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.”
“Something? Can you be a little more specific? Something bigger than a breadbox? Something 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.