“I can take care of myself, you know.”
Evans looked at her like he didn’t have the slightest clue what she meant.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
His tinny voice responded through the speaker mounted inside her mask, beside her right ear.
“Trust me, kiddo. I don’t.”
“There it is. Kiddo. You need to stop treating me like I’m a child.”
“Okay,” Evans said, and started crawling into the darkness.
“Wait a minute—”
“I said okay. That’s what you wanted, right?”
“She thinks you’re getting in the way of a romantic liaison with Dr. Villarreal,” Jade said through the speaker.
“Oh, my God,” Anya gasped. “Who all can hear me?”
“There are four of us watching your feed now. They say there’s no reason for you to feel embarrassed, though. Everyone already knows.”
Anya resisted the urge to scream in frustration and quickly changed the topic to something—anything!—else.
“I’m not sure how much you guys are going to be able to see once we’re in the water. It’s pretty murky.”
“We’ll take whatever we can get,” Jade said. “The camera looks like it’s pretty well aligned with your line of sight, so if you can see it, we should be able to see it, as well.”
Anya switched on the light mounted to the opposite side of her mask from the camera and squirmed through the tunnel behind Evans. It didn’t look as though there were any way he was going to fit through there with the tank on his back, and yet somehow he made it all the way to the end and slid into the vile water, releasing a stench she could smell even through her mask. She groaned and dialed on the flow of compressed air.
“What’s wrong?” Jade asked.
“Nothing. Just dreading the prospect of putting my head into this foul soup.”
She maneuvered her body from the orifice and lowered herself into the cool water. Her light cast shifting shadows upon the faces of the feathered serpents leering at her from the walls, seemingly animating them in such a way that their eyes appeared to track her movements. Evans was already on the far side of the pool. From above the surface, the chamber was completely self-contained and gave no reason whatsoever for them to even suspect that there was potentially a passage beneath it.
“So we know the victims were sealed in here,” Evans said. “What we don’t know is whether or not they were alive when that happened.”
“What difference does that make?” Jade asked.
“Maybe none, but I can’t help wondering what would be the point of sacrificing so many people where no one could watch.”
A clattering sound came through the speaker.
“The ritual of the sacrifice was of great importance to the Aztec and Maya,” Villarreal said. Anya hoped he hadn’t joined the others in the trailer, where they’d set up the makeshift monitoring station, until after her embarrassing gaffe. “The same can be said of the other sacrifices we have discovered in Teotihuacan. It is my belief that whether or not they were alive at the time is of less consequence than the fact that they were sacrificed underground, where neither the citizens nor the gods could bear witness.
“During the First Dynasty,” Evans said, “the ancient Egyptians utilized a practice called retainer sacrifice, in which servants were killed and buried alongside pharaohs to continue their service in the afterlife.”
“But they were killed,” Anya said. “These people were left here to die.”
A rumpling sound preceded Jade’s voice. She and Villarreal must have been sharing the microphone and sliding it back and forth between them.
“For some unknown scavenger to consume.”
Another clatter and a hum of feedback.
“What we can say with complete certainty,” Villarreal said, “is that the victims were sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl, beneath a city devoted to his worship, and potentially at the entrance to a maze beneath his pyramid. Whatever lies beyond is no doubt of extraordinary value.”
The excitement in his voice was palpable.
Anya nodded at Evans across the surface of the water, from which their lights reflected and produced sparkles that danced on the stalactites.
“Ladies first,” he said.
Anya rolled her eyes for his benefit and lowered her head beneath the water. Her headlamp turned the brown water a vomitous shade of green that swirled with organic matter and tiny air bubbles. She propelled herself low across the bottom through the swirling cloud of sediment that rose from her exertions. The partially buried bones weren’t all human, although she could only speculate about which species they once belonged to. The earth beneath the sludge was hard and smooth, presumably the same limestone as the roof of the cavern.
“Do you see anything?” Jade asked.
“I can barely see my hand in front of my face,” Anya said. It felt weird talking underwater.
“I’ve got something over here,” Evans said.
Anya swam toward the vague aura of his light until his silhouette drew contrast from the murky water. He crouched with his back to her, his headlamp focused on the wall. He brushed a layer of phlegm-like sludge from an outcropping, revealing a stone snout and a pair of rectangular fangs.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked.
“It looks just like all of the others,” Jade said.
Anya helped him smear the mess from its eyes and the fringe of feathers framing its ferocious reptilian visage. This feathered serpent was considerably larger than the others and lifelike in a way that they weren’t. Its features were textured with either scales or a fine coat of feathers. Jewels had been fitted into its eyes and chiseled in such a way that the facets lent an aura of sentience. Its mouth opened all the way to the ground, creating a passageway easily large enough to accommodate someone her size, were it not for the sheer quantity of bones and debris wedged inside the orifice. A faint current trickled through the logjam and churned the debris floating in front of their faces.
“Looks like the flooding carried the bones in here from whatever’s on the other side,” Anya said.
“What do you say we find out what that is?” Evans said.
They pulled one bone after another from the mouth until they loosened them enough that the current cleared the rest. A rush of remains and slimy detritus tumbled toward them. Anya ducked to the side and completely lost sight of Evans through the dense cloud of sediment.
“We’ve lost visual,” Jade said. “Are you all right?”
“We cleared the clog,” Evans said.
His light materialized mere feet in front of Anya’s face, and yet still she couldn’t see him until she practically stuck her head into the hole beside his. He reached inside and scraped the sludge from the walls, revealing reddish murals that had nearly been scoured to the bare stone by the flooding.
A squeal of feedback.
“Can you get a better look at the Quetzalcoatl as a whole?” Villarreal asked.
Anya backed up and shined her headlamp onto the ornate orifice. Her light sparkled from the inset jewels.
“Stop right there,” Villarreal said. “Back up. Just a little more . . . there!”
There were several petroglyphs above the crown of feathers, so faint they were nearly indistinguishable from the sludge. She cringed when she smeared it away with her bare hands. One design looked like a hand, or maybe the petals of a flower. It was hard to tell with the left half eroded to the bare stone. Beside it was a stylized face in a squared, yet flowing style with what almost looked like smoke coming from its mouth, and a third that could have been a face like that of the moai of Easter Island, only wearing a crown made of beads.
“These petroglyphs are not like any I have seen elsewhere in Teotihuacan,” Villarreal said. “They reflect a more primitive style, and yet one similar in many ways to both the Aztec and the Maya, who came much later.”
“Can you read them?” Anya asked.
“I cannot read the first one. The second? Perhaps a visual representation of the Nahuatl word cochcahua, which means ‘to sleep.’ No, ‘to let sleep.’ The third is teotl. It means ‘god.’” Another voice mumbled something from out of the microphone’s range. “You are right, Emil. The first one is ohuihcan. It means ‘dangerous place.’” He gasped when it all came together for him. “It is a warning. ‘Do not wake the sleeping god.’”
“What’s the ‘sleeping god’?” Evans asked.
He looked back at Anya, who met his stare through their masks. There was an element of doubt in Villarreal’s voice that neither had heard there before.
“I do not know,” he finally said.
“Well,” Evans said. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
Anya lowered her head and shined her light into the tunnel, which extended beyond her beam’s reach. A shiver traced the length of her spine. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure she wanted to find out what was inside the maze after all.
16
TESS
The Cage, FOB Atlantis
“None . . . of . . . you . . . will . . . survive.”
Dr. Tess Clarke paused the playback and studied Director Barnett’s face. She’d hoped his reaction would betray something, but she was beginning to think he didn’t even blink without making a conscious decision to do so.
“Play it again,” he said.
Tess tried to mask her expression of revulsion as she leaned in front of him to rewind the feed. He smelled like he’d just crawled out of his grave. She stopped at the point where she’d started antagonizing the creature and gratefully returned to her chair near the air vent.
If the director was angered by anything she had said about him, it didn’t show. He merely watched the heat signature respond to her words by throwing a tantrum that escalated from guttural noises to verbal communication to hurling itself against the door like an animal.
“It initially responded to your challenge with the same arrogance as Mr. Rubley would have.”
“You don’t think there’s a part of him that’s somehow still alive in there, do you?”
“Unlikely, and probably entirely coincidental, but worth noting.”
Tess wondered if his observation stemmed from a genuine desire to understand the creature or if he still held out hope that Hollis Richards—if they ever found him—could be saved.
“The . . . serpent . . . god . . . will . . . rise . . . from . . . the . . . dead . . . and . . . consume . . . you . . . all.”
“Do you think it’s speaking literally or metaphorically?” Barnett asked.
“Serpent god?” Her recorded voice sounded strange coming from the speaker.
“That’s why I called you down here,” Tess said. “I have a theory.”
“None . . . of . . . you . . . will . . . survive.”
She paused the playback at a point where the orangish creature crouched at the back of the cavern, its white eyes boring through the camera from beneath the ridged brow of its elongated cranium.
“It hasn’t moved from that spot in”—she glanced at her watch—“just over three hours.”
“So what’s your theory?”
The tone of his voice suggested he was only humoring her and already had one foot out the door. He’d changed so much in just the few months since her arrival. While once he’d been outgoing and made an effort to connect with everyone, he now came across as a man victimized by his own obsessions, one in dire need of sleep.
“Let me show you something,” she said, and brought up the image of the white blobs against the backdrop of the blue streaks. “You know how Zeta has destroyed every surveillance system you installed so we couldn’t see what it was carving into the walls? It hit me that the pressure necessary to carve into the walls using the bones of an animal had to be fairly significant, which meant that the process had to produce a significant amount of friction and, subsequently, generate a measurable amount of heat. So I isolated that heat value and programmed the system to run back through the archives in order to generate a single image, kind of like taking a picture of the stars with a really long exposure time. Once I subtracted all of the thermal signatures outside of the blue range and eliminated residual heat not in direct physical contact with the walls of the cavern, I was left with this.”
She pulled up the final image, which she’d digitized in such a way that it could be rotated 360 degrees on any axis, essentially producing what looked like a globe, only viewed from the inside.
“It’s a star chart.” Barnett was unable to hide the disappointment in his voice. “Just like in all of the others.”
There were thousands of blue dots of varying size. Some were so small and so close together they almost looked like clouds, while others were connected by lines to form constellations whose shapes were open to interpretation. It reminded her of lying beneath the sky, far away from civilization and light pollution, and seeing the universe with the kind of clarity generally reserved for telescopes.
“Yes and no,” Tess said. “I loaded the data into a program that compares it against the night sky from any geographical and historical point of reference, but the closest match was only ninety-one percent.”
“Probably because it’s not finished yet.”
“Which is what I thought, too, until I studied the nature of the matches. You see, this particular chart was created to reflect a vantage point of this precise location, and the sky as it appeared on September twentieth of last year.”
“Impossible. That was the same day Rubley activated the pyramid. I clearly remember that there was a blizzard outside. There’s no way it could have seen the night sky.”
“You’re absolutely right, which then begs the question of how it could have re-created this star chart so perfectly.”
“Do you have a theory?”
“I’m getting there.”
“Get there faster.”
“I believe it serves as a frame of reference.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of this star chart like one great big, ultra-detailed map. Now ask yourself what purpose it serves.”
“That’s why you’re here, Dr. Clarke.”
“Why would Zeta invest so much time and effort into creating a work of art so magnificent and detailed if it knew no one would ever see it?”
“You tell me.”
“The answer is simple,” Tess said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Despite what I can clearly see with my own two eyes?”
“Something it said got me thinking.”
She rewound the thermal surveillance video to the point she’d bookmarked and let it play.
“Does it make you mad?” her voice asked from the speakers. “Knowing that you’re at the director’s mercy?”
“As . . . you . . . are . . . at . . . ours?”
“There,” she said, and stopped the video. “Did you hear that?”
“I have other issues that require my attention, Dr. Clarke.”
“Ours,” she said. “Not mine. Ours. Take a step back and look at it from the most basic perspective. This is a sentient being composed of countless microscopic organisms that function like a hive mind of sorts. Our mistake has been in assuming that their ability to communicate is confined to those within a single physical vessel. What if this star chart wasn’t designed to be viewed here, but to be viewed from any number of geographical locations simultaneously? What if the creature in there was able to re-create the night sky from this location using visual data shared from other vantage points?”
“You’re suggesting there are more of these things out there. And that they share some sort of communal memory.”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
“So what are the implications?”
“If this individual can recognize an arrangement of stars corresponding to a certain location and date, then surely any other individual can, too.”
“Then if you’re rig
ht about there being others, then it’s transmitting its location to them.”
“More than that,” Tess said. “I think it’s sending them a message.”
She pressed a series of buttons and the majority of the stars vanished, leaving only loosely gathered clusters.
“What’s this?”
“This is six of the nine percent that doesn’t match the historical star chart.”
She rotated the image and focused on a jagged line of stars, which ascended the cavern wall from the floor all the way up to the ceiling.
“Now, imagine yourself standing in the very center of the room, at a point we know to be right here in Antarctica. What does this pattern look like?”
Barnett turned the display maybe ten degrees until it hit him with an unguarded moment of clarity.
“It’s the western coastline of South America. All the way through Central America and up into Mexico.”
“More accurately, it traces a series of deep sea trenches along the edges of several tectonic plates.” She applied an overlay that outlined all the tectonic plates and active fault lines. “You can see right here where the route crosses Drake’s Passage along the boundary of the Antarctic and Scotia Plates and heads north along the border of the Nazca Plate. It travels the length of the Peru-Chile Trench to the Middle America Trench, which branches inward into Mexico along what’s known as the Mesoamerican Subduction Zone from Acapulco to Mexico City. And do you know which god primitive Mesoamerican cultures, from the Aztec to the Maya, worshiped?”
“Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, Tohil.”
“Also known as?”
“The Feathered Serpent God.” Barnett’s expression clouded and Tess caught the most fleeting glimpse of what could have almost passed for fear. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”
He rose from his chair and strode across the room, leaving the aroma of death in his wake.
“I’m not done yet,” Tess called after him.
“Write it up and send it to me directly.”
Forsaken Page 10
