by D. K. Mok
Emir waded through the floating plants towards Chris, who was moving along the circular wall, running her hands over the glazed porcelain surface.
Luke deliberately examined the wall on the far side.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Emir, his voice low. “I mean, what have you been up to, you know, since uni?”
“I’m kind of still at uni,” said Chris, her fingertips tracing the edge of a tile.
“I know, but, I mean… I guess you’ve been busy, but…” Emir ran his hands over the wall, shuffling alongside Chris. “We kind of fell out of touch.”
“Well, you kept on changing your email address, and your postal address, and your home address, and not answering your phone. I kept getting these recorded messages saying ‘Emir is currently under communications silence. Please try again in three months.’ And mail kept on getting returned stamped, ‘The Location and Existence of this Person is Classified.’ After one of them spontaneously combusted in my mailbox I figured it was a case of ‘You’ll call me.’”
Emir had changed agencies a few times, particularly after that awkward cruise ship assignment, not to mention the fiasco at the Iron Trophy Tournament. Early on, he had sent a few souvenirs back, but when he’d stopped hearing from Chris, he had just figured…
“Do you feel it, too?” asked Chris softly, looking up at Emir.
“I think so,” said Emir, looking at her upturned face, framed in strands of wet hair. “Wait—feel what?”
Chris looked down, shuffling to the left, then right again. She pulled Emir closer.
“That,” said Chris triumphantly.
Emir concentrated, and yes, he felt it too. Through the thick fabric of his suit, he could just feel the push and pull of movement against his legs, like a very faint current. Before he could say anything, Chris had taken a breath and ducked under the water. She immediately burst out again, gritting her teeth and hopping across the pool, clutching her shoulder.
“Salt water and open wounds,” gasped Chris. “Bad combination.”
At the commotion, Luke swam casually over.
“There’s a current,” said Chris, drawing a breath through clenched teeth.
“I’ll check it out,” said Emir.
“You’ve got open wounds, too,” said Luke.
“Where?” asked Emir.
“You’ve got blood all over your face,” said Luke. “I assume it’s yours.”
“Oh.” Emir self-consciously wiped his face with a sleeve.
“I’ll have a look,” said Luke, squeezing between them to the wall.
Luke could definitely feel the current against his legs, swirling in and out gently like breathing. He took a deep breath and plunged under the layer of lilies. The water was a clear, night blue beneath the surface, the glow of the plants like moonlight through the pool. The graze on his cheek stung like a slap, but he could push that aside—it was the other kind of pain he couldn’t shake, the kind that had only grown, ever since—
He could see the opening of a tunnel in the tiled wall, perfectly circular, about a meter in diameter, and pitch black.
I guess this is what I’m here for, thought Luke, and he kicked into the narrow darkness.
Chris and Emir waited in the atrium, surrounded by the glowing blue lilies.
“I shouldn’t have given up on you,” said Chris, leaning against the wall, her satchel resting on her head. “It sounded like you were leading such an exciting life, while I was…pushing trolleys.”
“It was pretty interesting,” said Emir. “Most of the time. But it…”
It was lonely. You could travel the world and see the most incredible things, places you never imagined, artefacts you never would have believed were real. But somehow, it still didn’t feel real until you shared it with someone, passed on the memory and made it more than just something floating around inside your own head. He’d felt disconnected, like a camera without a photographer, churning out photos that just fell into the sea. In some ways, all those years of travelling from place to place seemed less real to him than the memory of standing in the rain, holding that muddy rock.
Emir’s hand reached automatically to the amber pendant at his neck.
“I got the ornamental dagger you sent me,” said Chris.
“Actually, turned out we needed that as evidence,” said Emir, cringing slightly. “But it’s okay, we got the guy anyway.”
Chris’s smile faded into slight worry.
“I don’t think Luke can hold his breath that long,” said Chris. “He always panics when we have to drive through a river.”
Emir started to remove his backpack, but Chris had already ducked under the water.
“Chris!” he cried.
Suddenly, Chris and Luke burst from the water. Luke sucked in a lungful of air, pushing the wet hair from his eyes.
“Tunnel. Goes too deep,” gasped Luke. “At least twenty-five metres.”
“You can’t hold your breath for twenty-five metres?” said Emir.
“Emir, you’ve got a spare oxygen tank, don’t you?” asked Chris.
“I had to leave it behind,” said Emir. “The backpack’s not heat-proof.”
The other gates were lessons, thought Chris. Wisdom, humility, community. Faith.
“I think it’s supposed to be a one-way trip,” said Chris. “I think we can make it if we don’t save anything for the way back.”
Life, unfortunately, was a one-way journey, with no do-overs, no extra lives, no save-game points. You could rarely see what was coming up ahead, but you had to plough forward anyway—time saw to that. As to what was at the end of it all, well, everybody found out eventually.
“Do you think you guys’ll be okay?” asked Emir, having a brief flashback to Chris almost getting washed away by a waist-high brook. “Chris, you’re not taking that satchel, are you? Remember those polar explorers who froze to death because they wouldn’t leave behind their sacks of rocks?”
“They weren’t ‘rocks,’” said Chris. “They were rare geological specimens. And I’ll be fine. Emir, how about you bring up the rear?”
Emir nodded. Chris turned to Luke, his breathing still heavy from the first dive.
“Ready?” asked Chris.
“Days ago,” said Luke.
Years ago, thought Luke. Give me an answer I can believe in.
Chris plucked a glowing plant from the water and dove with it into the cool, dark tunnel. Luke took a deep breath, then followed close behind. Emir stepped forward, then paused. After a moment, he shrugged off his heavy pack, watching as it sank beneath the lilies. He wouldn’t be able to swim with it through the tunnel, and he had a feeling the passage had been designed that way. Emir took a breath, and dove into the water.
Holding the bioluminescent plant in front of her, Chris kicked through the water, feeling the walls rushing past. In the blue-green light, she could see pale shapes peering at her from the bare limestone walls—variegated fossils, shells, and curled animalistic shapes. The tunnel went on, and Chris could feel her lungs straining to draw breath, her shoulder screaming at her to stop what she was doing. She was burning inside and out as she continued to kick forward, her head starting to feel light and bright spots bursting across her vision.
All she saw was darkness ahead, and she had a flash of fear that perhaps this was the last, mocking lesson. There was no such thing as eternal life, only mortality. Life’s a tunnel and then you die. Chris could feel her heart pounding faster, and she couldn’t hold her breath any longer. She thrashed forward, letting go of the plant as she burbled and gulped water, her vision dimming in a terrifying way. Suddenly, as she kicked forward, there was a splash of light directly above, and she pushed against the floor, bursting up into the cool air.
She flailed and grabbed onto a stone siding, retching violently as water gurgled from her throat. Choking for breath, she turned to see Luke break the surface, looking wan and exhausted. A moment later, Emir rose from the water, flicking his hair
back, barely out of breath.
They stood chest-deep in a large ring of water, like a cross between an athletics track and a swimming pool. A massive cavern rose around them, carved from the living rock, dusty red and ragged. The roof pressed upwards in irregular crags, and enormous lapis lazuli seals studded the walls high above. The seals were inlaid with swirling silver pictograms, and they lined the circumference of the cavern, embedded solidly in the rocky walls.
The ring of water was set in the middle of the huge cavern, and it encircled a flat island of packed red earth. In the centre of the island stood a waist-high pedestal, carved from the same stone as the cavern.
All three gazes were drawn to one thing.
“That…would be the gate,” said Luke.
Beyond the ring of water, a gigantic set of arched doors had been carved from one entire cavern wall. The archway towered almost to the roof, and the doors were covered with complicated clockwork mechanisms, all carved from the same red stone. The sheer scale of the construction was staggering.
A diffuse light filtered from some unseen source, and the cavern was bare aside from the gate and the pedestal. It was like staring at a console with only one big button. Chris coughed up the last of the water and pulled herself onto the island, dripping onto the red dust. Luke and Emir followed as she walked cautiously towards the pedestal, facing the gigantic stone doors.
The sides of the pedestal were covered with stylised images of devastation and destruction—warring armies, fields of impaled corpses, flotillas of burning ships, the smoking ruins of cities. At the top of the pedestal, in the smooth, flat surface, was a hollow the size of a fist.
The three of them stood around the pedestal, their eyes absorbing the images carved in the stone. Chris wasn’t sure why she had expected anything more welcoming, since humanity had left Eden on somewhat acrimonious terms. However, the carvings were not simply ominous; they were positively dire. They read like a warning, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps these would be the consequences of opening the gate.
Her mother had turned away. After everything she had been through, she had walked, no, run away. Chris had run towards this, every step of the way. Now here she was, and all she needed was the key.
“How are you going with that last riddle?” asked Luke.
All the gates had been lessons. They had been tests about being human, about understanding not what life was, but what life meant. Chris thought of Lien, lying on the scarlet sand. Bale, praying on the triggered panel. Roman, twisted and broken in the corridor. Docker, eyes closing as the flames roared. Life was about choices, consequences, and sacrifice.
She had come this far, left important people behind, and risked not only her life but also those of others. They said anything worth achieving demanded sacrifice, and the Tree of Life was a prize like no other. Chris looked at the stone hollow, dry and waiting.
Life was also about changing your mind.
Chris looked across at Luke, who was lost in his own thoughts.
“Luke—” began Chris.
The rest of her sentence was drowned out as the continuous low background rumble suddenly reached a dramatic peak, and the cavern shook with thunderous vibrations.
“This place isn’t supposed to collapse until after we open the gate!” yelled Chris.
“Maybe there was a time limit!” called Luke.
Choppy waves began to seethe in the ring around them, and blobs of water bounced angrily from the surface. Dust shook down from the ceiling, and the ground rocked beneath them like a giant rodeo ride, sending them to their hands and knees. As the rumbling rattled through their bones, it turned finally into a screeching roar, like the sound of aluminium cans being put through a blender, magnified a millionfold.
Suddenly, something the size of a private plane and the shape of a submarine burst through the cavern wall, spraying chunks of rock across the chamber. A wide, spinning drill set at the front of the experimental excavator buzzed aggressively as it pulverised everything in its way. Clearing through the rock, the machine crawled into the chamber on tank-like treads and landed heavily on the dirt floor, the spinning drill bit slowing to a stop.
The excavator was charcoal black with an iridescent green sheen where it caught the light. Impenetrably tinted viewing ports covered the front and sides like compound eyes, and five crab-like legs protruded from each side. Before the dust had settled, gull-wing hatches swung open, spilling a dozen SinaCorp mercenaries into the cavern. They were all identically dressed in black combat gear, similar to Emir’s, and they bristled with firearms.
A fashionable fibreglass plank was thrown across the ring of water, and Chris, Luke, and Emir quickly found themselves in the middle of a prickly circle of sub-machine guns. A pair of soft leather boots stepped from the fawn interior of the Scarab excavator, measured steps treading across the red earth.
“Thanks for the coordinates,” said Marrick with a cold smile.
Emir stared at Marrick in mortification, then realisation, as he pulled out his sleek earpiece. He looked at the tiny device, etched in silver circuitry, and let it fall to the ground.
“I take it you’re terminating your contract with us,” said Marrick as she walked calmly towards the ring of water, flanked by two mercenaries.
Emir looked around at the circle of guns, a dozen trigger fingers behind a dozen loaded barrels. He didn’t trust himself to say anything.
“You’ll still be paid your pro-rata fee,” said Marrick casually. “An agent of your calibre should have no trouble getting another placement. Talent certainly seems to run in the family.”
Emir’s heart pounded against his ribs, tension buzzing through him like an electric current. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to his family in almost two years, and that there was no reason he shouldn’t call them right away once this was all over, and possibly encourage them to leave the country.
“That’s all you do, isn’t it?” said Chris. “People’s lives are just punctuation in your transactions, the brackets that move money back and forth. How many people have died in your quest to live forever? How many people have you had murdered to keep your secrets?”
“I take it those are rhetorical questions,” said Marrick.
“One comfort which can be taken from death is that every monster will be outlived,” said Chris. “So the cycle has a chance to be broken. I won’t let eternal life become a privilege, to be bought and sold and traded. Life is precious, but not like that. That’s something you’ll never understand.”
Luke covered his face with a hand. Dramatic, defiant speeches were all well and good, particularly if you were standing in a public square with lots of witnesses and a hospital close by. However, when you were in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by armed mercenaries, and no one knew where you were, making melodramatic threats lost a good deal of their tactical value. In fact, it was akin to declaring “You’d better kill me now before I thwart your evil plan.”
Luke appreciated the necessity of the occasional diplomatic retreat, and the value of biding your time. Lying low was also one of his preferred strategies, one which had served him reasonably well on campus until the day Chris had walked into his office and shucked him from his desk. He had sought the truth, and here it was. There were no miracles, no trumpeting angels, no gates of golden light. Only humanity through the ages, unchanged and alone, suffering from the same vices and privations as they had millennia ago, and still desperate to believe.
“I’m afraid I don’t have time to grandstand,” said Marrick. “I have one simple question, which I advise you answer honestly. Does the phrase ‘The blood of the blameless man’ mean anything to you?”
There was a cold silence.
Marrick nodded to the mercenaries, who tightened around the three on the island, prodding them to one side and clearing a space around the pedestal.
“So be it,” said Marrick. “Trial and error is so wasteful, but you’ve left me no choice. Proce
ed.”
One of the mercenaries strapped her submachine gun to her back and stepped towards the pedestal, pulling a plasma pack of blood from her bag. All eyes were on the mercenary as she pulled the plastic stopper from the pack and squeezed the oozing red liquid into the stone receptacle until it filled to the brim. The blood soaked into the stone, as though being drawn into the pores of the rock. There was a familiar hum, and suddenly a narrow beam of blinding light stabbed from the ceiling, engulfing the woman with a soft crackle. The light abruptly vanished, leaving only a small pile of white ash and the smell of fading smoke.
There was a slow, sucking pause as eleven mercenaries suddenly realised that perhaps they should have read the fine-print on their job descriptions.
Chris stared in horror at the tiny mound of ash that only seconds ago had been a woman who had probably already made plans for New Year’s Eve and fretted about what to get her parents for Christmas.
“Chris, just out of curiosity,” said Luke. “Are we just winging it now?”
Chris looked from the pedestal to Marrick, to the mercenaries, to the Scarab, her heart booming in her ears.
“I’ll get us out of this,” said Chris, her voice tight.
“Chris, don’t do any—” Emir began, but stopped as a gangly mercenary loped towards the pedestal.
The mercenary stopped at the stone pedestal, rolling up his sleeve to expose a lean, muscular arm.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Luke, blanching.
The gangly mercenary flicked a hunting knife from his belt and expertly drew the blade across his arm. Fresh blood the colour of poppies streamed from the wound, pouring into the receptacle. Chris heard one of the mercenaries whispering to her colleague.
“That’s why we brought the knife licker.”
Chris wanted to look away as the red liquid splashed into the stone hollow, filling it to the edges. The gangly mercenary was already backing away when the flash of light pulsed, and the smell of smoke trailed through the air. Two small piles of ash now lay beside the carved stand—one of them looked like it had been running. Chris was finding it very difficult to swallow.