“Uh, sure?” Eleanor said.
“No, it does,” he said. “For storing power and stabilizing output. A giant capacitor network, or maybe an array.”
Eleanor wrinkled her brow. “That just went completely over my head.”
“Capacitor is like a battery, only it doesn’t store energy for a long period of time. A capacitor charges and discharges fast. Most electronics use capacitors, to make sure things run smoothly. Usually, they’re small. This is—”
Something moved off in the distance. The sound of a foot dragging along the stone floor. Or at least, that was what Eleanor imagined, but when they both shone their flashlights in that direction, they saw nothing.
“Rats?” Eleanor asked. “I’m sure they’re down here. Right?”
“Big rat,” Luke said.
Eleanor turned back toward the direction of the Concentrator’s hum. “Let’s just keep going.”
As they moved forward, the hum grew louder, and louder, until Eleanor knew it must be very near. A hundred yards on, an open space appeared in the columns, and the chamber floor reached the edge of what seemed to be a large chasm. When they got closer, Eleanor realized it wasn’t a chasm but a kind of broad, circular amphitheater.
Down at the base of its terraced steps, at its center, stood the Concentrator.
The device very closely resembled the other two Eleanor had seen, with a black trunk rising up to its twisted, angular branches, and the structure defied perception in the same perplexing manner that the others had. Eleanor stood at the top of the amphitheater for a moment and then began the short descent to it. Luke followed, and when they reached the bottom, he picked something up off the ground.
“What’s that?” Eleanor asked.
“A sword.” He held it out to show her. It had a curious, almost question mark shape, its tarnished blade straight near the hilt, then curved like a sickle. “There’s more of them,” he said, pointing at the ground, and he was right. There were a dozen or so of the swords strewn about.
“Well, that’s a bit concerning,” Eleanor said.
“Makes sense to me,” Luke said. “They would have wanted to guard this thing, right?”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I’m wondering why the guards would have just abandoned their weapons here. Like they left in a hurry or something.”
“Never held an actual sword before,” Luke said, testing its weight, swinging it in casual arcs.
Eleanor turned her attention back to the Concentrator and quickly found its control console. “Let’s do what we came to do,” she said.
“Be careful, kid,” Luke said.
Eleanor nodded and placed herself in front of the console. Then she laid her hand against it, awaiting the familiar sensation of something inside reaching back, touching her hand, her skin, picking at her nerves. What she felt instead was the aggressive force of something seizing her by the arm, almost painfully, and it didn’t let go. She gasped.
“What is it?” Luke said.
“Nothing. It’s under control.”
But it wasn’t. Eleanor felt locked in a battle with the Concentrator, and she knew that if she gave even a fraction of ground, the thing would break her. This one seemed . . . angry. If that was possible. She couldn’t let it into her mind. But if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to establish the connection she needed to shut it down.
“What in—?” Luke shouted.
Eleanor tore her eyes from the control panel and looked up. At the top of the amphitheater, several impossibly narrow figures shambled down toward them, with raisin-like faces gaunt enough to reveal the contours of their skulls, their eye sockets empty pits beneath their ragged, deteriorating headdresses. Scaled armor covered their chests, while their sinewy arms showed through wrappings of cotton.
Mummies?
“I guess those guards never left!” Luke said.
The Concentrator threw itself against the gate of Eleanor’s mind, seizing upon the moment of her distraction. She fought it back, her arm shaking, her hand going white against the console. She had to ignore what was going on around her, even though there were mummies descending upon them from all sides of the amphitheater now.
“Did . . . did the Concentrator do this?” Luke asked.
“It must have!” Eleanor shouted. “It . . . preserved them, like the one in Alaska.”
“Not exactly how I pictured that Amarok guy,” he said, glancing about nervously.
But this was different. These were mummies, which meant most of their brains and organs were gone. They were just animated shells.
When the first of them reached the bottom of the amphitheater, it extended its bony hands to grab for Luke, but he swung the sickle sword and cleaved its arms off. When that didn’t stop its advance, he swung two-handed for the neck, and the mummy’s head shot sideways, bounced to the ground, and rolled away. With that, its body slumped to the ground in a heap.
“Easy enough,” he said. “I got this, kid! Do your thing!” He charged another mummy. It took him a few more swings, and a few more severed limbs, before he’d hacked away enough pieces of the thing to stop it. “Kid! Shut it down! Hurry!”
Eleanor returned as much of her attention to the Concentrator as she could. She didn’t know what made this one different from the others. Perhaps the Egyptian manipulation of its energy centuries before had somehow strengthened it, triggered its defenses. Or perhaps it was simply created that way. But she had to find a way to defeat it.
She tried relaxing, letting down her own guard just a bit, but each time she did, the awareness in the Concentrator rushed her, like something shoving her aside and grabbing the steering wheel of her mind, and she struggled to push it back.
The mummies kept coming, and Luke kept chopping them down around her. “Any time now, kid!”
Eleanor cursed herself. They had come all this way, and now it was up to her to do what no one else could. What good was her ability now? If she couldn’t use it to stop this thing, then it had no purpose, and that meant she really was nothing but a freak.
She still didn’t know what to make of the anger she felt burning within the Concentrator, if it could be called anger. Eleanor was attuned enough to the language of the Concentrator to know the awareness in there loathed her—or rather, loathed people. Humans. All of them, and especially the ones who had enslaved it thousands of years ago.
“Look out!” Luke shouted.
Eleanor glanced over her shoulder. A mummy had almost reached her, its claw hand but inches away, its face a rictus of mindless drive. Before she could react, Luke’s blade came down, taking the arm with it, and then he went for the head and sent it flying.
“Remember the guy who talks to llamas, kid,” he grunted, reminding Eleanor of their conversation in the cockpit of his plane. “You are what you are. You can do this.”
The awareness in the Concentrator rammed her again, throwing her head back as her mind shook with the force of it, and her body stiffened. She wanted to retreat, to find some far corner of her thoughts and hide there until the invading consciousness had moved on. She had only her memories to use as a shield—her friends back home, her uncle Jack, the swell of purpose she’d felt when she’d found out her mother was lost and she had gone to find her, the quiet moments she’d shared with Finn. But these thoughts only kept the Concentrator’s aggression at bay. She had to gather the strength to face this thing and beat it.
Like Luke had just said, she had to be what she was. But what was that? She was Eleanor, sweetie, Ell Bell, kid, a friend, a girl, a person—there was no way to hide any of that from the Concentrator’s hate and aggression. But then it occurred to her that she must be something else, too. The something in her she didn’t understand, the something that made her unique, that allowed her to connect with the Concentrator in a way no one else—except, perhaps, Watkins—could. She had to bring forward that part of her. She had to show the Concentrator what she was afraid to show everyone else.
A mummy’s arm landed on Eleanor’s foot, but she ignored it.
I am not a freak.
I am different.
I am who I am.
She closed her eyes and pushed up against the Concentrator’s awareness with the thought, I am like you.
She felt its wall of resistance weaken, and in an act that terrified her, she let hers down by the same degree. I am like you, she repeated in her mind. I am not one of them, I am like you.
When she finally got to a point where she felt she could trust the awareness, she let it in, and it wriggled up her nerves to her mind with the desperation of something frightened and alone. And as she merged her thoughts with it, she realized why.
This Concentrator remembered.
The other two hadn’t, at least not in a way Eleanor experienced, perhaps because they were devices of a lesser order, or perhaps because they had been treated differently by the humans who had found them and worshipped them.
The Egyptians had tortured this one. In their study of it they had burned it. They had stabbed it. They had dug up its roots, which they wrenched, and twisted, and broke, bending them to their will. And the Concentrator had felt all of it.
This was not just a machine. It was alive, in a way. A tree, with memories in its roots.
The pain it revealed to Eleanor nearly overcame her, and she found herself pitying this wretched thing, in spite of what it was doing to her world. But she indulged in that for only a moment and then did what she had come to do. She took hold of the Concentrator’s battered roots, and carefully, ever so gently, she eased them into a position where they could do no more harm. And then she took the alien awareness, at peace for the first time in millennia, and brought it to her chest. Then quickly, before it knew what was happening, she killed it.
The Concentrator shut down, and the hum ceased, and the terrible silence that followed carved a hollow into her mind. Eleanor felt an even greater weakness than she had with the last, and collapsed to the ground just as Luke struck a final, heavy blow to a mummy, sending it sprawling.
“You okay?” he shouted, rushing over to her. “Kid, you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Eleanor whispered. Dessicated mummy parts littered the ground around her. She wiped at her face and was surprised to find her hand wet with tears. “I . . . yeah. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. Is it done?” Luke knelt beside her, his face smeared with dirt and sweat.
“Yes,” Eleanor said.
“Then let’s get out of here. This mummy killing ain’t even fun anymore.”
But Eleanor didn’t know if she could walk. She could barely hold herself upright in a sitting position. “I don’t think I can. . . .”
Luke sighed. “Okay, then.” He reached his arms beneath her knees and around her back, cradling her, and then lifted her up with a grunt. Then he labored up the steps of the amphitheater to its ridge.
“Do you remember which way the exit is?” Luke asked. “I’ve gotten turned around.”
“I think it’s that way,” Eleanor said, pointing in a direction that felt right to her.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He nodded. “Well, you haven’t been running around playing whack-a-mummy. Let’s go for it.”
Eleanor heard a sound to her right. She whipped her flashlight around as a mummy leered out of the darkness. “Run!”
Luke took off in the direction Eleanor hoped was right. The chamber seemed more endless on the way back, nothing but pillars, and Eleanor was beginning to wonder if she had been wrong. But Luke kept running, breathing hard, and then he was just trotting along, then he was only walking under the strain of her weight. But soon she saw the dark shadow of the doorway up ahead.
From there, it was a steep climb back up through the mountain, stairway after stairway. Luke would never be able to carry her up that.
“I think I can walk now.”
“You . . . sure?” he said, panting.
“Let me try.”
He set her down gently, and she tested the weight on her legs. They didn’t give out from under her, and she took a few steps. Some of the weakness had faded. “I can do it,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure.
“Okay.” Luke looked relieved and led the way, setting their pace. Eleanor’s legs wobbled before they’d made it very far, and her muscles wanted to give out before they’d reached the top. The dragging, shuffling sounds of the mummies followed after them, while the almond-shaped eyes of the painted Egyptian gods stared at them from the walls.
“Here it is,” Luke finally said, out of breath and bent over, clutching his knees in front of the secret doorway. “You first, kid.”
Eleanor’s legs were happy to clock out for a moment or two, and she dropped to the ground and crawled back through into the chamber of KV39. Then Luke came through, and they allowed themselves to rest for a moment, sitting on the chamber’s floor.
“I think we need to block the opening,” Eleanor said.
It wasn’t hard to find the rubble to do it, just exhausting to gather it from the crumbling stairs and carry it back. After a few trips, they had filled in the gap with tightly packed stones. It wouldn’t take a person very long to excavate the opening, but Eleanor figured a brainless mummy would have more trouble.
They left the tomb and emerged into the cold night air, which chilled Eleanor everywhere she’d been sweating. She took a deep breath, and she laughed. Luke looked at her in surprise for a moment, but then he started laughing too.
“Mummies,” Eleanor said. “I just . . .” She shook her head, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open, nothing to say except “Mummies,” again.
“Come on,” Luke said. “We should get back before the others wake up and notice we’re gone.”
They half walked, half stumbled back down the ravine and crossed the valley to their tent. As they approached, they turned off their flashlights and quieted their steps and other sounds, to avoid disturbing those sleeping. Luke ducked inside first. Eleanor was already halfway through the entrance when she noticed the black helicopter hunkered down in the shadows a short distance away.
“Welcome back,” a familiar voice said from inside the tent. “I am Dr. Pierce Watkins. I was beginning to fear we’d lost you.”
CHAPTER
22
A LIGHT SWITCHED ON, AND ELEANOR FELT A FIRM HAND against her back pushing her the rest of the way into the tent. Her mom, Finn, Betty, and von Albrecht sat side by side on two of the cots. Two G.E.T. agents wearing paramilitary uniforms stood behind them, holstered pistols at their sides. Nathifa stood near the table where the scanners and instruments had been laid out, her mouth downturned in its usual way, her eyes sad, and Eleanor noticed the G.E.T. laptop there was running.
“Come in, please,” Watkins said, standing next to Nathifa, his hands clasped behind his back. “Sit down, won’t you?”
The man behind Eleanor gave her another shove, and she stepped farther into the tent to stand with Luke. The scene before her actually felt more surreal in its way than fighting the mummies had. Eleanor’s triumph at finding and shutting down the Concentrator still pulsed through her, even as she realized they had just been captured, their mission incomplete.
“Oh, sweetie, thank God,” her mom said. “Where have you—”
“I’ll do the talking for now, Dr. Perry,” Watkins said.
“What you’re doing is illegal,” Betty said.
“Is it? Taking saboteurs into custody?”
“Saboteurs?” Eleanor said. “Not terrorists?”
“Of course not,” Watkins said. “I know you do not intend to inflict harm on anyone, in spite of what happened to Skinner. But it seems you have made it your mission to disrupt the G.E.T.’s Preservation Protocol. So yes, I think, saboteurs.”
“What happens to us now that we’re in your custody?” Luke asked.
“That is entirely up to you,” Watkins said.
“In that case,” Luke said,
“I think I’ll be going.”
He turned back toward the tent opening, but the man who had pushed Eleanor inside stood in the way, blocking it. He wore a uniform like the other two guards but exuded a much greater authority. His silver hair was shorn close, and he had the muscled neck of a bull, with deeply tanned skin, and Windex-blue eyes. Luke stepped right up to him and said, “You gonna move, or what?”
“I’m afraid leaving is not one of your options,” Watkins said. “I think you’ll find Mr. Hobbes here quite capable of elucidating that.”
Luke hadn’t taken his eyes from the man Hobbes. “That a fact?” he said.
No part of Hobbes moved, except his lips. “That’s a fact.”
“So what options do we have, then?” Eleanor’s mom asked.
“That is precisely what I would like to discuss,” Watkins said. “I had just begun to explain things to your mother and friends here when you surprised us all by returning. Were you successful? Did you find the Osiris Tree?”
“Osiris Tree?” Eleanor said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We just felt like a nighttime walk.”
Watkins chuckled. “How charming you are. Yes, the Osiris Tree. So named for the legends connecting Osiris to the Egyptian Tree of Life. Did you know that nearly every culture and religion in the history of the world has a Tree of Life myth? I believe that is due to the ancient presence of the . . . what do you call them? Ah, yes, the Concentrators, around the world.”
“It’s a name that describes what they do,” Eleanor’s mom said.
“True,” Watkins said. “But I prefer to think of them as the Trees of Life they are.”
“How charming you are,” Betty said.
“I ask again,” Watkins said. “Were you successful in finding it?”
“No,” Eleanor said.
“No?” Watkins frowned. “Pity. But no matter. Nathifa assures me this is the correct site, and it shall be found. As I have demonstrated, I’m very good at finding things. We will move our operation down here from the Giza Plateau, beginning tomorrow. The protesters there were becoming troublesome, at any rate.”
Island of the Sun (Dark Gravity Sequence) Page 21