The open passage taunted her with its nearness. She knew she would never be able to reach, but she stretched her arms out anyway. A thought flashed through her head. I might survive the fall if I don’t get knocked out hitting the wall.
Something moved, right above her. It was Professor, hurling himself across the gap, just as she had done. She felt his hand close around her arm and then….
The impact with the wall knocked the wind out of her. She thought she would fall then, but instead, there was a sharp pain in her shoulder as all her weight settled beneath the hyper-extended limb. Her mouth opened to issue an involuntary cry, but she had no breath to scream.
She hung there, pressed against the wall, hanging by one arm. Her immediate impulse was to claw her way back up the rock, but every time she tried to move, the pain in her shoulder spiked. If she didn’t relieve the pressure, her arm was going to be ripped from its socket.
She glanced up and saw the hand that had saved her, Professor’s hand, wrapped around her wrist. He lay flat in the opening to the passage, head and shoulders protruding, teeth clenched with the exertion of holding her.
He reached down with his free hand, and she reached up, stretching more than she would have believed possible, and somehow grasped his outstretched hand.
Suddenly she was moving again. The pain in her shoulder was nothing to the relief she felt as he lifted her to safety.
Her breath returned with a gasp and for nearly a full minute, all she could do was lie on the stone floor, enjoying the feel of something solid beneath her.
“Okay,” Professor said, at length. “We’re alive. I haven’t decided if that’s the good news or the bad news.”
“The good news,” Jade said, “is that we aren’t trapped.” She tried to sit up, winced at a fresh stab of pain in her shoulder.
“Don’t tell me you saw a back door? That would have been nice to know.”
“I didn’t know,” she retorted. “Not at first. But those Changelings that were waiting for us? They didn’t come in the front door. And I got a look around when we were separated.” She did not reveal that her look around had been mostly a virtual tour. “I know where to go.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” He got to his feet then squatted beside her and began probing her shoulder. “Still attached,” he declared. “Just a muscle strain. We’ll get you some SEAL candy — you mere mortals would call it Motrin — and you’ll be ready for the Olympic gymnastics team in no time.”
She laughed despite herself. “That’s good to know, because this archaeology thing is wrecking me.”
He helped her to her feet and then gestured for her to lead the way. She backtracked into the rotunda, and soon happened upon a pair of bodies — Kellogg and the man Jade had called Not-Professor.
“I wonder who they really were,” she murmured. “You think the real Jordan Kellogg is in a landfill somewhere?”
Professor’s eye twitched. “If he’s lucky.”
His tone was enough to keep her from asking him to elaborate. She knelt to retrieve his fedora and placed it on his head. “There you go. Back in business.”
That was enough to bring a sparkle of humor back to his eyes. He retrieved his watch from the dead imposter, and then riffled through man’s pockets, reacquiring his passport, wallet and phone. “Now I’m back in business.”
“Want to see what he really looks like?”
“Nope. I just want to find that back door and get the hell out of here.”
Jade shone her light down the passage and moved toward the stairwell she had used to reach this level of the vault from the chamber where she had received her vision. The stairs did not ascend any further, but there was another opening on the inside wall of the rotunda, a passage that led to the chamber Jade thought of as “the interface.”
She pointed to it. “We have to go through there. But I should warn you, you’re going to see some things.”
“Yeah? Like Biblical stuff?”
Jade shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. What you see kind of depends on what you take in with you.”
He narrowed his gaze at her. “How do you know that?’
“That’s how they built it.”
“They?”
“The aliens,” Jade said, feeling inexplicably foolish. “The grays. The extraterrestrial astronauts that Stillman was always going on about.”
“You saw them?”
“Yes. And I also found a bunch of their skulls.”
He nodded slowly.
“Don’t patronize me,” Jade snapped.
Professor raised his hands. “Sorry. Actually, I’m a little curious to see what this thing will show me.”
Jade gave him a hard look, but his skepticism was already undermining her own certitude. What if everything she had seen was just the product of her own preconceptions? Was her vision of alien engineers any more reliable than the angels or devils that Shah and all the self-styled prophets before him had seen?
But in the Hypogeum, I saw this place. That wasn’t a lie.
A tremor rippled through the floor and Jade felt a subtle change in the air pressure. Professor raised his head sharply, turning to look back down the passage. A moment later, a loud thump reached her ears.
“What the hell was that?” Jade asked.
He turned back to her, his expression now full of urgency. “That was an explosion. Shah’s terrorist friends just blew the entrance.”
Another violent shudder shook the passage, accompanied by a noise as loud as a gunshot, and Jade was thrown to the floor. Jagged cracks, like lightning bolts, appeared on the walls and ceilings, vomiting out a miasma of dust. Professor managed to stay on his feet. He seized Jade’s arm, triggering a nauseating wave of pain in her injured shoulder, but she fought through it, got up and staggered through the doorway.
The floor heaved and then began to tilt crazily, like the deck of a ship climbing the face of a rogue wave. Pieces of stone and concrete tumbled down around them. Jade threw her good arm up as a shield and plunged forward as the vault began coming apart all around them.
The Interface looked nothing like her vision of it now. Although the initial blast yield had been relatively small, it had thrown a monkey wrench into the precisely engineered machinery of the vault. The infrasound amplifier had become nothing more than a roiling tangle of jagged stone, slumping down through the center of the cylindrical tower.
“There!” Professor’s shout was barely audible in the tumult of grinding rock, but Jade heard and followed his pointing finger to their salvation, a rope ladder hanging down in the center of the chamber and rising up into the gloom overhead.
It seemed impossibly far away.
“We’ll never—”
Professor let go of her arm and scooped her off her feet. Before she could protest, he heaved her out over the center of the stone vortex. Something — the rope! — slapped against her face and she threw her arms around it, hugging the woven fibers even as she started to fall. The friction burned her face and chest, but she squeezed tighter and managed to slip her arms between the rungs.
The rope jerked taut with a bone-shaking abruptness and then she was hanging again, dangling above the swirling whirlpool of debris.
The ladder shuddered again, as if trying to shake her loose, and she saw Professor above her.
“Climb!” he shouted, and then he was moving, scrambling up the rungs.