Changeling

by David Wood

  Professor’s duplicate stopped a mere ten feet away, nearly point blank range. Kellogg continued forward, careful to stay out of arm’s reach, and circled alongside Professor. “Your weapon,” he said. “Where is it?”

  It was plain that any show of resistance would be suicidal. Professor raised his hands a little higher. “Under my shirttail.”

  Kellogg moved out of Professor’s line of sight and then came in close enough to pluck the weapon from its holster. “Is that the only one?”

  “Unfortunately,” Professor replied. He felt a tap against his right ankle, then the left; Kellogg verifying that he did not have a backup weapon concealed there.

  “Kneel,” Kellogg said. “Hands laced behind your head.”

  Professor remained standing. “If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.”

  “I said—”

  The woman cut him off. “It’s all right. Let him stand.” She tilted her head toward Professor. “Contrary to what you might thing, we do not shed blood with reckless abandon. And you may yet have some usefulness to us.”

  “This should be good.”

  She turned to Shah again. “Atash, are you armed?”

  “No,” Shah said, and then echoed Professor. “Unfortunately.”

  She reached out to him with an open hand. “Join me. I want to show you something.”

  Shah glanced uncertainly at Professor. “Show me what?”

  “What you came here to see. The Vault. You do want to see it, don’t you?”

  “I…” He swallowed. “I don’t know. What’s in it?”

  “Only the truth, Atash. Does that frighten you?” She smiled, which did not soften her arrogance in the slightest. “Gerald Roche was wrong. There was no conspiracy to alter the calendar. No fabrication of history to conceal this supposed ‘Phantom Time.’ That’s the truth you want to hear, isn’t it? You need not fear otherwise.”

  “The Prophet?”

  “Peace be upon him,” she said, sardonically. “Come with me and I will show you the truth about your Prophet.”

  “I don’t understand. Is this another one of your tricks?”

  “No tricks, Atash.” She stretched her hand toward him again. “This is for you.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Somehow, Jade managed to hold on to her flashlight, though it offered little in the way of illumination as she was swept along in the torrent. Caught in the whirlpool, she was spun around so violently that, despite the light in her hands, all she could see for several long seconds was complete unrelenting dark. Her lungs burned and her chest convulsed with the need to breathe, but she could feel water moving against her face and had no way of knowing if she was submerged or not. She squeezed her fist tight around the flashlight, and fought the compulsion to draw in a liquid inhalation until she couldn’t fight it anymore. Her mouth came open in a gasp that drew in neither water nor air but an aerosolized combination of the two. She gagged and coughed, all the while spinning around and around like a sock in the wash cycle.

  Something struck her in the abdomen, turning her head over heels, and a blast of water swept across her, filling her mouth and nose once more. Then, the flood passed and she was able to breathe again.

  It took a moment for her to realize that she was hanging in mid-air, suspended by the rope attached to her climbing harness. The blow she had felt was the line snagging on something, going taut and dragging her to an abrupt stop as the water rushed away. Even though she was caught fast, unmoving, she could still feel the vortex whirling around her.

  When the sensation finally passed, she found the rope and pulled herself upright. The flashlight revealed the smooth wet walls of a cylindrical shaft about twenty feet in diameter. She was off center, dangling about five feet away from the wall. Though she could not make out the bottom of the well, she could see a ledge ringing the shaft about twenty feet above. The ledge was not a solid piece of stone, but composed of individual blocks jammed together tightly. Her trailing safety line was caught between two of the blocks like a string of floss between two molars. The improbability of this apparent reprieve did not escape Jade’s notice, but she had more immediate concerns than wondering why fate had chosen to intercede on her behalf.

  She stared at the rope for a few seconds, searching her memories of climbing lessons past for the best technique to make her way back up the rope. The nylon sheathed line was not thick enough to grip effectively. There were two perfectly good mechanical ascenders in her backpack, along with the rest of the climbing gear, but she had left the pack behind when she had gone into the water. She thought she might be able to use the carabiner on the front of her harness as a field-expedient ascender, but to do so would require unclipping the safety line, which would send her to the bottom in a hurry. The next best thing to a mechanical ascender was a Prusik, a friction hitch knot that could be fashioned out of a shoelace or a piece of paracord. When tied around a belay line and fashioned into handhold loops, a climber could slide the Prusik up a few inches at a time, and eventually regain her position after a fall. Jade stared at her boots, wondering how much effort it would take to remove the laces, and if there was a better option.

  “Yo-yo,” she murmured, and that was what she felt like; a child’s yo-yo toy that had reached the end of the string and lost all its momentum.

  Maybe she could rewind.

  She reached up again, gripping the rope as hard as she could, and pulled. She managed to raise herself several inches, easing the tension on the rope a little, but knew that if she let go with either hand, she would immediately lose whatever progress she had made, unless she found a way to gather up the slack. When she was certain that she couldn’t lift herself any higher and felt her arms starting to burn with the exertion, she whipped her upper body around the rope, coiling up the slack around her waist.

  Her grip failed and the rope went taut again, constricting her mid-section, but she had gained almost twelve vertical inches.

  “Okay. Just need to do that nineteen more times.”

  She reached up and pulled—

  The rope slipped from between the stone blocks with a loud twang and then she was falling.

  The first full second or two of the fall was weirdly distorted by the panic-induced rush of adrenaline that amped Jade’s brain into hyper-drive. A single thought ricocheted around her brain: how far to the bottom?

  But after three seconds of falling—How far is that? How fast am I falling now?—the question of distance became less important than the question of what she would encounter when she reached the end of the vertical journey. If it was solid rock, then she would either die on impact or wish she had. But if it was water….

  If it was water, deep enough and not too much further down, she might survive.

  She brought her hands together in front of her lower torso, the flashlight still squeezed in her fist. She kept her legs straight, toes pointed down and feet pressed together tightly. The flashlight illumed the darkness around her, but she was moving faster than her brain could process, so she simply closed her eyes and—

  The impact shuddered up her feet all the way to her hips, but the chilly water was considerably more forgiving than solid limestone would have been. She arrowed deep, so deep that the pressure against her inner ear became uncomfortably intense—one more painful sensation reminding her that she was still alive. Too late to make a difference, she threw her arms and legs wide to slow her descent and immediately started kicking furiously back toward the surface. The pressure in her head relented slowly, but the spasms in her chest intensified as the surface remained maddeningly out of reach.

  She felt like she was clawing her way out of Hell.

  When she finally broke the surface, she was too spent to do anything more than lie on her back, floating motionless, trying not to think about the pain crackling along her shin bones.

  The break did not last long. Professor was still up there, probably thinking the worst. And if she didn’t find a way out of the pit,
surviving the fall would mean a protracted death of hypothermia. She played the light in every direction, but saw only the same smooth walls she had seen from above. The rocks that had briefly snagged her rope were too distant to make out.

  Damn.

  But the walls of the shaft were too smooth, too perfectly round to be the work of nature. In some ways, the handiwork reminded her of ancient Roman structures, which despite the passage of thousands of years remained mostly intact. Some ancient craftsman had labored in the spot where she now trod water. Someone had carved out a cistern in the limestone to reclaim the water from the submerged chamber above, and that gave her hope. If the shaft had been cut for some purpose, then logically, there had to be a way to access it. If not above the water’s surface, then perhaps below.

  While the idea of another free dive did not exactly thrill her, the possibility…no, the certainty that she would find a way out compelled her. She filled her lungs and then plunged beneath the surface, diving in a corkscrew pattern around the perimeter of the well, shining the flashlight beam on the walls looking for an intersecting tunnel.

  There it was, a dark opening about six feet across.

  What if it goes nowhere at all? What if it feeds into a maze of pipes and I can’t find my way back to the surface?

  It was a choice between a slow death on the surface or a quick end from drowning. Neither fate was more appealing than the other, but not exploring the submerged passage was certain death.

  She swam into the pipe, kicking and clawing her way forward. After more than half a minute of hard swimming, she spied the telltale flat shimmer of air above the water’s surface, and kicked urgently toward it.

  She came up in a large pool, surrounded by a gymnasium-sized chamber with cylindrical pillars rising up from the water to support the high ceiling overhead. She dog-paddled for a few seconds, playing the light in every direction, until she spotted a flat stone walkway that rose just a few inches above the water. She paddled over and hauled herself up onto it.

  Solid ground had never felt quite so good.

  But she was a long way from safe. When she was sure that her legs would support her weight, she gathered up the rope that was still attached to her climbing harness, coiling it and throwing it over one shoulder, then headed toward an arched passage that led away from the pool. She was about halfway to this intermediate goal when the ghosts began to appear.

  The flash of movement in her peripheral vision startled her, as it always did, but once she realized what it was, she tried to ignore the infrasound induced hallucinations. This strategy worked for the length of time it took for her to reach the mouth of the passage. That was when the ghosts started talking to her.

  She jumped in alarm, whirling around to face them, positive that this time, there would be a real person there…but the ephemeral phantoms had already retreated to a different threshold of perception.

  The voices, like the ghost figures, gave the impression of being real, but lacked the necessary substance. It was not merely that the speech was incomprehensible. The words were not words at all, but tortured unnatural sounds, like someone playing a recording backwards. But then, from the midst of the aural chaos, a single word rang out.

  “Jade!”

  “Professor! I’m here!”

  The stone consumed her shout, absorbing it completely, returning no echo.

  The weird cacophony resumed.

  “Screw it. There’s got to be a way out of here.” She started forward again, ignoring the figures flitting about in her peripheral vision, paying no heed to the noises that she knew were probably inside her head.

  The passage led to a spiral staircase which she mounted without hesitation, charging up two steps at a time, pain and exhaustion as ephemeral now as the hallucinated phantoms.

  More real words found their way into the mishmash of sound, as if moving up the staircase was akin to tweaking the tuner on an old analog radio. Garbled static one moment, the next, someone talking plain as day.

  “They are my family.” A woman’s voice, but Jade did not recognize it.

  “You used me!”

  That was Shah. This realization was followed by another far more disconcerting one. There’s someone else in here.

  These voices were not auditory hallucinations. She was certain of that. They were real, filtering down through the levels of this strange citadel hidden under the mountain. That meant Shah and Professor had found their way in, but someone had come in after them.

  Changelings.

  What about Professor? Is he safe? She almost called out again, but realized that if she could hear them clearly, they might be able to hear her as well, and that would ruin any chance of taking them by surprise.

  She kept going, consciously trying to lighten her step as she bounded up the stairs. The voices blurred back into random discharges of noise, though once or twice she thought she caught a recognizable word or a hint of the woman’s voice.

  The sight that greeted her at the top of the stairs was no hallucination, but that did not make it any more believable.

  She had expected another chamber, or perhaps a cramped tunnel snaking through solid rock like wormholes in a sponge. Instead, she found herself surrounded by empty space… or very nearly empty.

  She knew there must be cavern walls and a ceiling of stone high overhead, but these limits were beyond the reach of her light. The staircase she had just ascended appeared to rise up the middle of a cylindrical tower, and she now stood at its summit. There were several other towers of varying heights—one of them was probably the shaft she had fallen through after solving the puzzle at the entrance—all connected by stone bridges, but the network of towers was possibly the least amazing thing her eyes beheld.

  Aqueducts curled around the towers, supplying water that turned stone wheels and gears, which in turn drove enormous vertical shafts and screw pumps that conveyed water up into the dark reaches overhead. Other structures, which resembled enclosed walkways or perhaps air ducts on a massive scale, wove through the midst of the waterworks, curling around the towers. The curves were reminiscent of a musical instrument. The water and air flowing around the cylindrical towers were creating a veritable storm of resonance frequencies combining in intricate but inaudible infrasound patterns to dizzying effect. In a leap of intuition, Jade realized that the Vault was not some hidden fortress or citadel where the knowledge of the ancients had been secreted away.

  It was a machine.

  More precisely, it was a sophisticated computer that employed mechanical logic systems, and utilized an infrasound interface.

  This realization unlocked a memory, implanted during her experience in the Hypogeum, but incomprehensible without context. She had been here before, though only in a disembodied state. The recollections were not perfect and they did not come all at once, but she grasped, albeit in a very basic way, how the pumps and ducts, and the acoustic design of the towers and indeed the entire underground chamber, functioned. More importantly, she knew where she needed to go next.

  She sprinted onto the bridge that led away from the tower and crossed to another. The visual and auditory phenomena chased after her, but it was just so much background noise now. From time to time, she caught a word—Shah or the woman she’d heard before—but never enough to make sense of what she was hearing.

  The bridge connected to a larger cylindrical tower that stretched from the cavern floor below to the unseeable reaches above. It might have been a massive support column, but Jade knew it served a far more important purpose. If the vault was a computer, then this was its central processing unit.

  An arched opening led inside the cylinder, where she found herself immediately confronted by a choice. To the left, a flight of stairs curled upward, following the curve of the wall. To the right, the stairs went down.

  Up felt like the correct decision, so she headed in that direction and bounded up the stairs. She ascended for at least a full minute, the stairs stretching up in the cramped
confines of the passage like something from a surreal nightmare. Thankfully, the ghosts and whispers had not chased after her. Something about the composition of the stairwell walls evidently shielded her from the infrasound effects. When she caught a glimpse of a lurking figure, she knew the seemingly endless ascent was nearly at an end. She was not wrong.

  The stairs brought her to a wide balcony overlooking a bowl-shaped pit that occupied the center of the cylindrical column. The pit was not deep, in fact it looked to be only about twenty feet from the top of the utilitarian stone guardrail to the bottom. The balcony ringed the pit, and on the opposite side, the stairs continued, disappearing into the space between the outer and inner walls. Overhead, the pit was mirrored by a domed ceiling which, Jade now realized, created yet another spherical chamber.

  “If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.”

  The voice startled her, and not just because of its clarity.

  Professor?

  It was definitely Professor, and what he had just said confirmed her worst fears. He was in trouble. Either Shah had betrayed them and somehow gotten word to his jihadist confederates, or the Changelings had caught up to them.

  That question was answered a moment later when she heard Kellogg’s voice, and then the woman she had heard earlier. The voices seemed to be coming from the pit, but Jade knew this was just an acoustical trick. They were close, probably in a room or passage somewhere above this place.

  She ignored the not-too-distant conversation and turned toward the rising stairs. She did not know what she would do when she found the others. Judging by Professor’s statement, the Changelings were armed and she was not. Maybe she could distract them and give Professor a chance to gain the upper hand. She would think of something once—

  She stopped suddenly as if a wall had suddenly appeared in her path. In a way, that was exactly what had happened, although the wall was not a tangible thing of limestone or concrete. Rather, it was a sensation, like a kind of magnetic repulsion pushing her back. She felt an overwhelming premonition, not of danger exactly, though that was certainly part of it, but of having missed something profoundly important.