"You know, that saying ... `A life that is wasted is not truly lived,"' she recited.
"Where did you hear that?" Grant asked.
She thought. "Come to think of it, it was at your funeral. I mean, Collin's. The priest presiding over the ceremony said it."
"Huh," Grant commented, thoughts drifting back to that day. It felt like a lifetime ago. In some ways, he supposed it was.
"I wish Alex were here," he remarked.
Julie froze, and Grant pulled up short in front of her, right at the unlocked door.
Wait, he thought to himself. What did I just say?
He'd said it without thinking.
But it was true. He did wish Alex were here, at his side....
Where did that come from? I mean, she's Alex.
Of course, I don't have feelings for her.
Unless-
"Took you long enough to figure it out," Julie said, wearing a crooked smile as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.
"So you knew this whole time? Does anyone else know?"
"I don't know. I think Morgan did. Remember back in L.A., the day before we left town, when she gave me that book, The Remains of the Day? You were standing right there when she gave it to me, and I suspect it might have been more for your benefit than mine. The Remains of the Day is a story about a man who wastes his life and lets his one true love slip through his fingers."
Grant looked at the ceiling, stunned at all this new information. How had he missed it? "Does Alex really feel the same way about me?"
"I think so," Julie replied, nodding. She walked forward and opened the door. "Let's finish this so you can go find out."
"Come," Devlin said smoothly as Grant and Julie rejoined him on the downward stairway. "There's something close-by I want you to get a look at."
They walked on in silence, Grant holding Julie's quivering hand. She looked so tired....
At the bottom an enormous set of double doors awaited them. Crafted with tremendous attention to detail, these doors were four times the size of the metallic ones back at the substation's entrance, where Grant had met Devlin. These were made of wood and were framed by an equally ornate doorway. Extremely intricate carvings offered another variation on the six-sided Secretum symbol.
Two soldiers like the ones Payton had fought above stood at attention before the two doors, and as Devlin approached them, they clasped enormous, round iron handles and pulled until the massive gateway was fully open.
A blast of sweltering hot air hit them as they approached the giant doorway, but Devlin kept walking until he'd gone through. Grant and Julie saw no choice but to follow.
"There are other ways to reach our destination, of course," Devlin said, acknowledging the immense heat. "But missing this would be like traveling to China and not seeing the Great Wall."
On the other side of the doorway was a chamber of boundless proportions-even larger than the cave that held the underground city far above. It had no distinct shape; Grant guessed that this room had not been carved out of the rock like the ones above. It was used as the Secretum had found it.
And with good reason. A slender bridge stretched out before them farther than they could see. The bridge fluctuated at various points, making its width anywhere between six and twelve feet wide, depending on where you stood.
Red light flickered on the craggy ceiling of stalactites. Grant stepped forward and peered over one side of the bridge. Three hundred feet below, a sea of molten lava stirred, casting an eerie crimson glow over the entire space and pouring heat out upon them.
"Careful on the bridge," Devlin instructed. "We've never managed to perfect it, so it's full of small stalagmites and rocks you can easily trip over. A few centuries ago, someone nicknamed it the `Scar Bridge,' because it was so easy to get hurt on."
Grant and Julie slowly and cautiously stepped out onto the bridge, holding tightly to one another and staying as close to the center as possible. The temperature easily soared above one hundred degrees the farther in they went.
"Geothermals such as the one beneath us," Devlin explained, following them onto the bridge, "are our primary means of powering our technology, though we have also embraced power sources that the External world has not yet mastered, such as the electromagnetics that govern our Conveyor system."
"Is that the transport tunnels I saw above?" Grant inquired. "Where else can it go?"
Devlin smiled, clearly proud. "It reaches from one end of the world to the other. It allows us to conduct our affairs most efficiently. We can get to the farthest Conveyor stop from here in less than four hours. Jules Verne dreamt of traversing around the world in eighty days. We can make the entire trip in eight hours."
Julie's ankle twisted slightly, and Grant held onto her even tighter, steadying her as they walked. He hoped their journey would be over soon; it was wearing her out.
"That's how you were able to follow us from Los Angeles to Jerusalem so easily," Grant realized. "But how is it possible? How can you have such enormous tunnels running under all of the world's civilized regions without anyone knowing about it? How could a project of that size have been built in secret?"
"To answer your first question, yes, I used the Conveyor to visit Los Angeles during the riot. That was the same day, if I'm not mistaken, that you met someone from your past."
Someone from my past? What was that supposed to mean?
Did he mean that strange old man at the nursing home?
They continued walking across the bridge as Devlin breezed past Grant's confusion. "As for our technology and construction ... Come now, it's not so hard to believe, is it? Your own people have developed monorail systems that work on technology ancestral to our electromagnetic Conveyor. And it was not very long ago that the British and the French dug an enormous tunnel under the English Channel for a subterranean train system of their own, was it not? We're using the same technology they're headed for; we're just further along the curve.
"As I said before, the Secretum is not a part of your world, and therefore it is not subject to the same history. We have developed independently of External civilization, and in many ways, at a much faster rate. Our scientists estimate that our technology is at least fifty to one hundred years ahead of the surface world. It used to be a wider margin than that, but your scientists have made huge strides in recent decades. Of course, with our resources, we have access to every new discovery your people make, so we can take advantage of any advances we might have missed."
Grant estimated they were around the halfway point on the bridge now.
"So what are these substations for?" Grant asked.
"They are observation points and places where our plans are carried out by acolytes like your parents."
Grant's mind was still tugging at something he'd noticed earlier. "You're wearing the same silver ring that my grandfather wore when he was the Keeper, aren't you? There's only one of them, right?"
"That's right," Devlin said.
"But my grandfather and his ring were buried under tons of earth when I destroyed that substation. How on earth could you-?"
"When you take in the sight of this place you're standing in right now," Devlin cut him off, "is it really so hard to accept that the Secretum has technology advanced enough to accomplish all of these things you consider impossible? The disasters, the repositories, the Conveyor, the drastic shift in global power. Your entire worldwide economy has collapsed, thanks to us. Even down to the simplest of things, like the memory-altering drug our operative in London used on you. Every detail has been seen to, every piece of the puzzle is perfectly in place. And now, at last, we have come to the end of the journey."
Past the bridge, the path split, with multiple hallways opening up before them.
Devlin selected the one in the center and they continued on to another downward slope, this one at a much greater angle than the one Grant and Payton had used earlier. It wasn't long before Grant found that this slope was circling around on itself, sp
iraling similar to the stairs above. He held Julie's hand in his, carefully keeping her steady as they traversed the slope.
"Considering where the rings come from, and who originally wore them ... Why do the rings give us enhanced mental powers? Why don't they come off? And why do they glow?"
"I understand your need for there to be an explanation for everything, Grant," Devlin said patiently. "I really do. Better than you think. But sooner or later we must all accept that there are some things that even our science down here cannot neatly justify, quantify, or explain.
"The rings and where they come from is not a mathematical riddle for science to answer; it is much, much bigger than anything our finite minds could ever place into a nice, tidy explanation. Put simply, there are some things we will just never know the answers to."
"I can't accept that."
"I know," Devlin replied. "Consider this. The rings come from a reality that exists beyond our own. They originate somewhere behind the curtain of this life, in a place and time that is far outside our knowledge as mortal beings. Can you swallow this as a possibility?"
"Oka Y"
Devlin nodded. "Good. Think about it this way. If you were to give a microscope to an infant, what would the result be?"
"I don't know," Grant said slowly. "The kid would probably damage it somehow."
"More likely he would try to ingest it," Devlin explained. "All infants know very few reflexes, and the drive to eat rules them all. But this is not the point. The microscope is simply a tool, and regardless of what the infant might decide to do with it-whether he tries to bite it, hurts himself with it, or makes it into some kind of tactile toy-he will find a use for it. But the fact remains that the microscope was not made nor intended for his use."
Grant was starting to catch on. He thought back to what Trevor had tried to tell him the first time they met, about his ring never having been meant for use by a mortal human. "So you're saying the rings are a tool of some kind that weren't intended for us."
"Precisely," Devlin replied. "They were never made for use by human beings, so when a man or woman comes into contact with one of them-when we wear one of the Rings of Dominion, as you do nowit is an improper ... or perhaps an impure ... mixture of this object from a reality beyond our comprehension and human flesh here on the mortal plane. The results are dangerous, unpredictable, and we may never fully understand them.
"What we do know is that the Rings of Dominion are linked to a source of power beyond anything the intellect of man is equipped to grasp. When brought into contact with humans, the rings interact with the mortal body in ways that can't be anticipated or explained. By some, that union is considered a desecration, a distortion of the natural order because the effect that they have on their wearers is to allow them to distort the natural order at will."
"If you knew how powerful they were, then why did the Secretum give the rings to us?" Grant said, straining with serious effort not to raise his voice. "Why not wear the rings yourselves?"
"Because it was commanded of us," Devlin replied. "As you probably know, the Secretum has awaited your arrival for seven millennia. And we have done so ... under orders given to us seven thousand years ago."
"Why? What am I here to do?"
"The Bringer brings the future into being."
They continued walking downward. Grant feared for Julie's health, even though she was doing her best to put on her bravest face.
Devlin never slowed his pace, nor showed any signs of weariness.
"This planet and all of its inhabitants were forged millennia ago as the greatest calculated risk in all the universe," Devlin went on. "Call it an experiment. Some have referred to it as a grand cosmic wager. Call it whatever you like, but the secret of our existence boils down to this: Would a race of sentient creatures, granted unequivocal free will, willingly choose the path of light?
"One need look no further than the Internet or your daily newspapers to see that this question has been answered. Man is incapable of choosing the correct path on his own. Put simply, this grand experiment called humanity was a horrendous failure. The worst mistake ever made.
"The Secretum of Six was formed seven thousand years ago to set things right. To undo the incalculable damage that mankind's free will has wrought. Around that same time, it was prophesied that a man would someday be born who would complete the Secretum's great work. And this man would be called the Bringer."
"Wait-hold on ..." Grant stopped. "Who made this prophecy?"
Devlin eyed him with a bemused smile. "You would never believe me."
The slanted corridor gave way to a small alcove-type landing. Double wooden doors waited to their immediate right, but these doors were normal sized and unadorned with any sort of marking or carvings. They appeared ancient in the extreme.
"This," Devlin said with reverence, "is the Hollow. We have arrived at our destination."
Grant's eyebrows scrunched up as something tickled the back of his brain. Something about this sounded very familiar...
The Unholy Markers! it came to him.
"The end shall be marked by a scar, revealing man's deepest hollow."
Scar Bridge ... and now the Hollow ...
Oh, no.
The third Marker wasn't the discolored scar on his hand. It was happening right here, right now.
The doors parted and before them lay darkness. It was a dimly lit space about one mile in diameter. Like so many chambers in this underground complex, this area was circular as well. Firelight was the only source of illumination, coming from torches affixed to the walls at evenly spaced intervals.
They stepped slowly inside.
The entire room, if it could be called that, had been sculpted from a different kind of rock than he'd seen anywhere else under the mountain. This rock gleamed black as onyx.
There were no walls here, in the traditional sense. A domed ceiling of solid black rock stretched over two hundred feet into the air at its apex, arching down until it met the floor at the outer edges of the vast room. The floor was a shallow dome as well-a perfectly symmetrical mile-wide hill that rose very gently to no more than ten feet high at its center point.
Carved into the floor were grooves of various sizes that cut about two inches into the ground. Grant couldn't quite figure out what the point of the grooves was, but they converged in the center of the Hollow.
A cold wind blew around them, though Grant could see nothing that the blast of air might be coming from. It seemed a stark contrast to the intense heat from the geothermal lava flow above.
Grant took in all of this peripheral data in a blink. The room's true focus stood at its center, and he could barely tear his eyes from it. Like a mirage of oil and heat on a highway, something solid and dark swam there before the three of them, but there wasn't enough light in the room to make it out properly.
"What is it?" Grant whispered, finding himself timid at the thought of speaking loudly in this intimidating space.
Julie squeezed his hand harder than before.
"Holy ground," Devlin replied. "We are at the bottom-most level of Substation Omega Prime, which was built above and around this room. You are looking at the very reason the Secretum exists."
Grant made no attempt to move inside beyond the handful of steps they'd taken to clear the doorway.
Devlin walked a few paces farther and then turned to face them.
"Do you have any idea where we are, geographically speaking?" he asked.
"I don't," said Julie.
"I know we're under the Taurus mountain range in Turkey," Grant offered.
"Before there was a Turkey, before the mountain range had a name, this Hollow existed. Thousands of feet above us is the Euphrates River, the place where it forms and empties into Syria. The site in question is no longer accessible, but at the dawn of time, it was right here, a few miles directly above where we now stand."
"What site in question?" Grant asked, though he had a feeling he knew where this was going.
"Eden. The birthplace of mankind," Devlin replied as though it were obvious. "The Garden."
Grant couldn't stop himself from gasping. "`A place of great power ..."' he quoted to Julie.
This was bigger than either of them could have imagined; it was huge and dangerous and they were meddling in things and places and powers that man was never meant to touch....
Julie squeezed his hand again, and this time there was no mistaking the message the gesture carried: We have to get out of here. Right now!
"Where better," continued Devlin, "to subvert the Great Experiment than the site where it first began? This place was prepared for us thousands of years ago so that we could carry out the prophecy of Dominion and arrange for the Bringer to perform his function."
"And what is the Bringer's function?" Grant cried desperately.
"Come," Devlin replied. He turned and began walking toward the center of the room, toward the blurry object that resided there.
Grant took a step forward, but Julie held him firmly back.
"No!" she cried. "Something terrible is going to happen here! You can't let them do it! You know you can't! Don't, Grant! Never give up!"
Grant barely heard her, all of his senses trained on this remarkable, terrifying room. Something deep and powerful had begun to stir in his core. It pulled at him like a magnet.
He had to get to the center of the room.
"Never give in," he offered the response she waited for at last. "I won't, Julie. I'm in control of myself. But we've come this far, and something about this place is what all of this has been about! I have to know! I have to!"
He let go of her hand and followed Devlin.
Slowly, the object in the room's center began to take shape as they drew closer. It grew darker the closer Grant came. It was still hard to make out, but he thought he saw a dark black circle marked on the ground about twenty feet across.
He sensed that Julie was behind him, so he turned and grabbed her hand once more.
"We're going to make it," he whispered. "It's going to be okay."
She hesitated a moment but eventually followed, clinging to Grant's hand as if her life depended on it.
Fearless (Dominion Trilogy #2) Page 31