“We should draw straws or something! Christ, you can’t just accept you have to sacrifice your life!”
“But the challenge is called sacrifice. And here it is.” Edward took a step out on to the precipice and then onto the free standing stone which stood like a totem pole in the valley. “I’m old Billie. If I live another five years that would be more than I or any other man my age would have any right to. But you — you could live another sixty or seventy years!”
“But…”
He didn’t let her protest. “The decision’s been made now. You have to save yourself. Don’t look so mortified. I’m not simply doing it for you. We both know there’s a lot more at stake here than our lives. You need to get through this so you can deactivate the code to Atlantis. You’re the only one who’s been there in living history. Only you can save the rest of them!”
“But it will kill you!”
“Yes, but you will live. And that is all that matters.” He spoke the words calmly, and Billie realized that they were the truth — she was the only one who could reach Atlantis in time and change the outcome. But all the same, she found it difficult to accept.
“There must be another way?”
“Maybe there is. But we don’t have time to find it. We have less than an hour before this temple floods once more, and then Mark and everyone else are going to find themselves having a really bad day.”
She thought about it silently and then hugged him. “Thank you, Edward. If I do succeed, the entire world is going to know that it was because of your bravery and act of sacrifice.”
He hugged her back, and she felt the warm tears on the back of her neck.
“Go,” he told her, and turned to make his way to the SACRIFICE step.
“Good bye, Edward.”
Moments later she watched him, eager to do so before he had time to change his mind, simply step onto the final stone. She turned to see the last six stepping stones raise until they met the height of the levelled ground on the other side of the chasm.
Billie began running across them.
A split second later she heard the axe drop.
By the time she’d heard the third swing Billie was on the other side of the chasm. She immediately turned around, and looked back at Edward, who was standing there with tears of joy over his formidable smile.
“You survived!” she said.
The axe continued, like a pendulum.
“Another illusion.” The white of his teeth smiled back at her. “Wasn’t that lucky!”
“Wait there while I find the reset lever.”
Edward looked at the swinging axe. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Minutes later, after she’d reset the challenge so that the two of them could walk across without repeating it, Edward was across the chasm and holding her tight.
“I can’t believe you just did that. Edward, you literally just gave your life for me!” she said.
A wry smile came across his face. “I might have guessed that it was merely a test… I’m very glad I made the right choice!”
“How did you know?”
“How did I know what, Dr. Swan?”
“That the sacrifice was only in thought, not in practice?”
“What makes you say I did?”
She stared at him. Her brown eyes fixed on him, forcing him to be honest.
“I realized the pygmies must maintain this place. That being so, it would make sense that they needed to be able to complete the challenges themselves. It simply didn’t make sense that they would sacrifice one member of their maintenance crew every time they needed to reach the temple of Poseidon.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Billie walked into the final temple. A broad smile played across her face.
This room displayed none of the watermarks seen in the previous rooms, meaning that it had remained dry throughout the ages.
The room was said to be one stadia in length and half one wide. But what the Atlanteans called a stadia appeared much smaller in real life. In fact, it appeared no larger than a movie theatre. The interior was less grand than expected despite fundamentally matching the description that Plato gave in his Critias Dialogue. The roof was made of intermittent ivory as described in the two and a half thousand-year-old story, and the walls had silver, gold and orichalcum scattered. Poseidon himself stood as a statue standing on top of the chariot drawn by a six winged horse. Unlike the descriptions she had read, the God of the Sea had gold armor, but it certainly was not made of gold. Poseidon’s height fell short of the ceiling by no more than a couple feet. Above his head, the ivory had turned brown.
“There’s a fortune worth of precious stones covering this temple, but nothing like we were led to believe,” Billie said. Her tone was almost disappointed.
Edward nearly read her mind. “But it seems an anticlimax of the vivid description by Plato.”
“Precisely.”
“I wouldn’t fuss. What we are after is worth a lot more than ten times this amount of gold.”
Billie smiled as she began to climb the back of the six winged golden horse. “Don’t remind me. We’re here to save the world.”
Edward began reciting the navigational guide they found in the Tibetan Atlantis. “For the six winged beast that pulled Poseidon’s chariot stared at something more valuable and dangerous still than the entire temple — the prefix to the code to Atlantis.”
She scaled the gargantuan beast without a thought of the thirty feet in which it rose above the ground.
And then swore.
The kind of curse that echoed throughout the temple until it sunk heavily in Edward’s heart, and he knew in an instant that all was lost.
“What is it?”
She quickly slid down the back of the horse.
“Someone’s beaten us to it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because the entire piece of orichalcum in which it was supposed to be contained is completely missing. A blank hole in the ceiling is the only evidence that it once existed at all. Looks recent, too.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“There are drill marks in the ceiling. They look like someone’s used a power drill to quickly remove the orichalcum placard without any care for stealing the rest of the temple’s treasures. And that means to me that whoever did so knew the value of the code to Atlantis.”
“It also means that pygmy leader lied to us. Someone’s previously entered the temple and come out alive.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Edward watched as Dr. Swan sat down in front of him. Despite her outwardly hard-ass appearance, he could tell she wanted to cry. The inner workings of her mind, unfamiliar with failure, continued to search for the next solution.
“If you don’t mind, Dr. Swan, I would like to find a way out of here. If we’ve failed, I for one would like to spend my remaining days on earth somewhere other than this godforsaken temple.”
“I agree, but I’m not convinced that this is the end. I refuse to believe we can’t find another solution.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but anything’s better than the alternative. Sam Reilly uses a computer whiz who can work miracles. Perhaps now that we have half of the code, she can break the first half of it. It’s unlikely, but I’ve never been very good at rolling over and dying.”
“Okay, so you’ll take your chances on the cryptanalysis, and computer geeks. What will you do with your remaining days?”
“I’m going back to Atlantis. If I can contact Sam and Tom, I’ll bring them too, and we’ll revisit the temple. See if there’s anything I missed.”