It’s the same and yet, not.
The lid closes — echoing moments later as hundreds of other platinum cases close over other treasures. Minor things: gold necklaces; silver baubles and ruby rings. Hundreds of treasure chests, time capsules to preserve their most valued items, should they survive the ravages of the war to come.
The brothers lower their heads, as — shifting to the view outside the dome — the skies turn black as rolling crimson-grey clouds rush in, bringing with them cyclonic winds, massive waves, lightning, and then — a scalar beam of pure energy arcing across the globe, spearing toward the city of light and hope.
Alexander jolted back to the surging cold as Aria let go of his hand and wrapped her arms around him tight. Bubbles shot out of his dislodged regulator, his mask was a blur of her hair and bubbles, but Alexander saw other things: dark, fan-like things. Eyes, long tails and white underbellies.
They were descending through the school of mantas. And her light — dropped and dangling from its tether on her belt, spun around after the rays brushed past it and sent the beam this way and that—
Highlighting that they were nearly to the great crack in the dome-shaped reef. To the hole drawing them inside, into the past…
Alexander fought for his regulator and got it back into place just as the leather caress of a stingray caught his leg. Aria made a bubbly-screaming sound and clenched him tighter. The light spun, and he tried to kick out to arrest their descent.
Had to check the gauge.
They had been near 80 feet already and couldn’t risk much lower for too long without oxygen poisoning. How he wished for Waxman’s resources, the boat that took his young father to Alexandria, with a hyperbaric chamber, and probably the means to get a Deep Diving Suit to go down 600 feet. They might need it, if they could get the time and the chance to come back here and do this exploration up right.
But would they — any of them — have the time?
From what he had just seen, if this was it — the domed city, there was no way they could get to the bottom during this dive.
But we don’t need to… do we?
That thought calmed him. He held her tight. Felt her cold skin against his fingers. She was trembling through fear and cold, and he couldn’t imagine the terror going through her mind now.
Just keep trying to stay calm.
He found her chin, gently turned her face up to locate her eyes in the fogged mask. Tried to nod and make the ‘ok’ sign, to which she just shook her head rapidly in the negative. She struggled in his embrace a few moments longer and flinched as another ray brushed against her leg.
Then, just like that, they were out of the school.
Not out, he realized, but just under their congregation, through the fissure in the barnacle and urchin-decorated dome.
The temperature dipped, and Alexander could feel her skin tightening, goosebumps rising, but then she calmed — or more like froze.
Not in terror or deathly concern, but in awe. It was the same shared experience Alexander just felt wash over him as the light speared this way and that, finding and dazzling off structures at once alien and yet so familiar, as he had just seen them.
The city of the ancients.
Lemuria or Atlantis, his father would know for sure. More likely the former, but here was one of its greatest outposts, at one time a shining city of tremendous architectural skill and techno-magical accomplishment. A civilization where psychic-mystics ruled, and knowledge was revered as religion, and the impossible a daily reality.
Aria gently squeezed his hand again, and again a flash speared through another blue filter as his mind sought out the answer to another question:
A battered remnant of the past glory, survivors huddled on the island’s mountainous and volcanic cliffs, this peak which had been a mountain lording over the previous land’s scenic harbor. A limping old man with a gnarled staff leads the survivors to the water’s edge, where workers clear debris and pile up washed up coral. In the distance, carrion birds feast on floating bodies, hundreds of them that have risen from below.
Turning away in sadness, the old man speaks to his staff, which vibrates and hums, and then it calls to an enormous shaft of basalt, and stands it up on end, hovering, until he walks it into its new place, the first in a foundation of rectangular edifices placed on the coral reefs to create a new complex…
Back — and Aria let go of his hand. Treading water in reverence, she hauled back on the flashlight’s cord, caught it, and now with it firmly in her grasp, she aimed it down, and then back and forth. So dark, only traces of the spires and angular buildings peeked out into the light. A dome here, an arch there. The beam tread carefully over rooftops, around columns of marble and across bridges of majestic construction. Exotic fish darted away, and in the distance a larger nurse shark eyed them warily.
The light fell on the closest structure. The tallest.
Alexander was already heading there, pulling her by the shoulder. They couldn’t separate; but had to be quick. This was the tower he had seen — he wanted to tell Aria that, to indicate he knew this was it, and he had to check it.
They might reach it.
His air was getting thin, his breathing tight and strained, and he could only imagine what Aria felt. Hopefully the experience of wonder and the thrill of this discovery outweighed her fear of not only being so deep, but of potentially not being able to find the exit and get past those stingrays and rise again.
With every kick toward the spire, which seemed to be pointing at an angle now, as if the whole city had tilted during the cataclysm, he was struck with the certainty they’d never make it out, and their bodies would be lost to time, just like all those poor souls inside this dome when disaster struck. But they were almost there, almost…
Her light shone ahead, like a tether they were latched onto, hauling them in to the prize.
Alexander slowed, then pulled up.
Not because of the shark that circled around the tower’s cupola, and now seemed to be waiting for them at the balcony area, but because what he had hoped to see there was absent.
The platinum coffin.
It might have fallen off the balcony or been washed clear in a tidal wave, but something told him its positioning there in the ancient past was far too important. It was a beacon, a treasure, a riddle to solve that none ever would. Or even if they did, they could never ascend the tower, with its guards, traps and defenses.
And he thought again of those hundreds of other platinum coffins — red herrings in a game of misdirection. Each had their own guards and traps, all over the city.
His heart surged at the thought of trying, imagining a desperate puzzle-cracking quest. Of blazing his own trail and conquering a test older than anything even his father had attempted, but — still touching Aria — another flash came to him, and now at last the truth hit, and hit hard…
It wasn’t there.
This trip had been for nothing, and they were going to die.
His vision showed him the truth, and as he turned, met her eyes and reluctantly shook his head and dashed her excitement, he knew that it had already been too late.
Too late by sixty years.
Bad intel. Wrong question. Whatever the reason, they had come on a wild goose chase, and despite this most amazing of finds, they had been put into danger — and their enemy had not only expected it but let them fall into the trap.
And now Nina and Jacob were up on the surface, fighting for their lives. Two against how many?