Changeling (3 page)

“Good work,” she said, approvingly. “Is it human or…” She arched her eyebrows in an approximation of Stillman’s trademarked enthusiasm. “Alien!”

Rafi laughed with her, then bent down and tried to wiggle the skull loose. “I’ll tell you in a—”

The skull came free easier than expected, and then, as if he had pulled the plug from a drain, the sand beneath Rafi began to move, sliding into the void the removal had created. He let out a yelp of surprise, and then dropped several inches into a swirling vortex of sand.

Jade threw herself flat on the ground at the edge of the pit and thrust a hand down at the imperiled Rafi. She caught hold of his wrist, but in the instant that she did, the ground beneath his feet gave way completely. He only outweighed her by about twenty pounds, but with no time to brace herself, Jade was yanked headfirst into the pit. She scraped past the rocky edge of the excavation so quickly that she did not even have time to think about letting go of Rafi’s arm, and then she was falling headfirst into the yawning blackness.

The fall lasted
only a moment or two and ended with a plunge into chilly brackish water, which was, Jade supposed, preferable to slamming face first into solid rock. An instant after the splashdown, a thrashing Rafi struck her with enough force to knock the wind out of her. For a few seconds thereafter, she struggled to right herself while fighting back the panic of being unable to breathe while enveloped in near-total darkness. She groped for something to hang onto, noticed a spot of light high overhead and oriented toward it like a beacon.

“Dr. Ihara!” Rafi called from somewhere nearby. “Are you all right?”

She tried to answer but no sound came out. Then, with a gasp, she caught her breath. “Okay,” she managed. “I’m okay. What the hell just happened?”

It was a rhetorical question, she knew what had happened, but Rafi answered anyway. “The shaft must have been dug right over a cave or a sinkhole. It collapsed. A cave-in.”

Jade took several breaths to steady herself, and then stared up at the opening overhead. Judging by its size, she estimated it to be a good fifty feet above them. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but aside from Rafi treading water nearby, there was nothing to see. The walls and ceiling of the cave remained beyond the limit of her vision.

She tilted her head toward the opening. “Professor!”

Her shout rebounded from the unseen walls with a harshness that set her teeth on edge, but a moment later, the light from the opening dimmed, partially eclipsed by Professor’s silhouette. “Jade! What happened?”

Rafi started to answer but Jade cut him off. “Tell you all about it later.” She grimaced as her voice echoed back, almost painfully loud. “Right now, we could use some rope.”

“On it,” Professor replied. “Don’t run off.”

“Haha. Funny guy.” The light grew noticeably brighter as Professor moved away, and Jade realized that her night-vision was continuing to improve, though that was about the only bright spot, literal or otherwise, about the situation. She faced Rafi again. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of swimming. Let’s try to find somewhere high and dry.”

Rafi nodded, then jerked abruptly as if he’d been stung. He whipped his head to the right and peered into the darkness. “What was that?”

Jade was instantly on guard, searching the unplumbed depths of the cave. “What? What did you see?”

Rafi did not answer immediately, but kept turning his head in fits and starts. “I… I’m not sure. I saw some… thing… moving in the corner of my eye.”

“Some
thing
? Can you be a little more specific? Some
thing
bigger than a breadbox? Some
thing
with teeth and claws?”

The intern shrugged helplessly. “A shape. I thought it was a… It looked like a person, but—” He jolted again, spinning nearly halfway around. “There. Did you see it?”

Jade frowned. She had not seen anything and she was fairly certain that there was not actually anything to see, which meant that Rafi was either messing with her—unlikely, since he had not demonstrated the least inclination toward playfulness, and still insisted on calling her “Dr. Ihara”—or he was hallucinating.

Hypothermia?

The water was cold but she didn’t think it was cold enough for that. Regardless, immersion was not doing their health any favors. There was a tingling in her scalp and pressure building behind her eye sockets like the beginning of a sinus headache. The sensation had been there all along, probably the result of the impact with Rafi, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. “There’s nothing there, Rafi,” she insisted. “Come on. Let’s try to get out of the water.”

He returned a tentative nod and then began dog-paddling toward her. She rolled over was about to head out in a random direction when she caught a glimpse of someone floating beside her. She snapped her head sideways but there was nobody there.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Rafi said, his tone verging toward hysteria. “There’s something here. We’re not alone.”

“There’s nothing there, Rafi. We’re jumping at shadows.” Even as she said it, Jade glimpsed movement again.
Damn. Now he’s got me doing it.

“They aren’t shadows,” Rafi insisted. “Think about where we are. This was their burial place.”

“Ghosts, Rafi? Seriously?” She tried to inject an appropriate level of disdain into her voice but the chilly water and the throbbing behind her eyeballs was taking its toll. The best she could manage was a nervous quaver. “You don’t believe in that stuff anymore than I do. You’re just psyching yourself out.”

She actually did not know what his personal beliefs on the subject of the afterlife were. Religion was a topic they had never discussed. He was an Arab-American, which meant there was a better than average chance that he was Muslim—his cultural heritage had in fact recommended him for the job, since it was extremely unlikely that he would be a sleeper agent for the religious extremists with whom Jade had tangled in the past—but up to this point, Rafi had been very private about the practice of his faith.

“I don’t know what to believe. What if he’s right? Stillman, I mean. What if the Paracas
were
part alien or something?”

Jade’s first impulse was to scoff, but two things stopped her: the terror in the young man’s voice, and the presence of a very human-looking shape in the periphery of her vision. She resisted the urge to look directly at it, and to her astonishment, it remained there, hovering at the edge of her perceptions.

She didn’t know if it was a ghost, or an alien, or the ghost of an alien, but something was definitely there.

No
, she told herself.
There’s nothing there. You know better.

“Ignore them,” she told Rafi. “They haven’t done anything to hurt us. Maybe they don’t even know that we’re here. Maybe they’re just an echo of something that happened in the past.”

She felt foolish talking about the hallucinations—that was what they were, she decided, what they had to be—as if they were something real, but her subconscious mind refused to accept that they were not.

“Yes.” Rafi grasped at the explanation eagerly. “That makes sense.”

Jade did not think it made a lick of sense, but if it was enough to get her young companion moving, that was good enough. She began swimming again, paddling away from the scant light filtering down into the cave, and into its dark unknown depths. Despite the fact that everything else was shrouded in impenetrable murk, the shapes floating at the corner of her eye remained every bit as vivid, which meant that they were almost certainly some kind of optical illusion—not a true hallucination, but something else, like the visual aura from a migraine or phosphenes, the phenomenon more commonly known as “seeing stars.” The fact that both she and Rafi were seeing them, not to mention the sudden onset of her increasingly intense headache, might indicate an environmental factor—toxic gas or fungal spores in the air—which meant it was imperative that they find a way out as soon as possible.

“Ignore them,” she said again. “Swim.”

She struck out again, stroking and kicking into the shadowed unknown. The ghost images remained with her, but she did her best to put what she was seeing out of her mind. She succeeded only when one outstretched hand brushed against a slick wet but very solid wall of stone.

“Found something!”

Rafi did not answer but she could hear the splash of his strokes, still several feet behind her. She could not see him but the ghosts were still there, haunting the edge of her vision.

She explored the wall with both hands. It was unnaturally smooth, almost certainly the product of human artifice. This was no sinkhole, but a man-made underground chamber, probably a burial crypt used by the Paracas.

Despite the dire circumstances, Jade felt a surge of excitement at the unexpected discovery. She had not dared to hope to find anything like this.

“A way out?” gasped Rafi coming alongside her.

“No. Not yet, at least.” She moved along the wall and as she did, her knees bumped against it. The wall was not a sheer vertical surface, but curved toward her like the inside of a bowl.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say
, she thought. But the only thing that mattered now was getting out.

“This is salt water,” Rafi said. “This cave must connect to the ocean.”

Jade had already come to a similar conclusion, but they were at least half a mile from shore. If there was a tunnel or passage, and if by some miracle it was big enough to accommodate them, it would almost certainly be completely inundated.

One ‘if’ at a time
.

She filled her lungs with air and then ducked her head under the water, sliding along the convex wall. Just a few feet below the surface, she encountered loose debris—pieces of rock, possibly dislodged in the collapse that had deposited her and Rafi in the chamber.

Something flashed just at the limit of her field of vision. Her first thought was that the ghosts had followed her underwater, except that this time when she involuntarily turned her head to look the specter did not disappear. A faint yellow glow was emanating from the floor of the chamber.

It was Rafi’s flashlight, still shining despite being immersed in sea water and half-buried under the rock fall. She grasped hold of it and was rewarded with a bright shaft of yellow illumination that revealed the true dimensions of the chamber.

And something else. An opening, as smooth and round as the chamber walls. She kicked toward it and thrust the hand with the flashlight into its depths. The light revealed a smooth borehole that went on well beyond the reach of her eyes.

A long swim
, she thought.

Maybe too long. Professor would be back with a rope. The smart thing to do was stay put and wait to be rescued.

She ducked her head inside and swam forward.

Just a little ways
, she promised herself. As far as she could go before her lungs demanded she head back to take another breath.

The distinctive sound of a splash reached her ears. There was an air pocket above her. She surfaced, letting her breath out slowly while allowing the unfamiliar atmosphere to waft into her nostrils. It smelled like the ocean.

As she breathed in, cautiously at first, then eagerly, she surveyed her new environment. The air pocket was not an isolated bubble but occupied the ceiling of the passage, stretching out as far as she could see.

Better
, she thought. There was no guarantee that this route would not lead to an impassable dead end but there was air to breathe and turning back was always an option.

She filled her lungs again, and dove beneath the surface, kicking hard to reach the chamber where Rafi waited. She broke the surface and found the shivering student ducking away from an invisible assault.

The ghosts.

She had almost forgotten about them, but almost from the moment her head broke the water they were there again, lurking just out of view. Worse, the pain behind her eyes, which she now realized had abated somewhat during her initial exploration of the passage, returned with a vengeance.

It’s definitely something about this chamber
, she thought.
And whatever it is, I don’t want to spend another second here
.

“Rafi! Come on. This way. We’re getting out of here.” She seized hold of his arm and pointed down, signaling for him to follow.

A few seconds later, they were both in the air pocket. The pain in her skull immediately relented and the hallucinations ceased as well. Jade did not pause to offer an explanation. Instead, she began immediately paddling down the length of the tunnel. Rafi followed along without question but it was plainly obvious that the change of scenery had energized him.

She swam the length of the passage, more than a hundred yards, noticing all the while that the ceiling overhead was getting closer. Her first thought was the passage was sloping down, but when there was just six-inches of air above her, she realized what was actually happening. The water level was rising with the tide. In a few more minutes, the tunnel would be completely filled and the precious air pocket would be gone.

Crap.

“Rafi! Big breaths!” She gulped in air, filling her lungs to their full and rarely used capacity. Her body rose until she was nearly horizontal, her back scraping against the smooth ceiling. “Stay close,” she called, letting the breath out and immediately sinking back. “And whatever you do, don’t stop swimming.”

She took another deep inhalation and then plunged downward, paddling and stroking furiously.

The flashlight revealed the long, smooth-bore tunnel, as straight and perfect as a length of steel pipe, seemingly without end. Her strokes felt sluggish, the effect of the incoming tide pushing against her like a current, but she did not relent.

A faint spasm in her diaphragm reminded her of the need to breathe. She ignored it but knew it was only the first of many to come. Before long, her lungs would begin to burn from the buildup of too much carbon dioxide, and while she knew that she was capable of pushing through even that discomfort, Rafi did not have her experience or training. If she was feeling it, then he was probably already starting to panic.