“It’s right there,” she pleaded. “The Prime. I can fix everything, if you just let me go.”
“Sasha…”
King reached them. “Miss Therion, I’m sorry, but you have to come back with us.”
Sasha looked at him for a second, and then turned the full force of her gaze on Parker. She pointed ahead into the darkness. “The Prime is right there. It’s why we came here.”
King sensed that his friend’s resolve was starting to slip.
“Danny, please let me. My whole life has been leading up to this. Don’t let him stop me.” She reached out and placed her hand over his heart. “You promised to help me.”
Parker’s restraining hand fell away. With a sigh of resignation, he nodded down the tunnel. “Go.”
“Damn it, Danno.” King reached out to restrain her, but Sasha was already forging ahead, deeper into the darkness. He started after her, but then felt a hand pull him back.
“Let her go, Jack.” Parker’s voice sounded weary, defeated. King tried to pull free, but what had at first been only Parker’s token effort to forestall him abruptly became something more resolute. As he tried to wrench himself free, Parker yanked him back hard enough to spin him into the wall.
The impact stunned him, but not as much as the evident betrayal. Parker, too, seemed surprised by what he’d done; he took a step back and raised his hands. He knew he had crossed a line, and now he had to decide whether to retreat and do some damage control, or commit with both feet.
“I don’t have time for this shit, Danno.”
King started forward, but Parker moved to block his way. “Jack, just let her do this. It’s important to her.”
“The last time someone screwed around with this stuff, it killed half the world’s population, remember? You told me that. The Black Death? The Prime is dangerous.”
The flame of Parker’s resolve flickered, but then he shook his head. “That was different. Sasha knows what she’s doing. I have to let her try.”
“Well I don’t.”
King advanced again.
Parker, with arms akimbo, tried to block the passage, but King stepped to one side and lowered his head like a charging linebacker. He plowed into Parker, staggering him back, but even as he fell, Parker closed his arms around King, taking him to the ground in a bear hug.
Parker grunted from the impact, but instead of letting go, he wrapped his legs around King’s, hobbling him, and then he started grappling for a better position. King quickly recognized what was happening, but before he could do anything about it, Parker had rolled him over and slipped an arm around his neck.
King knew how to break free of such a hold, and Parker knew how to prevent him from doing so. For several seconds, they struggled without appearing to move more than a few inches at a time. They had fought each other often in training, and sometimes just for the hell of it; they knew each other’s best moves and Achilles’ Heels. Neither man could hold an advantage against the other long enough to achieve a decisive victory. Experience told King that exhaustion would be the decider, and that was something he couldn’t wait for.
He slammed his head back, driving the back of his skull into Parker’s face. There was a white flash of pain, accompanied by a ringing in his ears, but he also heard the crunch of bones smacking together.
Parker let go and scrambled back. “Shit, Jack.”
In the diffuse glow from King’s light, he saw Parker holding a hand to his mouth, and bright drops of blood seeping through his fingers. “Shit,” he repeated, the words distorted by the injury.
“You just can’t let go, can you?” Parker continued, the accusation pouring out in an accompanying fountain of blood. “No wonder you didn’t want me on your team.”
King shook his head, and winced as another wave of pain spiked through his head. “Danno, we can talk about this later, but right now, you need to get her back. The Prime is dangerous. Don’t let her mess around with it.”
“Damn it, Jack. Would you just fucking back off for once? You don’t have to be in control every God damned minute. It’s not like the world is going to end.”
A deep rumble shuddered through the cavern, throwing both men to the hard floor, and showering them with dust. The tremor lasted a few seconds, and when it stopped, King could hear the sound of the cavern walls groaning with the strain of holding up the earth.
The air was thick with falling dust, giving the beam of King’s light the illusion of solidity but reducing its effectiveness. He could just make out Parker, struggling to rise a few yards away.
Between them, stretching from one wall of the passage to the other, was a shadowy line that swallowed the light whole, and as he peered into it, King saw that it was getting wider. The tremor had opened a fissure in the cavern.
The earth rumbled again, and King’s side of the passage dropped six inches, with an accompanying shower of dust. Over the crushing of rock, other noises were audible, muffled but no less distinctive — the sound of gunfire.
“You were saying, Danno?”
FIFTY-FOUR
Twenty-five meters further down the tunnel, Sasha Therion had reached her destination. While King and Parker fought, she had pressed forward, using the laptop screen to light her way. She arrived at a small, unremarkable looking cavern.
She saw a few stalagmites, looking like deformed white mushrooms growing out of the floor, but the feature that immediately drew her attention was man-made. In the center of the chamber, someone had laid down a circle of stones, each about the size a man’s head. It looked like it might have served as a campfire ring, but instead of charcoal remnants, the entire circle — about six feet in diameter — was filled with soil, and poking up from the crumbly surface were the desiccated fibrous stalks of plants that had once grown here, in defiance of all the laws of nature.
This, she knew intuitively, was where Bacon and al-Tusi had conducted their experiments. This was the Prime — the place where life had begun — or as near to it as any human had ever come.
Not in this cave of course. When the spark of life had first caught, some three and a half billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had been a very different place. The land mass that would eventually become the continent of Europe would not be thrust up from the Earth’s mantle until hundreds of millions of years later. The calcium carbonate that comprised the limestone walls of the cave network itself was an accretion of organic material — the skeletons of aquatic life forms settling to the ocean floor and compressing into sedimentary rock — and so the cave itself could not have existed prior to the genesis of life on Earth. Life had not begun in this cave, nor had it necessarily begun in the physical space the cave now occupied, but there was nevertheless something important about this place, something that was not bound to the fickle whims of geology.
There were many places like it, places long known and revered by humans even before the rise of civilization — power spots, rivers of invisible Earth energy, ley lines, vortices. They were places where the laws of nature could sometimes be bent, if not broken altogether. On a day lost to time, so long ago that the span of years was incomprehensible to the human brain, those laws had been distorted in a very special way, at this particular place, and the tinder of life had become a wildfire.
Sasha stood above the ring of stones, one hand extended as if she might be able to feel the unique energy of the Prime.
Oddly enough, she could feel something…a tingling in her skin, like the vibration of a tuning fork. She closed her eyes and savored the moment.