Pri Lo climbed onto the slab and settled into the stone, her body fitting perfectly into the depression. “I am ready,” she announced.
“There are prayers and-” Pri Tak began, but Pri Lo cut her off.
“There is no time for that. And there is no time for you to leave.” She laughed. “Don’t you see what’s coming? You could not run far enough, anyway. Best to have it over with here.”
She turned her head to the warrior, a man named Kra Tek, a brave fighter, who had been entrusted with the spear. He was also Kala’s father. She gave the slightest of nods and saw relief briefly race across his face. She knew she had chosen wisely in picking him — it was obvious in Kala. “Do it.”
He slid the spearhead into a slit next to the slab. His scarred hand rested on the snakeheads. Without hesitation, he turned it.
The pyramid began to vibrate. A blue glow suffused the slab and Pri Lo’s body. The priestesses were chanting prayers. The glow centered on Pri Lo’s head, the skin rippling as if the bone of the skull was alive.
The skin began peeling off, the eyes turning into two blue glowing orbs. The bone appeared, bleached white, changing, metamorphosing from the inside out. The white became clear, crystallized, suffused with the blue glow. Her mouth was wide open, but no scream issued forth even though she was still alive, the channel for the power that was rising through the structure.
A bolt of blue shot out of Pri Lo’s head toward the approaching black wall. When it touched the darkness, there was an explosion.
Again and again, blue lightning seared off the top of the pyramid toward the Shadow, until the black wall stopped moving forward, halting less than a hundred yards from shore. The consistency of the darkness began to change, swirls of blue mixing with the black.
Then the pyramid stopped vibrating, the blue bolts ceased firing, and all was still for a moment. The priestesses and warriors, who had fallen to the stone and covered their heads during the assault, slowly lifted their heads. The Shadow was fading, breaking apart, rays of sunlight piercing it. They stood, watching the Shadow disappear, jubilation filling their hearts. Except for Kra Tek, who was staring down at Pri Lo’s remains. The body was gone, leaving just a pure crystal skull lying on the slab. He reached for the skull.
Then the volcano blew.
The explosion took off the top third of the mountain, sending hundreds of thousands of tons of ash, gas, dirt, and rocks into the air. Toxic gas rode the shock wave downslope, killing every living thing it washed over.
Kra Tek cradled the crystal skull in his arms, turning his broad back to the coming death. The gas killed him instantly, then the blast of heat that followed scorched the flesh from his bones, but his hands still gripped Pri Lo’s skull as his body slammed into the slab.
Several miles to the south, Pri Kala had watched the Shadow dispersed by the blue bolts. She had sensed her mother’s power projected from the island, then felt it fade to nothing other than the faint essence of her father’s sorrow. But there was an aura of comfort from the dolphins swimming about the prow of the ship, seemingly guiding it out to sea and away from the island.
Then the large volcano in the center of the island exploded. Every member of the crew paused as the sound of the blast reached them. They could see the spreading cloud of ash. Rocks, trees, and other debris splashed into the water all around.
“Row, you fools!” the captain yelled as he pushed the tiller, putting the stern of the ship square on toward the island. The tidal wave from the blast was over fifty feet high, bearing down on them at eighty miles an hour.
“Hold on!” the captain cried out. He held on to the tiller with one hand and with the other grabbed Pri Kala. Tears were running down her smooth cheeks, but she gripped his hand. The wave hit, and the ship rode it, the stern going up almost straight, several men sliding over-board, everything that wasn’t tied down smashing forward. Then the ship leveled on the top of the wave before slipping down the less steep backslope and settling in the water.
Pri Kala looked back. Less than a third of the island was still above water. The Earth had not known such violence since the destruction of Atlantis over eight thousand years previously. People as far as a thousand miles away would hear the sound the volcano had made and the ash and dirt would circle the globe and drop the world temperature a couple of degrees for years. Once more, the Shadow had been stopped, but the price had been high.
Pri Kala’s small hand reached up and felt the Defender crystal. She knew the Shadow would come again, and she knew her duty.
CHAPTER TWO
“KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Over.”
Amelia Earhart knew the sunrise she was watching might well be her last as she let go of the Transmit button and there was no reply to her latest attempt to contact the Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The very top of the sun was rising, as if directly out of the Pacific Ocean, which stretched in all directions as far as she could see from the cockpit. She was flying at twelve thousand feet, so the range of vision was quite far. But no sign of Howland Island or the Itasca, which was supposed to be on station just offshore the unpopulated island. It was waiting for her arrival to refuel the plane.
She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had already flown twenty-two thousand miles in the past several months in her quest to be the first woman to fly around the world. But this section was the most dangerous: the longest they would be over water. They’d taken off from Lae, New Guinea, the previous day at noon, and she knew she only had about two more hours worth of fuel in the Lockheed Electra’s gas tanks. She had had the plane specifically modified for the flight, adding fuel tanks and radio-directionn- finding equipment.
Noonan had been working the direction-finding equipment all through the night, trying to keep them oriented, but reception was intermittent. The Itasca was supposed to be transmitting nonstop, giving them a target to fix on, but there had been long periods where she could pick up nothing.
“Give me a fix, Fred.” Earhart glanced at her compass. She was on a course slightly north of due east, but Howland was so small that the slightest deviation would cause them to miss it, thus the reliance on the Itasca’s transmissions. If they didn’t make the island, they would run out of gas and go down in the ocean. There was no other land within range for them to divert to.
“I’m getting a lot of static,” Noonan reported.
Earhart reached down and grabbed some smelling salts, taking a deep whiff, her eyes tearing. She didn’t drink coffee, and she had learned that she needed the salts on such a long flight. She’d been at the controls for eighteen hours, and tired didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. She’d recently had dysentery and had still not completely regained her strength. She had made the decision, during one of the long legs of the trip, that this would be her last flight of adventure. From now on, she would only fly for pleasure.
She was a striking woman: tall, with short brown hair. Many in the media had called her Lady Lindbergh, and there was some resemblance between the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first man. Of course, Earhart’s first trip across the Atlantic had basically been as luggage, a passenger as two men piloted the plane, but that didn’t stop the sensation the flight caused in 1928. Ever since, she had been pushing the envelope, to a large degree because of the scorn of the few who pointed out that she hadn’t piloted on that first flight, and partly because her husband, George Putnam, the famous publisher, encouraged her, keeping her in the limelight. Throughout the flight, she had filed dispatches from her journal.