She raised one finger and pointed at the exit to the chamber. The white glow of the neon trail snaked from the tip of her clawed finger and into the tunnel.
“Time is short,” she said. “You would do well to hurry.”
Vander looked at her a moment more. Black veins were snaking out from her eyes. He thought this first meeting with her might also be her last. He tried to think of something to say, but he had never been good with words.
“Farewell,” he said, turning toward the egress.
“Wait,” Kira said, her croaking voice taking on an urgent strength as she seemed to remember something. He turned back to her. “It didn’t want me to see, but I saw enough. And even as it destroyed my sight, I could still hear.”
“Hear what?”
“I don’t know what it means,” Kira said. “But I could hear my sister. I could hear her song.”
2
BRYNN
She woke with a headache, the harsh light of the morning Texas sun streaming in through the slats of the trailer windows. She sat up too fast and hit her head on the low roof above the bunk.
“Shit,” she said, wincing and rubbing her head. Her petite body was naked, which was weird, since she normally didn’t sleep that way. Sweatpants and a T-shirt were her usual bedtime digs, or shorts in this heat.
Brynn sat up on the edge of the bed, groaning, spotting the empty bottle of tequila on the tiny kitchen table affixed to the trailer wall. Then she remembered Marcus.
“Ah, double shit,” she said. They were out here together, looking for the site. He was a grad student, the only one she could convince to come along with her on this dig. Though he probably hadn’t believed her theories regarding what she referred to as “World B” any more than her colleagues, if you could call them that. She doubted anyone in the archaeology community actually considered her a peer of any sort. A crank, maybe. But not a real scientist.
Then she noticed the piece of paper sitting under the tequila bottle, the ragged edge where it had been torn from a spiral notebook. Even from across the small mobile trailer, she could see the scrawl of handwriting.
“Well, triple shit,” she said.
A pair of pink panties was wadded up on the floor at her feet. Next to those were her khaki shorts and a white tank top. She pulled on yesterday’s clothes, groaned again, then went for the note.
Dear Dr. Mulbrook, it began.
Nice, she thought. We just screwed last night in my camper, and he still calls me Doctor. He was probably just trying to be formal and respectful, but it rubbed her wrong all the same.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to assist you with your work.
Oh brother, she thought. Here we go.
And thank you for last night. It was amazing.
Right, she thought. Sure it was. But?
But I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be here anymore. You’re a great person and I wish you luck.
--Marcus
She thought she might hurt herself from rolling her eyes at that last bit. She wadded up the paper and threw it in the corner. Then she pulled on her socks and hiking boots and swung open the screen door, stepping into the morning sun.
She’d parked the trailer, towed by her beat-up jeep, about thirty yards from the road. They were twenty miles from the nearest town. Had he walked? Called an Uber?
She sighed and stretched her arms over her head. Did it really matter? She would have to continue the search just like she did nearly everything else in her life, by herself.
She walked back to the jeep to unhook it from the camper. She would drive out to the area marked 6L on the map she had overlaid with her own grid. For the past three weeks, she’d been searching each grid one-by-one. She was convinced the place she was looking for was out here.
She’d been following this trail for years now. The latest bread crumb had been a juicy one, a parchment in the language she was now convinced belonged to a civilization long-dead and not from our world. She’d bought it from an old Korean woman in the back room of a nail parlor in Dallas. It had cost her five hundred dollars. It was made out of some kind of skin. She’d sent away for a DNA analysis, but the results had come back inconclusive, though the tech had said it was most likely some kind of reptile.
Her department head, Dr. Joan Seevers, thought she was a nutcase. Brynn could see it in her eyes every time she talked to her. But Brynn worked hard, carried a heavy teaching load, and promised not to publicly talk about her research.
Of course, Brynn didn’t get any grants, either. She paid for everything, including this trip, out of her own pocket. According to her analysis, the scroll was a map. To what, she didn’t know. But she was damn sure going to find out.
The deciphered coordinates had led her here, a flat stretch of red desert owned by a man named Mackenzie. After six months of phone calls and letters, he had finally agreed to let her explore the area. She’d promised to credit him for any discoveries of scientific merit.
Brynn snorted a laugh as she dropped the hitch, freeing her jeep. Scientific merit. She’d gotten hooked on archaeology from her dad taking her to the museum. All those pots and vases and spears and clothing from people long dead, a tangible link stretching across time and space. She had wanted to find the things people had made, to understand them, and in a way, to resurrect them. She also thought Indiana Jones was a badass and wanted to be just like him.
Her graduate studies had started out conventional enough, studying the emergence of writing systems among southwest Native American tribes. In her second year, though, she’d found a complex set of symbols written on deerskin in storage at the college’s small museum. She’d analyzed the sample and shown it to her advisor, who had dismissed it as a hoax. The lettering consisted of four-hundred and thirty-six distinct symbols, clearly imprinted into the skin via some mechanized process, a method that couldn’t have existed in pre-Columbian America.
Brynn had followed her gut, and that had led her down a rabbit hole her career had never recovered from. She’d started seeking out information from dubious sources, alien conspiracies and secret civilizations, the kinds of things you’d see on late-night cable. But amidst all the chaff, she had seen a pattern emerging. She became convinced, even if no one else in the academic community had, that a world parallel to their own existed, and that people had been traveling between the two worlds for thousands of years.
Somewhere in this flat patch of Texas desert, she was going to find the final key, the slam-dunk piece of evidence that was going to validate everything she’d done for the past eight years.
Brynn started up the jeep and headed out, spreading the grid-lined map in her lap. Red dust kicked up behind her as she set out. Her head was still killing her, but this had to be done. No one else was going to do it.
She drove across the flat red dirt until she reached 6L. Then she drove in concentric circles around the exterior of the grid, dropping the speed to ten miles-per-hour. Poring over each square of desert took her about six hours. She’d take a break each day halfway through for lunch, then finish it off. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she knew something was out here.
The search took an enormous amount of patience. Every patch of desert looked just like every other. The sun beat down over head. Brynn wore a wide-brimmed hat, liberally applied sunscreen, and drank plenty of water. But the task still reminded her of mining gold, painstakingly sifting through thousands of pans of identical dirt looking for that one shining nugget.
Just over an hour after she had started searching grid 6L, Brynn found her nugget.
She almost didn’t see it. Her mind had been wandering, thinking about Marcus. Hell, maybe he was right. Maybe all her colleagues were right. Maybe she should just give up on this silliness. Had she completely lost her objectivity? Was her desire to find that earth-shattering discovery warping her perspective?
And then, there it was. A patch of the desert floor was indented, about the size of a d
oor but in a trapezoidal shape. She stopped the jeep and hopped out. Her heart was thumping now.
She was reminded of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the apes find the monolith. The red dirt sunk about two inches in a shape that didn’t belong here. Brynn held her hand up to her eyes and scanned the horizon. What could have made this? Clearly no one else had been out this way in a long time. There were no tracks from people or vehicles, other than the ones she had just made herself.
She knew she should go get the camera from the jeep and snap some pictures first, but her instinct was to reach out. She crouched, sinking her fingers into the red dust. About an inch down, she felt a hard, cool metallic surface.
Her heart jumped again. Maybe this really was it. But she knew not to get her hopes too high.
It could be some abandoned government project, she thought. Or some drug dealer’s stash. Or a hundred other things. But the little girl in her, the one who had devoured every book in the library on history and archaeology, couldn’t help but get excited.
She lifted her fingers from the surface, and put her hands on her knees, steadying herself to stand up. She would go back to the jeep, get her gear, and do this right.
But the sound of squealing metal and grinding gears stopped her cold. She felt the ground begin to shake, the tiny pebbles on the desert surface starting to dance.
She tried to stand, now meaning to run. Instead, she lost her balance and fell backwards on her butt.
The thing in the dirt before her was moving, the front of it rising up in a cloud of dust.
Brynn let out a cry and tried to crab-walk backwards away from it. She had always imagined herself as an intrepid explorer, but now she was scared out of her mind.
A dark metal lip rose up out of the ground, stopping about ten feet in the air, revealing an open shaft. The entrance was pitch black, but she could smell oiled machinery and processed air. Her best guess was that this was some sort of government installation. Now she just wanted to get back to the jeep and get her phone. She had to call somebody, even if she didn’t know who.
Then a row of lights lit the interior of the shaft, leading down under the desert floor, and she saw something that made the breath catch in her throat.
There, etched into the metal on the inside of the shaft wall, was a symbol. She recognized it from her research, from the writing samples she was convinced were from another world.
It looked like a circle with a pie-piece missing at the top, like Pac-Man with his mouth open to the sky. A dot was in the middle of the circle. The symbol often appeared by itself at the beginning of documents.
Initially she had interpreted the symbol as a sort of greeting. Later, she amended her interpretation to something more like: “And so the story begins…”
Her mouth suddenly went dry. Her brain felt like it was on fire. This was it. This was the jackpot.
Now she was torn between returning to the jeep and descending into the sloped shaft to see what was there. That second option was clearly the worst thing she could do, but her insatiable curiosity was what got her here, so why not keep feeding it?
She climbed to her feet and dusted off her hands. The lights ran along strips near the top of the shaft, giving off a hazy blue-white light, like the lights in an abandoned mall parking lot at midnight.
Brynn took a step closer and tried to see deeper into the shaft, but the lights only illuminated the first ten feet or so. Beyond that were shadows.
Audentis fortuna iuvat, she thought. Her father had taught her that phrase, her first foray into Latin. Fortune favors the bold.
Brynn stepped forward into the shaft, feeling the cool air. The door had stopped moving, but she thought she could hear the dull, rhythmic thump of machinery somewhere below.
She stepped inside, the air causing goosebumps to break out across her forearms.
This is dumb, she thought, wondering if fortune also favored the idiotic. Maybe the bold and the idiotic were basically the same thing. The thought almost made her giggle, but she knew if she started, she might not stop. She didn’t want the greatest discovery of her career, hell, possibly in the history of archaeology, to begin with a hysterical laughing jag.
So she took a deep breath, smelling oily machinery along with a hint of ozone. Something was down there, and she might be the first person from Earth to see it, the first scientist to document it.
Brynn began to walk. She stopped, startled, as the lights overhead shifted. The ones behind her were turning off, while the ones ahead were lighting up. They were moving with her. Motion sensors?
The tunnel went straight down at a gentle slope, but didn’t go very far. Brynn counted the paces. Thirty-seven before she reached the end of the shaft. At the end was what appeared to be another door. It was curved at the top, more symbols written in a semi-circle above. She recognized one or two, but couldn’t make out the message.
She reached out and touched the door, feeling the cool metal thrum gently under her fingers. Suddenly, she wanted that door opened more than anything she'd ever wanted in her life. She put both hands on it and pushed. It didn’t budge. She traced her fingers along the edge, pressing and pushing for some kind of pressure lock.
She tried to get in for nearly half an hour. Then she sighed, looking up at the message. She might be able to translate it, but not here. She’d need to go back to the jeep, then return with the camera and her notebook. Back in her office at the college she had everything she would need to work on it. That was the thing to do.
Brynn walked back to the jeep to get her supplies, then spent the next hour taking pictures and drawing sketches of the exterior, the shaft, and the door and its writing. When she was done, she exited back out into the desert. The sun was already low in the sky. She realized she'd been down there a lot longer than she'd thought.
Should she just leave this thing open? Nobody was likely to find it, but now it was very conspicuous. But as she stood and looked at the open hatch, it began to close on its own. Panic seized her, and she almost thought about dashing back inside. But that would have been suicide.
She stood and watched the hatch descend back even with the desert floor, closing with a dull thunk and a puff of red dust.
It will still be here when you get back, she thought. And it will open again. The college was about a three-hour drive away. If she stayed up all night, fueled by those god-awful giant cans of energy drink, she might be able to decipher the message and make it back here by tomorrow.
She turned and headed for the jeep.
I did it, she thought. I really did it.
3
VANDER
Vander waded out of the pink surf a different person than when he’d gone in. His first meeting with the oracle had been far more eventful than he would have liked. A vision had appeared before her eyes, a revelation so evil it had melted away her eyes, so that the full vision had remained unseen.
The encounter had shaken him. But it had also firmed his resolve. The beach was empty now. The onlookers had likely grown bored and gone about their business.
He doubled over and coughed the water out of his lungs, his long wet blond hair dripping onto the sand. His eyes watered as he heaved up pink water.
Then he straightened and looked down the shore at the palace. Extending out into the water was the familiar bamboo veranda. Even from this distance he could see two figures clad in black, one man and one woman. His hair was white, hers black. The Nightshadows.
He almost longed to be back in the chamber within the reef, as horrifying as that had been. But he took a deep, ragged breath and walked towards them.
Hywin stood with them, no doubt filling their ears with trivial histories or something else they wouldn’t care about. He was going to have to keep this meeting short and try not to cause too much offense. But he had to leave soon. As the oracle had said, time was short.
He’d almost thought of simply taking dragon form and heading for the Icelands, but that definitely would have
been too great an insult. So he walked toward the veranda, still wet from his journey underwater.
They turned to see him. The girl was fair. He would give her that. Perhaps fair wasn’t the right word. She had a stark beauty, with her black bangs and delicate pale skin. Her eyes said there was nothing delicate about her, though.
The elder Nightshadow was an imposing figure, standing there in his black armor, with dark eyes and high cheekbones. They both looked wildly out of place among the verdant jungles and bright blue waters of the Emerald Isle. The two almost seemed to sap any color from the area around them.
“Greetings,” Vander said, walking up the steps that led out onto the veranda.
“Well met,” Sorian Nightshadow said, his arms clasped behind his back. He gave a curt little bow. “Your advisor here was just telling us about your meeting with the merfolk oracle. How did it go?”
“Not well,” Vander said. He glanced at Nevra, who was studying him with a little smile at the corner of her mouth. He looked back at Sorian. “I’m sorry you came all this way, but the arrangements will need to be postponed.”
Sorian just looked at him flatly, not reacting. The silence that hung in the air between them was communication enough. Vander thought what little color might have been in Sorian’s face was now completely drained away. Nevra looked more pleased than ever, though.
Sorian sniffed, his nostrils flaring just a bit. “The alliances designed to keep our clans from descending into all-out war have been crumbling one-by-one,” he said. “Do you wish to follow that precedent yourself?”
He was talking about the recent marriages that were supposed to happen between the Everfrosts and Wildfires. That had collapsed when the blue king married the wrong woman. Then Karth Wildfire was assassinated, and Kal refused to honor the arrangement with the Moonglows. The implication was clear enough. Sorian was threatening him and his lands. Marry my daughter or risk my wrath.
“I am not backing out of the arrangement,” Vander said. “I will marry your daughter. All I ask is your patience. A…situation has arisen that I must deal with first.”
Dragon Green Page 2