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“Can’t be!” he shouted. “Our forces should be here!”

Caleb coughed and half-chuckled, half-choked. “Not…ours anymore,” he tried to say.

Come on, he thought. Put it together. Our enemy must have turned or possessed the troops here. Probably a while ago, recruiting them to his side, knowing that he was coming for whatever they were guarding.

What were they guarding?

Did they even know? Or were they just doing their jobs, assigned to the bottom of the world to protect the greatest secret ever discovered?

Caleb thought of the recent visits to this location by world dignitaries and religious leaders. They had been shown something, told something — that had changed their world view, shattered their preconceptions and brought about a new move toward harmony.

Was it the revelation of another civilization, long-forgotten, or something far more ground-breaking? Was it along the lines of the multi-verse concept, the Custodians or UFOs in our midst? So many theories and conspiracies, he couldn’t track — or rank — them all. But if he tried, if he had just a moment of peace amidst all this carnage… the blue screen was down, he could see it. He could just about…

But the numbness and utter chill seeped into his bones and the wind ripped through his every cell, and it felt like he was being disassembled by the frozen hands of some mischievous ice demons, and he couldn’t focus for one second. He had to get warm, had to get dry or he’d have—

— nitrogen narcosis, rising too fast, and…

…and for a moment he was back under the Alexandrian harbor, touching that stone head of Isis, the one that had started it all and led to his recuperation in the hyperbaric chamber on Waxman’s yacht where his visions continued.

Where am I?

It was like being in two places at once: in the warmth of the Mediterranean and on the icy shores of the Antarctic. Straddling both times and locales in his mind.

Gunfire and explosions still popped in his ears, only now the Greek setting was being torn apart by the shells, and men in parkas raced this way and that, firing and shouting orders, and there was Edgerrin — (but he wasn’t even around during the first mission) — and now he dove over Caleb, still shooting at what must have been a massive group advancing on their position.

Caleb cried out as a hole punched through Edgerrin’s insulated coat. Red streaks on the ice as he spun around, tilted and tumbled out of view.

Shadows fell, guns pointed at his face, and Caleb peered up through the pockets of warmth from the Egyptian sun. Clinging to that other place, to the warmth of the past, he fought off the chill…

Long enough to clear his vision and see not only in the present — in the brutal cold of this icy battlefield (where the battle was clearly lost) — but also beyond it, beyond the veil of secrecy and eons of blindness, to find the man who now spoke to him through the mouth of another.

One of the soldiers stood up straight, lowering his weapon. He was out of breath, but his voice was restrained and calm, yet encouraging.

“Mr. Crowe, thanks for coming. Let’s get you out of the cold and show you what you’ve been searching for all your life.”

* * *

Caleb could feel his head moving even as he was lifted, pulled up by several others, helped to a transit vehicle of some kind, ushered into the back seat where he felt a true blast of warmth. The possessed soldier got in beside him, then pounded the back of the driver’s chair, and they took off.

Before he knew it, he was out of his coat and a sweater and a heavy insulated heated blanket had been wrapped around him. Through it all, he kept mumbling. Words that he realized, formed a question.

One question, over and over.

“Who are you? Who are you?”

The man to his left, youthful but hardened by the elements, just grinned. After a moment, as the driver veered around a bend, still ascending, sunlight speared in from a low angle and dazzled Caleb’s eyes. He squinted, leaned forward and saw it: their destination. Up a steep and winding ramp of ice, toward the triangular summit of what first appeared to be a mountain but was clearly an edge of an immense pyramid.

Knew it, he thought. Damn fuzzy Google Earth images.

Dizzying in height, massive in width, Caleb could barely breathe as he shuffled to the window to look out and down. For a moment, his mind did it again: bifurcating and existing in the present, observing this icy anomaly, and also in a past so ancient as to be beyond prehistoric even: a lush world of vines and greenery and plants so huge and alien they could have been at home in an epic sci-fi movie. Rivers and waterfalls cascaded in the dazzling glow from the gold-plated pyramid looming over everything like a cyclopean behemoth.

But the same in both worlds: an entrance, halfway up, in the shape of a great, triangular arched door, plain and opening into welcome darkness.

“Who are you? Who are you?”

The words still came from his trembling lips as they neared the doorway.

This time, an answer came, of sorts.

“That’s the wrong question, Caleb. You know all about that problem, right?”

“Wrong question,” he echoed. “Wrong…” He blinked and tried to pull back from one of the worlds, and found himself in the warmth, in the dazzling blaze from the pyramid that wasn’t just glowing but trembling, as if it could barely wait to reveal the secrets inside.

“What’s the right question, Crowe?”

“Not who are you.” I know that answer already anyway. He blinked down now at the tiny forms below, the men and women of the past age. Bathing by the river’s edge, working at the village in the valley, writing, painting, designing, planning…

“Then?”

“Who were you?”

The silence stretched and lured him back to the grinding of the tracks into the ice, of the engine rumbling, until the soldier leaned in and spoke…

“That is not only the right question, Crowe, but the one…”

Caleb flipped back to the present, to where, at the edge of the ascending pathway, in the arched doorway, a man in red robes calmly awaited him, and finished the sentence:

“…you should be asking yourself.”

30

NASA Headquarters — Washington, DC

With the six elite guards who had been with him since Long Island, the ones he trusted not to be on the mind-susceptible drug, Xavier secured the control room, stationed two men outside the main doors, and had four others patrolling inside.

Diana got to work accessing the systems, locking out other users and establishing a secure channel only to the bunker under the White House, to Edgerrin Temple, and to this room.

“Expecting trouble?” she asked, head down, scanning the control functions and security measures, determining what she had access to down here, and rerouting the command functions.

“Always,” Xavier responded. He pulled up a chair. Sat and faced the door. Hands clasped in front of his face. His eyes were pained, brow furrowed. Elbows on his knees, he started to rock.

“Xavier?”

When her hand touched his shoulder, he flinched. He still hadn’t quite gotten used to this body. The way it reacted to her touch. It was… off, detached and not yet integrated somehow. He cursed Mason Calderon again, and every day. It shouldn’t have been this way.

Beats the alternative by a light year, he reminded himself. But still, what she must think of him. The sacrifice of going from the man she fell in love with, to this… monster. He could only imagine, and the unshakable doubt gnawed at him every day, to the point he wanted to brush off her every touch as underserving. He couldn’t accept it, despite her assurances that she didn’t see skin deep. This was different. Xavier couldn’t even bear to look in the mirror some days; and like now, by habit, he still wanted to run his hands through his thick red curls, only that was someone else.