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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Jess put out a hand to steady the unnerved assistant. “Bakana, your instincts were right. This is about more than just me. It’s about all of us—the Family. I never wanted anyone to be hurt, but we have to learn the truth. It’s important that we find a way out of here. Can you help us again? Please?”

  Bakana shook her head, apprehensive. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Victoria . . .” She sobbed.

  David tried again. “This is a bomb shelter. Something with such a prominent entrance has to have another hidden exit. In case the main way out’s covered in rubble after an attack.”

  The Cross operative swayed as he got to his feet, bloodied and sore from his fight with David. “Can you really find the White Island?”

  “If we get out of here, yes,” David said.

  The young man staggered to Victoria’s desk, ignored the body in the chair, and opened the screen of the laptop.

  “Find what you need in here, and I’ll show you the way out.”

  Jess knew she had betrayed everything she’d worked for all her life, everyone she’d ever known.

  Victoria had been right.

  But so am I, she thought.

  “Here’re the photographs,” Bakana said. Somehow she’d rallied, rationalized her participation in the events that had led to a defender’s death. As a researcher in the Shop, she was an expert in using its cataloguing system and found the sun map files in less than a minute. She turned the laptop around. “Is this what you need?”

  David and the Cross operative had carefully laid Victoria’s body on the floor and covered it with a throw from the back of the leather couch. Then they had tied and gagged her security guard. Bakana had warned them there could be up to three others in the Shop, depending on whether or not they were inside when the blast door closed. So far, no one else had shown up at the office door.

  “That’s it.” The image on the screen was a close-up of the diagram etched on the meteorite Jess had seen in the Shrine of Turus.

  The photo’s sharp side-lighting gave high relief to the details. The six planets were there, each at a different point along its circular orbit. One moon for Earth, four for Jupiter, and a ring for Saturn.

  “Is that what you expected?” Jess asked David. His simple search to unlock his personal genetic heritage to save his life had been swept into her own quest for the survival of her family’s whole existence. But she felt no guilt. Too much had happened. Her life and David’s were somehow intertwined: Neither of them could solve their mystery without the other. And with hunters on their trail, from the Family and from Ironwood, there was no way back for either of them.

  David frowned. “Not sure. The planets all orbit at different speeds, so how often do they take on this particular arrangement? Is this the whole diagram?”

  Jess thought back to the artifact in Zurich. “This doesn’t show the decorative bands.”

  “Do you have a photo of that?”

  Bakana tapped a few keys, brought up another image. Now the diagram was smaller, but the entire cut face of the meteorite could be seen, including two engraved bands around the solar system. The outer band was a narrow ring of thin radial lines. The inner band, an apparently random pattern of dots.

  “Those are the stars in the zodiac,” David said. “Whoever made the map might have imagined different constellations, but the stars would be the same.”

  Jess confirmed it. “That’s the consensus.”

  “Then I bet that’s the key. An astronomer could tell us when this specific configuration took place. You know, Mars in Aquarius, Saturn in Gemini. All at the same time. That kind of thing.”

  “Bakana, is there an astronomer here we can talk to?” Jess asked.

  “Tomasso. He’ll be in the archives.”

  David looked at the bound and gagged security guard. “We’ll have to leave him behind.”

  “I can lock the office.” The Cross operative wiped dried blood from his face with his sleeve.

  “What about the other security guards?”

  “If you trust me enough to give me the gun, you can be my prisoners.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Jess took the gun from David. She dropped the magazine from the grip, checked the chamber to be certain it was clear, then gave the gun to the operative.

  “Now we trust you.”

  Jess, David, and Bakana kept their hands on their heads as they walked slowly through the long hallways of the Shop. The operative, whose name, he volunteered, was Niklas, walked behind, empty gun in hand, Victoria’s laptop under his arm. The Taser hung from a clip on his belt, but the Taser’s cartridge was in the pocket of Jess’s khaki shorts.

  Scholars who watched the four of them pass made no attempt to interfere or even question what was happening, even though all must have known how extraordinary it was to have the whole Shop in lockdown. Jess understood why they turned away: Not to know everything was normal in the Family, and so, for most, the habit of questioning had died.

  That’s what David was trying to tell me . . . and Victoria . . . that this is what we’ve become, she thought, as scholar after scholar stepped aside or averted his eyes, her eyes. Unquestioning slaves to tradition, suppressing knowledge that doesn’t fit. Is this how we lost the Secret?

  They made only one stop, when Niklas slipped into a storage room and brought out another olive drab shirt for David, to cover the evidence of his chest wounds.

  Soon after, they reached the central core of the underground facility—a ninety-foot-wide, five-hundred-foot-deep shaft straddled by a Goliath crane, a device common to shipbuilding yards. In the fifties, the crane had lowered and raised the tunneling equipment and mine borers that carved out the archive level, and in the nineties, once again, for its expansion. The Shop’s Goliath was operated only occasionally now, when oversized shipments arrived for safekeeping.

  Personnel and smaller loads made use of two open wire-cage elevators in opposite corners of the shaft. The larger of the two cages accommodated loads up to a small car’s mass; the smaller held ten people. Niklas and his apparent captives entered the smaller cage.

  Slowly and noisily, the wire-cage elevator now descended past a seemingly endless string of low-power bulbs connecting the small square of light above to the small square of light below.

  The cage clanked as it reached bottom, and its sliding metal door rattled as it opened to admit its passengers to the hard rock floor of the archive tunnel. Scored and grooved, the lines on the tunnel walls and ceiling ran parallel with the narrow pipes carrying wiring, and the large round ducts for ventilation.

  Tomasso Moretti was in chamber 314. Short, round, mostly bald with a wispy fringe of faded brown hair that floated around his neck and grazed his shoulders, the Family astronomer was sitting at a computer workstation, staring at a complex graph that showed a thin red line flashing between different points on a grid.

  To Jess, the juxtaposition of a state-of-the-art computer in an enormous rock cavern crammed with towering shelves filled with boxes, books, and antique scrolls was business as usual. But it wouldn’t be to David. Jess wished she could hear his impressions, get his viewpoint again, the way she had in Cornwall. She wondered if they’d ever talk like that again. She hoped so.

  The Shop astronomer was so engrossed in his work, he was startled when Jess touched his shoulder. Still, he was delighted to have visitors—he had so few. It was clear he hadn’t noticed the blast-door siren, either, so they didn’t have to tell him anything of what had happened.

  Jess put their question to him.

  Moretti cocked his head, intrigued and honored to assist a new defender. “It’s not a very difficult problem to solve,” he said. “The solar system’s dynamic, always changing, and for any specific arrangement of planets to repeat exactly . . . Well, that’s something that could happen only in something more than, oh, a trillion years.”

  He became more animated as the implications filled him. “Since the sun will die long before that—expanding to cons
ume the inner planets in just a few billion years from now—no specific alignment of planets will ever repeat. Which means each moment of the planets’ combined journeys is unique.”

  David voiced his lack of understanding. “I thought planetary alignments were more common. Every fifty years, or hundred and fifty years. Something like that.”

  Moretti welcomed the opportunity to enlighten him. “Ah, but the term ‘alignment’ is very loose. You see, astronomers are easy to please. We say the planets are aligned when they appear in the same small section of the sky. That’s maybe within five to ten degrees of each other. Now, for some small groupings of planets, that does happen with greater frequency. But”—Moretti held up a stubby finger to emphasize his point—“never exactly the same. And mathematically, well, it’s easy to see that any two planets might come within a particular alignment quite often. Any three planets, a bit less often. Any four, less often still. And,” he concluded with pleasure, “with the addition of more planets to the equation, the odds of repetition quickly escalate to . . . well, to literally astronomical proportions.”

  Jess realized the lonely astronomer could keep them here for days as he discoursed about the stars. She exchanged a quick glance with Bakana and Niklas. Niklas tapped his watch, and she nodded. Someone was bound to discover Victoria’s body soon, and her remaining security guards would hunt her killers.

  “So,” she said, “you can tell us the date the sun map shows, from the alignment of the planets?”

  The astronomer shrugged, disappointed but not surprised to be cut short. “Si, simplice. Though, of course,” he qualified, “depending on the accuracy of the depiction of the planets’ position, it might not be possible to achieve a precise date. More of a range, I’d say.”

  “What magnitude?” David asked.

  “Perhaps a month, plus or minus a few days.”

  Jess smiled. “Thank you, Tomasso. Anytime you’re ready.”

  “Prego.” Moretti accessed a program that controlled a telescope in Hawaii funded by the MacCleirigh Foundation. It took him less than ten minutes to run the clock backward through the centuries until the positions of the five classical planets and Earth matched the alignment against the stars on the sun map.

  “Velò,” Moretti said and leaned back in his chair.

  Jess read the date range on the computer screen.

  August 10–25, 8254 B.C.E.

  David handed the astronomer a flash drive no larger than half a stick of gum. “There’s a star map on this. Can you tell us where an observer would have to be on that date, to see these stars?”

  Moretti pushed out his bottom lip in contemplation. “I’ll need to assume a time of day. Maybe local midnight, but . . . why not?” he said.

  This time, it took almost twenty minutes, and the answer came out in a string of numbers: longitude and latitude.

  64° 48m 34s S 60° 54m 49s W

  “That’s not right,” Moretti said.

  “Why not?” Jess asked.

  The astronomer called up a new program that displayed the Earth as a globe. He copied the longitude and latitude into a search window, hit RETURN.

  The globe rotated to center the coordinates; then the image zoomed.

  “See?” he said. “It’s too far south. It must be an error.”

  Bakana and Niklas were confused; not so Jess and David.

  On-screen was a mass of land from which a narrow peninsula stretched northward into the Great Southern Sea.

  The home of the First Gods. Her hope unspoken, Jess turned to David, and for the first time she saw the same emotion there.

  “Antarctica,” he said, “but that’s impossible. People have never lived there. Couldn’t live there.”

  Jess understood what only those brought up with the Traditions could know. “People of darkness, no. They couldn’t. But the First Gods were more than that, David, this was their home. The White Island.” Jess said the words with reverence as Moretti gaped at her.

  In that shared moment of discovery, of hope for even greater enlightenment, the next words spoken were “Hands on your heads!”

  FORTY-SIX

  “How dare you!” Moretti stood to face two of Victoria’s security force. Their guns were drawn. “Jessica MacClary is of the Twelve Restored, and I’m of the 144.”

  “The Defender of Canberra is dead,” the taller guard said. “These people are responsible.”

  The astronomer stepped back, stunned. “Victoria . . .”

  “I’m under orders from the Defender of São Paolo,” the guard continued. “I’m to take MacClary and her accomplices to Zurich.”

  Unloaded gun in hand, Niklas moved between Jess and the two gunmen, turned so the Taser on his belt was out of their sight. The moment he did so, Jess began to unhook the weapon.

  Whatever they were planning, David knew they needed more cover. He edged closer to Jess, ready to act when she needed him.

  The taller guard addressed Niklas. “Victoria Claridge was shot. We need to inspect your gun.”

  Niklas held steady. “She was alive when I left her office with my prisoners. She sent me down here to get information from Dr. Moretti. This is a defender affair. Do not interfere.”

  “Give me your weapon,” the guard repeated. He advanced toward Niklas.

  The young operative suddenly began shouting, “You will not harm a defender! Put your weapons down now! Now! Now!”

  Instinctively, the guards moved back as David heard the click of the Taser cartridge as it locked into place. He started forward. Jess could take out one guard with the Taser, but not two. Then David froze as he saw what she and Niklas were doing. The operative had held out his hand behind his back, and Jess had slapped into it the magazine she’d pocketed for his unloaded gun. Then, seamlessly, they’d shifted into a new position, shoulder to shoulder, each facing a guard. Niklas with the still-empty weapon. Jess with the reloaded Taser.

  “Weapons down! Weapons down!” Niklas and Jess shouted at the same time.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop!” the two guards commanded.

  David knew the standoff could only last a moment more. Then he saw his chance. All attention was on the four with weapons. No one was looking at him.

  He tensed to leap between the guards and Jess and Niklas. If a bullet found him, it wasn’t as if it would cut his life short by much.

  Moretti acted first. “Enough!” The astronomer brought his chubby fist down on a control at his workstation, and the chamber’s overhead lights shut off.

  In an instant, the guards were shapes backlit by the open doorway. A second more, and one guard fell with a Taser dart in his chest as David threw Bakana down and covered her with his body. The other guard fired once, blindly into the dark. By then, Niklas had slapped the magazine into his weapon.

  Three quick gunshots and it was over. The sudden quiet broken only by the groaning of the Tasered guard. Huddled behind his workstation, Moretti reached up to his console, switched on the lights again. Immediately David looked for Jess. She was unhurt. So was Niklas. He got to his feet, helped Bakana to hers.

  Leaning against his console for support, Moretti brushed back disheveled strands of hair, trying and failing to regain lost dignity. “The location is real?” he asked in a shaking voice. “The White Island is part of Antarctica?”

  “I believe so,” Jess said.

  “Then the Mystery of the Promise . . . it’s solved?”

  Jess took his hand. “I promise on the First Gods, whatever I find there, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell everyone. Everything.”

  “Defender,” Moretti whispered and kissed her hand. Then Bakana took Jess’s other hand and knelt beside the astronomer.

  David could understand why. There was no more doubt in Jess’s tone, and he wished he could share that strength as well.

  Half a mile beyond the central shaft, some twenty minutes after they’d fled Moretti’s section of the cavern through a secondary exit known to Niklas, he directed them through an uns
ealed entrance and into another vast chamber. Moving quickly, he led them past a remarkable set of free-standing walls some forty feet high, built from precisely shaped stones with a pinkish cast.

  “What are those?” David asked Jess.

  “Walls from Petra. They’re from the earliest city built in Jordan. Too much Family iconography in the decorations. So we brought them here.”

  Family iconography. The walls were banded by a frieze of charioteers in battle, which, though ancient looking, bore signs of recent reconstruction. One wall, in particular, drew David’s attention. A large opening in it was edged with carved pillars wrapped in oak leaves. Sculpted above was a medallion inset with twelve wedges, each carved with a distinctive symbol. In the very center of the medallion was a carving of a cross similar to the one that Jess had given him.

  A sudden thought caused him to pat the pockets of his khaki shorts. Yes. It was still there. He’d concealed Jess’s cross for safety when they’d arrived here.

  Niklas didn’t even glance at the walls from Petra, halting only when he reached a tower of crates stacked on the floor between two impressive figures, six feet high, on wooden pallets. The sculptures were strongly reminiscent of the Egyptian Sphinx, except the faces were those of men, not lions.

  David had heard Jess call this room from treasures chamber 248. How many other rooms and treasures were hidden down here? How many, if not all, of the world’s—and Ironwood’s—mysteries could they solve?

  Niklas opened a metal door behind the crates, and Jess went through it first.

  “Lights?” David heard her ask as he and Bakana joined her. They were at the base of a tunnel that slanted upward.

  Niklas gestured to a rack just inside the doorway. It held a dozen emergency flashlights, hand-cranked, no batteries required. “Follow the slope uphill,” he said. “It’ll take half an hour to reach the outer door.”

  “Where do we come out?” David asked.

  “Don’t worry. There’ll be transportation.”

  “Niklas, you’re not coming?” Jess asked.