tablet itself is undecipherable. I got nowhere with it, and honestly I didn’t want to try. It was enough that it fell to me to protect it. But now… Now I wish I had tried a little harder. Maybe I’d know what it is we need to do.”
Rashi kept her head down, contemplating the lines on her hands, between her knuckles. “We’ll tell you what we know, but after this you must rejoin your sister. And the others like yourself.”
Alexander perked up. “More remote-viewers?”
“Soon,” Caleb said. He had seen it, too—brief glimpses of well-trained men escorting Phoebe and Orlando through caves in the desert, then onto a plane, heading back to some well-hidden facility in the snow-capped mountains of the Pacific Northwest. “Soon, and I know they’re looking for answers too, but I don’t believe they know the right questions to ask. That’s why it has to start here. It needs to come from practical research first, grounding us on what to set as our objectives. Otherwise we’re blind mice sniffing around empty cupboards. Wasting time.”
“Time we don’t have,” Rashi agreed.
Caleb leaned back, studying the other members, then looking past them to the scrolls laid out on the work area. To the banks of servers storing all the scanned documents.
The other two Keepers were looking solemn, palms flat on the table. Caleb had taken a seat next to Alexander. He leaned forward. “Tell me what you’ve found. About the Tablet, about… the Spear.”
Rashi closed her eyes, and began to talk. “The first thing we found wasn’t from the Library, it was something much more recent. We looked into Robert Gregory’s files, decrypting his locked folders and accessing what he’d been studying in secret.”
“So basically,” Hideki said, “he had already done the research.”
“Knew what he was looking for,” Caleb said.
“But some of it wasn’t even from what you found under the Pharos. He had access to other books, private collections, heretical texts acquired from individuals with powerful connections, to say the least.”
Alexander was listening to all of this, confused. He kept focusing on the Zodiac images painted above, on the azure-background of the dome, imagining the animals taking form, moving around. He thought of the shapes in Genghis Khan’s tomb, thought of how much he had seen in the past few weeks. How much death, but in the midst of all that life. His eyes settled on the constellation of Gemini, the twins. And he realized couldn’t stop thinking about them, his new brothers. Where were they now?
“…revelations that seemed far too fanciful for us at first,” Hideki continued.
“But,” said Rashi, “now we’ve been reconsidering. In light of other insights. Now that the majority of the Pharos’ documents have been scanned and uploaded, and everything that could be translated has been, we have been able to search for keywords and phrases.”
“‘Tablet of Destiny’ being one,” Hideki said.
Caleb’s lips felt parched. His stomach grumbled. And he thought of Alexander and how neither of them had eaten in more than a day. He looked toward the door set back in a side room off the main domed chamber where they kept supplies, enough food and water for months. Beds, a shower. He thought about getting up and telling Rashi and Hideki to wait until he got a snack, but that was when he felt something.
A rumbling.
The table rattled. The microscope in the other room shook, toppled. The lights overhead dimmed.
Caleb blinked, and across his eyelids flashed an image, a vision in stark clarity:
A snowy field beset by enormous mountains ringed by an emerald aurora. Almost two hundred radar arrays, glowing, sparking with errant electrical discharge. And zooming in closer… through the walls of the main facility, lightning-quick through hallways and down elevator shafts to a control room… and a man in uniform holding a phone to his ear, saying: “Yes, Senator. It’s been done…”
The very chamber shook now, dust fell from the dome, and the barest hint of a crack split through the constellations, ripping apart Pisces and splitting the Twins.
Rashi stood up, eyes wide. “No… They can’t… They wouldn’t dare!”
Hideki screamed and pointed to Alexander, who when he stood, leaned forward so the necklace with the three charms slipped out.
“The Keys!” she shouted. “They’re after the Keys!”
Caleb got up, reaching for his son—but suddenly the room pitched and buckled and the table rocked into his side and thrust him backwards while Alexander stood there, helplessly.
“Dad!”
Caleb climbed over the table, and was about to leap and swoop him up when a huge section of the ceiling collapsed, masonry crashed between them, and everything turned black.
#
He stayed on his knees, arms outstretched toward the mass of debris: layers of twisted concrete, metal and girders. And all he could think of was: this can’t be happening!
Robert and Lydia and all the Keepers had given their assurances that this library was built to withstand the ages, time and especially, earthquakes. Not only were the upper levels built upon shifting, standalone foundations that should have been impervious to ground fault tectonic shifts, but this sublevel especially was reinforced. A veritable bunker. Even if the unthinkable were to happen up above, the most treasured documents should have been safe down here.
Safe…
The rumbling subsided, the vibrations died down. But now what replaced it was infinitely worse:
Silence.
It was as all-pervasive. One set of flickering lights above remained, highlighting the cracked forms of the lower half of the Zodiac.
“Alexander?”
He held his breath, listening for anything. Studying the wall of debris, trying not to think the worst. Keeping it out of his mind, just as he kept away the horrors of what must be happening on the surface, up in Alexandria. What kind of devastation…?
A glimpse, a curse rewarding his lack of willpower: A birds-eye view from two hundred feet up… The slanting glass roof destroyed, just a jagged semi-circular foundation left in the earth. Great chunks of glass and twisted metal girders strewn about an area that looked like a meteor had struck a direct hit. Centered perfectly on the library.
Not possible, Caleb thought. Pausing now in his se
arch. Going with the vision, the power that wanted, needed him to see.
Show me, he whispered, and mentally stepped back a few moments…
The domed library, scintillating in the sun, through the transparent windows hundreds of patrons could be seen strolling the aisles, reading at tables, looking at exhibits, while outside tourists took in the gardens, the fountains, or marveled at the planetarium.
Then, without warning, without even a flash of light, nothing but a faint ripple in the air, as if an invisible wave had just disrupted the fabric of the atmosphere—the dome imploded, shelves and floor were slammed down and met the exploding ground levels. Chunks of metal, concrete and earth rending and splitting, thrusting up and out and slamming down again, pulverized into Alexandria’s foundation.
The force of a meteor, just like—
He’d seen this before. Something Orlando had shown him…
Caleb shook his head, gagging on the visualization of the complete destruction of such a grand monument, not to mention the instant death of all those people. And only minutes after his arrival!
There could be no natural event. Just like he now believed Tunguska, Siberia was anything but natural. That place by the snowy mountains… Calderon…
He hung his head, fighting the tears, the guilt threatening to rend his heart of its last remaining strength. Willing it all away. He had to get to Alexander.
As much as it might be the final nail in his heart, he had to see…
#
But before he even looked, he knew what he’d find. Alexander was okay. He just had to be.
If Calderon did this, he would only have gone so far if he knew of the vault down here. Knew they’d be here. Calderon gave them enough time to get settled in, then he brought the world down upon them, sealing them in.
Keeping Caleb and Alexander—and the other Keepers—from the worst of the destruction.
But Alexander had the keys.
That was the one thought that kept Caleb going.
If Calderon still wanted that translation, he needed the keys. Sure he could mount an excavation in the guise of a rescue, and dig up the lower vault to find the keys, but that could take months, especially given the level of response and world attention that would be starting even now.
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