Read Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) Online
Authors: JB Dutton
“What about the other one?” I asked.
“It was closed, so I went in the living room and grabbed the hammer.”
“And then you left?”
“No, I realized that if someone was still inside that room, it would still be locked. And if they weren’t there anymore, maybe it wasn’t locked anymore.”
I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t just gotten the eff out of there. But that explained some of my attraction to him. He was crazy enough to make me want to do things with him, go places with him.
“So I tried the door,” he continued. “And it wasn’t locked.”
“You’re shitting me.”
He smiled at my potty-mouthed exclamation and I felt myself blush.
“Nope. I ain’t shitting you,” he answered with a big grin. “I opened the door and went inside. And man, what a freakin’ whacked-out room. It was huge, just like we thought. Maybe a thirty-foot ceiling. And it was as long and wide as the whole rest of the apartment, like someone just took the apartment next door and the two above it and knocked out all the walls and ceilings to make a kind of big hall.”
“Wow,” was all I could think of to say.
He took another gulp of soda and carried on. “All the windows were boarded over and there was nothing in the room except...”
“Except?”
“A pyramid. A huge, gray metal pyramid.”
This must have been the object with the sloping sides that I’d seen part of through the keyhole.
“Just, like, sitting there?” I asked.
“
Das it,” he nodded, and hopped up onto the counter beside me. “I walked all around it. It must have been twenty-five feet high. When I touched it, it was smooth like metal but felt kinda warm.”
“And there was nothing else in the room?”
“Nada.”
“Just this solid pyramid?”
“Hey – I never said it was solid. If it was, it would have weighed a ton. I don’t think the floor could even have supported it.”
“That’s so totally effed-up. Were there any markings on it? Or, like, a door or something?”
He shook his head.
What could this possibly mean? The
Temple of Truth had suddenly gotten a whole heck of a lot more sketchy.
“Did you take a photo of it?”
“I heard a noise and realized I had to get outta there fast,” he said. “I opened the front door quietly and peeked out. There was no one there, so I ran down the stairs.”
I had a sudden flash of worry. “Did you close the door to the pyramid room?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said and kissed me on the forehead.
A wave of relief swept over me and I crumpled into his chest. We hung out for a while, talking about what we’d seen that afternoon. What were the next steps? I looked at the photos I’d taken of the ancient books. Wait a sec – maybe there was a way to find out something from them. There was a Greek kid in my Math class. What was his name?
Jordan? No, George... I opened my Facebook app. There he was – George Soulis. I made a swift friend request. It would be amazing if he could shed some light on the mysterious book.
Then the excitement of the afternoon got the better of us, and Cruz and I made out for a while, sitting there on the counter. I loved every second of it. He was warm and safe and loving. Yet as we kissed I
couldn’t stop thinking about the apartment. Noon must have slept in one of those sparse bedrooms. What kind of life did he live? Was he happy? And why was I thinking about him now while my lips were pressed tightly against Cruz’s? I opened my eyes. Cruz was looking at me.
He pulled away, frowning. “What were you thinking about right then?”
Oh man – I felt super guilty.
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
Now I felt more guilty.
“No. I was thinking about...”
I looked down. He lifted my chin up gently with his forefinger.
“About Noon?”
I looked hard into his eyes. The same expression he’d had before entering the tunnel. He was scared, but trying with every ounce of mental strength to overcome his fear.
Cruz swallowed and squeezed my hand. “I have to get going.”
I felt terrible, and all I could say was, “Sure thing.”
I knew I wouldn’t see him for a couple of weeks because Mom and I were heading down to Florida to stay with my grandparents. Today had brought us a lot closer though. We’d shared an intense experience. We had real feelings for each other. There was definite physical attraction. Yet I couldn’t deny that the thought of Noon was tugging at the back of my mind.
We said our goodbyes and he left. I knew I’d miss Cruz.
And I also knew I had to go see this pyramid for myself.
Dream #19: I’m in homeroom. It’s morning. All the desks have names on them, like Mom has on her desk at work. But the kids are sitting in different places from where they regularly sit, and when I go to my desk a girl is already there and her name is on the desk too. I check all the desks and my name isn’t on any of them. I think I’ve been expelled, then a kid tells me that my new place is at the front of the classroom so I go look at the teacher’s desk and my name is on it.
Friday. My only chance to get back inside the ToT apartment and see this crazy-ass pyramid for myself. Over breakfast I could hardly contain myself. I was itching to crawl down the tunnel (though I couldn’t have imagined myself feeling that way a few weeks earlier) and I think Mom could sense my antsy-ness, but I passed it off as Christmastime excitement. She smiled at me like I was her cute little pumpkin again. I swear she almost pinched my cheeks. Oh wait – there was going to be plenty of that down in Florida at the weekend.
She closed the front door behind her and I looked at the time on my phone. Give it two minutes, I thought, just in case she’s forgotten something and comes back to get it. A buzz. George had responded to my FB
friend request so I sent him the photo of the page filled with Greek text and asked him if it was a big deal to translate it for me. Then I went into the tunnel, armed with the screwdriver and an insane confidence that I was going to get to the bottom of all this insane stuff.
When I reached the grille I listened
intently for a while. The last thing I wanted was to get caught. But there was no sign of life in there. I removed the grille quickly and crawled through into the musty dining room. Looking at the table and thinking back to the first time I saw the Temple of Truth members sitting around it holding hands in the middle of the night, something struck me. It was hard to put my finger on it. Although it looked like a dining room, it didn’t feel like one. I went into the kitchen and started opening cupboards and drawers. They were all empty. So was the fridge. What’s more, it wasn’t even switched on. The under-sink garbage was pristine. Whoever “lived” here certainly didn’t eat here. Ever.
This was bizarre enough in itself, b
ut it wasn’t why I was here, so I made my way carefully along the hallway past the identical bedrooms. The front door beckoned up ahead. If it opened now and someone came in, I’d be screwed.
Keep it together, Kari
...
I reached the door to the pyramid room and started to turn the handle. Suddenly my phone buzzed loudly
. It was a Facebook message. Oh-em-gee, Kari – you frickin idiot! Why didn’t you put it on vibrate? I scrambled to get it out of my jeans pocket. As I was muting it, I saw that it was George replying to my translation question. I glanced at the front door. It wasn’t exactly the ideal time to read stuff on FB, but as usual I couldn’t resist and clicked on the message.
George said how it was lucky he was at his grandparents’ place because he was really struggling to translate the text
himself. But as it turned out, there was a good reason why. The page contained a section of the Minotaur myth, a story he was very familiar with. But the problem was that the text was written in ancient Greek. Not some kind of modern approximation of ancient Greek, but Greek that was actually written 2,500 years ago. He said that his grandfather wanted to know which book it was reproduced in. And that’s when it dawned on me that the book I’d photographed wasn’t a reproduction at all. It was literally twenty-five centuries old!
I went into the living room and looked across the bookcase shelves. The Greek book was easy to spot, so I pulled it out and opened the cover. I was looking for a title page, a copyright symbol or something that would disprove what I was thinking. The leather creaked and crackled. This time I handled it a lot more carefully – no way did I want to be responsible for ruining a cultural artifact. But there was no sign that the book was a copy. In fact, now that I was looking more closely at the lettering inside, I could tell that it was handwritten. I couldn’t even imagine what a book like this would be worth. And here it was, sitting in a bookcase with a whole bunch of other volumes that could be just as valuable.
I wondered if it would be obvious if I were to take one of the smaller, less conspicuous ones away with me. Maybe the one in French? Surely they’d never know...
I heard a creak coming from above me. The kind of noise that you hear all the time in an apartment building and never notice. But this one brought me back to reality. This was no time to act like I was hanging out in a reading library. I impulsively grabbed the small French book, shifted the rest of the row slightly to get rid of the space, and put the big Greek one back on its shelf.
Glancing nervously at the front door, I tiptoed toward the pyramid room. I turned the handle again and went inside. The sight that met my eyes made my blood run cold. It was just an enormous empty room. The pyramid was either never there, or, unbelievably, had gone.
I was in such a state of disbelief that I even walked into the middle of the room, feeling around like a blind woman in case the pyramid was there but invisible. Honestly, it would have been a better explanation than the other alternatives: that Cruz had hallucinated the whole thing, he had lied, he had gone crazy, or that the pyramid had actually vanished.
I walked around the enormous room, totally bewildered. The room itself was exactly how Cruz had described it. The windows were boarded up and the walls were bare. The large black-and-white floor tiles made an almost hypnotic pattern. I felt like I was a pawn on a huge, freaky, empty chessboard. Then I noticed something on one of the tiles – the black one right at the center of the room. As I walked toward it, I saw a twinkling. I crouched down to get a closer look. Embedded precisely in the center of the center tile was a tiny crystal. I ran my finger over it. The raised part was a geometrically perfect four-sided point that was almost sharp to the touch at its very tip. It was incredibly pure and beautiful. It sparkled like a... like a... could it be a diamond? I tried to pick it out with my fingernails, but couldn’t. A diamond is set in a ring with the narrower part facing downward and the smooth facets on the surface, but this seemed to be the opposite way around. Somehow the wider part was
inside
the tile, making it impossible to remove.
Bending down more, I put my cheek to the floor to look at it from the side. It was barely visible, protruding by maybe an eighth of an inch. Then I realized that it formed an exquisite miniature pyramid. WTF? I took out a quarter and ran the face across the top of the crystal. It scratched the metal easily, making a big scar across George Washington’s cheek. But when I checked the crystal, sure enough it was totally undamaged. It really did seem to be a diamond. I spent a few seconds wondering what it all meant, but there were just too many questions. If I was going to have any hope of answering them, I knew that I absolutely had to find
Noon.
I left the room, turned off the light and closed the door. I really wanted to hang around there and explore the only thing that seemed worth exploring in the entire apartment – the bookcases. But it was too risky, especially being there on my own. So I crawled back into the tunnel, screwing the grille back in place.
As soon as I was back home I called Cruz to tell him about the pyramid.
My voicemail went something like this
: “Hey. Yo.” (Wonderful, he’s going to think I’m making fun of him.) “So, like, I went back to the apartment to check out the pyramid and, well, crazy – it’s, like, gone. And even more crazy – there was this tiny pyramid-shaped diamond in the middle of the floor. So, like, call me back whenever.”
What a loser I am. Yesterday’s uncomfortable goodbye had gotten the better of me and I sounded like dork. As the day progressed, things got worse, because he never called back. I knew he wasn’t working that day
as he only had Monday and Tuesday shifts in the small restaurant he’d just started working in. So I could tell he was screening my calls. And then at 10 pm I got the confirmation that things had taken a turn for the weird between us – the following text message:
“Got yr msg. Ask
Noon, I guess.”
Oh, man. Cruz is amazing. How can I be screwing this up?
Noon is somehow
inside me
, like a brain implant. Maybe going away for a couple of weeks over Christmas will clear the air. Clear my head. Clear Noon out of my system.