by Brandt Legg
“There’s more.”
“What could be worse?”
“There is another Eysen.”
Markol felt dread knot in his stomach. “What? That means . . . ”
“Yes. Trynn has managed another insertion.”
“Is it active?” Markol asked, not believing for a moment that there could actually be a second active Eysen operating in the far future.
“It is.”
“Oh no,” he breathed, almost feeling the reverberations of the Terminus Doom crumbling the world around them. “We must take it out.”
Markol knew Shank meant for him to kill anyone operating it. There was no other way.
“We don’t know how many people,” Markol said. “The archaeologist’s Eysen proved that. There could be ten, twenty, maybe more.”
“It doesn’t matter if there are a hundred people who know how to operate the Eysen,” Shank countered. “We must kill them all. Eventually they will run out of those who know what to do with it, or they’ll be too afraid to touch it.”
Markol nodded. “Then I must get to my lab.” Suddenly having another idea, he turned back. “But the Imazes launch in the morning . . . ”
“We can’t wait until they get there—if they get there at all.”
“But if they do . . . they could locate one, perhaps bring it back.”
“A challenging proposition, but I have people onboard, Imazes loyal to me. If anything can be done to advance our objectives, it will happen.”
Sixty-Three
Trynn touched Shanoah’s shoulder, gently tracing the scar he found there, and met her eyes. “You’ve never really told me exactly what happened out there,” he said as the sun set over the mountains behind them.
“It’s difficult to talk about.”
“I’m sure it is, but you’re about to return there. You’re going to have to face it again. Whatever happened, I think it would be wise to relive it now, rather than when you are actually flying out there in space.”
“I know you’re right,” she said, looking off into the distance, as if traveling millions of miles in her thoughts. “We were approaching the blind,” she began before going silent for several minutes.
He allowed her that, knowing she was steadying herself, collecting the memories and, in a way, going back in time, which was something he understood better than most.
“We were approaching the blind,” she finally began again. “That’s a part of the Kaynor system.”
Trynn knew about the blind. There were an unknown number of them in the universe; a cousin of a black hole, a place where communications and electronics equipment fail.
“It’s like a portal, you know?” she said, not sure how deep his knowledge was on the subject. Blinds had challenged and baffled Cosegan astronomers for hundreds of thousands of years. “There are no charts. The calculations must be done in-flight. And you know what happens if you go in at the wrong angle or, even worse, once you’re inside, if you cross a line and get on the wrong trajectory . . . ” Her voice rose, filled with panic, something he had never heard from her. “You get lost, maybe never come out, or wind up who knows where, who knows when.”
“And you got lost?” he asked, trying to calm her with a soothing tone even though he was caught up in her own distress, afraid for her and all that she’d gone through, even more fearful that she was going back.
“We got lost,” she said quietly. “The worst part is, I don’t know how it happened. None of us knew. We’d gone in at the correct angle, the lights were lining up, and then . . . we . . . there was a twist, something . . . I don’t know. We were suddenly going askew. The lights, you wouldn’t believe how they twisted. Pulsers rained in, the colors slammed again and again . . . there is no way to even understand what was happening.”
She paused, looking at him, but he saw her focus was light years away.
“The equipment meant nothing. I don’t even know how the ship stayed together, why the oxygen maintained, because everything else was insane.”
Trynn wanted to ask what she’d done, how they’d come out of it, but the look on her face stopped him. Her eyes appeared as if she was drowning in fear and confusion. She stayed silent for several more minutes, at least externally. Inside he could see swirls of chaos as she relived those moments. He knew enough about blinds to understand that being inside one could feel like years and take only minutes, or the other way around. He recalled hearing another Imaze once describe being within a blind: “There is no place in the universe that one fully grasps that the human invention of time has absolutely no bearing on reality.”
When Shanoah began to talk again, it came out as a whisper. “Stave, I couldn’t save him,” she said, speaking of her late husband, who’d died on the mission. She stood near the window, as if trying to find her way back. “It was the colors,” she said, “that changed things the most.”
“Colors?”
“So many colors, ones you’ve never seen before, impossible to describe . . . yet somewhere in the imagination, colors like that must exist. I had never experienced anything like them, not even in my dreams.”
Trynn tried to visualize flying through colors.
“They overtook us. I know it sounds strange, and it’s difficult, even for me, to understand that I don’t know how to describe it all, but it was as if we were drowning individually, collectively, the ship, the world, everything, engulfed in these colors, strangling the light from us, while at the same time caressing us in an ecstatically beautiful expression of love.”
“So it’s something like duality?” Trynn asked.
“I guess that’s a simple way to describe it. It was like being swallowed in a kaleidoscope . . . faced with agony, death, evil itself, and at the same time enveloped in all that love.”
As she described the dark side, the fear and repulsion on her face made her look angry, old, scared. Yet when she spoke of the light, she radiated a stunning glow, with an angelic, youthful appearance.
“I don’t know how long we were in that light, but at some point, minutes or days . . . ” She looked at him in complete seriousness and whispered, “It might’ve been years.”
Sixty-Four
Rip and Gale recognized the old man from a photo Booker had sent them. “Hello,” Gale said, waving.
Rip thought the man, dressed in a rumpled suit without a tie, could have been a hundred years old.
“You must be Rip and Gale?” the man asked.
“Yes.” Rip nodded. “Thank you for meeting us. And our daughter, Cira.”
“Hi,” Cira said. “Pretty park.”
“Hello. Yes, a little out-of-the-way place, good for a meeting such as this.” He winked at Gale. “I’m Tom Avery. Everyone calls me Avery.”
“Avery, this is indeed a strange meeting. It’s amazing to me—I mean, that you would trust us with something like this.”
“You look like good people.”
“We are,” Gale said, smiling. “But it still seems strange.”
“Because I don’t know you?”
“Yes.”
“Booker Lipton, you know him?” Avery asked. “Well, he’s kind of an important man, for reasons you might not understand . . . ” He studied them a moment. “Anyhow, he knows some people who know me.”
“I know Booker can be persuasive, but an artifact like this . . .” Gale shook her head. “It would be priceless, and you’ve been charged with protecting it. Why allow us to see it?”
“They always said you’d come.”
“Who?” Rip asked, astounded. “Who said we’d come?”
“The people who put it there.”
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t know that anyone knows, but the story was that Jesus himself prophesied the year that a man and a woman would come seeking the sphere, and they were to be given it.”
“Given it?” Gale echoed.
Avery nodded. “You’re here. Carved into the case which holds it, there�
�s a date.”
“What date?”
“Today’s date.”
“Oh my god,” Gale breathed.
“How did it get here?” Rip asked, stunned by the news, but already imagining all that must’ve happened in the two thousand years since Jesus held his Eysen—if it was indeed an Eysen.
The old man looked at them curiously. “This is not the only important biblical artifact to make its way to the New World.”
“What do you mean?” Rip asked.
The man rubbed his chin, stared into Gale’s eyes for a moment. “The Arc of the Covenant is also in America.”
“It’s real?” Rip asked, his skeptical scientific mind having long ago dismissed the possibility of the gold box containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on the Mount. He would have wagered it never existed, yet after his discovery of the Eysens, he now believed anything was possible.
“Oh, yes,” the man said. “The stories, or legends, of how it got here are many among the handful who know that it did. As with most astonishing events such as these, money and power, faith and corruption, and perhaps some divine intervention, all merged, and it was brought here.”
“Here? You have it here?” Rip asked, adrenaline pumping through his veins in anticipation.
“No, no, it’s kept in Washington DC, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels underneath the great city.”
“Washington?” Gale echoed, surprised. “Why would someone decide to keep it there? I mean, there are so many risks . . . DC has been targeted as a first strike in the event of a nuclear war, it would be destroyed . . . why would they take that chance?”
“I understand why it can’t be on display,” Cira added, taking up her mother’s question. “But why wouldn’t they stash it away in some mountain somewhere?”
“The Arc of the covenant is not at risk,” Avery said in an amused tone. “They keep it in Washington to protect the city. No harm will befall the nation’s capital so long as the Arc is there.” He smiled. “That’s why they brought it there. No nuclear weapon could destroy such a thing. One might say that the un-precedented rise of American power owes itself to whats hidden beneath the city.”
“Incredible,” Rip said, wishing he could go on that quest, but the Eysens were much more pressing. Unless they are somehow connected, he mused.
Rip and Gale took a few moments to digest the stunning news. Rip’s mind raced to inevitable conclusions and theories, wondering how it might tie in to the Eysen and what else that information might mean to his enemies in the US government who were pursuing other extraordinary artifacts.
“Are the people at HITE and the NSA aware that the Arc resides in Washington?” Gale whispered to Rip. “What about the Foundation?”
“You don’t know where the Holy Grail is by any chance, do you?” Rip asked, only half-joking.
“There are stories, of course, as you must know, though I have no firsthand knowledge. But I believe it’s in England.”
Rip nodded, thinking that perhaps one day he might like to go on that adventure as well. But first, the Eysens. First he needed to survive.
“Have you seen it?” Rip asked, trying to get Avery and himself back on track, wondering if it was buried in the park somewhere.
“I have,” he said, as if this should have been obvious. “It’s kind of a small, black, onyx sphere. They claim it belonged to Jesus.” He paused and looked at them again. “Some thought it was a meteorite, others thought it was a direct gift from God to his son.”
“Have there ever been any reports of it lighting up or doing anything supernatural?”
“Nothing I’ve ever heard of,” Avery said, a curious look on his face. “You think it does?”
“Maybe.”
“Want to go find out? It’s just up the road a bit.”
“Where?” Rip asked, afraid at any moment the gunmen from Italy would start shooting again.
“Where else would you keep something that belonged to Jesus?” he asked. “It’s at the Old North Church.”
Sixty-Five
Booker had ordered Savina not to tell Rip about Huang until he returned to the island. “Rip is not going to be near his Eysen,” the billionaire argued. “He is not at risk.”
“What if he finds another Eysen in Boston?” Savina argued. “What if he initiates it, and they kill him, too?”
“It won’t happen.”
“What? He won’t find it, or they won’t kill him.”
“Rip would never initiate a new Eysen in the field,” Booker clarified.
“Didn’t he do it with the first one?”
“That was before he had any idea what he had. He knows better now.”
“There could be an accident.”
“There won’t be. And anyway, the Cosegans aren’t trying to kill him.”
“Tell that to Huang.” She spat the words. “Something is going on back there. Imagine all that technology, everything they know, and they can’t figure out how to save themselves. They’re counting on us! It’s desperate times. For all we know, they’ve already died, and like the light of a dead star, it keeps shining and we have no idea it’s happened.”
After the call, Savina, feeling utterly betrayed by her beloved Cosegans, called in her team. “We must figure out a way to operate the Eysen safely.”
They had all been told of Huang’s death. “Why don’t we wait?” one of them asked.
“For what?”
“Rip to get back to his Eysen. We could do a joint takeover.”
“It won’t work,” she said. “The Cosegans control them all.”
“But with four, maybe we could find a way to cross-check.”
She thought back on what had happened to Huang. “You may be onto something,” she said. “Our advantage is that we have all the data and recording of Huang’s death.”
“There may be a way to block them,” another suggested. “They’re using the energy contained in the Eysen to . . . kill . . . but it must be concentrated to work.”
“Assuming it was not designed as a weapon from the initial stages,” yet another said.
Savina sighed deeply. She loved the Cosegans and everything they had created. “It’s hard for me to imagine they set out to harm us,” she said. “However, they have. Or at least one of them did.”
“I know we already ruled out an accidental charge,” one of them said, “but we could be wrong.”
“We could always be wrong, but we cannot risk that.”
“A four-way link is our best option.”
“Yes, but not over distance,” she said. “We’re too exposed to what the Cosegans could unleash.”
“Then break the rule?” another suggested, referring to the longstanding rule that they did not keep the two Eysens together in one place.
“We’re about to have four Eysens,” she said, smiling. “It’s time to break all the rules.”
Avery stood aside to allow Gale, Cira, and Rip to enter the Old North Church first.
“Quite a bit of history here,” Gale mused as they walked into the centuries-old building.
“Oh yes,” the old man said with a twinkle in his eye, as if he might like to tell stories all day. “’Course, most folks know about Paul Revere.”
“Yes,” Rip said, anxious to get on with the search.
“Sure,” the man continued, heedlessly launching into the story, “back on a cold April day in 1775, ol’ Paul Revere had told a group of Boston patriots to hang one or two lanterns in the steeple of this very church to warn which way them redcoats were coming.”
“We know the rest,” Rip said, glancing out the window, worried someone might be coming for him and Gale.
“One of them was Robert Newman, the church sexton. The other was Captain John Pulling. They took the lanterns up those narrow stairs while Thomas Bernard stood watch for British out front.”
“Fascinating,” Rip said dryly. “But—”
“See, they had to have the light high enough
to warn the Charlestown patriots who were on the other side of the Charles River. Needed to signal them in order to know if those redcoats were going to cross the river with boats to come up at Phips farm, or if’n they were going to march over Boston Neck and the Great Bridge. ‘Course Paul Revere got the word and took off on his horse. Ended up he and a few others got the news out to dozens of towns.”
“Exciting,” Gale said, smirking at a silently annoyed Rip.
“Did you know those lanterns were only kept lit in the steeple for less than a minute?” Avery’s eyes widened. “They couldn’t risk any of the British troops occupying Boston to see it.”
“Thank you for the history lesson,” Rip said quickly, trying not to sound impatient.
“It all started in this building,” the old man said breathlessly, sounding as if he had been there. “The next morning was Lexington and Concord, the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. Many of the fallen are buried here at this very church.”
“That really is something,” Gale said, touching Avery’s shoulder while glaring at Rip, annoyed he couldn’t see how emotional the story was to the old man.
“You do make it come to life,” Rip said, pretending to be interested. “But if you could help us, we really don’t have much time, and maybe we should get going to wherever the . . . uh . . . artifact is.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing,” Avery said. “We’re there. Well, almost.”
“Where?” Rip asked, confused.
“It’s here.”
“Here? At the Old North Church?”
“It’s real name isn’t the Old North Church.”
“What is it?” Gale asked, unsure why the name would matter.
Avery smiled back at them. “It’s the Christ Church.”
Sixty-Six
Avery unlocked the door and ushered them into the dimly lit space. “Welcome to the underbelly of the oldest standing church in Boston.”