“What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
“Well, it’s kind of obvious that something’s going on,” Sid replied with her usual warm smile. “You’ve both been trying to hide your loved-up little smiles ever since we left Germany.”
Nadia stared at her coldly for a moment and Sid thought that she’d overstepped her bounds. Nadia was an incredibly private woman.
“I need to get you some antiseptic cream to clean this,” she said quickly, changing the subject. “Murray said there is some in the team’s med-kit.”
But then the Russian’s face broke into a genuine smile. Sid could see the happiness radiate in her eyes. After everything they had been through, the barrier was at last coming down.
“I don’t know what is going on,” Nadia admitted, laughing to herself. “I mean, he’s not exactly marrying material, is he? But, I don’t know, I just can’t stop smiling. I’m constantly thinking about him! And, when we…” she hesitated, a coy grin on her lips. She knew she sounded like a swooning school girl. “When we made love, it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”
Sid giggled, happy for her friend, and took her hand. “I’m so happy for you.”
Nadia sighed. “I’m trying not to get too excited. I can’t exactly see a man like Nate wanting to settle down anytime soon.”
“I don’t know. He might surprise you. After all this adventure, I think we’re all about ready for the quiet life again.” There was something melancholy about the way Sid said the words. Nadia knew that a distance had developed between her and King ever since his reckless actions back in Germany. Had it affected their relationship more than she’d estimated?
A touch of sadness entered Nadia’s expression then also. “Not Nathan Raine,” she said definitely.
Sid thought for a second. “Then what’s stopping you from going and living the highlife with him?” she asked. Nadia hadn’t considered that. “I mean, he’s obviously lonely. You can see it in his eyes. He might portray that hard-ass bravado stuff, but you can see that he just wants to be loved like the rest of us.”
The smile returned to Nadia’s face at that prospect. “Maybe,” she said and then they both laughed. Nadia felt a burst of the freedom of youth, giggling about boys with her girlfriend, which she had not experienced since that terrible night all those years ago. She felt, for the first time in her adult life, genuine happiness.
Sid squeezed her good hand. “I’ll go get that cream. Back in a second.”
Still with a giant smile spread across her full lips, Nadia sat back against the headboard of the bed.
She did not see the distant shape of an attack helicopter powering towards the boat.
King followed Raine down into the temple, the twin beams of their torches sweeping through the submerged cavern, adding to the weak light filtering down through the hole to illuminate an entire forest of intricately carved pillars. He felt the strongest sense of déjà vu overwhelm him, and it wasn’t just because of the columns’ striking similarity to Egyptian, Greek and Mayan designs. He had been here before. Or, at least, he had seen it before.
Through the eyes of the Moon Mask.
“This is it,” he told Raine. “This is what I saw in my vision. Exactly this!”
They descended lower, their tiny bodies dwarfed by the sixty foot tall pillars, fashioned to resemble the long stem of a flower, its bloom sprawling above to hold the ceiling in place, its roots trailing the floor to support the colossal weight.
Sweeping his torch beam back and forth through the almost complete blackness, Raine pointed out. “I can’t see Nadia’s giant meteorite.”
“Sure you can,” King replied, surprising even himself. “We’re inside it.”
“What?”
“Turn off your light,” he ordered.
“I’m not turning off my light, Benny. We don’t know what’s down here.”
“You don’t believe in sea monsters do you, Nate?” He joked. Then, in a calming voice, as though it was the most reasonable demand in the world, he repeated his request. “Turn it off.”
He switched his own torch off and the darkness encroached closer to them. Raine hesitated a moment longer and then complied, plunging them and the temple once more into black oblivion, broken only by the tepid shaft of light focussed down through almost ninety feet of inky water and through a hole only three wide.
The darkness, however, wasn’t all consuming.
Instead, a subtle red glow, so faint as to be almost imperceptible, radiated mutely out from each and every pillar.
“What is that?” Raine asked with a sense of awe in his voice.
King finned over to the nearest column. Protected from the current by the enormous temple walls, swimming was easier down here. As well as the unnatural red hue, the temple also radiated a sense of calm. Peace. Serenity.
Gaining neutral buoyancy, King hovered in front of the column. The dimensions were similar to the two giant pillars outside only these looked as though they had been finished whereas the ones Nadia had investigated he guessed were still under construction at the time catastrophe struck.
On closer inspection he realised that it wasn’t the entire pillar that was glowing. Instead, only small symbols radiated with that dull red hue. He gasped when he saw those symbols.
“What is it?” Raine asked, gently finning into a hover beside him. Then he noticed the symbols too. “Is that writing?”
King ran a gloved fingertip over one of the symbols. “Yes,” he replied. “Not just any writing. The same writing as what we found at Xibalba.” At least it was very similar, he allowed silently. He hadn’t had a proper chance to study the Xibalban text — which, like here, had been etched into a forest of columns at the summit of that city’s enormous pyramid — in any real detail, but it certainly bore strong similarities to this. Pictographs incorporated into a series of swirls, lines, dots and seemingly random squiggles.
“They carved out the core of the meteorite,” he realised, pushing back and switching on his torch again. The beam sliced through the darkness, spearing through the forest of columns. “They cut through the metal ore and built this temple inside it, leaving these huge columns of metal supporting the roof.”
“The columns look like stone to me,” Raine admitted, “with metal etched into it.”
“No,” King replied and finned back next to him. “Here, feel.”
Raine touched one of the red symbols and sure enough he realised it was a depression, as though the stone had been carved to reveal the metal beneath. But that wasn’t possible. Even with modern technology, to find such identical veins of metal running through rock, then to carve them out so perfectly would be almost impossible.
“The entire core was solid metal,” King explained. “The ancient builders carved it out, leaving behind these metal columns. Then they cemented over the metal—”
“Whoa, cement?” Raine asked incredulously.
“Nothing strange about that,” King said. “Cement has been used for thousands of years, right back to the building of the Giza Pyramids, and to a much higher standard than today’s equivalent. In fact, the Pantheon in Rome was built from a mixture of crushed rock, burnt lime and water and still, today, holds the title of the world’s largest un-reinforced concrete dome.”