Island of the Sun (21 page)

“It is hard,” he said. “There's no rule book for this kind of thing. Hard things have to be done. Hard decisions have to be made. And I don't think it's going to get any easier.”

Eleanor hoped he was wrong, but she also knew it to be a false and desperate hope. If she let herself believe she wouldn't have to make hard decisions, that meant she might not be ready for them when they came.

“But we'll get it done,” Luke added.

“Yes,” she said. “We'll get it done.”

S
everal hours later, Eleanor's mom declared von Albrecht's data valid and reliable, his conclusions sound. The ley line nexus was in or near the Valley of the Kings, and since Eleanor hadn't corroborated the signal they had encountered in KV39, it was determined to have been an anomaly, and they planned to do some further exploration the next day.

“There is the West Valley,” Nathifa said. “It has only five tombs, but it will be worth exploring with the scanners.”

If Eleanor had told Nathifa the truth about what she
had sensed, it might have changed that plan. A pang of guilt struck her, and she wondered how she would tell them the next day what she had done. Her mom would be furious, of course. Finn and Betty might feel a little betrayed, and no doubt Nathifa and Von Albrecht would be very disappointed. Eleanor would just have to deal with all that when the time came. Assuming she was successful in the first place.

It was after midnight when she and Luke finally felt satisfied that Nathifa and von Albrecht and the others were asleep, and outside the tent, the valley was cold and nearly featureless in the darkness. They used flashlights to hurry back through the valley, past the dozens of tombs Eleanor now tried unsuccessfully to ignore, convinced at times that if she looked, there would be eyes in the doorways looking back.

The mountain path was a bit more difficult to navigate at night, even with the flashlights, but they picked their way up the ravine and before long stood once more above the opening to KV39.

“You expecting me to go first?” Luke asked.

Eleanor pushed past him and climbed down into the draw. “Why would I expect that?”

Luke skidded down behind her and they entered the tomb, which it turned out did not look very different than it had earlier in the day. Dark was dark.

They descended the stairs, and then the ladder, and then the second set of stairs, until they stood once again in the bottom dead-end chamber. The hum was still there, confirming to Eleanor that they were getting closer. The room must hold some secret.

“What now?” Luke asked.

“We should check for a hidden door or something,” Eleanor said. So the two of them crept along, scanning, scraping, rubbing. Eleanor got so close to the wall that the dust on it made her sneeze.

Finally Luke whispered, “Over here.”

Down low, on his hands and knees, he showed her a seam in the wall—the outline of what appeared to be a small door, three feet wide and two feet high.

“Does it open?” Eleanor asked.

Luke pushed hard against it. “Not easily. Hang on.” He rolled onto his back with his feet pointed at the wall, and then he kicked straight against it. With the impact, more dust broke free from the walls and the ceiling, while a spiderweb of cracks appeared across the stone door.

“Keep trying,” Eleanor said.

Luke kicked again, and then a third time. With the fourth, the wall shattered inward, broken to pieces, and Eleanor realized it wasn't stone, but a couple of inches of some kind of cement or hard plaster that had
simply been smoothed to look like the rest of the wall.

Luke shone his flashlight through the new opening. “Another tunnel. A long one.”

“Only one way to go, then,” Eleanor said. “I'm having déjà vu.”

“Let's just get this over with,” Luke said. “And I will go first, whether you expect me to or not.” With that, he got down on his belly and shimmied through the little doorway.

Then Eleanor got down and followed. The feeling of claustrophobia that rushed through her wasn't quite as bad as it had been in the underwater cave. On the other side, she climbed to her feet and found herself in a narrow passageway.

“Now, that's more like it,” Luke said

Eleanor's earlier disappointment turned to awe. Paintings and hieroglyphics covered the walls in brightly colored, carved relief. A procession of animal-headed Egyptian gods held court down the length of the corridor, surrounded by other figures, vanishing beyond the limits of their flashlights' reach. Some of them carried what Eleanor guessed to be lightning bolts in reed baskets and boats, and they surrounded the image of a tree, which she assumed represented the Concentrator.

“Oh my God,” Eleanor said.

“You mean
gods
, don't you?” Luke said.

“I mean this is incredible,” she said. “Could we be the first people in thousands of years to see this?”

Eleanor found that thought almost frightening in how small it made her feel. In the years between the sealing of that wall and Luke's breaking of it, the Egyptian empire had long since fallen, and dozens of nations had risen and fallen since. In the vastness of time and space, in the cavalcade of human communities rising and vanishing, life's evolutions and extinctions, it was hard to believe that any of it mattered. Von Albrecht was trying to leave his mark, like his father, but the problem with marks was that they eventually faded.

But Eleanor wasn't doing this to leave a mark. Hardly anyone would ever know what she had done, anyway. She was doing this simply to survive.

“Let's go,” she said. “The Concentrator is this way.”

T
HE CORRIDOR STRETCHED ON FOR SEVERAL YARDS AND
then stepped down another stairway. In addition to the gods, whose names Eleanor didn't know but whose jackal, ibis, and alligator heads looked familiar, the walls bore depictions of Egyptian life. Rows of identical workers harvested wheat and fished the Nile with nets from shallow boats, charged into battle riding chariots, and held court before a figure on a throne. Floor-to-ceiling panels of hieroglyphics gave Eleanor the impression of walking through a book, or a papyrus scroll.

The passage continued a regular descent, hallways
followed by stairways, followed by hallways, followed by stairways.

“We must be under the mountain by now,” Eleanor said.

“You notice it kind of looks like a pyramid?” Luke asked.

“Yes,” Eleanor said.

“Kind of a coincidence,” Luke said. “Maybe they built the pyramids at Giza as a kind of tribute to the mountain where the energy came from.”

“Maybe,” Eleanor said.

“If you think about it, it is pretty incredible, though. That they were able to use the Concentrator's energy. Maybe that explains how their empire lasted for so long.”

“Maybe,” Eleanor said again. It seemed the Egyptians had basically done what Watkins hoped to do. They had harnessed the energy of the Concentrator. But then, they didn't have to worry about a rogue world, or the whole earth turning into an ice cube. And they weren't sacrificing the rest of the planet to ensure their survival.

Eventually, the corridor bottomed out and they reached a doorway. Through that they entered into an improbably cavernous chamber, with a ceiling more
than fifty feet high, supported by thick columns in regular formation, and distant walls far outside their sphere of light. Even their voices seemed to get a bit lost in there. Every surface was decorated with the same kinds of artwork and writings. Eleanor wondered how long this would have taken to create, and what it all meant—whether any of it might be the instruction guide for how to run the ancient Egyptian power grid. The humming was more forceful here, too, and coming from a direction up ahead of them.

“This way,” Eleanor said.

They set out across the chamber, and before long they lost sight of the doorway through which they'd come and were surrounded on all sides by retreating columns.

“Keep track of the exit,” Luke said. “It would be easy to get turned around in here. Every direction looks the same.”

Eleanor wondered how big the chamber actually was, and whether its size and features were a part of how the Egyptians harnessed the Concentrator. When she posed this idea to Luke, he stopped and took another slow glance around them.

“You know, it almost has the feel of a capacitor network, doesn't it?” he said.

“Uh, sure?” Eleanor said.

“No, it does,” he said. “For storing power and stabilizing output. A giant capacitor network, or maybe an array.”

Eleanor wrinkled her brow. “That just went completely over my head.”

“Capacitor is like a battery, only it doesn't store energy for a long period of time. A capacitor charges and discharges fast. Most electronics use capacitors, to make sure things run smoothly. Usually, they're small. This is—”

Something moved off in the distance. The sound of a foot dragging along the stone floor. Or at least, that was what Eleanor imagined, but when they both shone their flashlights in that direction, they saw nothing.

“Rats?” Eleanor asked. “I'm sure they're down here. Right?”

“Big rat,” Luke said.

Eleanor turned back toward the direction of the Concentrator's hum. “Let's just keep going.”

As they moved forward, the hum grew louder, and louder, until Eleanor knew it must be very near. A hundred yards on, an open space appeared in the columns, and the chamber floor reached the edge of what seemed to be a large chasm. When they got closer, Eleanor realized it wasn't a chasm but a kind of broad, circular amphitheater.

Down at the base of its terraced steps, at its center, stood the Concentrator.

The device very closely resembled the other two Eleanor had seen, with a black trunk rising up to its twisted, angular branches, and the structure defied perception in the same perplexing manner that the others had. Eleanor stood at the top of the amphitheater for a moment and then began the short descent to it. Luke followed, and when they reached the bottom, he picked something up off the ground.

“What's that?” Eleanor asked.

“A sword.” He held it out to show her. It had a curious, almost question mark shape, its tarnished blade straight near the hilt, then curved like a sickle. “There's more of them,” he said, pointing at the ground, and he was right. There were a dozen or so of the swords strewn about.

“Well, that's a bit concerning,” Eleanor said.

“Makes sense to me,” Luke said. “They would have wanted to guard this thing, right?”

“I don't mean that,” she said. “I'm wondering why the guards would have just abandoned their weapons here. Like they left in a hurry or something.”

“Never held an actual sword before,” Luke said, testing its weight, swinging it in casual arcs.

Eleanor turned her attention back to the Concentrator
and quickly found its control console. “Let's do what we came to do,” she said.

“Be careful, kid,” Luke said.

Eleanor nodded and placed herself in front of the console. Then she laid her hand against it, awaiting the familiar sensation of something inside reaching back, touching her hand, her skin, picking at her nerves. What she felt instead was the aggressive force of something seizing her by the arm, almost painfully, and it didn't let go. She gasped.

“What is it?” Luke said.

“Nothing. It's under control.”

But it wasn't. Eleanor felt locked in a battle with the Concentrator, and she knew that if she gave even a fraction of ground, the thing would break her. This one seemed . . . angry. If that was possible. She couldn't let it into her mind. But if she didn't, she wouldn't be able to establish the connection she needed to shut it down.

“What in—?” Luke shouted.

Eleanor tore her eyes from the control panel and looked up. At the top of the amphitheater, several impossibly narrow figures shambled down toward them, with raisin-like faces gaunt enough to reveal the contours of their skulls, their eye sockets empty pits beneath their ragged, deteriorating headdresses. Scaled armor covered their chests, while their sinewy
arms showed through wrappings of cotton.

Mummies?

“I guess those guards never left!” Luke said.

The Concentrator threw itself against the gate of Eleanor's mind, seizing upon the moment of her distraction. She fought it back, her arm shaking, her hand going white against the console. She had to ignore what was going on around her, even though there were mummies descending upon them from all sides of the amphitheater now.

“Did . . . did the Concentrator do this?” Luke asked.

“It must have!” Eleanor shouted. “It . . . preserved them, like the one in Alaska.”

“Not exactly how I pictured that Amarok guy,” he said, glancing about nervously.

But this was different. These were mummies, which meant most of their brains and organs were gone. They were just animated shells.

When the first of them reached the bottom of the amphitheater, it extended its bony hands to grab for Luke, but he swung the sickle sword and cleaved its arms off. When that didn't stop its advance, he swung two-handed for the neck, and the mummy's head shot sideways, bounced to the ground, and rolled away. With that, its body slumped to the ground in a heap.

“Easy enough,” he said. “I got this, kid! Do your
thing!” He charged another mummy. It took him a few more swings, and a few more severed limbs, before he'd hacked away enough pieces of the thing to stop it. “Kid! Shut it down! Hurry!”

Eleanor returned as much of her attention to the Concentrator as she could. She didn't know what made this one different from the others. Perhaps the Egyptian manipulation of its energy centuries before had somehow strengthened it, triggered its defenses. Or perhaps it was simply created that way. But she had to find a way to defeat it.

She tried relaxing, letting down her own guard just a bit, but each time she did, the awareness in the Concentrator rushed her, like something shoving her aside and grabbing the steering wheel of her mind, and she struggled to push it back.

The mummies kept coming, and Luke kept chopping them down around her. “Any time now, kid!”

Eleanor cursed herself. They had come all this way, and now it was up to her to do what no one else could. What good was her ability now? If she couldn't use it to stop this thing, then it had no purpose, and that meant she really was nothing but a freak.

She still didn't know what to make of the anger she felt burning within the Concentrator, if it could be called anger. Eleanor was attuned enough to the
language of the Concentrator to know the awareness in there loathed her—or rather, loathed people. Humans. All of them, and especially the ones who had enslaved it thousands of years ago.

“Look out!” Luke shouted.

Eleanor glanced over her shoulder. A mummy had almost reached her, its claw hand but inches away, its face a rictus of mindless drive. Before she could react, Luke's blade came down, taking the arm with it, and then he went for the head and sent it flying.

“Remember the guy who talks to llamas, kid,” he grunted, reminding Eleanor of their conversation in the cockpit of his plane. “You are what you are. You can do this.”

The awareness in the Concentrator rammed her again, throwing her head back as her mind shook with the force of it, and her body stiffened. She wanted to retreat, to find some far corner of her thoughts and hide there until the invading consciousness had moved on. She had only her memories to use as a shield—her friends back home, her uncle Jack, the swell of purpose she'd felt when she'd found out her mother was lost and she had gone to find her, the quiet moments she'd shared with Finn. But these thoughts only kept the Concentrator's aggression at bay. She had to gather the strength to face this thing and beat it.

Like Luke had just said, she had to be what she was. But what was that? She was Eleanor, sweetie, Ell Bell, kid, a friend, a girl, a person—there was no way to hide any of that from the Concentrator's hate and aggression. But then it occurred to her that she must be something else, too. The something in her she didn't understand, the something that made her unique, that allowed her to connect with the Concentrator in a way no one else—except, perhaps, Watkins—could. She had to bring forward that part of her. She had to show the Concentrator what she was afraid to show everyone else.

A mummy's arm landed on Eleanor's foot, but she ignored it.

I am not a freak.

I am different.

I am who I am.

She closed her eyes and pushed up against the Concentrator's awareness with the thought,
I am like you.

She felt its wall of resistance weaken, and in an act that terrified her, she let hers down by the same degree.
I am like you
, she repeated in her mind.
I am not one of them, I am like you.

When she finally got to a point where she felt she could trust the awareness, she let it in, and it wriggled up her nerves to her mind with the desperation
of something frightened and alone. And as she merged her thoughts with it, she realized why.

This Concentrator remembered.

The other two hadn't, at least not in a way Eleanor experienced, perhaps because they were devices of a lesser order, or perhaps because they had been treated differently by the humans who had found them and worshipped them.

The Egyptians had tortured this one. In their study of it they had burned it. They had stabbed it. They had dug up its roots, which they wrenched, and twisted, and broke, bending them to their will. And the Concentrator had felt all of it.

This was not just a machine. It was alive, in a way. A tree, with memories in its roots.

The pain it revealed to Eleanor nearly overcame her, and she found herself pitying this wretched thing, in spite of what it was doing to her world. But she indulged in that for only a moment and then did what she had come to do. She took hold of the Concentrator's battered roots, and carefully, ever so gently, she eased them into a position where they could do no more harm. And then she took the alien awareness, at peace for the first time in millennia, and brought it to her chest. Then quickly, before it knew what was happening, she killed it.

The Concentrator shut down, and the hum ceased, and the terrible silence that followed carved a hollow into her mind. Eleanor felt an even greater weakness than she had with the last, and collapsed to the ground just as Luke struck a final, heavy blow to a mummy, sending it sprawling.

“You okay?” he shouted, rushing over to her. “Kid, you okay?”

“I'm okay,” Eleanor whispered. Dessicated mummy parts littered the ground around her. She wiped at her face and was surprised to find her hand wet with tears. “I . . . yeah. I'm fine.”

“You don't look fine. Is it done?” Luke knelt beside her, his face smeared with dirt and sweat.

“Yes,” Eleanor said.

“Then let's get out of here. This mummy killing ain't even fun anymore.”

But Eleanor didn't know if she could walk. She could barely hold herself upright in a sitting position. “I don't think I can. . . .”

Luke sighed. “Okay, then.” He reached his arms beneath her knees and around her back, cradling her, and then lifted her up with a grunt. Then he labored up the steps of the amphitheater to its ridge.

“Do you remember which way the exit is?” Luke asked. “I've gotten turned around.”