“I’ll bet Zara Tucker lands in a locked para-psych ward,” Rachel said. “Something really twisted in that pretty little blonde head.”
“Tell me about it,” Drake said. “I still can’t believe I dated that crazy woman.”
Alice made a face. “I can’t believe I agreed to an MC with Fulton Whitcomb.”
Rachel smiled. “Everyone makes mistakes when it comes to that kind of thing. What you both need to remember is that in the end you listened to your intuition and cut your losses before you wound up in a Covenant Marriage.”
Alice shuddered. “Imagine being stuck in a marriage with someone like Fulton Whitcomb for the rest of your life.”
Sunlight flashed on Drake’s glasses. “Whitcomb and the others never intended a long-term marriage to be a problem for you.”
“There is that,” Alice said.
She shook off the creepy sensation that swept across her senses. She was safe now. It was over. And so was her Rainshadow honeymoon. At that thought, the creepy feeling gave way to an inexplicable sense of loss. Not like it was ever a real marriage in the first place, she reminded herself.
“What’s next on our to-do list?” Harry asked.
Drake straightened away from the wall. Energy sparked in the atmosphere around him. “Next up is a closer look inside the pyramid.”
“Right,” Harry said. “We need to find out how dangerous that Chamber really is.”
“And if it is dangerous?” Slade asked.
“Then we have to find a way to destroy it,” Drake said. “Preferably without taking out the whole island.”
Chapter 45
DRAKE STOOD IN THE CENTER OF THE PYRAMID AND opened his other vision. The translucent stones that formed the walls and the floor of the Chamber still seethed with energy, but the currents were stable now that the Old World crystals were gone. The wall of midnight that had blocked the entrance had disappeared.
“Feels much calmer in here now,” Alice said. “Not nearly so dark, either. I can see some of the energy locked in the walls, but it’s all sort of muted to my vision, as if this room is drenched in paranormal shadows.”
“That’s the way the daylight world appears to me when I view it through my glasses,” Drake said.
“I understand,” Alice said. “What do you see in here?”
She stood beside him, surveying the Chamber. Houdini was perched on her shoulder. He did not show any particular interest in the pyramid. Harry and Rachel stood just inside the entrance. Darwina was perched on Rachel’s shoulder, an Amberella doll in one paw.
Drake turned slowly, examining the Chamber. “Each of the big blocks of crystal are made up of hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller crystals. Each of the small crystals is illuminated in a different shade of dark light. I’ve never seen most of these colors before. But I think I can channel some of this energy.”
“Channel it to what purpose?” Harry asked, sounding wary.
“I’m not sure yet,” Drake said. “But I don’t think there’s any risk in running a couple of experiments. The energy in this place is stable.”
“Go for it,” Harry said.
Drake scanned the myriad building blocks of the pyramid, searching for one that felt right. The lively energy in one of the crystals caught his attention. He could not explain why but he knew intuitively that it was somehow familiar.
He walked closer to the crystal and got a fix. It was as if he had flipped a switch inside the stone. An image appeared the way images do in dreamscapes. In this case, it was a very familiar image.
Houdini chortled excitedly. Darwina joined in, waving her Amberella doll.
“Oh, my goodness,” Alice whispered. “Would you look at that?”
They all gazed at the image in the crystal.
“It’s a dust bunny,” Harry said. “I don’t get it. Why would the Aliens go to the trouble of building this place just to put up a picture of a dust bunny?”
“I think it’s more than just a picture,” Drake said. “It feels like an icon, a symbol indicating something else beneath the surface.”
He fixed his attention on the image. The dust bunny icon dissolved into a series of subtly shifting dream-like images. They floated in and out of focus in a seemingly random pattern. It took a few tries but he finally got the hang of summoning one image and concentrating on it.
Beneath it, however, was another series of eerie, fleeting dreamlight impressions.
Eventually he found the secret to unlocking the dreamscape. The scenes suddenly sprang to life in a three-dimensional, life-sized display that occupied most of the interior of the pyramid.
“It’s as if we’re standing inside a hologram,” Alice whispered.
“A video hologram,” Rachel added. “The images are moving.”
“It’s a dreamscape,” Drake said, very certain now. “A waking dream that was constructed specifically to transmit information via dreamlight. In this case, the data being transmitted is about dust bunnies.”
There were moving images of dust bunnies everywhere. Houdini and Darwina were thrilled. They seemed to understand that the dust bunnies were not real, but that did not stop them from chasing each other through the dreamscape.
The scenes depicted dust bunnies in the wild, dust bunnies at play, dust bunnies on the hunt. But it was the scenes of dust bunnies dashing around a green quartz room furnished with what looked like high-tech lab equipment that made Alice and Rachel cry out simultaneously.
“No,” Alice said.
“Please don’t tell me the Aliens used dust bunnies for experimental purposes,” Rachel whispered. “I don’t care if it did happen a couple of thousand years ago. It would be just too horrible.”
Houdini and Darwina appeared oblivious to the menacing scenes around them. They continued to dash around the pyramid in a mad game of hide-and-seek.
Drake pulled harder on the dreamscape lab images, making them sharper and crisper. As he did so, understanding flooded his senses.
“The dust bunnies are native to Harmony,” he said. “And, yes, initially they were used in experiments involving paranormal forces. The Aliens’ goal was to find a way to adapt to the poisonous environment here.”
“Poisonous to them,” Alice said.
“They came from a world where the paranormal forces were much stronger,” Drake said. “A world lit by a sun that gave off that kind of energy. For the Aliens, the paranormal was normal. They were well adapted to their home world. Colonizing Harmony proved more difficult than they had anticipated.”
“It would be like humans attempting to adapt to a planet that had a much lower level of oxygen or normal sunlight,” Harry said. “The only way to survive would be to synthesize more of what was lacking in the environment.”
Drake studied the myriad crystals of the Chamber, willing the information he wanted to come to the surface.
A small triangular crystal in one corner brightened. Dreamlight whispered in the atmosphere. Information came to Drake the way it did in a dream—a deep sense of knowing that required no words.
“When they realized that they would be forever trapped underground unless they found a way to bioengineer themselves, they established Rainshadow Island as a research center,” he said. “But for the most part the experiments proved unsuccessful. The majority of the creatures that resulted from the research could only survive in a heavy-psi environment. If they were removed from Rainshadow, they died very quickly. There was only one viable exception.”