“God I hope I’ve got this right.”
His heart slamming hard, he shuffled to where the sound told him the winds began. Then, like a sledder on a mountainside, he turned ninety degrees and dropped flat into the wind flow.
Incredibly, the slightly concave shape of the struts caused the wind to raise the little vehicle from the floor. There was some initial wobbling, which he corrected by positioning his body in the center. As disconcerting as it was to be moving at this speed in the dark, it wasn’t half as bad as going without. The hood protected his ears, fed on the wind, and he was not uncomfortable. And because he was finally using the mechanism that must have been designed for the tunnel, he felt safe.
There was nothing for him to do except stay still, and because his last dose of REM was incomprehensibly long ago and far away, Mikel actually drifted to sleep. He dreamed of a hand stretched toward his bowed head, the fingers pointing at the nape of his neck…
He woke to a strange sensation. Still floating in the air, he was moving much more slowly. The sound of the air changed again as well, lower than before. It was as if he was being invited to stop.
“Yes,” he answered. “Yes!”
Mikel angled his body toward the wall and the nose of the sled went with him, effectively pinwheeling a quarter turn so it was facing into what he presumed was another niche. His weight, held forward, caused it to lurch in a little farther and stop.
Smiling at the simple beauty of the system, Mikel gratefully stood and moved in the direction where he imagined the wall should be, but he doubled over something thigh-high and very hard. He landed on rippled and rocky stone. Crawling forward, his hands found an arched doorway in the wall that was, like the other, sealed shut by a long-solidified lava flow. Mikel pushed against the wall to stand and feeling his way along it, discovered another set of mosaic tiles under his hands, but these weren’t glowing either. Exhausted by the thought of having to make one more intense decision, he impulsively pressed hard against the tiles.
With no warning, Mikel was suddenly looking into a pair of hazel eyes. White eyebrows sat close above them and a white beard displayed dozens of carefully made ringlets, swoops, and curls.
Mikel Jasso was looking at Pao, the hesitant, recalcitrant man from the stone and fire chamber. Only now the man was very, very different.
He was somewhat translucent, the images of the real world blurring slightly when he passed. The man was pale and gaunt and moved with strange, ethereal sweeps of his arms. He seemed to control objects around him without touching them.
This man was dead.
CHAPTER 13
Questions flooded Mikel’s mind as he watched the spectral figure.
Years before, he had attended a séance at the Group’s headquarters. It was an exercise to contact any surviving spirit of the ancients. Artifacts had been positioned around the table and Arni, the synesthete, had served as a very effective medium. Though the effort had failed in terms of opening a useful pathway, everyone felt a shift in the character of the room. There was a weight, a slight pressure of energy like shallow water. It was as if someone—or several someones—had been present who wasn’t present before. Flora, ever the one for empirical proof, declared it a form of group hypnosis and that was that.
Mikel had not been convinced. For him, the sensation had remained in the room for days after. Now he knew the truth: she had been wrong. The previous “recording” offered up by the tiles had shown living people. This one showed a soul, a ghost, a poltergeist, whatever label one wanted to attach to it.
This man and his colleagues believed in souls, Mikel told himself. They tried to bond them, to unify, to rise to some other plane. Had they succeeded? Had this one intentionally remained behind?
Or is that the fate of a soul that did not bond? he wondered.
Argh! To be so close yet unable to communicate with this man, he thought. To not to have the chance to study the room personally—
“Talk to me!” Mikel yelled.
The figure went about his wraithlike business. With a frustrated cry, Mikel drove the side of his fist into the tile. The image jumped ahead. Now there were two specters in the chamber: Pao and another, an aged woman.
“All right,” Mikel said to the tile. “Why did you stop here?”
There didn’t seem to be anything exceptional about the moment. Had the projection jumped to this spot because there was some kind of bookmark? Then, suddenly, Mikel realized something that sent a jolt through his belly. Or—
Is it real? Is this happening now?
His chest felt heavy under the weight of the thought even as his heart and mind raced.
He hit the tile again. The image did not change. That could only mean that this was no longer an image. Was he watching figures who were present now, behind the tiles. Were the stones relaying activity that was taking place behind them: the actions of spirits in the present day who had been here, he surmised, for untold millennia. He recognized one as Pao, the other was in shadows, barely visible.
As his eyes adjusted to the scene he saw more that confirmed his assessment. There were skeletons on the floor, close to one another. The bones had crumbled almost completely away, but Mikel could still make out the supraorbital ridge of a skull defining the hollow of an eye, and the arch of a pelvis. He felt the cold shock of realization. The skeletal remains belonged to these two souls.
Looking closer, he saw that the spirits were moving among scrolls and piles of stones with markings that appeared to shift and move, like animated drawings. Each time they did, Mikel noticed a barely perceptible flicker among the tiles before him: here and there a glow brightened slightly, as if they were acknowledging—or recording?—the change. That did, after all, appear to be their function.
The two spirits were speaking. Though Mikel was still trying to understand the mechanism by which living spirits were visible to him, the words they spoke were clear and comprehensible. Pao paused to look at a petroglyph.
“We cannot afford to spend more time,” he said.
“We cannot afford to leave,” said the other—a woman, bent and small, her voice low and grave. It took Mikel a moment to realize that this was Rensat, the woman who had seemed much closer to Vol in the last “vision.”
This Pao, too, was much older than he’d been in the chamber. The beard was still lush but age had whitened it even more. His face was etched with deep lines and his voice cracked.
Suddenly Rensat moved from the shadows.
“I will not go without knowing what happened to Vol,” she said. “And we still have work to do, a traitor to locate.”
“And… a mysterious savior, perhaps,” Pao said, more resigned than hopeful. He turned back to the stones moving again from one petroglyph to another.
But something else was different, something more than just the jump forward in time. The air around Mikel himself felt hollow, like the low-pressure system created by an approaching storm. Someone, something, was also present in his time, in the chamber. He wanted to look around but he did not want to take his eyes from the living history. The only experience Mikel could compare it to was the séance, the way the atmosphere in the room had shifted: it felt empty of life, even their own, yet full of something else.