by M. G. Harris
A transformation comes over Ninbanda and she starts to speak. A stream of strange-sounding syllables flow from somewhere in the back of her throat.
Then with round, staring eyes, Ninbanda turns to us. She seems to be looking right through Tyler and me. Despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to see us, she nods.
At Ninbanda’s signal, we touch the symbols on the panel of inscriptions, one after the other, in a steady sequence. From inside the centrepiece there’s a deep, sonorous click. A second passes. I catch the look in Ninbanda’s eye.
Now she’s nervous.
Another second.
“What. . .?”
Ninbanda shushes me harshly, waiting, listening.
Another second. Then the sound of a final click.
The Erinsi woman breathes a sigh of absolute relief.
“That’s it?”
She swallows, a little shaky.
“What . . . that click?”
“The laser beam just sent a signal to the moon. It takes about a second and a half to get there . . . then a second and a half for the reply. We just had the reply. The energy device is activated.” She sighs again, but without any obvious satisfaction. “Thank the gods. It’s over. I can finally die in peace.”
There’s something very final about the way she says that. Final and also immediate.
“What . . . what do you mean, die?”
She looks up at me, a curious, bland expression in her gaze. “None of us will leave this place.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In about five minutes a gas will be released. It’ll put us all to sleep very gently. We will never wake up.”
Tyler and I stare in stunned silence.
Ninbanda’s voice seems to come from outside of her, as though she’s completely detached from the words. “Some secrets must be buried with the Erinsi.”
Somewhere down the tunnel, we hear the sudden grinding of stone.
“Run!”
Tyler and I race through the tunnels, half-blind. My torch scatters light in a crazy pattern before us. The door to the antechamber is closing; a shrinking black rectangle. It’s already too low to walk through. We sprint; I rapidly pull ahead as Tyler struggles with his injury. When we reach the door my heart almost stops. It could already be too late.
I dive feet first, slide beneath, let out a sharp yell as the stone slab almost pins me under its crushing weight. Squirming, I manage to free myself.
There’s no way that Tyler can squeeze through the gap. From each side of the door we both grip the bottom edge of the stone slab, heaving, straining muscles against the ancient mechanism. We slow its progress, but can’t budge the door any higher.
“We just need to jam something in, wedge it open,” I shout, panting with effort. “Then I’ll go up and get some tools from the Muwan. There’s got to be a way.”
“Have you got something?” Tyler says.
“Try the torch.” I shove in the torch, propping it upright in the opening. The slab descends as we let go. In another second there’s the sound of cracking glass. The torch begins to buckle.
There’s desperation in Tyler’s voice.
“Piece of junk! You got anything else . . .?”
My hand goes to the Bracelet of Itzamna under my sleeve. “I’ve got something that’s solid metal . . . should be stronger. . .” My fingers tremble as I fumble, pushing up my sleeve, tugging at the Bracelet.
Then I understand. As I pass the Bracelet of Itzamna through the remaining gap under the stone door, the torch begins to give way.
“Tyler, listen. Use the Bracelet. It’s your only way out, Ty! To time travel! It’ll get you out of there, take you right back to Oxford. Your Oxford, Ty.”
Tyler’s voice sounds faint. I see his fingers reach for the Bracelet. “What . . . what do I do?”
The torch buckles; the door collapses, now less than five centimetres from the ground. And still it squeezes, slowly crushing the remains of the torch.
I drop down, lie flat as I speak through the gap. “Listen carefully. You ready? When you want to go, Tyler, when you’re ready, you press down on the Crystal Key. Your fingers can’t be touching any other part of the Bracelet. Press down hard. The Bracelet will go weird and bits of it will start to move. Don’t be scared. There’s a countdown. Then . . . you’ll go. You’ll go back to where we started – back in Oxford.”
“Back to the EG Centre? Oh great, man. So they can shoot me all over again.”
“No – the Bracelet will transport you to roughly twenty metres from where you left. And . . . this bit is important, Ty . . . you’ll arrive ten minutes before we left.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Yeah, it’s a safety default. For exactly this kind of emergency. You’ll go to approximately where we were, ten minutes before. Make sure you get out of there! Go back to the Muwan, in the uni parks. It’s yours now, Ty. It’s yours.”
I wait for Tyler to answer, hear a tiny chuckle in his voice.
“So. I’m going back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not. This was all good, mate. It was fine.”
I swallow. “Tyler, you’re . . . you’re the best friend I ever had. I mean it. The best.”
“Yeah, yeah, Mariposa, whatever,” he says with a laugh. “What was that riddle again?”
“Riddle?”
“Yeah, the one on the postcards. The one from your old mate, Arcadio. I’m Arcadio, I must be. I’ve got the blue eyes; I can use the time-travel bracelet. Looks like I’m going back to my reality. And somehow, I’m going to leave that flyin’ saucer for you to find in 2014.”
I whisper, “Please . . . not like this!”
“My crew need me too, Josh. So - that riddle. You’d better tell me. Hurry up.”
Mouth as dry as dust, I say, “It . . . it’s written on a piece of paper. In my parents’ house. I mean – other-Josh’s.”
“Heh, so it is. Perfect,” says Tyler. “I’ll drop in for a cup of tea and some of your mum’s cookin’.”
“Tyler . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you mixed up in all this.”
“Hey. I was feeling a bit harsh about stepping out on my boys in Jericho, you know what I mean? Maybe I am livin’ inside the trunk of a dead tree, like that Camus bloke wrote in The Outsider. But I got used to it. It’s time to get back to my boys.”
“Ty. . .” My voice breaks.
I hear Tyler catch his breath for a second. He exhales slowly, resigned. “Allow it, man. You can’t stay anywhere for ever.”
The torch holding the stone door open is squashed completely flat. Deep inside my chest I can feel something tearing wide open. Alone and trembling, I stand. I’m grateful, so grateful that in the end, someone shared this responsibility with me.
I hope Tyler understood that. I hope he knew.
BLOG ENTRY: WAKE ME UP WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS
As I floated in the stratosphere all the way back, nothing but a silver streak in the sky, there was a mist in my eyes. In memory of my friend, I played the same track over and over.
The radio was chattering with people in Ek Naab wanting to talk to me, but I needed the solitude. I’d let them know that I was alive, the job was done and Tyler was gone. More than that, I didn’t want to discuss. Instead, I dedicated those few hours to Tyler. A Tyler that I’ll never meet again, in all probability. Because the boy I know in Oxford will grow up in a world where all the opportunities of modern life are open to him. He’ll go to college and study, meet someone to be with for the rest of his life. He’ll become whatever he wants to be.
Yet that other Tyler exists too. In another reality, where his life took another path. All the courage and determination, as well as the bleakness, the anger; everything that made him the man I saw is inside the boy I know in Oxford, right now.
And although it makes me uncomfortable to think about it, the potential that other-Josh had – to choose the stupidest time to walk away from his fam
ily – that potential exists in me too.
I’ll never forget Tyler’s words before that door closed, locking him inside the tomb. How accepting he was. Deep down, he knew where he belonged. As hard as that life was, he wanted to return. What mattered to Tyler in the end were his responsibilities, the people who relied on him.
For the longest time, I thought about all that. Travelling in time had been making me feel disconnected, as though I’d lost my anchor. Other possibilities, other realities, seemed so tempting. The fact that in one universe I could be making a different choice somehow made it all right to do whatever I wanted. Finally I’d experienced a reality that helped me feel more grounded in my own. Maybe I’d found some essential part of myself, an inescapable core. Like Tyler, I knew where I belonged.
Back in Ek Naab I received the hero’s welcome I’d secretly always wanted. The entire population turned out, crowding the area around the black cenote. My fellow student pilots grabbed hold of me; they carried me on their shoulders through the streets.
The sky flickered red with handfuls of hibiscus petals tossed into the air. I spotted my mother’s face at the periphery. She was next to Carlos Montoyo. He pulled his tight grin and gave me an ironic salute. My mother smiled and blew me a kiss. For the first time in a very long time, I saw no trace of sadness in her eyes.
The crowd released me when we reached the market. And then I was face to face with Ixchel. She didn’t hug me right away, just looked me up and down a little. I could feel people’s eyes on us. Every second that passed made me feel more awkward.
Eventually she broke the tension, grinned broadly and threw both arms around my neck.
“Anyone would think you’d just saved the world.”
“It wasn’t me. It’s like you told me once: I was just the button-man.”
Ixchel laughed. “You know something? You shouldn’t listen to me too much.”
“Could you write that down on a card? I might want to remind you sometime. . .”
The crowd, having seen the moment of our reunion, began to disperse. I heard calls for an impromptu pool party.
More than anything, I wished Tyler could have been there to see it.
BLOG ENTRY: SIXTEEN
My sixteenth birthday came at a pretty crucial time for Ek Naab. The medical team finally released Captain Connor Bennett, who spent weeks in their care. The National Reconnaissance Office agreed to swap the captain for our Muwan Mark II, which was still “in their custody”, no more questions asked. Benicio had tried to make sure that Captain Bennett hadn’t been able to watch the final approach to Ek Naab. Hopefully, the location was still secure. But I guess time will tell. We just have to trust them, for now.
I wondered about the plan to use hip33 against the NRO. The NRO had surprised us by turning up at the fifth chamber. We were completely unprepared.
It wouldn’t have been a nice tactic to use against someone who, in the end, was trying to help. Would it even have worked, given what we now knew about Captain Bennett? If he had Erinsi DNA, if he was a descendant, like me, then he would be immune to the effects of hip33. Tyler told us that a blue-blood couldn’t be influenced by someone using hip33.
But later, Lorena discovered something else that made us all wonder. Captain Bennett had an identical twin, a scientist called Dr Jackson Bennett. Jackson Bennett’s name was on research papers that had found something similar to hip33 biology, but in the fruit fly. Maybe the NRO already knew a lot more about hip33 than we might have guessed.
Why hadn’t Jackson Bennett been asked to be the third member of the team to activate the moon machine? I remembered something that Ninbanda had said through her tears, when Connor was shot – “Not Connor . . . I couldn’t bear to lose him, too. . .” Had something happened to Jackson? Why did she seem so close to Connor and his brother? Could they have been the ones who actually revived her? I began to realize then that there’d been a lot more going on than I’d ever known; other people who I knew nothing about, risking their lives to bring about the ancient plan to protect the world from the superwave.
Everything returned to normal, with the NRO still jealous over Ek Naab’s hoard of ancient technology. Yet somehow, finally, we’d reached a kind of truce.
What topped everything for excitement was the breaking news about a strange energy phenomenon near the moon. It was amazing and also kind of weird to suddenly see everything we’d speculated about for years being openly talked about on the television and in social media.
The superwave emerging from the galactic core couldn’t be stopped – the scientists in Ek Naab had feared that much. But the moon machine could protect us. Now we were finding out how. Scientists started recording incredible data in cosmic ray detection, and all sorts of other stuff that I didn’t understand. Something bizarre was happening on the moon; that much was clear. For weeks people tried to make out it was a natural phenomenon.
The conspiracy theorists, of course, they knew better. I went back to my old ways for a while, hanging out on the Internet discussion boards, enjoying all the crazy, wacky theories that were being posted.
Aliens got the rap most of the time.
I toyed with the idea of posting what had really happened. It wasn’t close to as outlandish as some of the theories. And who would believe me, right?
With all that going on, we didn’t get around to much of a party. Well, we had a bigger party in mind.
Dr Banerjee got her moment in the sun, too. She published her article in some top science journal. Once other scientists understood the implications, it spread across the planet like wildfire. Or like the energy bubble that seemed to be radiating from the moon. Around the time that people understood what was happening at the centre of the galaxy, the space agencies managed to get a shuttle out to the edge of the moon bubble. They did some experiments and realized – it was a gigantic force field. Growing in radius every day. And it would entirely shield the Earth – for three days.
After that, the power would run out and the field would collapse. By then the gigantic electromagnetic pulse would be on its way through the rest of the solar system. No problem for all those uninhabited planets, but it looked pretty bad for all those scientists who had probes on Mars and for the poor old Voyagers. There was some hope that the Voyagers would be shielded in part by the “heliosheath” – the outer layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. But there was also a good chance that their systems would fry and we’d lose all contact with them.
All this would happen on December twenty-first to the twenty-third, 2012. No one missed the significance of that. But how? everyone asked. Who did it? And how did the Mayans know?
Hey. I’ll never tell.
Ixchel gives me a little shove. “Get up, lazy. You have to get that application for Harvard in today.”
I roll over in the hammock and frown. “Did my mother send you?”
Ixchel takes a backwards step towards the window, a glass of water in one hand. She leans out, tips the water into flowers in the hanging basket overlooking the narrow alleyway below. “I sent myself. If you’re coming with me to university, you’d better shape up.”
“You’re too good for university,” I tell her. “You should be teaching there.”
“Ha ha. Maybe one day.”
I sit up, glance out of the window. The sound of a band rehearsing comes wafting in from the marketplace. Preparations for the biggest party Ek Naab has ever seen – on December twenty-third. The same party is being prepared all over the world.
The day the world didn’t end. Funny to think that when these parties were planned, almost no-one outside Ek Naab and the NRO knew that the ‘Mayan apocalypse’ threat was actually real.
Well, didn’t they have a surprise, when the force field began to form?
“I’ve been thinking. . .” I tell her.
“Yes?”
“I know we’ve both got offers for Oxford. But maybe I actually want to go to Harvard.”
She purses her lips in thought. “Is this about Tyler?”
Despite myself, I feel my cheeks burn. “Tyler? No. He’s going to study capoeira in Rio, in Brazil.”
“It’s understandable if you feel weird about seeing him. I can imagine it won’t ever be the same for you, after meeting the other Tyler.”
Sometimes this girl knows just the right thing to make my eyes misty. With my eyes, I plead with her silently. “Can we not talk about all that?”
Ixchel looks at me as if she’s thinking about going further, but stops.
“Look, I grew up in Oxford. I want to go somewhere new.”
“Well. . . ” Ixchel grins. “We don’t always get what we want.”
I stand up. “Ixchel . . . I mean it. I want a new beginning.”
“Seriously, Harvard?”
“I just feel like I should be moving forward. Not back.”
“Do you have any idea how cold it gets in Massachusetts? I couldn’t handle it.”
“OK, then somewhere else.”
Ixchel nods, thoughtful. “I think we should both apply to various schools. Keep our options open. See where we feel happiest.”
“You’re going to love Oxford, though,” I groan. “All that history, all those ancient colleges. You won’t be able to resist.”
Outside, people are carrying trays of food, stereo speakers, paper decorations to hang from the lampposts, huge baskets of flowers. Ixchel and I give the baker a hand with an enormous blue-frosted sponge cake. The party’s being held around the black cenote. When we arrive, I see Montoyo in earnest discussion with the chief. When I turned sixteen in August, Montoyo stood down as my proxy on the ruling Executive, let me finally succeed. But already there’s talk of him joining again, this time as an official proxy for Blanco Vigores. Who, so far as anyone can tell, has simply vanished. Like mist.
A bigger question is this – what is the point of Ek Naab now?
We’ll worry about that after tonight.