Changeling (28 page)

The memory nagged, a dire warning of a danger that she couldn’t quite wrap her thoughts around.
Not Shah… Something else
.

The stairs. Something about the stairs. Where did they come from
?

One moment, she had been in the submerged chamber, sliding the pieces of the ring puzzle into place. The next she was falling, caught in the rush of water pouring down through the midst of the steps.

The steps
….

In her mind’s eye, she saw it happening, like a video playing in slow motion. The last piece of stone sliding into place, the rings completed, and then….

And then the sphere began to move. It had seemed random from her perspective, trapped in the flooded chamber, but it was anything but. The movement of the sphere was as precise as clockwork. As was what happened next.

The sphere had opened like the petals of a flower, the individual tiles shuffling and rearranging to form the stairs that led down to the vault itself. The unfurling had of course triggered the flood that washed Jade away, and that indeed had been somewhat more chaotic, but the unfolding of the sphere chamber had been exceedingly exact. When the puzzle was solved, the door opened. Simple as that.

And what happens when the door closes
?

“We have to get off these stairs.” She said it once, too softly to be heard. Then repeated it again, louder so that Professor could hear.

She saw the unasked question and knew that if she didn’t at least try to explain, precious moments that might mean the difference between life and death might be lost.

“Once he reaches the top, the lock will reset. These steps will disappear.”

Professor seemed to grasp the broader point. “And we’ll be trapped in here.”

Before Jade could respond to his hasty conclusion, Professor leaned into the stairs and poured on a burst of speed that she was hard-pressed to match. She heard him shout again, and then the noise of multiple reports filled the shaft. She threw herself flat as stone chips and dust filled the air. Jade tried to count the number of rounds fired, but it was difficult to distinguish one shot from the next, to say nothing of differentiating Professor’s gun from Shah’s.

After a few seconds, the shooting stopped. Something flashed through the air, hit the wall behind Professor and rebounded away, skittering across the steps and ultimately sailing out into the abyss. It was a gun. Shah’s gun.
One less thing to worry about
.

She raised her head and caught a glimpse of Shah running, still dragging the dark haired woman behind him. He was on the far side of the shaft, nearly at the top of the stairs, and even though Professor was closing the gap, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to catch Shah in time to stop him from slipping through the exit passage. Nevertheless, Jade’s sense of the place told her that close might be good enough. The ancient architects of the vault had designed the lock room to function like the automatic doors at a supermarket. As long as Professor was within reach of the exit, the mechanism would not reset.

Suddenly the stairwell erupted with another blizzard of gunfire. The incoming storm of bullets and debris was so intense, it forced Jade to retreat back down the spiraling steps until she was almost directly below the exit, out of the shooter’s line of fire.

Professor scrambled back down to her position. “Son of bitch brought reinforcements,” he growled. Before she could think to ask what Professor meant, he pointed at the pistol in her hand. “Let me have that. I’m out.”

She passed it over. “How many?”

“Too many. But unless you know of a back door, the only way out of here is—”

Before he could finish, an ominous grinding sound filled the shaft as the steps on which they were standing, and all the others above and below, began moving.

Shah crawled down
the cramped passage, one hand stretched awkwardly back to drag Gabrielle along. Though he had only been in the vault a short while, he was desperate to be in the open, breathing fresh air again. Perhaps having the sky above him again would help to purge his memory of the things that had been revealed to him, but somehow he doubted it. The truth would haunt him to the end of his days.

Gabrielle was sobbing behind him. That was something new. In all the time they had worked together, all the intimate moments they had shared—
all a lie
—he had never seen her cry. Her despair comforted him. She had brought his world crashing down; a little suffering was the least he could hope for.

He would put an end to her misery soon enough.

The jihadists’ arrival could not have been more timely. Though he had only been able to give them vague directions in his text messages, the men had correctly divined the significance of the little cave in the sheer face of Bell Rock and rigged their own belay lines in order to transport the material he had requested and expedite his escape. Two were waiting in the niche at the end of the passage. The others were bringing up the rear, wriggling through the passage behind him. Shah did not know if Jade and Professor would attempt to follow, but if they tried, it would only hasten their inevitable appointment with fate. He could not allow them to leave the vault.

He emerged from the cramped passage and hauled Gabrielle forward. She went sprawling and would have tumbled out through the mouth of the cave if the two jihadists, uncertain of his intentions toward her, had not caught her.

Shah did not actually know why he had brought her along. He should have left her behind, both as a practical matter and a moral one. She was the enemy, his enemy and the enemy of Islam, and she always had been. Every word she had uttered, and a thousand implicit promises never spoken, were false. Everything they shared, a deceit. And yet, here she was, still alive.

What power does she have over me
?

Gabrielle raised her head. She had lost her sunglasses during their transit to the surface. Her tear streaked eyes staring at nothing. “Atash,” she wailed. “What have you done?”

Shah choked on his disbelief. “What have I done? I?”

Her head turned toward the sound of his voice. “You have everything. You have
seen
. You are the Mahdi. The Prophet returned. I did this for you.”

Rage in Shah’s chest like steam in a geyser. She actually believed she had done him a favor. “I guess you never really understood me at all then.”

He turned to the nearest jihadist and held out his hand. The man placed a pistol in his palm. “Did you bring what I asked you to?”

One of the others—the young man from California, the geologist’s son—stepped forward. “Only about fifty pounds. All I could get my hands on.”

“It’s enough.” He pointed up to the passage leading into the vault. “Place it there.”

As the jihadists set about their task, he placed the muzzle of the pistol against the back of Gabrielle’s head. Before he pulled the trigger, he leaned close and whispered in her ear. “I didn’t see anything.”

In a matter
of seconds, the stairwell transformed into something else. The blocks that had arranged themselves in an orderly spiral began to shift and slide, changing position with mechanical precision. Some disappeared altogether, sliding into recesses in the wall, their purpose served, while others protruded further, tilting and rotating, rising or falling, reassembling the spherical chamber that was the entrance to the vault.

Professor grabbed Jade’s arm and was about to start up the treacherous steps but Jade pulled free. “No! Down!”

“We’ll be trapped in here!”

There was no time to explain to him that trapped was preferable to being dumped down the full length of the vertical shaft or crushed between blocks of stone, so she let her actions do the talking. She turned away from him and started down the stairs, or rather tried to. Negotiating the descent was part fun-house, part obstacle course. Every step took her from one moving surface to another and she wasted precious seconds with each move just to keep her balance. They were nearly clear of the blocks that were rising to form the sphere. Below, the steps were simply retreating into the walls, all the way down the landing. If they could not reach the passage back to the rotunda before the steps vanished, they would fall into the cistern below, as Jade had done earlier, but from more than twice the height.

“Shortcut!” Jade shouted. Instead of trying to corkscrew her way down the rapidly disappearing passage, she launched herself out across the chasm, landing on the lower steps on the opposite side. Her momentum, along with the movement of the block upon which she landed, carried her into the wall, but she pushed off and jumped again, arcing across the ever-widening gap to the next level. Professor had evidently decided to trust her judgment; he too was caroming back and forth from one side of the spiral to the other, but as the blocks slid back into the wall, the distance across the chasm increased while the potential landing zones continued to diminish.

Jade saw the landing, what little was left of it anyway, ten feet below. The wedge-shaped blocks, which had caught her climbing rope during her initial fall, were in full retreat—less than six inches remained, and even if by some stroke of luck she managed to make the nearly twenty-foot leap and stick the landing, the blocks would be gone completely before she could reach the opening to the rotunda, so she decided to skip a step and go straight for her goal. She turned forty-five degrees to aim herself at the passage, then jumped straight up, planting her feet against the wall and pushed off like an Olympic swimmer making a turn.

Yet, even as she straightened her legs, propelling herself out into space, she knew in her heart that she was going to fall short of her target. The difference would be miniscule, just a few inches, but those inches would make all the difference. She would slam into the wall just below the entrance, and then fall once more into the cistern below.

The open passage taunted her with its nearness. She knew she would never be able to reach, but she stretched her arms out anyway. A thought flashed through her head
. I might survive the fall if I don’t get knocked out hitting the wall
.

Something moved, right above her. It was Professor, hurling himself across the gap, just as she had done. She felt his hand close around her arm and then….

The impact with the wall knocked the wind out of her. She thought she would fall then, but instead, there was a sharp pain in her shoulder as all her weight settled beneath the hyper-extended limb. Her mouth opened to issue an involuntary cry, but she had no breath to scream.

She hung there, pressed against the wall, hanging by one arm. Her immediate impulse was to claw her way back up the rock, but every time she tried to move, the pain in her shoulder spiked. If she didn’t relieve the pressure, her arm was going to be ripped from its socket.

She glanced up and saw the hand that had saved her, Professor’s hand, wrapped around her wrist. He lay flat in the opening to the passage, head and shoulders protruding, teeth clenched with the exertion of holding her.

He reached down with his free hand, and she reached up, stretching more than she would have believed possible, and somehow grasped his outstretched hand.

Suddenly she was moving again. The pain in her shoulder was nothing to the relief she felt as he lifted her to safety.

Her breath returned with a gasp and for nearly a full minute, all she could do was lie on the stone floor, enjoying the feel of something solid beneath her.

“Okay,” Professor said, at length. “We’re alive. I haven’t decided if that’s the good news or the bad news.”

“The good news,” Jade said, “is that we aren’t trapped.” She tried to sit up, winced at a fresh stab of pain in her shoulder.

“Don’t tell me you saw a back door? That would have been nice to know.”

“
I
didn’t know,” she retorted. “Not at first. But those Changelings that were waiting for us? They didn’t come in the front door. And I got a look around when we were separated.” She did not reveal that her look around had been mostly a virtual tour. “I know where to go.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” He got to his feet then squatted beside her and began probing her shoulder. “Still attached,” he declared. “Just a muscle strain. We’ll get you some SEAL candy—you mere mortals would call it Motrin—and you’ll be ready for the Olympic gymnastics team in no time.”

She laughed despite herself. “That’s good to know, because this archaeology thing is wrecking me.”

He helped her to her feet and then gestured for her to lead the way. She backtracked into the rotunda, and soon happened upon a pair of bodies—Kellogg and the man Jade had called Not-Professor.

“I wonder who they really were,” she murmured. “You think the real Jordan Kellogg is in a landfill somewhere?”

Professor’s eye twitched. “If he’s lucky.”

His tone was enough to keep her from asking him to elaborate. She knelt to retrieve his fedora and placed it on his head. “There you go. Back in business.”

That was enough to bring a sparkle of humor back to his eyes. He retrieved his watch from the dead imposter, and then riffled through man’s pockets, reacquiring his passport, wallet and phone. “Now I’m back in business.”

“Want to see what he really looks like?”

“Nope. I just want to find that back door and get the hell out of here.”

Jade shone her light down the passage and moved toward the stairwell she had used to reach this level of the vault from the chamber where she had received her vision. The stairs did not ascend any further, but there was another opening on the inside wall of the rotunda, a passage that led to the chamber Jade thought of as “the interface.”

She pointed to it. “We have to go through there. But I should warn you, you’re going to see some things.”

“Yeah? Like Biblical stuff?”

Jade shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. What you see kind of depends on what you take in with you.”

He narrowed his gaze at her. “How do you know that?’

“That’s how they built it.”

“They?”

“The aliens,” Jade said, feeling inexplicably foolish. “The grays. The extraterrestrial astronauts that Stillman was always going on about.”

“You
saw
them?”

“Yes. And I also found a bunch of their skulls.”

He nodded slowly.

“Don’t patronize me,” Jade snapped.

Professor raised his hands. “Sorry. Actually, I’m a little curious to see what this thing will show me.”

Jade gave him a hard look, but his skepticism was already undermining her own certitude. What if everything she had seen was just the product of her own preconceptions? Was her vision of alien engineers any more reliable than the angels or devils that Shah and all the self-styled prophets before him had seen?

But in the Hypogeum, I saw this place. That wasn’t a lie
.

A tremor rippled through the floor and Jade felt a subtle change in the air pressure. Professor raised his head sharply, turning to look back down the passage. A moment later, a loud thump reached her ears.

“What the hell was that?” Jade asked.

He turned back to her, his expression now full of urgency. “That was an explosion. Shah’s terrorist friends just blew the entrance.”

Another violent shudder shook the passage, accompanied by a noise as loud as a gunshot, and Jade was thrown to the floor. Jagged cracks, like lightning bolts, appeared on the walls and ceilings, vomiting out a miasma of dust. Professor managed to stay on his feet. He seized Jade’s arm, triggering a nauseating wave of pain in her injured shoulder, but she fought through it, got up and staggered through the doorway.

The floor heaved and then began to tilt crazily, like the deck of a ship climbing the face of a rogue wave. Pieces of stone and concrete tumbled down around them. Jade threw her good arm up as a shield and plunged forward as the vault began coming apart all around them.

The Interface looked nothing like her vision of it now. Although the initial blast yield had been relatively small, it had thrown a monkey wrench into the precisely engineered machinery of the vault. The infrasound amplifier had become nothing more than a roiling tangle of jagged stone, slumping down through the center of the cylindrical tower.

“There!” Professor’s shout was barely audible in the tumult of grinding rock, but Jade heard and followed his pointing finger to their salvation, a rope ladder hanging down in the center of the chamber and rising up into the gloom overhead.

It seemed impossibly far away.

“We’ll never—”

Professor let go of her arm and scooped her off her feet. Before she could protest, he heaved her out over the center of the stone vortex. Something—the rope!—slapped against her face and she threw her arms around it, hugging the woven fibers even as she started to fall. The friction burned her face and chest, but she squeezed tighter and managed to slip her arms between the rungs.

The rope jerked taut with a bone-shaking abruptness and then she was hanging again, dangling above the swirling whirlpool of debris.

The ladder shuddered again, as if trying to shake her loose, and she saw Professor above her.

“Climb!” he shouted, and then he was moving, scrambling up the rungs.

Jade kept hugging the ladder to her, certain that if she let go, even to get a better hold, she would lose her grip and fall into the meat grinder below. She tried to find the rungs with her feet, but felt only empty space.

Another thunderclap shook the mountain, and what little remained of the interface and the surrounding tower dropped away. For a fleeting instant, Jade saw the vast cavity inside Bell Rock—the towers and aqueducts and air channels crumbling like an elaborate house of cards.

Then the shockwave hit. The Vault breathed its last, a blast of heat that buffeted Jade, propelling her up even as it engulfed her in a cloud of scalding steam….

And then it was over.

She lay beneath a sky full of stars. The smell of crushed earth was still in her nostrils, but the air was clear.

Professor lay beside her, and between them was a heap of rope, the ladder that Jade was still clutching. Professor had made it to the top and then hauled up the ladder—and her—like a fisherman dragging in his net. He had saved her.

She made a mental note to thank him.

To her left, a narrow fissure marked the Changeling’s secret entrance to the vault, or rather to the cavern where the vault had once stood. She did not need to look into it to know that the vault and all the answers it might have held—secrets or illusions—were gone forever.

Maybe it was better that way.