Ice Shock (18 page)

“You read his blog—he has an open invitation to go back.”

I close my eyes in dread. Ollie's betrayal went all the way. She must have snooped on me when I was using my computer.

They read my blog
.

“What about the boy's mother?” says the woman.

“Well, it's all rather tragic. She'll lose her son as well as her husband.”

“Who cares about that? The question is, do you think she knows anything? Is she a threat?”

My blood almost freezes when I hear these words, and I feel the sudden touch of Ixchel's fingertips on my arm.

Marius seems to think things over before responding. “I very much doubt it. It's clear from his blog that he doesn't confide in her.”

“You believe what he writes in his blog?”

“So far, yes. It's been consistently accurate.”

“So why has he stopped writing it? After he wrote the dream about his father, nothing …”

Marius gives a small sigh. “I very much doubt that he's stopped. He's simply moved it, as he did before.”

“How will we find it again? Without our agent to spy on him?”

“My dear professor, we don't need to.”

“Because he's no longer useful to us?” There's a touch of doubt in the woman's voice.

“Precisely so.”

They're silent for the next few minutes. This does not sound good. I'm dying to say something, and even in the shadows I can see that Ixchel keeps turning to glance at me. But we have to progress even more quietly now that they've stopped talking.

And then the woman starts up again. “I'm not sure we should kill him, not yet, anyway. It would be a waste of a useful resource.”

“How so?”

“I could use him as a test subject. For the gene therapy. It's almost ready for trial, but we need a human subject—one with the Bakab gene. And the experiments are illegal.”

“Dangerous?”

“Potentially fatal—no way to predict side effects.”

“And the benefits … ?”

“If I can get the gene therapy to work, Marius, the Sect will be in a position to completely take over from Ek Naab. We won't need them or their Bakabs to handle the Erinsi technology. And that's just the beginning. The other abilities of the Bakabs—we may be able to enhance them.”

“Enhance them?”

“Right now it's a weak ability at best. But in our hands, it could be turned into a weapon.”

Marius pauses just for a second, gives a tiny sigh. “If the boy can be useful to you, my dear, you must use him while you can.”

“So we agree?” the professor says. “Whoever captures the boy, he'll be taken alive?”

“Absolutely.”

At this point, Ixchel stops in her tracks. I can't get her to move. Martineau's and the professor's voices disappear into the gloomy depths as I silently try to persuade her.

When we can't hear their voices anymore, Ixchel pulls away from me and whispers, “No! We have to go back—didn't you hear what they said? Do you want to become a genetic experiment?”

Help the Sect to take over from Ek Naab … ? There's
no way
I can be part of that.

Ixchel turns around and starts walking back the way we came. She switches on the flashlight. I catch up and grab her wrist.

“How do you think you're going to get out? You think there's going to be a door handle?”

“Weren't you listening?”

“‘Course I was. But don't you see? We can't stop now. We have to find out what they're doing.”

“Josh, we're walking into a trap.”

“It's only a trap if they know we're here.”

And then I get the most terrible idea. Slowly, I relax my grip on her arm.

“Is it a trap? Have you tricked me into coming here? And now that you know what they've planned, you've changed your mind?”

Ixchel stares at me in horror. “No! What? You're crazy! What's wrong with you?”

I raise my voice. “Have you, Ixchel? Have you lied to me, too?”

Ixchel clamps her hand over my mouth and hisses, “Shut up; are you insane? Of course not! It was your idea to come here, idiot—
your
idea, not mine. I followed you.”

I push her hand away and glare at her.

She shakes her head. “You're crazy. I'm leaving. I'm sorry I ever met you.”

With that, she turns, continues walking back to the entrance.

That's when I realize how paranoid I've become. I chase after her again.

“Okay, maybe I'm wrong …”

“Maybe?!”

“Okay, I'm definitely wrong. But it wouldn't be the first time someone tricked me.”

“You're the one who let himself be tricked.”

“No, Ixchel. Listen.”

She stops.

“That girl they talked about, the one they said was an ‘excellent agent' … that's Ollie. I thought she liked me. You know,
liked
me.”

“Oh.” Ixchel taps her foot for a second. “I'm sorry. That's too bad.”

“But she was a spy all along,” I mutter, almost to myself. “A spy for the Sect of Huracan.”

Ixchel stiffens. “The Sect? Tell me you're kidding.”

I shake my head. “You've heard of them, then?”

“The Sect of Huracan? Everyone in Ek Naab has heard of them. But they're supposed to have been gone hundreds of years ago—disappeared.”

“Yeah, I'd say they're back. And in pretty good shape, too,” I say grimly. “Training secret agents in Switzerland and doing … whatever's going on here.”

I take the flashlight from Ixchel and offer my hand.

“Come on. We've got to finish this. We've got to find out what they're doing here. We don't even know how to open the outside door. We're already trapped.”

We jog back through the tunnel. It always slopes down, heading deep under Becan. Long past the point where we last saw Martineau and the professor, we come to a fork in the tunnel. We pick the left tunnel and continue. Then, from somewhere up ahead we see light and hear voices. I switch off the flashlight. Behind a gap in the rock, several figures are moving.

There are more voices this time, not just the two we heard on the way down. This time, they sound muffled, as if coming through filters or a mask. I just about recognize Martineau and the professor. Then, unmistakably, I hear the voice of Simon Madison rising above them.

“No, no, no, that's not how it works. The codex says something like, ‘In liquid form the Key is highly unstable … must be used within sixty minutes.'”

The professor says tartly, “Yeah … I remember the instructions, Simon.”

“But if you're using the liquid form of the Key after it's been frozen, it isn't fresh … it's not going to work.”

The professor sounds smug and confident. “We've modeled the experiment with a bio-sensor. Fresh or thawed—there's hardly a difference.”

“
Bio-sensor
—are you serious?!” Madison's voice rises to a shout. “A bio-sensor is fine for working things out in the nice, perfect environment of a lab. But things could be totally different here. We're working completely in the dark! We should stick to the damn instructions.”

Now it's the professor's turn to shout. Except she doesn't just sound loud and angry when she shouts—she sounds dangerous. I don't quite understand what, but something is clearly going wrong with their experiment.

“Did y'all see a high-tech production facility anywhere around here? No, sir! If you want this to work, then it's gonna have to be frozen. Now, Simon, apply the Key to the Adapter. Stop wasting my time.”

Marius interrupts in a mild yet firm way. “Perhaps you'd explain
your
objection to Simon's objection, my dear professor? After all, it seems like he knows what he's talking about …”

She rips into him. “Oh, well, pardon me, suddenly I'm surrounded by experts …”

Madison is still angry. “A frozen Key is not gonna work!”

The woman remarks, “The codex does say that the Key should be fresh. But in the lab we've used the liquid form of the Key after freezing, then thawing. It still binds tightly.”

Superpolitely, Marius asks, “‘Binds tightly' … ?”

The Professor begins to speak very slowly, like a teacher talking to a class. “Well, this Key, see, it sticks to a chemical coating on the surface of the Adapter. The Key changes the chemical coating in some way. Like magic! Yeah—imagine the Key is a magic potion, and we put some onto the Adapter. When the magic potion is on the Adapter, the Adapter can do its job.”

This time Marius sounds frosty. “No need for such a patronizing tone, my dear lady.”

The professor sighs, exasperated, but she keeps going. “We activate the Adapter with a ‘magic potion'—the Key. Then we place the Adapter in the Container, and it activates the Revival Chamber. We think.”

Marius's lofty tone is back. “My dear, we all know what we're trying to achieve. I just don't see why you aren't taking Simon seriously.”

“Right,” Madison agrees.

With a tone of finality, she says, “Why waste more time arguing? Do the damn experiment.”

Pressed back against the walls of the tunnel, we can hardly
see anything of what's going on. I lean forward for a second and catch a glimpse of six or seven people, all wearing gas masks and protective suits made of a crumpled blue material. Madison, as well as “Marius” and this “Professor,” stand by the entrance to the room.

Ixchel pulls me back against the wall. “Did you understand
any
of that?” she whispers, baffled.

I'm pretty excited to be more clued in than Ixchel, for once. “Not everything … but this stuff is mentioned in the first pages of the Ix Codex. I think they're going to try to use the Adapter in the Container. To activate the Revival Chamber—whatever that is. But for this to work, it needs some kind of chemical reaction. Madison thinks that one of the chemicals in their reaction might have deteriorated.”

“The Adapter?”

“No, the Key. Shh. I'll explain in a bit.”

There's a long silence. Seconds turn to minutes.

Finally, the professor says in a strained voice, “Well … ?”

Madison replies, “It's all in position.”

“But nothing's happening.”

“I told you! The Key must be fresh!”

The Professor snaps, “Listen, sonny, it's not the freshness that's the problem here …”

Martineau asks, “Then what?”

She sighs, sounding tired. “It could be a number of things. Bottom line—we need to do more research.”

Their experiment didn't work …

“Or we could just try the crystal form of the Key, as it says in the codex,” Martineau says, in a dry voice.

Irritably, the Professor replies, “Well, sure, that's a no-brainer. But it'll take months to make the crystal. All our attempts have failed so far—I think it needs to be made in zero gravity. Do y'all have
any
idea how hard it is to get time on the space station?”

Madison says nothing, but pushes past them both. He starts walking away from the bottleneck of suited observers near the room.

And straight toward us.

I'm paralyzed with shock; Ixchel's just the same. We blow the fraction of a second that we have—our only chance to make an escape.

Amazingly, Madison walks right past us both. We're pressed back against the wall, hidden in the shadows of the tunnel. But even so, I'm surprised. Then it hits me—with the protective suit and gas mask, his side vision is limited. His head is bowed when he approaches; he nurses one arm in a sling. The others walk past too—incredibly, within a foot of us.

Totally oblivious.

I've just begun to think we've gotten away with it when the last suited person passes us and then stops, turns around slowly. She must have caught something out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn't seem sure. She reaches for a flashlight on her tool belt. As the light goes on, I grab Ixchel and run toward the room they've just deserted.

The suited woman yells, “Hey!” and there's a panicked
rush in the tunnel beyond, as the others turn around to see us. The second we're inside the room, I press a large button in a panel against the door. We watch, our breath catching in our throats as the rock door slides closed. We're entombed for the second time today.

I can hear them behind the door—angry voices, mostly Madison's.

“He's mine,” he orders. “No one touches him.”

A wave of claustrophobia hits me. For the first few seconds, it blots out everything else going on outside the stone door. I scarcely take in anything about the strange room. Ixchel's the same. We don't even talk. We run in opposite directions around the octagonal space, looking for any sign of a way out.

I manage to register that there's a tall lamp near the middle. It casts an acidic yellow light into the low corners of the room, but the ceiling is shadowed. Around the room, there's the eerie spectacle of stone sarcophagi—three against each wall except the closed entrance, twenty-one in total.

No way out.

Dominating the middle of the room is a small stone platform or altar, about waist high. The surface is covered with glyphs and wedge-shaped writing. Inserted into a groove on the platform is an object a little larger than a cell phone, with one end slightly fatter than the other. It is a sort of grayish salmon-pink. The surface looks as smooth as polished alabaster,
except for some tightly packed, intricately patterned markings near the wider edge. The materials don't look much like what I've seen of Muwan technology, but the way everything is covered in inscriptions seems familiar.

I immediately guess what it is from Montoyo's description:
the Adapter
.

Next to it there's a tiny plastic test tube. Ixchel is about to touch the platform when I shout out, “Don't!”