She smiled grimly at her adversary. “I must thank you, Dr. Jones, for discovering the path here and unlocking Akator’s secrets, but I believe we’ll let more experienced minds proceed from here.”
“How did you find us?” Indy asked, baffled.
As answer, Spalko thrust out her arm and held her palm open. No one moved at first; then slowly George McHale slipped from Dr. Jones’s circle. He shuffled with a hangdog look and placed a tiny black box into her hand.
“A tracker beacon,” she explained. “We’ve been following its signal. Sometimes technology has its uses.”
“I’m sorry, Indiana,” McHale said.
Jones sighed and placed a palm on his forehead. “Sheesh. Will you make up your mind, Mac?”
Marion Ravenwood looked just as exasperated and shook her head. “I’m really getting tired of this guy.”
Jones eyed McHale with a pinched expression. “So let me get this straight, Mac. You’re a triple agent?”
“Nah, Indiana. I just lied about being a double agent.”
Jones rolled his eyes.
Tired of the exchange, Spalko headed over to Professor Oxley. She bore the man no ill will—the poor addled sot. So she gently removed the skull from his hands. It was easy to be generous in victory.
Behind her, she heard McHale speak. “Marion, you don’t need to worry. You can come with us. The riches here—”
He was cut off by a vehement laugh from Miss Ravenwood. “Fat chance, buster!”
Spalko ignored such petty foolishness and lifted the skull. This was all that mattered. She turned its eyes toward her. Surely in this chamber, it would finally commune with her.
“Speak,” she commanded it. “Speak now!”
The skull vibrated between her palms, growing warm as if it were real flesh. Something was happening. Finally! Her heart pounded faster, but she forced herself to remain calm. A deep glow suffused the crystal, rising from a seed of opalescence deep in its cranium.
At last . . .
She lifted the skull higher. As light filled her vision, pressure built inside her head, as if she were diving deep underwater. She did not fight it. Resistance against such force risked permanent mental damage. She’d seen ample evidence of that. To survive a riptide, you didn’t swim against it.
As she relaxed into the glow, she began to understand. Following a silent instruction, she lifted her gaze and stared around at the thrones.
She spoke, explaining what she now understood. “Look at them. They could’ve gone home. But they still wait. Others came looking for them. The smaller scouts.”
She pictured the tiny mummified remains stolen from Hangar
“Hidden here, these twelve continued to wait—for the return of the one who was lost.”
Between her palms, the skull grew brighter. “They’re a hive mind. One mind shared across thirteen bodies. A collective consciousness. More powerful together than they could ever be apart.”
Her feet, unbidden, moved toward the steps that led up to the headless body.
Her voice grew sharper. “Imagine what they’ll tell us!”
“I can’t.” These negative words came from Dr. Jones, breaking through her spell. He waved an arm around the room. “Neither could the humans who built this temple . . . and neither can you.”
She frowned at the smallness of his mind. “Belief, Dr. Jones, is a gift you have yet to receive. My sympathies.”
She returned her attention to the task at hand and climbed the steps that led up to the higher dais, where she belonged.
“Oh, I believe, sister,” Jones said. “That’s why I’m staying down here.”
She reached the top step under the throne and held the skull out to the seated body. Between her palms, she felt a fire build inside the crystal. It flared up, too hot to hold. As she let go, it ripped out of her fingers, sailed through the air, and snapped into place atop the shoulders of the lost one.
They all held their breath. No one spoke.
Slowly a rumbling grew underfoot. It swelled louder and louder. The floor and walls began to shake. To one side, a vase crashed to the floor and shattered. Other objects danced and bobbled in their niches.
Unsure what was happening, Spalko retreated down the steps and back to the middle of the room.
On the thrones, the bodies also began to vibrate and quake. Faster and faster. Their images blurred at the edges. As she watched, mummified flesh turned to dust and shook away, shedding from the bones beneath.
No, not bones.
Crystal.
The vibration slowed and stopped, and it became clear what was hidden under the dusty flesh. Upon the thrones sat thirteen flawless crystal skeletons—living skeletons. Through their bones glowed viscous fluids, half light, half substance.
Spalko continued to sense the strange pressure in her skull. She was still connected to the collective mind. As the pressure grew, so did her understanding. She moaned, half in terror, half in wonder. She knew what was happening and voiced it.
“They wake . . . !”
FIFTY-FIVE
DURING ALL THE COMMOTION, Indy moved closer.
On the upper dais, the body to which the skull had been returned stirred. Its bones quivered like the wings of a hummingbird. Out of this vibration, flesh bloomed into being—soft, living flesh, with eyes that could see, and hands that could move. In moments its entire body had fully re-formed, sculpted out of nothingness.
Awed, Indy gazed up at the face, knowing they were the first to view this countenance in centuries. And the figure above seemed to gaze back down upon them all, studying them just as intently. A wise gentleness glowed from its large eyes, but also something else, something that turned Indy’s blood cold.
An unnaturalness to this world.
At his side, Oxley had also been watching it all, unblinking. The professor suddenly began to speak, low and rapid. But it wasn’t English. Indy faced Oxley, listening in disbelief.
“It’s Mayan,” Indy realized aloud. “He’s speaking Mayan.”
Spalko glanced back to them. “What is he saying?”
Indy leaned closer, but he was afraid to touch Oxley in this altered state. What was happening? He listened to his old friend as he spoke an ancient language with complete fluency. Words flowed from his mouth like water out of a burst dam.
Indy could guess the source of this torrent. He stared back over his shoulder at the seated figure. In turn, the being gazed back at Indy with those strange eyes.
One recognized the other. They had spoken before.
The being slowly raised its hands, placed its two white palms together in an X formation—then twisted them once, inverting the X.
Not understanding, Indy turned back to Oxley for some explanation, an interpretation. He listened, deciphering as Oxley spoke in Mayan.
“He says he’s grateful—” Indy pointed back to the throne. “I mean it. It’s grateful. It wants to give us a gift. A big gift.”
Steps away, Spalko faced the throne and pleaded with the firm conviction of the resolute. “Tell me—everything you know. I want it all. I must know!”
The being turned to her, drawn to her.
Oxley continued speaking while Indy translated. “It heard,” he called to Spalko. Indy could not keep the disappointment out of his voice.
Mutt had followed it all, too. He stepped forward. “They’re going to tell us everything they know?”
The kid tried to step past Oxley, but Indy grabbed him by the elbow and shoved him back. “Hang on, genius.”
Indy felt the hairs on the back of his neck quiver. He straightened and stared around. The other twelve skeletons had started to vibrate, just like the first. In moments, flesh grew over all their bones, too.
Something had begun.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Indy mumbled.
At the foot of the throne, Spalko remained transfixed and locked her eyes on one of the thirteen. But all their eyes began to glow. Indy’s hairs prickl
ed. He sensed the flow of power among the seated figures. Pure mental energy, amplified across the thirteen skulls.
Marion joined him, staring around. “Indy! Their eyes . . . so beautiful!” When he didn’t respond, she turned to him and found him studying her. She grinned. “Aren’t you going to look?”
He matched her gaze. “I found what I was looking for.”
The floor began to shake again—only more violently. A three-foot-tall carved totem of a fertility god fell out of its niche and struck the floor, breaking off what made it a fertility god.
Wincing, Indy searched around him. The walls cracked and crumpled away, exposing the thinness of their façade. Beneath the false layer of stone lay a strange luminous surface: smooth, silvery, metallic. Indy remembered the silvery shrouds that encased the conquistadores’ mummies. Here was the same in thick, solid form.
Mutt gasped as sections of the ceiling crumbled, revealing a smooth domed roof. “What is going on? Are they spacemen?”
Harold Oxley turned to the kid. “In point of fact, Mutt, I believe they are interdimensional beings.” He nodded as if this made perfect sense.
Indy gawked in surprise at his friend. All three of them stared at Oxley. The professor’s eyes were sharp and bright. Frowning, the man picked the feathered hat off his head, stared at it with profound distaste, and threw it away from him with a shudder of disgust.
Indy smiled broadly at him. “Welcome back, Ox!”
Further conversation was cut off as the quaking and vibrations grew to a feverish pitch. More of the ceiling came crashing down in spattering sections.
“Um, Indy . . . ,” Marion called out. “Something’s happening!”
She pointed toward the upper dais—which was now moving!
Turning.
Like a Las Vegas roulette wheel, the upper arcade had begun to spin above them. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. The thrones and their occupants blurred away. All that remained visible was the glow of their eyes, now a continuous streak around the room’s circumference.
A keening wail rose, almost ultrasonic.
And still the upper dais spun faster.
Overhead, the silvery dome of the roof shone brighter, forming a glowing, whirling cloud under it. Indy smelled ozone, as he might during a lightning storm, as if the cloud were building into a thunderhead.
And as if reading his mind, the cloud began to darken into something threatening, drawing down upon itself. And still it continued to collapse and spin, turning to ink. From the debris scattered on the upper dais, small broken pieces of stone façade floated up toward the darkness, swirling around inside the dome, slowly being sucked up and up into the black center.
Suddenly a piece of the wall at their level broke away and flew high.
Indy cringed. That can’t be good.
“Keep low!” he yelled.
He dragged Marion down, while Mutt yanked Oxley down. They clutched together on the floor.
Indy craned his neck. It was like staring up into a tub’s drain hole.
Only this drain hole was growing larger.
Marion shouted, “What the hell is that thing?”
“A pathway!” Oxley answered, gaping upward with awe. “A portal!”
“A problem,” Indy finished for him.
He had seen enough. With the Russian guards’ attention focused upward, Indy pointed to the unguarded exit. He gathered the others, and together they scuttled low across the room, then bolted for the exit.
Spalko and her cohorts ignored them, still awestruck, staring at the growing thundercloud.
As they fled, Oxley kept glancing back over his shoulders—at the glow of the spinning eyes. His feet began to slow. His head turned more fully toward the shining brilliance of that unearthly intelligence.
Indy frowned. No you don’t, buster . . . not again.
He grabbed Oxley’s elbow and kept him moving past the iron doors.
As a group, they dashed into the antechamber and bulled through the gathered bodies, knocking them down, shattering through them.
Oxley prattled as they fled. “Multiple dimensions! Fascinating to ponder, isn’t it? Mignon Thorne wrote an interesting perspective. He teased out the notion of changeable physics—”
“Not a good time for this, Ox!”
“—a bit like eddies in water, with cold and hot spots. See what I’m on about?”
Mutt called from in front of them. “We got trouble!”
Indy sighed.
Of course we do.
FIFTY-SIX
MAC CRAWLED ON HIS hands and knees across the floor of the throne room. He gathered anything that glinted amid the rubble: silver amulets, gold coins, ruby-encrusted jewelry. He stuffed them all into his pockets. He would sort it all out later. Now was not the time to be picky.
He reached for a tiny gold statuette of an Incan king, about the size of his thumb and worth the price of a beach house in Brighton. As his fingers reached for it, the statue floated off the floor—then suddenly zipped away, shooting skyward.
Mac reached after the fleeing king and watched his dreams of a beach house in Brighton vanish into the churning black maw overhead. To add insult, his watch was stripped off his wrist and sailed upward. Mac yanked his arm lower and flattened to the floor. All around the room, other bits of metal jittered and quaked, then shot up to the domed ceiling.
Rubbing his stripped wrist, Mac got the message and crawled toward the massive doors. It was time to get out of here.
As he reached the doors, he stared back over one shoulder.
Spalko’s lieutenant, heavy with a belt of ammunition and iron-toed boots, floated off the floor. Mac stopped to watch, stunned. The soldier flailed his limbs, but he had nothing to grab onto but air.
One of his fellow comrades attempted to lunge for him. But he rose out of reach—though not out of range. From Spalko’s scabbard, her rapier suddenly took flight, blasting out of its sheath like a missile from a silo. It shot upward and stabbed the flying soldier clean through the gut. Blood spilled out but pooled in midair, suspended by the iron in the hemoglobin. Both sword and soldier spun upward, trailing a swirling tail of crimson.
Then a moment later body, blade, and blood were all sucked up into the vortex.
Not good.
Having seen more than enough, Mac crawled faster toward the exit. He heard a scream from another soldier, but this time he didn’t stop to watch. He could imagine the soldier was following his dear comrade.
Yet as he passed the throne room’s threshold, a voice called out—loud and piercing enough to draw one last glance behind him.
Spalko stood in the center of the room, bathed in the glow of the swirling eyes. She pressed her hands against her ears as if trying not to hear something. Her face shone with an inner light, almost revealing her own skull beneath.
A cry escaped her, a mix of delight and horror.
“I can see! I can see it all!”
Indy ran with Oxley in tow. He joined Mutt and Marion in the long hall lined by the giant bronze waterwheels. The kid was right. What lay ahead certainly could be classified as trouble.
Big trouble.
The ground quaked underfoot. Distant explosions echoed to them, coming from underground. Closer at hand, they faced a more serious problem.
As they sped down the long hallway, the turbines spun at maddening speeds. Overhead, the copper conduits they’d followed to the throne room crackled with dazzling arcs of electricity, like Saint Elmo’s fire along the masts of ships at sea. The scintillating fire raced down the conduits in bursts, flowing outward from whatever was happening in the throne room.
Oxley continued a running dialogue on his own theories about what was happening. “Thorne called them ‘post-inflation bubbles.’ Of course, that presupposes universal expansion and therefore random pockets of extrinsic physics—”
At the end of the hallway the electrical display shattered out into a brilliant lightning storm. Power arcs snapped like bullw
hips.
Unimpressed by the electrical show, Oxley only shouted louder. “—different realities reside in the same space at the same time, completely unaware of one another. It’s all rather simple really.”
The lightning storm pulsed larger yet. The air burned with ozone. Electrical arcs crisscrossed the tunnel and filled it like a fiery spider’s web. It would be death to try to pass through there.
“We need another way out!” Marion called.
A loud boom of thunder knocked them all back. A section of the far tunnel fractured and collapsed. The lightning storm headed their way, blasting away more and more of the tunnel as it swept toward them.
“Back!” Indy yelled.
Turning, they fled down the hall. The water turbines spun like the wheels on Formula One racers, spitting electricity. Ahead, one of the bronze waterwheels exploded from its stanchions and came rolling right for them. There was no retreating. Lightning crackled at their heels.
“Keep going!” Indy yelled. He pointed ahead to one of the cross-passages. It led into the maze of corridors.
They sprinted for the turn as the bronze wheel rolled straight at them.
Mutt reached the corner, dragging Marion, and vanished.
Indy and Oxley would not make it. He tugged the professor to one side, and they flattened against the wall, arms out, heads turned to each other.
Oxley stared at Indy as the giant wheel rolled past them, missing them by less than an inch. “So what’s your theory, Henry? About those beings?”
Indy rolled his eyes. “Not now, Ox.”
Pushing off the wall, he grabbed the professor and headed after Marion and Mutt. All around, explosions rocked and tore the place apart. The entire complex was coming down.
They had to get out of here—but where?
FIFTY-SEVEN
SPALKO HEARD ONE of her soldiers scream—but it was no more than the buzzing of a mosquito in her ears. Inconsequential now. She was so much more now. She was beyond such petty concerns.