by David Klass
And even in the midst of desperation, there was one faint last hope. It could all be reversed. The Prince of Dann might yet change things. A name, repeated to Eko from girlhood. Jair. A prophecy of a shared destiny. Something to cling to as the darkness closed in.
She volunteered for a mission. Passed through the womb of time. Was reborn in a sunlit world of eagles and dolphins, of blue oceans and sweet sea breezes. So this was the Eden that had been lost, and that might be again!
And one day, Jair himself stumbled into a barn beneath her. The beacon of hope was her charge, her student, her great responsibility. Eko loved him from the first moment, even as she commenced training him for the mission ahead.
As P.J. relived Eko’s loving memories of Jair, on the Outer Banks and the Amazon, she reached out her right hand and passed the yellow sphere to the woman across from her.
No words were necessary. It was a gesture of understanding and trust. Their hands brushed. Eko took the sphere in her own palm. She was right there with P.J. on the boat . . .
But she was also with P.J. beneath silent and shadowy bleachers on a wintry afternoon. She saw Jack looking at her in that moment just before a friendship blossomed into a romance. The gleam in his eye. The slow turning of his head. It was a silly thing, an innocent thing, but in its own way profound and powerful. A glance offered and held, and then a cautious first touching of lips. Promises whispered by the banks of the Hudson. Steamy petting sessions in the backseat of a car.
Eko followed the thread, to the moment it frayed.
Jack disappeared, and suddenly P.J.’s safe, secure, sheltered life came undone. How could he simply vanish?
Night after night, she waited to hear from him. It was more than she could bear. There were even thoughts of suicide, pushed away but not entirely conquered.
P.J.’s pain resonated with Eko—she understood sudden loss and wild grieving.
Eko followed the increasing misery to the moment the fraying rope snapped, and P.J. was kidnapped off a dark street and swept up into the nightmare. Flown to the Amazon. Confined alone in a dungeon till all hope seemed lost, and sanity itself was ebbing.
And then a familiar voice sounded outside her cell. It was Jack. Calling to her.
There was the miracle of liberation. The twists and turns of the Amazon. The whirl of the waterfall. The final battle in the Dark Lord’s cell as Jack fought a demon for her.
Finally it was over. They were together, riding in an outboard canoe down a winding river channel.
Through P.J.’s eyes, Eko saw every turn in that river, every tree, every rock . . .
28
The hovercraft moved slowly.
Inside the cabin, the two women still faced each other. The radiance of the yellow sphere flickered over them. Sometimes it seemed as fickle as firelight, at other times it was fixed and purposeful, as it projected on the wall of the boat the changing contours of a wondrous map.
The map flowed and ebbed. No, not such a wide bend. A narrower one. Oh yes, two tall trees.
Eko bored into the moment when the dog and boy split off and P.J. and Jack were alone together—the smell of the river channel, the plumage of the birds that flew over them, and the leaves of the shrubs on the banks.
The powerful outboard motor ate up the miles. P.J. reclined in Jair’s arms—in Jack’s arms. The sky began to lighten in the east.
New and even more helpful details became visible in the dawn light. The pattern of treetops against the sky. A mountain looming in the distance.
The golden map on the wall of the hovercraft transformed constantly with the new information.
The hovercraft whisked them upriver.
“It’s over for me,” Jack said and kissed her.
P.J. kissed him back. Asked him what would happen if they didn’t let him go. “You were born into their struggle. You’re of their time.”
He stared down at his father’s watch. The blue hands glinted on the white background.
He took the watch off.
The sky was lighter behind Jack now. The crags of the nearby mountain caught the morning light.
The hovercraft followed this scent of memory faster and faster, weaving through a labyrinth of streams.
Three tall trees with interlacing vines.
Jack flung the watch far out over the dark river. It gleamed when it touched the surface.
The golden map shrank in upon itself. Many rivers. One channel. A single long stretch of that channel.
“What did you do that for?” P.J. asked. “Didn’t that come from your father?”
“Yup. But I’m no longer operating on his time.” The feel of his tight embrace. “My connection to them and their time is sinking to the bottom of this river. Right now all I want is to live my life, my own insignificant Jack Danielson life, with you.”
“Bozo,” she responded, “you got yourself a deal.”
A blue light flashed on the golden map.
The hovercraft floated to a feathery stop.
Eko and P.J. broke apart at the same moment.
P.J. blinked and looked around.
They were on a narrow river, near three tall palms with interlacing vines. Somehow it looked very familiar.
Then she glanced at Eko who was staring back at her. There was a bond between them now that did not need to be discussed.
“Thank you,” Eko whispered, stepped out of the cabin of the hovercraft, and dove over the side.
P.J. followed her out through the door and stood there, looking down.
The thick, throat-clogging smell of the Amazon came back to P.J. in an instant, the heat of the sun on her arms and shoulders, and the constant buzz of the millions of birds and insects.
Dark water. Thick mud. But there was a blue glint deep beneath it.
That blue point of light began to move. The palm trees suddenly appeared bluish, then the rocks on the bank, and the birds in the air, till even the flickering light from the yellow sphere yielded to the blue tide.
Hands broke the surface. Eko held the watch, a treasure retrieved!
29
Slowly and painstakingly, Eko took the watch apart on the deck of the hovercraft. With each tiny screw that was removed and every layer of crystal and casing that was stripped off, the blue glow increased till the steamy river channel was infused with a mysterious boreal presence.
P.J. felt as if the great steam bath of the Amazon had suddenly been chilled by a cold breath of arctic air-conditioning. The sun still beat down, but the temperature dropped in seconds by at least fifty degrees. In the febrile dank of the river channel, thrumming with sound and life, a zone of frozen calm took hold.
Songbirds quieted. Insects stopped humming. Even the foliage ceased shaking in the morning wind. Leaves flattened and stalks stiffened, as if frozen into stillness by the polar majesty of the Blue Star of Dann.
Eko removed the backing and the transparent crystal top, and then separated the movement plate from the back plate. Gleaming brilliantly from inside a tangle of miniature gears and dials was a blue jewel, fragile as a teardrop. It was so small that it fit snugly into this tiny niche, but as Eko lifted it up with two fingers, it began to change shape and size.
The tiny blue teardrop swelled into a perfect shimmering pearl, and the pearl darkened and ripened into a walnut-size blue diamond with a thousand shimmering faces.
Eko lifted it up with two fingers, closed her eyes, and her fingers trembled. A look of surpassing sadness flashed across her exquisite features.
And then a truly freakish thing occurred. It began to snow. Dime-size white flakes sifted down out of the cloudless sky and dusted the leaves and dimpled the river.
Eko opened her eyes and looked across at P.J. “I could never have found it without you,” she whispered. “Do you want to hold it for a second?”
P.J. held out her palm. She had thought of the Blue Star as a lifeless mineral—a very precious stone, yes, but as inanimate as a lump of coal. It was only when it touched
her skin that P.J. realized it was alive, albeit in a way she didn’t understand.
As she held the gem, and snow fell on her face and hair, she seemed to cross a monstrous chasm into a white world of stark beauty and howling pain. There was water, but not the mud-brown streams and green-banked rivers of the Amazon. These were churning arctic seas at the top of the world, with iceberg islands lashed by frozen gales.
P.J. felt primordial anger flowing through the blue gem—pent-up sound and fury at centuries of defilement. Icebergs cracked with deep-throated roars of rage as vast avalanches tumbled into surging surf. A mother whale and her calf were harpooned side by side, calling out to each other in their final agonies. Polar bears swam endlessly in search of floes, stubbornly clinging to life but weakening and finally sinking beneath the iceless oceans.
Then there was a time when all the glaciers and ice sheets had melted, all the whales and polar bears were gone, and the noble heart of the polar regions beat on alone in a stiff, mournful cadence. The world was dying even at the equators, those hubs of life; but the top and bottom of the earth were lifeless and empty, wiped clear of what had once been so magnificent.
P.J. opened her eyes and found herself back in the Amazon river channel in bright daylight. The snow had stopped falling, a breeze rustled through the leaves on the near bank, and everything was as it had been, yet P.J. knew that nothing would be quite the same for her ever again.
Eko seemed to understand this as she lifted the blue jewel out of P.J.’s hand and whispered, “So now you know.”
P.J. looked back at her and nodded. “Can it still be saved?”
“Maybe,” Eko responded, walking over to the yellow sphere. “This is the last and only chance.”
Holding the Blue Star with her right hand, she touched the yellow globe with her left, and it began to pulse. She lowered the Star of Dann into the throbbing golden light, and the flickering nimbus seemed to reach up and enfold the blue gem. Then the jewel slipped from Eko’s fingers and dropped slowly inside the yellow sphere, as a pebble might sink into a fish tank.
The Blue Star floated for a moment atop the throbbing current of golden light, and then there was a tremendous flash, and a thunderclap that came not from the sky above but from another place and time entirely. P.J. shut her eyes at the bright light as the booming sound knocked her to her knees. Then all was still and silent, and she opened her eyes again.
The yellow sphere sat on the deck of the hovercraft, empty as a bowl of broth. The Blue Star of Dann had vanished, leaving not so much as a snowball in its wake in the long trail through time.
“Where did it go?” P.J. asked.
“To Jack,” Eko told her. “And now we’ve done all that we can do to help. I can take you back to New York. You can resume your life there.”
P.J. hesitated a long beat and then shook her head. “Thanks, but I don’t think that’s possible.”
“It’s very possible,” Eko told her. “This is not your fight. You were drawn into something beyond you and outside of you, which can only cause you pain. I know who you are now. Here is my advice. Let it go and move on.”
“How can I, after having seen what I’ve seen and felt what I’ve just felt?”
“If the future is ultimately saved or the earth dies—it is of no consequence to you,” Eko told her. “During your lifetime, you will still have enough food to eat, enough fresh water to drink, and the seasons will change. The sun will shine, birds will fly, and fish will swim. Go home and enjoy it, and let the rest go.”
“You mean let Jack go?” P.J. whispered.
“He’s a thousand years in the future. Out of your reach in so many ways. I know that you’re strong enough to forget him. You must do so.”
For a long moment the teenager from Hadley-by-Hudson looked back into the eyes of the Priestess of Dann, and neither spoke. Then P.J. whispered, “He’s coming back, isn’t he? That’s why you’re staying here, in this time, instead of bringing the Star to the future world yourself. You have to prepare for the final battle. Right?”
Eko hesitated and then nodded. “That’s very clever of you, and you’re right. If Jack can use the Blue Star to save his father, then the final showdown will be in this day and age. It will be a terrible fight, on the fringes of the earth, with light and dark hanging in the balance. I say it one more time, because I like you and respect you. Let this go. It’s not your cause, your problem, or your fate.”
P.J. stood and a strange calmness came over her as she made an enormous decision in a heartbeat. “I love him,” she told Eko, “and I can never forget what I felt when I held that blue gem. I’m making his cause my cause. You don’t completely understand fate and my role in how this will all unfold. You can’t send me away, because I helped Jack this time and I may be able to help him again, in some way that you can’t foresee. Wherever we have to go, whatever we have to do, I’m ready to help Jack and try to save his world.”
“Okay,” Eko murmured back. “We may never be friends, but we’re not enemies. Welcome to the cause.”
She held out her hand and P.J. took it.
PART THREE
30
The cavern is pitch-dark and numbingly cold, but by far the worst of it is the quakes. They seem to come most frequently at night, when I lie with my eyes closed and try to sleep. It’s a total farce because anything resembling sleep is impossible under these conditions, at least for me. I’m trapped in a waking nightmare and I’m pretty sure the only way out is death, which is now knocking on the door, or at least thumping furiously on the walls.
Boom, boom, boom, the cave chamber shakes. Dust and ice filter down over my back.
My mother, who is lying next to me, shifts in her sleep. I know she’s a warrior queen, but I don’t get how she can nod off and snore away when we may be frozen solid or buried by a cave-in at any second.
On my other side lies a ninja priest, who is apparently my second cousin, also sleeping. He’s been a faithful bodyguard during our trip, but when the cavern walls come down around us, he’ll be as helpless as I will. The remnants of the noble house of Dann will all be entombed together, except for my father who is scheduled to be executed in twelve hours.
Then it will really be over.
There’s a lull in the seismic rumblings and I doze off into the restless half sleep that has become very familiar. I’m neither awake nor asleep, neither consciously thinking nor freely dreaming.
Fearful memories from our four-day journey to this cavern recur in the darkness, often with such vividness that I find my fingers gripping the handle of my scimitar.
My mother and I are flying over a dry oasis bed on a speeding sand sled when a faint buzz swells to an earsplitting roar and locusts darken the sky. We manage to outrun them, but some members of our group aren’t so lucky. Two ninja priests scrape a dune and tumble off their sled. Before they can get back on, the dark swarm engulfs them.
We are camped beneath the stars and my mother begins telling me how she met my father. We’re both so engrossed in the moment of family bonding that neither of us notices the giant lizard that emerges from a sand dune.
A sentry shouts a last-second alarm as the lizard leaps at us!
I somersault out of the way of its snapping jaws, and then fight side by side with my mother, hacking with my scimitar at the garbage-truck-size reptile that swings its spiked tail back and forth like an angry stegosaurus.
We are climbing into hills that provide no shelter, only new horrors. Freshly hatched flying snakes greet us, hungry for their first good meal. They are both venomous and constrictors, and can flatten their bodies to glide on air currents. We watch helplessly as a bodyguard gets tangled up in an airborne scaly knot, and is squeezed and fanged into a red and bony pulp.
Ice storms pelt us. Ping-pong-ball-size hail is bad enough, but they soon become icy baseballs, fired down by a vicious fastballer in the clouds.
The dark entrance to a cavern looms ahead. We dive in to escape the hail. As
we start to trudge downhill I can hear the bambam of what sounds like frozen basketballs pounding the rocky roof above our heads.
Then come the quakes and the bitter cold of the deep caves.
Horrific images pinwheel around me as I lie there half-awake—giant lizards and famished locusts, flying snakes and ice storms.
Worst of all, it was all for nothing. We’re now huddled in the dark near a cave opening, a mere twenty miles from the Fortress of Aighar. But if we so much as stick one toe out of this cavern, Dark Army drones will annihilate us.
My father is probably eating his last meal of wurfle egesta or beginning his final torture session, or whatever the deathwatch custom is in Dark Army headquarters. And we’re no more able to help him than we were four days ago. We risked our lives for nothing. We will freeze to death here, pinned down inside the cave by the Dark Army drones that crisscross the skies outside.
I must have slipped off to sleep because I am now surely dreaming. It begins snowing in our cave! These aren’t random chunks of ice that have been dislodged from the rocky ceiling by quakes. These are soft, wet flakes, falling thick and fast. I turn my face upward, and I can feel them float down onto my cheeks and forehead.
In fact, I can see them! In this strange dream I’m having, our cave is no longer pitch-dark. It’s starting to shimmer around the edges with a sapphire luminescence that flickers off rock walls. But the bluish flames don’t warm things up—in fact, it’s getting much colder.
As I watch, the blue radiance stops flickering and grows more substantial, till it coalesces into one unblinking solid azure eye that watches me.
I get to my knees, then stand, drawn by its glow.
The rocky chamber has become so cold that I can barely bend my knees to walk forward.
I take one step, and then another, staring back into the cold blue eye. For a moment I see P.J.! She’s framed against a lush green background. Can those be palm trees? I can tell that she’s far away, but she somehow also feels very close.