“Damian Finnerty. U.S. marshal for eastern Kentucky.”
Lyons relaxed a little. “Finnerty,” he said. “They figured you’d be the one called.”
“Who figured?” Finnerty grunted in confusion.
Lyons got to his knees and then to his feet. “President, his national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I’m a Marine major, special ops. Been watching Gregor ever since he was put in Eddyville.”
“I don’t buy it,” Finnerty said. “You killed three guards.”
Lyons shook his head. “None of those men are dead. It was staged. FBI got them out of there before you could examine the scene, am I right? The government was hoping Gregor would go for the stone if he had the chance, and he did.” He gestured at the rock and smiled. “Now I’m returning this puppy to its rightful owner. The United States of America.”
Whitney looked at him incredulously, angrier than she’d been in her entire life, then her hands dropped and curled into fists. “You let them escape! You bastard! You let Andy Swearingen be killed? You let my husband get shot, my daughter be tortured?”
At that instant, the gigantic lightning bolt encased the ridge above them.
From the blackened archway on the far side of the grotto, from the passageway the shamans’ souls were said to use to leave the chamber, came a rushing, harmonic blast. The air in the archway rippled and blurred like wind over a desert floor.
The mirage pulsed forward, striking Lyons from behind and throwing him onto his face. It picked Whitney up and pitched her to her side. Finnerty was pounded against the cave wall, where he slumped to one side. Tom was squished into the floor.
The invisible force punched Cricket in the chest. She reeled backward and landed behind a large boulder. She reached up and held on to the boulder as a sailor might a mast in a gale. The squalling buzz emanating from the stone became so mighty it threatened to burst her eardrums. She lifted her head and felt a hurricane’s wind buffet her cheeks. On the stone altar, she saw the moon rock’s surface turn translucent and then molten and fiery as if it were filled with the sun’s power.
“Its gonna blow!” Tom screamed at her. “Get down!”
Cricket saw her mother curl herself down into a ball and cover her head. But Cricket could not turn away. She squinted in awe as spinning electrical storms seemed to appear within the plasma inside the rock. One storm curled itself into a backward S that burst up out of the stone, turning into a brilliant coil of blue and yellow accelerated and amplified energy that arced and then whipped down toward the crack in the floor.
The crack and the floor around it instantaneously disintegrated into millions of glowing particles—fluorescent greens and blues and reds—all colliding and caroming off one another in complete and total chaos, all except for the thin spiral ones the golden color of a full moon at night. Those particles seemed to drill through the others, busting them apart.
Lyons tried to get up, to get to the rock. But the shaking inside the cavern became almost inconceivably violent. Chunks of rock burst from the ceiling. A fist-sized piece of debris struck his jaw, shattering it and knocking him out cold. A bigger chunk landed on top of Kelly’s body, crushing it.
One last tremendous oscillation pulsed through the cavern, breaking moon rock 66095 free of the geodesic wire dome that encapsulated it. The stone tumbled across the altar, fell, and bounced across the floor.
The oscillations and the buzzing died. The fluorescent grains of matter around the chasm began to gather like bees swarming their queen, fusing together into atoms that in turn clustered into molecules that arranged themselves in slowing cooling ever-darkening patterns until, within a matter of moments, the walls of the crack in the floor had returned to that black and stinking abrasive slag. The gash had widened to nearly five feet across.
The stone landed next to her mom, who still held her hands over her head. Cricket could see the rock; it was no longer fiery and translucent, but slowly fading to a dull and unremarkable gray. Her mother raised her head and stared at it, perplexed, this thing from another celestial body, this simple object that channeled energy in a way never before seen by man, this mystery that had threatened to destroy their family, their place in the world, forever.
“Gun, Whitney,” Finnerty croaked. “Forget the stone. Get your gun.”
But Whitney kept staring at the rock and now she reached for it. Tom got up on one elbow. “Whitney, no! Don’t touch it,” he said.
“Get away from the stone!” Gregor bawled. “It’s mine!”
Whitney looked up to see the materials scientist sprinting at her in an insane rage. Tom lashed out his foot, trying to trip him, but Gregor nimbly jumped it, and made for Whitney. “I’ll kill you all, just like I killed MacPherson,” he seethed.
“Mom, get away,” Cricket screamed.
But Whitney grabbed the rock. Gregor lunged and got hold of the stone at the same time. Whitney held tight with both hands and they fought for it, battling in the black dust and the electrical smoke that choked the grotto. For an instant Cricket saw the stone sliding from Gregor’s grasp and her mother turning her hips, trying to wrench it completely free of his fingers.
“Never!” Gregor screeched.
He rocked his head back and smashed it down against her mom’s face. She grunted in agony, let go of the rock and fell forward, blood gushing from her nose and mouth. Gregor let loose a primal wail of triumph and brandished the stone high over his head.
Cricket flashed on the way Gregor had struck Lyons back there on the No Return River. He was going to kill her mother with it. That triggered some energy source deep inside her, an energy source more powerful and profound than any she’d ever felt before. It coursed through and electrified every cell in her body. At the same time, she heard that voice, that woman’s voice that was her own, telling her to save her mom, that after everything that had happened, Whitney could not die this way. She surged upward, no pain in her knee now, and flashed across the grotto.
“Gregor!” Cricket screamed.
The scientist turned from her mother to face Cricket, still brandishing the rock.
“Cricket! No!” she heard her father yell.
But Cricket was no longer the naïve young teenager who had entered the cave nearly four days before. She was an entirely different person, consumed and driven by the mysterious energy that welled, accelerated, and now amplified inside her. She drove her shoulder square into Gregor’s chest.
At impact, it was as if a shock wave of something primordial fluxed through Cricket; she felt as if she were coming apart into a whirling assemblage of particles that, together with Gregor, tottered for a beat on the brink of the black chasm that rent the cavern. Then they tipped, separated, and plunged over into darkness.
SURFACING
JUNE 19,2007
11:46 A.M.
ICU
COLUMBIA SOUTHWEST HOSPITAL
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
“LET ME SEE BOULTER,” Finnerty rasped. “Just for a minute.”
“Absolutely not,” his wife replied. “You’re six hours out of surgery for a collapsed lung and have had a nasty dose of some exotic radiation.”
The U.S. marshal for eastern Kentucky lay in a bed surrounded by beeping monitors. IV tubes fed into both arms. His skin was gray, his breathing labored, but he smiled. “Hey, you never know, babe: maybe it’ll help my sperm count.”
Natalie smiled in spite of herself. “You’ve got a one-track mind, you know that?”
“Just about you,” he said. “Nat?”
“Yes, Damian?”
“I had a lot of time to think underground. What do you think about adopting?”
Tears welled in her eyes as she reached out to hold her husband’s hand. “Why don’t we get you better before we think about that, okay?”
“Okay,” the marshal said, then he closed his eyes and drifted off again.
When Finnerty awoke, he was surprised to find Captain Boulter sitting by his be
dside. “Natalie let you in?”
“Took a lot of arm twisting,” the trooper said.
“Never works for me,” Finnerty said, shifting uncomfortably. “You’ll have to give me lessons.”
“How you feeling?”
“Like there’s a hot poker in my chest, but the doctors said they got the lung closed up tight,” the marshal replied. He glanced over Boulter’s shoulder at his wife standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. The commandant won’t tell me anything about the others.”
Natalie glared at him. “And he’s not going to until you’re better.”
“Ignore that woman behind the curtain,” Finnerty said. “Where are the Burkes? And the Marine, Lyons? I passed out in the cave after …”
“Tom Burke came out of surgery about the same time you did,” Boulter said. “He lost the arm. His wife’s heavily sedated and being treated for quark-decay exposure. Lyons was flown out of here by military helicopter. I have no idea where he is.”
Finnerty licked his lips. “And Gregor? The girl? The stone?”
Boulter’s expression tightened. “Still looking.”
2:20 P.M.
TOWER RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Helen Greidel stood before armed sentries guarding the makeshift road up Tower Ridge. The landslide rubble was visible behind her. She held her hand to her earpiece, then nodded and looked into the camera.
“In the aftermath of a powerful and unprecedented second earthquake here in eastern Kentucky, soldiers are still searching the depths of Labyrinth Cave for survivors,” she began. “Eight people, including six members of the Army Corps of Engineers who were operating a tunnel-boring machine when the quake hit, are known dead. Two people remain missing—Robert Gregor, one of the inmates who escaped and took refuge inside the cave, and Alexandra ‘Cricket’ Burke, daughter of Artemis Project leader Tom Burke and his wife, Whitney. They and two others were pulled from the ground late yesterday after a second boring machine was flown into the site by helicopter.
“Beyond basic information about the rescues, neither NASA nor the U.S. Army is granting interviews,” Greidel went on. “That and the fact that security remains wartime tight here has raised serious questions about what really went on here not only within the media but among members of Congress, who are already calling for hearings. In other developments …”
Deep inside Tower Ridge, Jeffrey Swain waded south along Pluto’s River, which had receded over the past thirty-two hours to almost knee level. The physicist was clad in a white radiation suit. Five soldiers in similar outfits trailed behind him and Chester. Swain could see through the visor of Chester’s helmet. His chunky nephew was gushing sweat and looking miserable as he watched the screen of the sensor he held before him like a shield.
“Anything yet?” Swain asked.
Chester stopped and held out the sensor for the physicist to see. “Nothing even approaching the signature,” he said.
Indeed, the golden infinity symbol lay inert in its sea of deep turquoise. The bell curve of colors that measured the electromagnetic spectrum on the other screen was relatively flat. Only one bar—the one that noted quark decay—fluctuated at all.
“You ask me, Uncle Jeff, that stone’s history,” Chester said.
“We’re not giving up,” Swain replied. “That rock’s in here somewhere and we’re going to find it. We have to find it or this was all for nothing. Have you forgotten that transmuted cavern above us? I’m betting those metals in the walls up there are elements we’ve never seen before!”
Swain and his nephew had been in and out of Tower Ridge twice to examine the transmuted ores inside the Shaman’s Catacomb and to search for the stone. On this third trip, Hayes’s soldiers had brought collapsible cable ladders and they’d all climbed the sixty feet down through the gash in the floor from Shaman’s Catacomb into this passage. They’d been working their way north, following the downstream course of the subterranean riverbed for nearly an hour.
“I know how you feel, Uncle Jeff,” Chester replied. “So close, yet so far.”
“That’s not it at all,” the physicist snapped, suddenly very agitated. “Carson MacPherson could be an asshole, but he was my colleague and research partner for more than twenty years. He lost his life over that stone. Ten other people died because of that rock. A girl not much younger than you died because of that rock.”
Chester stopped and peered through his visor at his uncle. “That all that’s bugging you?”
“No,” Swain admitted. “I keep telling myself that I’m here because of the science, Chester. But I’m not. The truth is that I’m here because our government had an object that might have solved all our energy problems and then lost it. I’m here because of commerce and economic vitality, not science.”
The physicist felt himself working up into a frenzy and he went on without a moment’s pause. “Has that woman, Greidel, managed to broadcast that story to the world? No. Why? Because the government doesn’t want the media to know that it had a rock that amplified energy, changed elements, and then disappeared. All they care about is saving face, recovering that stone, and then getting to the moon so they can find more. And I’m being used in the whole thing. Jeffrey Swain, the great hero who discovered room-temperature superconductivity. The hero who’s a farce is more like it.”
He threw up his hands in disgust.
“Why are we helping them, then?” Chester asked in a voice low enough that the soldiers behind them could not hear. “Why don’t we just leave and go home?”
“I don’t know,” the physicist replied. “Maybe I just need to see the thing that cost Carson and all those other people their lives. Maybe by seeing it, I’ll get some sense of closure.”
“You’ll be okay,” Chester said as he patted his uncle on the arm.
Swain nodded sadly and watched as his nephew turned and went forward under a low rock vault. He saw the teenager come to a quick stop and jut his head forward at the sensor. “I think we’ve got something,” Chester said, holding out the device. The infinity symbol had begun to fluctuate ever so slightly.
Together the physicist and his nephew began to slosh through the water, casting their lights about the cavern ahead.
“It’s here, Uncle Jeff,” Chester said. “It’s got to be—”
He stopped in midsentence, shining his headlamp among the rocks along the banks of the underground river. Swain leveled his headlamp that way, too, and his breath caught in his throat. Cricket lay there on her side, her cave pack still cinched tight around her shoulders and waist, her right leg splayed away below her hip at an unnatural angle. Gregor lay just beyond her.
Chester ran in front of Swain, dropping the sensor into the mud. Swain raced after him, calling over his shoulder to the soldiers, “It’s them! The girl! Gregor! Come quick!”
Within seconds, one of the soldiers, a medic, was listening to Gregor’s chest. “This one’s gone.” He turned to Cricket, leaned over her, then popped upright. “She’s alive, but just barely! We got to get her out of here, now!”
The medic immediately applied emergency heat packs to her body, then wrapped her in a Teflon blanket. Three of the soldiers fashioned a litter and within minutes were rushing the girl back toward the gash in the ceiling that led back up to the Shaman’s Catacomb. Two soldiers remained behind with Swain and Chester, all of them looking at the busted, ruined thing that had once been Robert Gregor.
“What a waste,” Swain said, feeling a combination of hollowness and awe. “What a terrible waste of talent and promise. He could have changed the world, you know.”
He turned to Chester. “Is it here? The stone?”
The physicist’s nephew looked all around, then finally found the sensor lying in the mud. Chester picked it up. The infinity symbol had returned to its inert state. “It’s not registering anymore, Uncle Jeff,” he said. “Must have been a false reading.”
Swain looked back in the direction in which the soldiers had taken Cr
icket. “Yeah,” he said. “False reading.”
JUNE 18, 2008
9:30 P.M.
14 VALLEY LANE
TARRINGTON, KENTUCKY
“And we’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow night,” Whitney said, closing the cover of the novel.
“Can’t we read just one more page?” Cricket pleaded. She was curled about her pillow, wearing her favorite ratty blue nightgown. “I feel sorry for her and Duane.”
“It’s getting late, and you said you wanted to go watch the four-hundred championship tomorrow.”
“I’m gonna be in the finals next year,” Cricket boasted. “No matter what it takes.”
Whitney smiled at her daughter’s confidence. “How’s it feeling?”
Cricket lifted her leg to show fading red scars that ran from her ankle to mid-shin and again from her knee to mid-thigh She rotated her foot, then bent her knee and straightened it. “Doctor says I’ll be good enough to sprint in about a month.”
Whitney got up from the side of the bed, marked the page, and set the book, Jim Harrison’s Dalva, on the shelf next to one of Cricket’s track-and-field trophies. Whitney had read the novel—the story of a woman who endures tragedy, loses her way, then ultimately refunds herself through family—during her stay in the hospital and thought that Cricket, too, might learn from the story.
She knew it was a strange thing for a mother to be reading aloud to her fifteen-year-old daughter, but it was something they had done every night since their ordeal in Labyrinth Cave had ended exactly one year ago. Reading at bedtime was something Whitney’s mother had always done with her, right up until a week before she died; and reading to Cricket made Whitney feel as if she were a link in a long invisible chain stretching backward and forward through time and events, giving structure and coherence to her life. She also believed that the time she and Cricket spent reading and talking before lights-out was like layer upon layer of cement being added to the foundation of a relationship that had been badly neglected in the thirteen months following Jeannie Yung’s death.
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