She stood there a long time before finding the courage to move to his desk to see what was lying there, inside an open manila file marked CONFIDENTIAL.
It was a catalog. A listing of the contents of Archives — Sublevel 5, K-L.
About the middle of the first page, her vision snagged on it: Kincaid's Cave. Locker 23-893. Combination 343212.
Gooseflesh ran down the back of her neck. Did Simcoe have a change of heart? Maybe he saw her on the entrance video feed, coming in brazenly with a leather satchel full of… something, and decided to end it for himself before she could expose him.
But… something didn't feel right.
She shook it off. She had an opportunity here. Xavier had been clear — what they took from the cave was nothing definitive. Easily dismissive as a forgery. The only real evidence was locked away in the Smithsonian's secret archives.
She made her choice.
At times during the descent, she was sure she was being followed. Shadows on the stairwell above her, darting out of sight when she looked back. But curiosity won out over caution. She made it to the sealed door on Sublevel 5, tried her handprint on the scanner and for some reason she wasn't surprised that it worked. She opened the door.
As she stepped inside, motion-sensing halogen bulbs illuminated an enormous warehouse floor with shelves twenty feet high, their contents locked away in boxes behind metal bars.
Drifting through the aisles as if in a dream; she eventually found herself before locker 23-893. It was the fourth shelf up, about at the level of her head. The compartment had a digital screen and a number pad.
At a scuffling sound behind her; she turned, holding her breath, but saw nothing.
Calming her nerves, she turned back and typed in the combination. The grate popped out, then the locker slid down.
She was about to open it and reach inside when she heard it again: a grating metallic sound from the next aisle. She dropped low and slid along the shelving for several steps before skidding to a halt.
There was a face staring at her through the bars.
Blue eyes. Red hair.
Xavier grinned as he bent to an empty shelf where they could see each other clearly. "Did you find it?"
Diana was too stunned to answer. A hundred connections slid into place all at once. Then she said it: "You… you killed Simcoe."
His grin never wavered.
Fighting off a fresh wave of nausea, she continued. "You left the catalog for me to find, after what? Forcing him to show it to you and then extending my clearance to the sublevels?"
Xavier shrugged, but still said nothing.
She knelt on the floor now, her mind spinning with everything that had happened since he dropped to her rescue, and now she fought the crushing realization that he had been four moves ahead of her the whole time. "Why?"
He raised his right hand. In it rested something a little smaller than a bowling ball. It was silver-plated, covered with crisscrossing lines etched with strange runes. Just looking at it made her head swim. "This, he whispered. "The contents of locker 21-432."
"What is it?"
"Something I need," he responded cryptically. "Something more important than you can ever guess. It was relegated here, suppressed without further study, simply because of where it was found."
"Where?"
"On a Wyoming cattle ranch in 1923; discovered under thirty feet of topsoil and inside the ribcage of a fossilized Triceratops. The implication of course being that whatever advanced civilization made this thing — it coexisted with the dinosaurs. Over seventy million years ago…"
Diana said nothing for a moment, refusing to even acknowledge the impact of what he had just said. Finally she said, "So you used me. Because… because… you saw it here and needed my access?"
He nodded. "See, you're getting this now. Yes, I saw this sphere. Dreamed of it many, many times. Knew I was meant to find it, and I knew I could get you to help me."
"The Kincaid article. The Grand Canyon. My father…" She slumped to the floor. "Everything…"
Xavier's hand appeared above her, his arm extending through a gap in the shelf. At first she thought he was trying to grab her hair or pull her up. A part of her wanted him to. Needed him to. Despite everything.
But then his hand opened.
And a single folded sheet of paper descended toward herand settled on the floor by her face.
"Look at that," he said in almost a whisper. "when you're settled down. When the turmoil and thrill of what's to come gives you a moment's breath. And when that day arrives, make your choice. You can change the future, or embrace it. Either way, I'll be waiting."
As his footsteps echoed down the lonely corridor, past the suppressed relics of a forbidden age, she somehow found the energy to touch the page and hold it up. In a sketch just as beautiful in its contours of light and shade, he had drawn a vision of the two of them together. Holding hands, facing a sun rising over a desert-like mountain scene.
A vision that despite the excitement of everything she'd discovered, and the fear of what was to come, still brought tears to her eyes and a smile on her face.