by T E Stouyer
“Actually,” Soran interrupted. “You should take care of your wound, first. In the meantime, I’ll get started on Sonar, and Luce can look after Marie.”
Doc hesitated for a moment, but he knew the young man was right. “Fine,” he said. “Do what you can. I’ll take over after I’ve stitched myself up.”
Having climbed the stairs leading outside, Kincade and Arianne had arrived on the top of the Grande Arche monument. The moon was full and bright that night. But unfortunately, it seemed to be in a mood for a game of hide-and-seek as it kept appearing and disappearing through the clouds. Though, when it did come out, it cast enough light to see well beyond the four corners of the monument’s top surface.
The rooftop was essentially a large terrace with a panoramic view of the city. A wide wooden deck stretched across its center, and thick, tall glass panels were lined up along the entire perimeter. A security measure to prevent any accidental fall, while at the same time keeping the view unobstructed. Stretching the full length of the terrace and delineated by a tall wire fence, the wooden deck was flanked by four square-courtyards—two on either side—dug about one floor below the rooftop level.
As they walked along the deck, Kincade and Arianne scanned their surroundings in the hope that something would draw their attention. But that hope slowly dwindled with each additional step, until finally, it faded away completely when they reached the last of the wooden planks.
Kincade turned to his companion and said, “What now?”
The young woman glanced at him, but said nothing. She then gazed around at the surrounding skyscrapers, before her eyes stopped once again on the shopping center.
“The sooner we find the card, the sooner we can go back to the others,” Kincade reminded her.
“I know,” Arianne said. But then, something suddenly occurred to her, and she turned her head and peered into the distance.
“What is it?” Kincade asked.
“When Ash and I looked over a map of the area, we saw there was a building called ‘Tour Ariane’, beyond the esplanade, on the right. It isn’t spelled exactly like my name, but we thought it was an odd coincidence.”
Kincade shot her a questioning frown. “Are you telling me the card might be there?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I really thought it’d be here. But now … I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Listen, we’ll go and have a look over there if you think it’s our best bet. But we need to be sure that’s what we want to do. We might not have time to come back here if we’re wrong.”
Arianne hesitated briefly, and said, “We may need to look further out. But for now, let’s just go back inside and make sure there wasn’t anything we missed.”
“Sure,” said Kincade.
They went back the way they had come, but moving with haste, now. They both knew that tonight would be their one and only chance to find the lost data card. And they were beginning to worry that time was running out.
As they neared the small bridge connecting the wooden deck to the stairs leading back inside, Arianne abruptly halted for no apparent reason.
Kincade noticed it right away. He stopped and turned around, and saw that the young woman was staring fixedly at the courtyard on her right.
Then, without offering any explanation, she tore an opening in the fence with her bare hands, and moved closer to the sunken courtyard.
At first, Kincade was so startled that he just stood there and stared at her. But eventually, he went over to her and said, “Care to tell me what you’re doing?”
She pointed downwards.
Kincade followed the line of her finger with his gaze, but his eyes needed a couple of seconds to adjust to the thicker darkness inside the cavity. Before long, he was able to discern black markings over the white marble tiles at the bottom of the courtyard. Most of the markings were etches and numbers, and appeared to be part of a circular dial that cut diagonally across the square-shaped floor. But there was also a black symbol, much larger in size, at one end of the dial’s arc. And another symbol, partly hidden inside the wall on the opposite diagonal. The courtyard’s walls consisted entirely of tall glass windows which, depending on the angle of view and on the moonlight, reflected a clear image of the symbols on the floor.
Arianne stared at the symbols for a while, and then rushed to the other courtyard on their side of the wooden deck. Once there, she stood on the edge and peered inside.
Kincade followed her and saw similar markings at the bottom of the other courtyard. A dial. A fully visible symbol. And another one, partly hidden. But those new symbols were different from the previous ones.
“It’s funny,” he said. “Those markings seem familiar, somehow.”
“That’s because you’ve probably seen them before,” Arianne said. “They represent signs of the zodiac.”
“Ah, you’re right,” he exclaimed. “That’s what it was. I’m curious though, how did you spot those things in the first place?”
“I saw a reflection in the glass wall when we were running.”
“Oh, I see.”
Arianne turned around and scanned the surface of the roof. “I’m guessing the dial goes around for the full 360 degrees. And I expect it has all twelve signs, some of them visible and others not.”
She returned to the first courtyard that had caught her eye and stared at the fully visible symbol at the bottom.
“Which one is this, again?” Kincade asked.
“Capricorn. It’s my sign.”
“Is it? Well, I don’t know if this is the best time to check your horoscope,” he joked.
His comment surprised her. “My father mentioned this to me, once,” she said. “This idea that your personality and your future could somehow be influenced by the positions of the stars at the time of your birth. I can’t think of a way to demonstrate this could even be a possibility. Do people really believe in such things?” she asked in a dubious voice.
“I guess, some,” Kincade replied.
“I see …” Arianne said. “Anyway, during my childhood, at a time when we were still allowed to go outside, my father and I would sometimes lie on the grass and gaze up at the stars. Just the two of us. That’s when he told me about the twelve signs of the zodiac. And that mine was Capricorn.”
Kincade turned to her, looking a little bemused. “And you’re bringing this up now because …”
“Because I think I understand now why Adam gave the necklace to me, and not to Darius, or Ash. Wait here, please.”
Kincade watched as she took a step in the void and let her body drop into the empty space. He had expected her to land with a thud. Loud and powerful. But instead, she landed like a cat. She touched down on the ball of her feet and flexed the muscles in her legs in a way that allowed them to gradually absorb the energy from the impact, thereby barely making any sound.
“You got a problem with stairs?” Kincade asked, nodding at the staircase on the other side of the courtyard.
She looked up at him and shrugged.
I guess, for her, it wasn’t worth it going all the way around just to get down there, Kincade said to himself.
Arianne knelt down and began to carefully inspect the black symbol on the floor depicting the sign of the Capricorn, while Kincade waited and watched from the courtyard’s edge. “Anyone who’s seen my file could easily figure out my astrological sign,” she said, talking to herself as much as she was talking to her companion above. “But it wouldn’t mean anything to them. It would be completely irrelevant. For me, however, seeing this reminds me of the time I spent with my father. He knew I would remember. He knew this symbol would make me think of him. Aha, there!” she exclaimed.
Without hesitation, she raised her elbow above her head, with her fist aimed downward.
Kincade’s eyes stretched wide. “Hey! What are you—”
Before he could finish his question, Arianne drove her fist through the tile and smashed it to pieces. She then stuck her arm inside the hollo
w space beneath the floor and pulled out a small black metallic box with rounded corners.
Kincade could hardly believe it. “Is that …” he said.
“I think so,” Arianne replied. Her fingers quivered with excitement as she held the box. And she felt a shiver traverse her entire body. Finally, she would fulfill the promise she had made to her father all those years ago.
As he watched her, Kincade suddenly had a doubt. “Are you sure this isn’t another trick set by your father to fool whoever came looking for the card?” he asked. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. He had expected the data card to be protected by some kind of intricate and sophisticated mechanism. Not to be casually hidden under a plate of marble.
Arianne sensed his disappointment. “You have to keep in mind,” she said. “Adam was on the run when he hid the card. He didn’t have time to create an elaborate hiding place. The box itself, however, seems to be a completely different matter. It looks pretty sophisticated.” She briefly examined the object, and then flipped it open like a wallet. There was a rigid simplicity to its design. It had no cryptic writings, no switches, no connectors, and no slots. Nothing other than a small screen and a miniature keypad.
She heard a quiet beep, and then the screen lit up. A blinking cursor appeared on the display, aligned with eight trailing underscore characters. There was also a small red digit on the top-right corner. The number two.
“What’s going on?” Kincade asked. He was now crouched on the edge of the courtyard, trying to get a better view of the floor below.
“I’m pretty sure the card is inside this device,” Arianne told him. “The screen just turned on. Now, I think we’re supposed to enter a password. It’s nine-characters long from the looks of it. No doubt a nine-letter word. There’s also the number two, in the top-right corner of the screen. I guess that means we’ll have two tries to enter the correct password.”
“You still think the key to finding the password lies within the anagram? The secret hint, as Adam put it. Think far outside the box.”
“Yes. It has to be.”
“And what happens if we enter the wrong password twice?” Kincade asked.
“I assume this box is designed to scramble the data on the card. Which means we’ll lose it forever.”
“Maybe Soran can find a way to hack into it without us having to risk entering the wrong password,” Kincade suggested.
“I can guarantee that won’t be possible,” Arianne declared. “Adam would have made sure of that. This device appears to have been made at the Arc. He would have had both the time and the resources to come up with a tamper-proof design.”
“Fine,” said Kincade. “Then we’ll figure it out later. We got what we came for. Let’s not stick around.”
“You’re right,” Arianne said. “We should leave.”
But even as she headed for the stairs leading out of the courtyard, the young woman was unable to pull her gaze away from the device. A nine-letter word. What could it be? she wondered. As she pondered the question, she realized that her eyes kept jumping to the number at the top of the screen.
Why two attempts? Why not three, or four? Why not just one?
She thought the number itself had to be a clue.
She visualized the anagram in her mind, factored in their location—the place where the card had been hidden, and then searched for a correlation with the number two.
During the next few seconds, different ideas intermingled inside her head, merging, and then coming apart again, like pieces of a puzzle attempting to combine into a larger, more complete picture.
Then, all of a sudden, it happened. The fog dispersed in an instant, blown away by a wind of clarity. And the answer revealed itself.
She had just arrived at the foot of the stairs when she looked up at her companion with a hopeful smile and declared, “I know the password.”
“You’ve figured it out already?” Kincade exclaimed, half surprised and half impressed. “Let’s hear it then. What is it?”
He gazed at her, waiting for the answer.
But none came.
Instead, Kincade looked on with confusion as Arianne’s warm smile was replaced by a frozen look of fear.
“Tesseract,” a voice said behind him.
At that moment, a cool breeze swept across the rooftop terrace. But the wind wasn’t responsible for the chill that ran down Kincade’s spine. He didn’t even need to look back. He knew who had just answered his question. He wouldn’t soon forget the voice of the man who had come so close to killing him with his bare hands. Damien!
Reacting to the threat, Kincade swiftly spun around and drew his gun. But he only made it to about 90 degrees before a firm hand reached out and halted his rotation. The hand closed around his right wrist and applied such intense pressure that he grunted in pain and let go of his weapon. Like the voice, the sensation too was familiar. Only this time, the mercenary didn’t waste half a second wondering how a person’s grip could be so powerful. And as Damien kicked away the fallen weapon, Kincade reached across his body with his left hand.
Bang!
An unexpected detonation quickly followed. And a hole appeared on the back of Kincade’s jacket.
A split-second before the gunshot, Damien had noticed the unnatural position of Kincade’s left arm, and he had guessed what the mercenary was up to. Even so, it was only out of pure reflex that Damien had twisted his body sideways in time to avoid getting hit.
The young man lowered his eyes and stared incredulously at the red trail left on his light-blue shirt after the bullet had grazed him.
Taking advantage of the brief respite, Kincade completed his turn, and his left hand appeared, holding a second gun. Which he fired again, twice.
But Damien had been warned. Aided by his unnatural reflexes, the young man dodged to the side and, with a backhand swipe, knocked the second gun away.
Kincade quickly rolled to the left, in order to put some distance between him and Damien. And, as he got back up, he reached inside his military boot and pulled out a combat knife.
Damien gave him an intrigued look. “Do you always carry around an arsenal with you?”
“Typically, I’d prefer to have a fair fight,” Kincade replied. “But let’s face it, even though it’s not intentional, you guys are still kind of cheating. So I figured I’d try to level the playing field for a change.”
“There is no leveling the field between us,” Damien said. “And I am not playing.”
Having run up the stairs and gone around the courtyard, Arianne finally made it to the two men. “Stop it, Damien. Stop this madness,” she pleaded.
He eyed the box in her hand and said, “What are you waiting for? Enter the password.”
She gripped the box tighter and gave him a cold stare.
Seeing that Arianne’s arrival had prompted Damien to hold off on his counter-attack, Kincade relaxed a little. “You know we only get two tries, right?” he said to the young man. “You sure you want to waste one of them on a quick guess?”
“It’s the correct answer,” Damien said. “And Arianne knows it. The very fact we were allowed two attempts is confirmation of that.”
Kincade shot Arianne a questioning glance.
But she kept her eyes locked on her brother and remained silent.
“There’s no point in trying to deny it,” Damien said to his sister. “I overheard you both, earlier. Think far outside the box. The answer is in the wording of the message. But it must be interpreted both literally and figuratively. The literal part gets us here. Outside. On the roof. And the figurative part is a reference to this monument. This arch.” Damien smiled. “It’s typical of something Adam would do. We’re literally standing on the answer. On a monument shaped like a cube. Like a box. A three-dimensional object. But if you think beyond the three dimensions … outside … far outside … I’ve read that, due to its shape, this monument is commonly believed to represent a four-dimensional cube projected in three-
dimensional space. Interesting little fact, wouldn’t you say?”
Four dimensions, Kincade thought. A four-dimensional box. As soon as he said the words in his head, he saw it too. “Of course,” he muttered. “A tesseract.”
“Or a hypercube,” Damien said. “Both are nine-letter words representing the same thing. Which means that both are valid answers to the riddle. Hence the two choices. We get two tries because there are two possible correct answers. But only one of them will unlock the box. And it’s the former.”
“Not that it makes much of a difference at this point,” Kincade said. “But how can you be certain?”
“Because,” Damien replied. “That’s what I would have chosen.”
“OK, that should do it,” Doc said.
Considering what they had to work with, he was rather pleased with the results. He and his two improvised assistants had ensured that Sonar and Marie would not bleed to death in the coffee shop. But they would still need proper medical attention in the near future.
As for Benjamin Green, his injuries weren’t too serious. Though Doc did have some lingering concerns about him coughing blood earlier.
“We need to get you to a hospital and take an X-ray of your chest,” Doc said to his comrade.
“Sure,” Ben said. “When we’re done here, I’ll go have it checked out.”
“You shouldn’t wait. If your lung has been punctured …”
“I don’t think it’s that bad, Doc. It hurts like hell, but I’m breathing a lot easier, now. I’m more worried about Sonar, and her,” he added, turning to the blond woman in the middle of the coffee shop.
Marie had taken a seat next to Soran and Lucielle, and was waiting for the young girl to finish putting the final touches on her bandages.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” Lucielle said as she placed Marie’s left arm inside a sling.