The Lost Code (19 page)

I SWAM INTO THE TUNNEL. IT WAS DARK EXCEPT
for the siren’s light. Reflected in the blue were the heavy, oblong figures of zombie koi, a pack of them, hovering in here, almost like guardians. We had to angle ourselves to pass between their fat, fleshy bodies, brushing against their clammy scales, and I almost wondered if they would turn on us, converge and devour us to protect this place’s secrets. But they just stared dumbly as we passed.

‘I hate these things,’ I said to Lilly.

‘They couldn’t be grosser.’

We rounded a bend. The siren was floating far ahead, at the end of a long passage. As we swam forward, she rose up out of sight.

‘Mine shaft,’ said Lilly.

I turned to her blue-tinted face. ‘What?’

‘I heard on the Free Signal that EdenWest is right near the site of ancient copper mines.’

‘Oh yeah, Paul said something about that. People that came here before the Vikings.’

The tunnel ended at a solid wall where the siren had been. A round shaft opened up above us. I pushed off the rock floor and rose through it. There were notches like ladder rungs carved in the wall. After a few meters the tunnel turned and continued upward at an angle. As I swam, I felt the pressure lightening. Above, the blue light seemed to ripple and separate in glassy diamonds. We were nearing the water’s surface.

I stopped just below and then slowly lifted my head and eyes. The tunnel angled up out of the water and, a few meters ahead of us, opened up into a large chamber.

Lilly’s eyes rose beside me. I nodded to her and we slowly crept ashore, gills tucking away, pulling in breaths of cool, damp cave air. As we stepped onto solid ground, her hand slipped into mine.

We entered the chamber. In the flickering blue, I saw circular walls and a curved ceiling. And there, hovering in the center of the space, was the siren.

I’d never had such a clear look at her, and now I saw that she was lovely, and yet, different. She had long, dark hair flowing down to her waist, the hair pushed back off her forehead with a band made of gleaming stones. She was all monochrome, shades of blue light, and yet I felt like, in my deeper mind, she had color. The simple dress she wore, sleeveless and down to her knees, was that crimson fabric of the priests on the pyramid, the belt tied loosely around her waist of hammered copper disks with turquoise crystal centers. The band above her forehead that held her hair back was ruby and jade. She wore a pendant around her neck, a leather strap holding a soapstone carving of some fearsome animal, a tiger maybe, only it looked larger, more fierce, but it was hard to tell because her light was brightest around her heart.

And the structure of her face, deeper-set eyes and a more pronounced forehead, high cheeks, her dark-toned skin—everything was so similar and yet so different. It was as if we were connected, and yet by such a distance of time, by so many thousands of generations, that we were almost different models of the human form.

“Hello?” I said to her. My voice echoed in the chamber.

She floated, not replying, gazing at me almost like she was sizing me up, deciding if I was worthy.

“What now?” asked Lilly.

“No idea,” I said, and yet I felt like that wasn’t true. I didn’t know what to do next, what was about to happen, but I had a strange certainty that something would. Like I’d boarded a train that was now in motion.

Then the siren spoke, its voice louder, harsher than I remembered it.
The key is inside you.

“What?” I asked.

The siren winked out. The world went black.

But not silent.

“What’s that?” Lilly whispered.

There was a humming, faint, but electric-sounding. Ahead, I saw a sliver of white light in the black. I gripped Lilly’s hand and headed for it.

As we neared, we saw that the light source was larger, but farther than it had seemed. My shoulder cracked against a rock wall.

“You okay?” Lilly asked.

“Fine,” I muttered. We rounded the little wall and found ourselves in another curving passage. The light was coming from its end. Electric light, spilling down this tunnel from a round opening.

We crept up to it and ducked in the last triangle of shadow. Ahead was a wide passage. It was also rounded, carved out of the rock, but its floor had been covered in smooth concrete, and a line of naked lightbulbs had been strung along the ceiling. I leaned out. To the right, the lights ended at a steel ladder that led up through a hole in the rock, toward more bright light above. The tunnel continued into darkness past that. To the left, the lights stretched away as the tunnel sloped steadily downward.

“Which way?” Lilly asked.

I looked for the siren’s light, but couldn’t see it. And yet, I could feel a steady tug inside, seeming to lead me in the right direction. “Down,” I said, and headed left.

We half ran down the tunnel, our bare feet slapping on the concrete. It went and went, other tunnels, unlit, branching off to either side. The rock walls were red.

“Look,” said Lilly as we started down a new passage. She was pointing to the wall. There was a shape carved in it.

“I’ve seen that before,” she said.

“Me too. On the Aasgard sign at Craft House.”

“Is it water?” Lilly asked. “Mountains?”

“Not sure.” I turned and kept moving. I had a feeling we were going to find out.

We’d been going a few minutes when we heard footsteps coming toward us. I squeezed Lilly’s hand and pulled her into a dark side tunnel. We retreated into the shadows and crouched, her slightly behind me, and I thought for a second about the fact that suddenly I was leading the way on this adventure. Owen Parker, first a turtle, then a fish, now some kind of action hero, like Tech Raider from those films we got from the ACF, the guy who always went into the flooded technopolises in search of treasure. He’d battle radiomutants and chem-zombies and always find some unbelievably attractive girl who’d been hiding out there with the bones of her dead parents, and then she’d join him and he’d take her by the hand and lead her to safety, and along the way it would turn out that she was good with a pulse rifle, too.

The footsteps were getting closer, two sets, and a dragging sound. Now voices:

“Don’t know why these fry-brains would want any of that junk down there,” said one. “Taking hostages, I get. But a bunch of Viking junk? What kind of sense does that make?”

“Can’t very well ask ’em now, can we?” said the other.

“Shoot-to-kill orders were a little odd, don’t you think?”

“Cartier said that Mr. Jacobsen was pissed about them knocking out the cameras down here. Apparently it’s going to take a while to fix all the wiring. Anyway, it was fun, right? Poppin’ some fry-brains. To do what we were trained for.”

“Yeah. Fun enough. And word is, once this Elysium thing is ready, we’ll be doing that a lot more.” I wondered what he was talking about. It sounded like shooting more people.

“Sounds good to me,” said the other. “Finally, some of the action they promised us.”

The two officers passed our tunnel, dragging a body. It had the dyed brown Nomad clothing. I wondered if this was a member of the Skull Team.

We waited until their footsteps had faded away and then kept going. The hallway continued angling downward, the air getting cooler and more moist.

As we walked, I felt like I was getting heavy, my legs slow. All my muscles felt like they were being buzzed somehow, like I was walking through an electrical field. I had a feeling like I was close to something, something big, calling to me, drawing me in like a magnet. And it felt like I couldn’t
not
go to it.

We used the string of lights as a guide, following a tunnel to the right, then left, and right again. It ended at a hole in the floor that had been braced with a metal ring. A steel ladder led through it. We climbed down, followed another passage to another ladder, down again, a passage, another ladder hole, all the while the magnet pull in my chest increasing. The fourth ladder hole was different. The light glowing out of it was brighter. I lay on the floor and inched forward, peering down.

“It’s a room,” I said, pulling myself back up. We climbed down, and as soon as we cleared the ceiling, the humming of energy became a low whine in my head. My foot slipped off a railing. My palms had gotten slick with cold sweat. I reached the floor and bent over, panting. The air smelled old, dry and sweet, and I felt like I couldn’t quite breathe in all the way.

“You okay?” Lilly asked, arriving beside me.

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

“Look at this place,” Lilly said quietly.

I slowly stood up. The walls made a perfect circle. More lights had been strung around the perimeter, but it was almost like they weren’t needed. The place seemed to light itself, as if all of its smooth surfaces were luminous. It had a domed ceiling, but unlike the caverns above, this time there were mathematically perfect arches built out of stone blocks, reaching from the edge of the wall up to the center of the ceiling, where a huge round stone, a ball of rose-and-white marble maybe two meters across, was lodged in what looked like it had once been an opening.

Directly beneath that ball, on the floor was a narrow, chest-high hexagonal pedestal made of tan stone, lighter than the color of the caves we’d come through above. Balanced on the pedestal’s flat top was a perfect sphere of black crystal.

“Obsidian,” I said, nodding at it. “Volcanic glass.”

“Check out these floors,” said Lilly, gazing down by her feet. We were standing on smooth, polished tiles. There was a design on them, something in blue-and-white blotches with gold borders. It looked like a giant map of landforms and oceans, but I didn’t recognize any of the shapes.

“And these walls . . . Owen, what is this place?” Lilly was walking slowly forward. The walls were covered in chipped and fragmented mosaics, their colors faded and in most places gone, though in what remained there seemed to be cities, stone pyramids and obelisks, coliseums and spiraling towers, arched bridges, and then ships, all similar to what I’d seen in the vision. There were also creatures, things with giant tusks, a striped catlike one with saber teeth that reminded me of the siren’s necklace.

I joined Lilly in the center of the room, still looking around. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I think it’s old. Really old.” Beside the pedestal was a simple rectangular folding table covered with papers and video sheets, and a lamp that was turned off. I looked up and spied the cameras around the ceiling. I hoped they were still disabled.

“Look,” said Lilly, pointing to the wall, at a section where someone had etched letters into the mosaic. They were crude symbols in comparison to the artwork behind them.

“Vandals?” I asked.

“Those symbols are Norse,” said Lilly.

“How do you know?” I asked her.

She laughed. “I’ve been coming to this camp for six summers. That whole Camp Aasgard thing is based on how Vikings came here once. And we learn about it in school over in EdenWest. There are other sites with artifacts around the lakeshore. But, these Viking symbols are on
top
of the mosaics, which means they didn’t build this temple. So who did?”

“Paul said these copper mines are over ten thousand years old,” I said. “Maybe whoever was mining here back then built this temple, too.”

I looked beyond the map-covered table, and that’s when I spied the other Nomad body. She was lying over by the wall, her head at a wrong angle, her arm extended out so that it was leaning up on the wall. There was blood on the floor. On her hand too. Her palm was covered in it. I looked around. What had they been after? The skull that the Nomads mentioned? Could that be the same as what I’d seen in the vision?

“So, that would mean that before EdenWest, before America, before the Vikings, someone was coming here, and they built this place,” said Lilly, looking around. “Wait.” She gazed at me with wide eyes. “What the Free Signal said, about the Eden domes being near ancient sites. Do you think EdenWest was built in this spot because
this
place is here?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s why the Vikings came here, too. Searching for this place. And now the siren brought us here.”

I scanned the piles of papers on the table. They were all large, their edges curled inward like they’d been rolled up. I stepped over and twisted the top one so I could see it, pressing it flat with my hands.

“These are maps,” I said. They were skillfully hand-drawn in black ink, but not ancient. “I’ve seen others like this.”

“Where?”

“On the wall in Paul’s office. Maybe he drew them.” I looked down at the floor. “Like he’s trying to decipher this room, or something.” The paper had faint blue lines creating a grid. While the floor map looked like it spanned the world, these maps were zoomed in to coastlines and islands. In the large stretches of blank ocean were little sea monster sketches. Things with serpent backs or giant mouths. Paul didn’t seem like the type to waste his time doodling. Maybe he had brought in a cartographer or something. Maybe the monsters were because it got boring sitting down here drawing for hours on end.