by Dave Stern
She brushed up against what she thought was a cavern wall and her arm went right through it.
Reiss noticed and frowned.
“Keep moving,” he said.
But the farther down they went, the more pronounced the effect got. The more confusing the chamber around them became—what was solid, what was illusion.
Lara walked smack into a wall and Reiss ran into her.
She swung for him and he danced back out of the way, just out of her reach.
“Don’t do that again,” he cautioned. “Or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
She turned without a word and started down the stairs again.
Except she was heading upward.
Lara stopped where she stood. Clearly this was no ordinary cave. Just as clearly, whatever sort of technology (or magic, if you wanted to call it that) had produced Pandora and created the shadow warriors as its first line of defense, had set up another obstacle between the box and whoever desired its power.
Reiss, on the step beneath her now, was shaking his head.
“What sort of place is this?” he asked out loud.
A place that was never meant to be found, Lara thought.
They continued onward. Lara began to lose her sense of direction—where the steps had turned, which way they’d come from. She had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, on pushing her body through what at times felt like an amusement park attraction—the Incredible Chamber of Optical Illusions, where down is up, left is right, and nothing is what it seems.
All at once the steps ended and they were on level ground.
“There it is,” Reiss whispered.
Lara looked around. The chamber they’d entered was empty, save for a small, star-shaped pool at the far end. The pool was filled with a thick, viscous, tarlike-looking substance—the same black goo, she realized, that had been oozing forth from the cone above.
In the middle of the pool floated a small box.
“Pandora.”
She couldn’t tell what the box was made of—stone? meal? It looked ancient, primordial.
Next to her, Reiss laughed out loud.
“Perfect, isn’t it? All that power in such a small container. The gods don’t need fire and brimstone to kill.”
Neither did she, Lara suddenly realized.
She’d forgotten all about the blade hidden in the small of her back. All she needed to do was get close enough to use it.
Reiss pushed her forward.
“Let’s have a closer look, shall we?”
Terry sat in the open door of the copter and lowered a rope to the ground.
He was about to follow it down when he noticed a sinkhole at the edge of the forest. He shone a light on the rim and saw flashlights scattered on the ground nearby.
He turned to Bryce, who had the helicopter in a hover, and motioned him to bring the copter closer to the hole. He saw scuffmarks on the ground near the hole.
“I think we’ve found them,” he said.
He pulled the rope back up and let it down again. It passed through the hole and into the darkness beyond.
Then he grabbed his rifle and a pack full of supplies.
“I’ll be back,” he said to Bryce and Hillary, and jumped.
“With Lara?” a voice called after him.
He saw no sense in answering—whatever reply he made would have been lost in the roar of the chopper’s blades.
Reiss stopped at the pool’s edge and stared at the black liquid bubbling within.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” he said and took hold of Lara’s wrist with his free hand. He turned her so she was facing directly toward the pool.
“I see no reason to break with tradition. I think a woman should collect the box.”
Before Lara could tell him what to do with his tradition, he kicked her legs out from under her, sending her falling face forward toward the pool.
Only the fact that he hadn’t let go of her wrist saved Lara from plunging in.
“Go on…” Reiss said, the gun in one hand pressed to her head, his other hand holding her up, dangling her over the bubbling, black liquid.
He lowered her closer to the pool.
Lara made a show of stretching out with her free arm, letting her hand dangle inches away from the box. In truth, she could have grabbed it from where she was right now. But she couldn’t just give it to Reiss—he would kill her the second he had it.
He lowered her closer to the pool and a few loose strands of her hair brushed the surface of the black liquid.
They dissolved instantly.
Lara flinched and drew back.
“Go on!” Reiss repeated. “Take the box.”
Her fingers touched the box and Lara knew she was out of time.
If ever she was going to make a move, this was the moment.
Terry landed softly on the cavern floor and unhitched the rope from his belt.
For some reason, his heart was going a mile a minute. He’d actually been apprehensive—all right, scared—sliding down toward the sinkhole, as if something was trying to get to him before he disappeared beneath the surface.
Ridiculous. There hadn’t been a single living creature above within miles.
Terry let his eyes adjust to the dim light and got his bearings.
There was Croft’s pack, on the ground in front of him.
So she was here. No surprise—there was no place in the world Croft wouldn’t go if it meant an adventure. Glory. And the money that went with it, of course.
All right, for her it might not have been so much about the money—only because Lady Croft didn’t need it. She was fabulously, independently wealthy—to the manor born. Unlike some of us, Terry thought.
We need every dollar we can get.
The cavern was closed on one end, so Terry set off toward the other. Found steps going down and took them.
A minute on, he walked straight into a brick wall. He’d taken a wrong turn somehow. So he went back to the cavern he’d landed in and tried again.
The same thing happened.
He turned to start back up—
And stepped down instead.
He froze a moment and looked around.
The walls seemed to literally be changing shape.
“What sort of place is this?” Terry whispered, shaking his head.
Lara had decided. Reiss was not going to get his hands on Pandora, no matter what. Even if it cost her life.
Of course, she hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
He pressed the gun closer to the back of her head. He lowered her closer to the pool.
“Pandora,” he whispered. “Give it to me.”
“I’ll give it to you, all right,” she snapped.
She swung her free arm behind her then and grabbed the knife from the small of her back. Then she did the last thing in the world that Reiss could have expected.
She stabbed him in the arm—the arm that held her wrist, the arm that was keeping her from falling into the acid.
Reiss cried out in pain and let her go. She released the knife and dropped toward the pool. Reiss fired as she fell. The bullet passed close enough to literally part her hair.
Lara twisted in midair and kicked out.
Her foot found Reiss’s chin and connected squarely, sending him flying backward through the air.
Her hands found the edge of the pool. She landed in a push-up stance, her face the width of a finger away from the acid.
She scrambled to her feet. Reiss did the same, picked up his gun again, and fired.
The bullet passed by her shoulder and smashed into the chamber wall.
Lara somersaulted through the air, landed on her feet, and ran back the way they came.
Reiss fired again and agony exploded across the back of her right thigh.
She stumbled, bit her lip to keep from screaming, and kept running.
Finally.
Reiss could just kill her and be done with it.
<
br /> No more threats to Croft or her friends, no more false promises of wealth and power. He didn’t need her to share some secret about the Orb, or to lead him to where Pandora had been hidden. He knew exactly where the chamber was now, where the box floated, and so he was free to hunt her down, shoot her like the dog she was, and feed her body to the acid. He would call for assistance then—have the box removed from the pool, brought to the lab in Yemen, whatever lay within it analyzed, the antiserum created, and Pandora itself passed on to his buyers.
Reiss could picture every step of the process in his mind right now and the part he was going to enjoy most was seeing Croft’s body dissolve into nothingness.
The hunt was off to a good start. He had got her with that last shot—she’d been visibly limping as she ran. Reiss smiled and jogged after her, heading back up the steps.
The path widened suddenly and he looked up to find that he was teetering on the edge of a twenty-foot drop down to solid rock.
Reiss gasped and leaned backward, stopping himself from falling at the last possible instant.
Where had that drop come from?
He peered over the edge and noticed a beam of light shooting up at him from below. Its source was a hole in the floor that looked familiar to him. In fact, Reiss thought, it looked exactly like the hole in the chamber roof—the one he and Croft had fallen through.
He looked up and saw the path he’d been walking on, now directly above him.
“What on earth—” he began, and then he was falling, up toward that path…
Down to the ground.
Reiss pushed himself up on his hands and knees and shook his head.
More of what he and Croft had encountered on the way down. Annoying, but effective as a last obstacle to Pandora. He couldn’t help but wonder what sort of technology was involved here—was gravity itself being manipulated? Or was some sort of optical illusion taking place? He favored the latter, given the way shadow and light had been manipulated here in the chamber, and above (Croft’s shadow guardians), but he had no way of being certain.
Not that it mattered. Whoever—whatever—had created this place was capable of performing near-miraculous feats—which only made him want to eliminate Croft quickly and get back to the box that much sooner. Get it open and see what sort of biochemical miracles lay within.
Ah. And speak of the devil…
There was Croft on the path twenty feet below him, oblivious to his presence.
Reiss smiled and raised his gun. He had a straight on head shot, no obstacles, and Croft had obligingly stopped moving for a moment.
This was going to be even easier than he’d expected.
Then Croft looked up and saw him.
Reiss swore and fired. She gathered herself and sprang twenty feet through the air to her left—
And landed on the cavern wall, feet first, tilted ninety degrees from the position she’d started in.
“Impossible,” Reiss said.
This whole place was impossible. It was like being trapped in an Escher painting, for God’s sake. Down was up, left was down—how was he supposed to know which direction was which?
Silly question, he realized. He’d spent his lifetime acquiring knowledge, and there was really one correct way to learn anything. Experiment and deduction.
Croft had done the experiment for him. She’d jumped left and fallen down. Therefore, at this instant—
Left was down.
Deduction complete.
Reiss jumped left and dropped down through space directly toward her.
Except as he fell, the chamber twisted, and suddenly Croft was on a ledge, above him.
He reached out to try and stop his fall and lost hold of the gun.
Croft’s eyes widened and she gathered herself and jumped down toward him.
Wrong, Lara. Reiss smiled in satisfaction as she flew past without stopping. You’ve miscalculated. Down is—
He didn’t get to finish the thought.
Croft fell back up through the air at him and caught him square across the chin with her boot.
Reiss dropped to the ground…right next to his gun.
Croft saw. She turned to run.
Reiss grabbed the gun and stood. He brought the weapon to bear and fired.
Gravity was with him this time. Luck wasn’t. The bullet missed her by inches.
Croft limped out of sight and Reiss lowered his weapon.
He only had two bullets left.
Better make them count, he thought, and started off after her.
“We can’t wait any longer.”
Hillary, leaning out the copter door, turned around at Bryce.
“You’re not seriously suggesting we abandon Lara?”
“I don’t know what the bloody hell else to do!” Bryce shouted, louder than he’d intended.
Hillary glared at him.
“Look,” Bryce said, pointing at the instrument panel, where the low fuel light was flashing insistently. “I don’t know how long that thing goes before we actually run out, but I have to think we don’t have that much longer.”
Hillary cursed (again, Bryce thought—bad habit he was picking up), and climbed back in the copter.
They rose into the air.
“We’ll go back to the clearing,” Bryce said. “We’ll siphon off fuel from the other copters and we’ll come back.”
“In time, hopefully.”
“In time,” Bryce said. “Besides, don’t forget Sheridan’s down there, too. He’ll—”
“No,” Hillary snapped. “No one knows what the hell Sheridan will do.”
The second he entered the chamber, Terry saw the box.
It floated in a pool of dark, bubbling liquid at the far end of the cave.
Pandora. His for the taking.
Somehow he’d managed to beat Croft and Reiss to the prize. Perhaps they were still lost on the steps leading here—God knows he’d had to turn back more than once. No matter. He’d be sure and tell Croft all about Pandora. Afterward.
He’d brought a lead-lined bag to transport the box in. He pulled it out of his pack and started toward the pool.
Halfway across the chamber, he stopped and sniffed the air.
Gunpowder.
Shots had been fired in here—and quite recently.
So Croft and Reiss had gotten here first after all.
He set down the bag and shone the flash in a wide circle. The beam fell on flakes of dark stone, scattered along the floor by the far wall. He found the spot where the bullet had struck.
A little farther on, he found the blood.
It was Croft’s, he knew instantly—it had to be. She was a crack shot. If she’d fired at Reiss, Terry would have found his body.
So she was injured. Reiss was chasing her.
That changed things.
Terry might not wear the white hat these days, but he had been a marine once. Coming to the rescue was still part of the job description, as far as he was concerned.
The key word there being part, he thought, as his eyes went again to the box.
She was losing blood fast.
The wound was deeper than Lara had originally thought and running around on the leg wasn’t helping. Not that she had much choice about that—Reiss was still coming. Apparently he’d decided that finishing her off was more important than getting Pandora in a timely fashion.
Fine. He might have the Nobel Prize, but Lara would wager she had considerably more combat experience than he did.
Unfortunately, being wounded tended to even things out.
Her vision blurred. Lara leaned back against the cavern wall a moment to steady herself.
Reiss had chased her into a part of the chamber they hadn’t passed through before. A bridge of some sort, looming high over the pool of acid Pandora floated in. Who knows, perhaps it hadn’t even existed before, the way the walls seemed to keep shifting on her.
She looked down a moment and blinked. Now she really was seeing things.
/>
The box was gone. How was that possible? Had Reiss doubled back to take it?
She heard the sound of a gun being cocked and turned.
Reiss stood in front of her, smiling.
Then her vision blurred and two Reisses stood in front of her.
“Lady Croft,” they both said. “You seem to be in a bit of distress. Something I’ve done, I hope.”
Lara blinked. The two Reisses resolved into one again and he moved closer.
And as he moved, Lara realized that she had one final chance to end this—here, now, on her terms.
Because Reiss was one step away from joining her on the bridge. One step away from being directly over the pool of acid.
Wounded she might be, but Lara knew she had one good leap left in her. One good leap that would send her and Reiss over the edge and into the pool below.
Unfortunately, Reiss wasn’t going to take that step.
“So it ends, Croft,” he said, raising his weapon. “Survival of the fittest. And the wisest.”
“I don’t think you’re either of those.”
The voice came from behind Reiss and now Lara knew she was really injured much worse than she’d thought, because not only was she seeing things, she was hearing them, as well. Impossible things.
Terry Sheridan, who she’d left shackled to a slow boat in China, jumping down on the path behind Reiss.
Terry Sheridan, proving everything she’d ever thought about him wrong, and coming to her rescue.
Except the doctor seemed to be seeing the exact same thing he was, for he’d spun around at the sound of Sheridan’s sudden appearance, as well.
“Give me the gun and I’ll make it painless,” Sheridan said.
Reiss took a step backward—the step she needed. She launched herself across the path, tackling Reiss and sending both of them off the ledge together, falling straight for the pool below.
Twenty-TWO
Reiss’s gun went off and fell out of the doctor’s hand.
