by D. K. Mok
“They’re body parts,” said Chris, concentric circles rippling through her mind.
Head, heart, and spirit.
“We have to find the coordinates using the symbols on the walls,” continued Chris.
Luke looked up at the white-hot sky. It was well past midday, and even with the truck, they weren’t equipped to spend the night in the open.
“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” said Luke.
“Sure. How about you take the road to certain death, and I’ll head towards a horrible demise?”
“Fine,” shrugged Luke. “Lead the way.”
After close to an hour of winding through sandy gorges, it was actually Luke who found the next symbol. Or rather, what was left of it. Chris stared at the scratched and gouged carving with horror. The symbol had been all but obliterated, with no recognisable trace of what it might have been.
“SinaCorp?” asked Luke.
Chris looked at the ground beneath the symbol. If there had been rubble and sand, it had been blown away long ago.
“More likely the cryptoconservationists,” said Chris.
Human culture, ancient artefacts, would have held no value to them. Only life was worth protecting, and only some life, at that. Legacies of language, art, creations of human imagination and inspiration, were just things—constructions of an arrogant culture bent on reckless consumption and self-glorification.
Chris traced her finger along a scraped section of the vandalised carving. They didn’t understand that the human need to connect extended not only across geography, but also through time. Understanding that vivid, full lives existed before you, and would exist after you, gave you a sense of perspective, a sense of meaning.
The next symbol they found had also been destroyed. It had been roughly hewn away, as though with a pickaxe, leaving a ragged hollow in the rock face.
“It could have been any of these,” said Luke. “How many do you think they found?”
Chris’s jaw clenched. Too many.
She looked hard at the symbol, as though she could reconstruct it by sheer will alone. She wasn’t sure where this left them now, without a map, without coordinates, in a canyon the size of, well, a sizeable canyon. And man, was it hot.
Three gunshots suddenly rang out in the distance, cracking through the air and bouncing off the rock. Chris and Luke stared at each other with a mixture of fear and curiosity.
“Do we run towards or away?” asked Luke.
At the same time, they both sprinted towards the gunfire.
* * *
“Formation Zero Nine Seven! Formation!” yelled Docker. “Form a perimeter!”
Bale stood in the pathway, gun drawn, his back to Docker. Emir stood at the other end of the sandy space, weapon raised towards an empty trail. Roman quickly swapped the Argon-L scanner for a shotgun, taking her place close to Docker.
Docker crouched beside Lien, who lay crumpled on the gritty floor of the canyon, a pool of blood seeping into the sand. Large gashes covered her left side and her right shoulder, her body suit ripped open at the thigh. She was pale and shaking, choking as she tried to breathe. Docker gently inspected the wounds, looking grim.
He pulled a small bottle from his jacket, holding the dropper to Lien’s mouth.
“Swallow,” said Docker.
Lien cringed as the colourless liquid dripped through her lips.
“What are you doing?” said Emir sharply.
“Keep your eyes out,” snapped Docker. “Does this look like a training sim?”
Grudgingly, Emir turned back towards the path, gun raised to shoulder height. Roman shadowed Docker closely as he draped a blanket over Lien.
“Move out,” said Docker.
Emir looked sharply from Lien’s shivering body to Docker.
“That’s it?” asked Emir. “We’re not even going to—”
“She’ll be airlifted out,” said Docker.
“When?” demanded Emir.
Docker placed a pistol on the ground beside Lien, then straightened up again.
“You don’t get it,” said Docker. “We get the job done, or none of us go home.”
He turned around and snapped, “Fall in!”
Roman gave Emir a cool look of understanding. Get the job done, it said. That’s why you’re here.
* * *
The echo of gunshots had died away, and Chris and Luke weren’t sure whether to take this as a good sign or a very bad sign.
“You don’t suppose the conservationists followed us?” said Luke, remembering their arsenal of guns and spiders.
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Chris, peering around another corner.
“Before or after we get shot?”
As the sun travelled lower in the sky, certain parts of the canyon started to give a little shade. Luke took another drag from his bottle of water, feeling it instantly evaporate through his pores. He stopped abruptly as something seemed to flash down a side path, and he pressed himself quickly against the wall. Evidently, Chris had seen the same thing, and had already crouched behind a boulder.
About twenty metres down a curving side trail, Luke could see a scrap of something velvet-black on the ground, obscured by several spires of sandstone. It didn’t appear to be moving. Luke and Chris exchanged a look, then crept carefully into the side passage. As they approached, the scrap of black remained motionless, and revealed itself to be a gloved arm in a black bodysuit. Closer still, and they could see that the arm extended to join a body lying beneath a khaki field blanket. A whip of impossibly silky hair trailed out.
“Lien?” said Luke, kneeling beside the figure.
Chris stared at the scarlet-coloured sand spreading towards her feet.
Luke’s fingers pressed against clammy skin.
“She’s alive,” said Luke, as Chris pulled bandages from her pack.
“What the hell happened?” asked Chris, gently drawing back the blanket to reveal deep gashes through flesh.
“Language,” said Luke distractedly. “Maybe they fought amongst themselves.”
He started to cut away at the shoulder of the bodysuit, peeling it back from the ripped skin. Luke grabbed a roll of bandages and started to wind it firmly around Lien’s upper arm.
“Do you think it got the others?” asked Luke.
“No,” said Chris, quickly dressing Lien’s side wound. “I think they just left her here.”
Lien moaned faintly, trying to open her eyes.
“Don’t move,” said Luke. “You’re going to be okay.”
“You couldn’t tell a kidney from a spleen,” said Lien, her words slurring slightly.
Luke’s mobile phone suddenly started buzzing violently. Lien glared at Luke through groggy eyes.
“You have reception?” whispered Chris.
Luke stared at the phone in surprise and pressed a button.
“Hello?” said Luke.
“Luke,” said Thena, her voice almost drowned by crackling. “You’re in danger.”
“I think that’s been happening for a while now,” said Luke.
“Do you want some privacy?” said Chris, raising an eyebrow at Luke as she cut away the fabric from Lien’s wounded leg.
“They knew SinaCorp were going to the canyon,” said Thena. “They left Bunsen there.”
“Bunsen?” asked Luke.
“She a full grown Verhkoyanskiy tiger and very—” Crackle. “—rous.”
“You’re dropping out,” said Luke, standing on his toes in the hope that this would somehow improve reception.
“There’s a command—” Crackle. “—to stop—”
Crackling filled the phone.
“Thena?” said Luke. “Thena?”
“—use the command, but for heaven’s sake just get out of—”
There was a burst of static, like a home crowd losing on a bad call. Luke pressed the phone to his ear, closing his eyes in concentration. The ghost of her voice was carried away like a pigeon in a hurricane. T
here was a sharp beep, and then silence.
Lien tried to move her good arm, wincing as she reached.
“Don’t try to move,” said Chris.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” said Lien hoarsely, gritting her teeth as she reached into her ripped vest. “Damn, this suit cost me two grand.”
With a groan, Lien pulled a bloodied photograph from her vest. She thrust it at Chris with disgust, before letting her arm fall limply back to her side. Chris looked at the creased photograph. It appeared to be a large slab of sandstone carved with pictograms of body parts.
“It’s a map of the canyon!” said Chris.
“Now let me die in peace,” coughed Lien.
Chris looked from the map to Lien.
They had just left her here. They hadn’t even bothered to stop the bleeding.
“It’s some kind of tiger,” said Luke, his gaze sweeping the various tracks leading away from them. “If we stay here, it’ll find us.”
Luke leaned close to Chris, his voice low.
“I don’t know what else we can do for her. We could risk moving her, or we could try to go for help, but…”
It was true, Luke couldn’t tell the difference between a kidney and a spleen, but he had ministered to the dying. And some of them had looked in better shape than Lien.
“Or we could find the Tree of Life,” said Chris.
And nobody dies.
Chris reached into her pack and pulled out several bunches of blue-grey sprigs with scalloped leaves. Luke wrinkled his nose at the pungent odour, watching as Chris covered Lien with the silvery leaves.
“Cats don’t like rue,” said Chris.
Luke bit his lip. He felt that now was not the time to mention they were dealing with a Verhkoyanskiy tiger, not Hello Kitty. Chris straightened up, hefting her pack onto her shoulders.
“We’re coming back for you,” said Chris.
“Spare me,” said Lien weakly, her eyes closed.
Chris took one last look at Lien’s limp figure, lying under the blanket, covered in shimmering sprigs. She looked at the map in her hands, orienting it north.
The truth lay within reach, but Luke had never felt so far from Paradise.
* * *
The head and the heart had been easy to identify, although there had been a brief debate over whether it was actually a heart or a badly etched lung. The spirit, however, had been more of a challenge. Luke was convinced it was the pictogram shaped like a bird, whereas Chris believed the “bird” was in fact a uterus.
“I studied biology at uni,” said Chris.
“And I studied pagan divination of entrails and animal sacrifice at the seminary,” said Luke.
“But you didn’t actually do any animal sacrifice.”
“And how many large mammals have you dissected?”
“The organs of large mammals are surprisingly similar to the organs of small amphibians and some crustaceans.”
“Well, if we were analysing a diagram of a large dismembered crab, you would have my full confidence,” said Luke. “Look, there’s a leg. There’s another leg. And another one. Oh, maybe that’s an antennae. Wait, no, it’s a leg.”
“Okay, two points don’t make a triangulation. So we’ve got to work this out.”
Chris stared at the symbols scattered across the photograph.
“How about a process of elimination?” said Chris, pulling out a pad of sticky notes. “Okay, we’re agreed on hands, feet, elbows, kidneys—”
Luke covered the relevant pictograms with scraps of yellow paper.
“Eyes, ears, mouth, nose…” continued Chris.
With only several further conflicts regarding identification, they were left with a blurry pictogram near the bottom of the map. The shape bore some resemblance to a vertical eye, or a long flame.
“Fire,” said Chris. “It must be an ancient stylisation, like how we draw love hearts.”
“The Holy Spirit came upon the apostles in holy flame,” murmured Luke.
Echoes of a common faith, a common myth, seemed to filter through countless cultures, endlessly transformed through the generations and giving rise to infinite variations.
Chris drew in the final lines, forming a triangle with the images of the head, heart, and spirit. Carefully, she joined each corner of the triangle to the centre of the opposite line, creating a six-pointed asterisk in the middle.
“Here there be dragons,” murmured Chris.
With any luck, here there be a very obvious and cooperative gate, leading to a very welcoming garden. Chris looked up at the slowly dropping sun, then back at the map of the canyon. The lines intersected at a point towards the north-east wall of the valley, somewhere between an eyeball and a tibia.
Travelling as the crow flies, it would have taken them less than half an hour to get there—even faster without packs. However, weaving through dried-up canals that forked and rejoined, twisting into coves and spits of rock, it was like wandering a labyrinth. Not the fun kind of labyrinth shorn from English hedges, low enough for the easily disoriented to wave for help. It was more like the kind of labyrinth people set up for bugs, baited with something delicious, and ended in a sudden slide and a watery plunge.
As they walked, Luke almost expected to see skeletons half-buried in the sand, but aside from the scuffed-out symbols, there was no sign that anyone had ever been here. There wasn’t even any graffiti.
“Do you suppose there’ll be a monument?” asked Luke. “There isn’t going to be a statue that asks questions and punches you if you get them wrong, is there?”
Luke suddenly wished he’d spent more time studying the riddles.
“As long as there’s something,” said Chris, more to herself than Luke.
They’d come all this way. There had to be something.
Chris looked down at the canyon map again, realising that she probably shouldn’t have used such a thick marker to draw the cross hair. Even so, it did look as though the lines intersected somewhere in this vicinity. There had been a sizable gouge in the wall just before, which could have been the eye. Further down the trail, Chris could see a boulder the size of a polar bear, with deep scratches where there might have been a proto-symbol of a tibia.
The trail split into three paths from here. One continued ahead, flowing through malt-coloured granite. The path to the left opened up into a wide passage, dotted with mounds of rock, rising from the sand like spurs of quartz. To the right, a narrow chasm squeezed between the canyon walls, ending in a T-junction at a smooth rock face.
“What does the map say?” said Luke, taking the photograph from Chris.
“Here, I think.”
“That sounds like an epitaph,” muttered Luke, squinting in the sunlight.
“It looks more this way.” Chris pointed to the trail ahead.
Luke suddenly shivered despite the heat, and he turned to look around at the empty passageways around them. He looked down at the photograph again.
“I think maybe this way.” Luke raised his finger towards the chasm.
“Don’t the walls look like they’re gonna suddenly slap together and crush you?” asked Chris, eyeing the narrow passage. “Okay, you go first.”
The chasm was wide enough for a single person to walk through comfortably, provided they weren’t claustrophobic. Luke went in first, with Chris bringing up the rear.
The walls were high enough to cast the passageway in shadow, and stepping into the shade felt strange after burning under the sun for so many hours. Although there was no breeze, Luke imagined he could hear an odd rush, as though the whisper of the ocean still echoed from the walls. It was with considerable relief that he emerged unsquashed on the other side of the chasm, standing at the T-junction with paths leading to the left and right.
Chris drew a deep breath as she emerged into the sunlight beside Luke.
“I hate the whole moving walls and big crushing rotating things,” said Chris. “I hate the ones that chase you down the corridors.”
There was something here. Luke could almost feel it tremoring through him. Chris swept her gaze down both pathways, and her eyes stopped at the smooth wall of the junction.
“The rock’s different here,” said Chris, walking over to the warm sandstone.
She looked closely at the surface, and it seemed to glint with a faint sheen.
“There’s a bit of silica in this,” said Chris, running her fingers lightly over the sandy rock.
Her finger brushed something. Chris looked hard, moving her fingers over the spot again. She could feel a faint depression in the rock, but her eyes told her there was nothing but unbroken stone. Chris pressed her face close to the wall, her eye level with the surface.
“You right there?” asked Luke, watching Chris sway from side to side, then up and down.
Slowly, Chris crouched further and further down until she knelt on the bed of the canyon, almost face to face with the wall. She turned to Luke with a lopsided grin.
“Check this out,” she said.
With an uneasy glance over his shoulder, Luke knelt stiffly beside Chris and looked at the wall. His gaze slid upwards, and about five feet from the ground, where there had previously been smooth yellow rock, there was a dark pictogram, carved sharply in the stone. Chris waited for a reaction.
“Hmm…” said Luke, pulling a sheaf of notes from his coat.
“Isn’t that cool?” said Chris. “The cuts have been made at a really acute angle upwards, like gills in a fish, so from above you can’t see the shadow. The silica kicks the light back up into the groove, so you have to be really, really low to see that there’s an inscription.”
The pictogram was proto-proto-cuneiform, with sharp lines and curves that seemed to catch the essence of an ancient thought. Luke flicked through his cuneiform notes—it resembled a word his gaze had lingered on in Sorakova’s office, as the fountains softly bubbled and clicked. It was a word that both called and criticised him, that swung before him like an ensign out of reach. His finger stopped on a simple pictogram, a pattern of lines that seemed to burn with the weight of human history.
“Faith,” said Luke.
Chris waited.
“Was something supposed to open just now?” asked Chris.