“Are you sure that is fruit, Reid? They look like dead rats hanging from the branches,” Blair said with skepticism. In the dim light before dawn, Blair had a point. The gourds were hairy lumps of a rodent brown color. The tree’s white flowers had a rotten smell that was grossly unappetizing.
Reid arched an eyebrow at Blair. “Blair. How can you not recognize this super fruit packed with vitamin C?” He made a playful tsk-tsk noise. Uh-oh, I thought, as Blair folded her arms across her chest. She was not a morning person and this was not a good time to tease her about her culinary skills.
“Seriously, Empath? Don’t discount the edge you have on all of us.” Her voice had a kick to it. They often ribbed each other but this time I felt I was missing something because my intuition shivered for a second and then subsided.
“OK. OK. Let me rephrase that. I thought your taste buds would be curious to try an exotic fruit. Of course, you are correct that I can impart more knowledge from touching this tree than most.” Reid held his hand against the trunk. “Inside here, it is hollow except for the gallons and gallons of water. That’s why the baobab tree is also called the Tree of Life. And why it is fireproof. No funny business, Patrick. We are trying to keep a low profile.” Reid pointed a finger at Patrick and Patrick flipped up his hands to show him he was innocent of any hijinks.
Dr. West had mentioned empaths could be skilled water diviners or dowsers. Finding important resources or commodities in the earth was the way Reid had explained his family wealth. In the desert, nothing could be more precious than water, and I was relieved Reid could find it if we needed it.
“Should be called the Tree of Ugly,” Blair muttered. She was cranky. We were all jet-lagged and hungry. “Or Tree of Stench.”
“Now, now. Don’t judge a book by its cover…or its smell.” Reid pulled two gourds down and tossed them to Patrick and Blair. “I’m told they are quite tasty. You can eat them on the way. Sorry, Whit, but you know the rules. We have to stick with what we know is safe.” Reid tossed me an orange from his backpack and started to peel one he kept for himself.
Blair muttered, “Chewy goat last night for dinner and dead rat fruit for breakfast…makes me wish I had a food allergy…”
The juicy fruit in my hand was exactly what I needed to quench my thirst and give me a boost but I offered it to Blair. She was not eating her baobab fruit and we all needed fuel. As the field leader, I had to put my team first and I wasn’t all that hungry yet.
She declined. “No. Reid’s right. This will be fine once we get moving. It’s the smell of these musky blossoms decaying on the ground that is bothering me. Reid may be an empath but I doubt he knows how it feels to have my sense of smell. It’s a family curse.” Blair stared hard at Reid and once again I felt like I was missing something. They seemed to be fighting without words but I could not hear what it was about. Before I could intervene, Reid quelled the argument.
“Blair, you lead since you know where we are headed. Whitney wants us to get to the cave as soon as possible which, given the brain-boiling heat, seems like a good idea as the sun will only make it worse,” Reid suggested, and Blair agreed. Her countenance brightened and I was glad Reid had brokered a truce. Navigation was one of her many talents. In fact, she and Reid were both excellent at orienting themselves to our position and direction.
I looked toward the cave, trying to judge its distance, but the flat plain devoid of landmarks made it difficult. “Let’s put some space between ourselves and the village as quickly as possible. We want to make it to the cave before the sun melts us.”
Reid stuffed his orange peel in his pocket. We didn’t want to leave a careless trace of ourselves on the ground and I had the sensation we were being tracked despite our precautions. We had to get out of the open plain and to higher ground. I wondered if it was Vlad.
“Blair, got any more Diet Coke in your backpack?” Patrick croaked. His voice was rusty with sleep. “This may be a super fruit but I am still super tired.” Blair’s eyebrows shot up in delight and I felt a smile turn my lips, as we both knew Patrick was going to reap the benefits of her Mary Poppins backpack. “As a matter of fact, I do. It’s the last one so enjoy it.”
“Don’t you mean, ‘Have a Coke and smile,’ Blair?” Reid asked. I groaned inwardly. Why did he have to keep teasing her? I made the cut it sign to him across my neck. He opened his mouth, about to protest, but Blair took care of herself.
“Thanks, Mean Joe Green, but that slogan is for Coke and about ten years too old. We are talking about DIET Coke here and its slogan is ‘Just for the taste of it.’” Patrick caught up to Blair and took the Diet Coke. I could hear the two of them discussing how ridiculous it was that Reid was so culturally out of touch. I saw the twinkle in Reid’s eye at his small success and with a wave of his hand he showed me this was what he intended. It was classic crane to take a hit to make a bigger gain. I smiled and grabbed his hand as we walked across the hard and barren ground, happy.
I felt him in my mind again. “How are you doing that so easily? Have you been practicing with Mr. Parks?”
Reid laughed. “No, I think it is more that you are not blocking me so much. I am always intrigued by what you are thinking and feeling. And, I am not as disciplined as you are so I can’t seem to help myself but try and uncover these answers. I don’t want to scare you but I think you are actually starting to trust me. Or at least that’s what I could feel when we were dancing at Mr. Parks’ house.” As we walked toward the cave, I thought about what Reid said and realized he was right except for one thing—Karen.
In front of us were the steep steps up to the cave; they were made out of rock. It was impossible to climb wearing our packs and there was only one rope left. I thought about the Air Force’s “Rule of Three” that I learned during my shadow week of training with F-15 fighter pilots. The number three could keep you alive if you remembered you could last three minutes without air, three weeks without food, three days without water, and three hours without shelter in extreme conditions. It made the decision of what to bring simple: we needed water and some food and the rest we could leave and hide at the base of the cliff.
“I didn’t know you went to Fairchild. It’s not in your file,” Reid said with interest. He was in my mind again and my eyes flashed with surprise because I hadn’t thought about anything that would have given away the Spokane, Washington, Air Force base training location.
He answered the questioning look on my face. “You were remembering the Rule of Three in Bosco’s voice. He was also my instructor.” Reid gave me a sheepish shrug. “And my cousin.”
Bosco was a burly man with a voice as loud as a cannon. He was a terrific instructor and had kept a close eye on me. “He was your cousin?” I asked. I did not think about it until now but there was a family resemblance.
“Of course. Whit, the Cloccans are your sworn guardians. You didn’t think you were shadowing that camp completely alone, did you? Cloccans have surrounded you your entire life,” Reid said in a gentle voice. That’s when it clicked in my mind and my eyes looked to Blair. It all made sense. How could I have missed it? She was a Cloccan like Reid.
Chapter Fourteen: Canary in a Coal Mine
I shifted through the information that had shaped my friendship with Blair. We had become friends through sports, and working together was the foundation of our relationship. Blair and I had always been a team as we competed against opponents and not each other. There was equality and support in our friendship and that’s why I never questioned why she went on training trips and hellish camp sabbaticals with me. Her support and effort were part of her personality; it was even present in kung fu, and the reason Mr. Parks said he trained us both as panthers was because he said we shared the same destiny. Best friends were on the same path no matter what.
Maybe she did participate in some of these things to help me because she was Cloccan…but if the shoe was on the other foot, I would have done the same for her. Blair was Cloccan but it didn’t ch
ange anything. That was not the reason for our friendship and I always felt a part of her family. That’s when it occurred to me.
“It’s her whole family, isn’t it?” I asked Reid. The Delaney family had taken care of me my whole life. They never asked many questions and given Blair permission to go with me all over the country, sometimes returning thinner and bruised from “camp.”
“Yes. The Delaneys are Cloccan but you were not their assignment. You and Blair found each other on your own and, after you became friends, some of the security division in the Cloccan tribe approached them. It was arranged as an informal agreement that they would keep an eye on you, and I think they offended Mrs. Delaney by asking her. She would have done nothing less,” Reid said holding onto my hand. “Whitney, I promised you I would not keep you on the outside of conversations. Cloccans can create and hear very low sound waves. Earlier, I know you sensed something in the air between Blair and I. That was Blair pretty much giving me the equivalent of the Cloccan middle finger.” Reid laughed and his eyes shone with amusement. “I’m not complaining about Blair. Lucky for me she didn’t use her fingernails across my back like her much more volatile best friend. I’m telling you to clear the air.” I cringed at Reid’s reference to my swipe and was glad for the small pebbles cascading down the cliff as Patrick walked to the edge to find us.
“Come on, guys. What is taking you so long?” Patrick was wearing the pack full of water and food we had sent up. He looked impatient and ready to go. We climbed to the top of the steps and discovered a narrow plateau with a worn path that meandered to the astronomer’s observatory.
Outside the astronomer’s hut there were rectangles of sand that had lines and rocks placed on them. It was an instrument to divine the future and reminded me how important the astronomer was to the Dogon. He was a seer who declared the arrival of the Sigi, the ceremony that took place once every sixty years.
In short order, we arrived at the opening of the small cave and it was not as big as I expected. The drawings on the inside were low to the ground, as if a child had done the etchings into the rock. The exactness and intricacy of the work defied this possibility—extremely short adults had mapped the constellations. The Tellem.
“Did the Munchkins live here?” Reid asked as he bumped his head on the ceiling. He was hunched over and had a hard time bending down to see the drawings on the cave.
“Good guess but I’m thinking no. Remember what Tiembo told us? The Tellem people lived here before the Dogon and were called ‘the small red people.’ They were pygmies,” I answered in a soft whisper. Blair was right, there was a sacred feeling to the place.
“Really?” Blair asked, turning around and looking at me from the front of the line. I wondered what I said that caught her attention. Then I realized that it did sound crazy.
“Trust me, it’s too early for me to be creative and my brain is on overload,” I said with a nod. We moved deeper into the cave and thankfully it got taller and wider. Even though Reid was able to stand up the drawings only went as tall as his waist and he had to bend down to see the stones. The red stones Patrick described were strategically placed into each drawing. I could not see a path to a larger stone. To me, it looked haphazard.
Reid felt one of the red stones with his hand. “It’s cinnabar. It is the common ore of mercury. It’s strange to find it here. Usually, this metal is associated with volcanic activity and hot springs, not a desert.”
The hair on my arm rose. I had been thinking of the cinnabar shield this morning and that I had seen the red color of Sirius and the light from the cliff before. Red was a color that kept popping up and I felt it was not a coincidence.
Patrick stood in the small concave dip in the cave and spun around. “See? This is what I did to see the path of the red stones. This is how you find the door.”
“Yeah, and I have a feeling once you see inside the door you will know why the Tellem were red,” Blair cryptically said to me.
“Sounds interesting,” I said as I followed Patrick into the sunken portion of the cave. I spun around to see if I could see the path he was talking about and was unprepared for the infrared impact on my eyes. The cave floor blurred with red. Ominous small cracks began to fracture the ground with the scarlet glow. Soon, they would cover the entire area. We had set off some sort of trap.
“Don’t move,” I commanded in a voice that was rigid and direct. Reid and Blair were outside the circle and they froze. A thin path toward a narrow threshold materialized, as it remained the only area untouched by the red fissures spreading like angry capillaries across the cave floor.
“What is it?” Blair asked. Her voice was as tense as her muscles. Reid had crossed into my mind and saw what was happening. My eyes scanned the cave and amid the red eruptions there was a series of boulders that formed an escape ladder.
Reid knew what to do and remained calm. “Blair, we need to move three feet to the left and stand on that large boulder. Then we will move precisely two feet at a time to the other boulders around the cave until we can make the jump into the depression with Patrick and Whitney. Let’s make it quick on three. One, two…three.” Blair and Reid moved with grace and precisions around the perimeter of the cave until they were finally close enough to jump. My heart was pounding. The red cracks were amplifying and I could feel a vibration beneath us. I wondered if the entire cave was about to collapse.
They jumped. Patrick and I were able to steady them as they hit the uneven ground. The path to the door was getting thinner. I did not want to walk a tightrope so I started to cross.
“Wait, Whitney.” Reid grabbed my arm to prevent me from walking across. His face was scrunched up in pain and he and Blair had their hands over their ears. There must be noise in the cave Patrick and I could not hear. “When Blair and I went around the boulders, it triggered an infrasound Cloccan distress call. If a Cloccan constructed this hidden chamber, they will expect someone who knows the rhythmic key to find the hidden door. Blair, you must have been the first to walk toward the door to the chamber yesterday since your walk is set to Cloccan rhythm. We have to repeat the harmony to keep the bridge from crumbling.”
All this time, I had thought Reid and Blair had a confident swagger because they played sports. I would have never guessed it was because they were Cloccan.
“OK,” I agreed as I banked the distance of the bridge with my hands so everyone could see its width. Reid called out the dimensions and the northeastern heading to Blair as if he saw them on a map. My sense of timing reached urgent. “Let’s move. It looks like the rock of the cave floor is melting and it feels really hot in here.”
Reid and I followed Blair and Patrick. Then Reid turned around. He picked me up and spun me around to rest on his toes. “Sorry, Whit. I can’t take the chance. Without music, I am leery of your sense of rhythm. Do me a favor and hold onto me like we did in dance practice as we move across.” There was not enough time to argue. I looked around the cave and saw the floor starting to turn vermilion.
“Someone made this pretty challenging. I wonder how many people did not make it to the chamber at all,” Patrick murmured.
My skin tingled at Patrick’s words and I felt a deep sense of profound gratitude to Marlin Steele because his enhanced vision had saved our lives. Marlin was precognitive…what if the extractor experiment was a sacrifice and not an accident?
The gilded statues at the end of the Memorial Bridge appeared in my mind. Dr. West had led us to the one called Sacrifice on his scavenger hunt. A rider on a horse flanked the bridge on each side. One showed a warrior leaving his family, titled Sacrifice, and the other had a man and woman going into battle, titled Valor. Together, they were referred to as the Arts of War.
Before this moment, the scavenger hunt had seemed like a silly exercise. In fact, it had annoyed me. I recalled questioning Dr. West about why he put us through the ruse. As a precognitive, it was not like him to waste time—his or mine. That told me something. It may have contained informati
on we would need later.
“I would have never thought of that,” Reid said with a smile, watching me think of our scavenger hunt destinations in my mind. “I think my respect for the guy bumped up a few notches. I thought he was one of those people who enjoyed being a pain in the neck for the fun of it.”
As I moved in time and across the bridge with Reid, the purple glow reappeared in my mind. The luminous swirl of color blended into a delicate violet cloud. Something transcendent happened between us when I totally dropped my guard. Whatever it was, the light show stretched beyond my ordinary range of perception and I did not usually see expressions of color inside my head.
I concentrated on my actual eyesight to push away the internal image. The buttons of Reid’s shirt came into sharp focus while behind me I could hear stone scrape against rock. It created a chalky smell and I turned my head to see what caused the noise. The chamber door was sliding open and the heat around us magnified. I faced Reid and leaned around him to look back toward the source of the heat. I gripped onto him as I saw the molten red color oozing across the bridge. The open door had triggered the bridge to dissolve.
“Hurry, Reid,” I said as I held onto him. “The bridge is about to collapse.” I hated that I couldn’t see where we were going. That’s when I remembered what Mr. Parks had taught me to do when I lost my sight: to use Reid’s eyes. We had a short distance left to cross.
“Don’t worry, we are almost there,” Reid answered. He glided us onto the threshold with Blair and Patrick. “Hopefully, someone will have turned on the air conditioning inside the chamber. Man, it’s hot. Patrick, can’t you do something about this?”
“I could if I could see the atoms I needed to control. This trap is designed to stump pyrokinetics as well. We were lucky we got this far yesterday by accident.” Patrick rubbed his hands together and created a small flame. The fire made the room bloom with scarlet light from the lustrous red crystal that covered the walls.
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