“Can you?” Amaru said. “And what if you’re wrong? What if the Freeze doesn’t stop? Can you promise me that my family will survive when the ice comes? Can you guarantee we will have food and warmth, as Dr. Watkins has? Can you?”
Eleanor wanted to say yes, but she could not bring herself to make him such a promise when she still had doubts of her own. The truth was that she didn’t know what would happen after the Concentrators were shut down. The rogue planet would still be up there, pulling the earth away from the sun. Without the earth’s energy streaming to it, what would it do? Would it move on? Eleanor thought so, but she didn’t know. And she didn’t think she could lie about it.
“That’s what I thought,” Amaru said. “Dr. Watkins promised me that my family will be saved, if I help him.”
“I think you’ll find his promises aren’t worth much,” Luke said.
“He is an honorable man,” Amaru said. “He has treated me with kindness and respect.”
“He is using you,” Eleanor’s mom said. “That’s all.”
But Eleanor could see now they wouldn’t be able to convince him. Amaru was driven by fear for those he loved, and he was doing what he thought was best for them, choosing to believe the side that offered him survival, if not hope. Eleanor found it difficult to be angry at him for that. But it didn’t seem that he would let her get anywhere near the Concentrator, and the G.E.T. now knew where it was. She had to do something before it was too late.
She sat down on the ground and closed her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Amaru asked.
Eleanor ignored him. She focused on the Concentrator’s hum, its reach into the earth, the way it strummed the ley lines of energy. She listened, and she tried to follow those lines, reaching back toward the Concentrator with her mind. She remembered the sensation of touching the Arctic Concentrator, the way it’d felt as if something moved and convulsed beneath its skin, the consciousness she’d found waiting inside it. She remembered the way she had connected with it and tried to do so now with this Concentrator, even without touching it.
“What is she doing?” she heard Amaru ask.
“I don’t know,” Eleanor’s mom said.
“Well, make her stand up.”
Eleanor’s mom chuckled. “You give me far too much credit. I’ve never been able to make my daughter do anything.”
Eleanor could hear Amaru’s footsteps come closer to her and then sensed him standing over her, but she kept her eyes closed.
“Whatever you are doing,” he said, “you will stop. Right now.”
Eleanor said nothing. She ignored him, even as he kept talking, warning her, threatening her. It felt as if her mind were getting closer to something, tracing the Concentrator’s roots beneath her, following the lines of telluric energy pulsing toward it like blood through veins. She didn’t need to touch the console. She could connect with it from here, because it seemed to be responding to her. The awareness inside was waking up.
The ground rumbled, and the Concentrator emitted a kind of metallic groan.
“What was that?” Amaru asked loudly, in audible panic. “Are you doing something to it? Is she doing something to the Tree?”
No one answered him.
“Listen to me,” Amaru said, his voice quivering. “Dr. Watkins said no one must be allowed to interfere. It is a matter of life and death. If you attempt to do anything to the Tree, I am supposed to shoot you. Do you understand me?”
At that moment, the Concentrator’s awareness was like some wild thing looking out from the bushes at her, suspicious, and Eleanor was coaxing it, trying to draw it nearer to her.
She felt something hard and cold against the side of her head.
“Amaru, no!” her mom screamed.
It was the gun. Eleanor could not ignore that, and as she gave the weapon her attention, the awareness in the Concentrator vanished into the shadows, retreating into itself.
“Stop what you are doing,” Amaru said. “Please.”
“You son of a—!” Luke shouted. “You’d kill a kid?”
Eleanor opened her eyes and looked up. Amaru was shaking. He was sweating. He looked terrified. This wasn’t something he wanted. “I stopped,” she said.
He sighed. “Thank you,” he said, and pulled the gun barrel away from her head. “What were you doing? That was—”
Luke came out of nowhere. He slammed into Amaru with his shoulder, and they both tumbled to the ground, grappling and rolling, fighting for control of the gun. Eleanor scrambled clear of them toward her mom, eyes wide and fearful.
“Luke!” she shouted. “Be careful, don’t—”
Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to—
The explosion of a gunshot filled the cavern. The two men went still for a moment, and then Luke pulled away from Amaru, holding the weapon. Amaru lay partly on his side, curling up a little, looking at his abdomen. A small amount of blood came out of a hole in his dry suit.
“No,” Eleanor whispered, and rushed past Luke to Amaru’s side.
“Please,” he said, “leave the Tree alone. Let Dr. Watkins—” He grimaced and convulsed in sudden pain, breathing hard through gritted teeth. “He . . . he told me what it can do.”
Eleanor’s mom dropped to Amaru’s side. “We need to get him out of this suit. Quickly.”
She and Luke unzipped the dry suit enough to open it away from the wound. Once they did, all Eleanor saw was blood. It was pouring out of him, soaking into his thermal suit inside the rubber shell.
“No!” her mom shouted, and put both hands over the wound, pressing hard, blood pooling between her fingers. She had the basic medical training of anyone working in the Arctic, but Eleanor knew this wound was beyond her skill. Amaru was bleeding to death right in front of them, and he groaned beneath her hands.
“Promise me,” he whispered.
Tears blurred Eleanor’s vision. “We will save the earth, Amaru,” she said. “I will promise you that.”
“No.” He shook his head, eyes clenched tight. “Please, I—” Then his eyes popped back open, almost as if in surprise. “Mi hijo . . . ,” he whispered. Then his body went limp, and he slowly rolled onto his back, eyes staring up into the shadows.
None of them spoke for several moments.
Luke’s voice came out hoarse. “I didn’t mean— He had a gun to her head.”
“He left you no choice,” Eleanor’s mom said, looking at her blood-covered hands. “And you saved my daughter.”
Eleanor wiped her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault, Luke,” she said, but that didn’t mean it was Amaru’s. She still found it hard to blame him for doing only what he thought he had to for his family. If anyone was to blame for his death, it was Watkins, and Eleanor’s grief for Amaru very quickly turned into rage. She got to her feet and turned toward the Concentrator.
“Sweetie, be careful,” her mom said.
“I will,” Eleanor said.
She walked toward the alien device, stepping through the ring of statues, and circled the trunk until she located the console. Its porous metal looked a bit like the surface of the lake, with waves of bumps and divots. Her mom had followed her and stood to her left, while Luke stood to her right.
“I don’t even want to think of the hands those controls were meant for,” he said, staring at the console. “Or tentacles, I guess. Or . . . whatever the heck they have.”
Eleanor’s mom shuddered.
“You’re a scientist, Mom,” Eleanor said. “Aren’t you interested in this?”
“I probably would be if my daughter wasn’t about to let this thing into her mind.”
“You sure about this, kid?” Luke asked.
“Got a better idea?” Eleanor asked him.
His mustache twitched. “Can’t say I do. So how does this work?”
“Like this.” Eleanor closed her eyes again and laid her palm against the console. Even though she had done this once before and knew what to expect, she recoiled vio
lently when she felt the larva-like consciousness squirm within the Concentrator’s fibers and machinery. But she forced herself to leave her hand in place as the alien awareness seized the nerves in her arm and made its way up to her mind. She let it in, but not far. Only enough that she was able to connect with it, and then take control.
It was almost like she was part of the Concentrator, or like the Concentrator was part of her. She was able to manipulate its roots, shifting them out of alignment with the telluric currents, thus cutting off its supply of energy. Then she found the wiggling consciousness, the intelligence that she could not say was artificial or natural, but that governed the Concentrator, and she killed it, like stepping on a worm.
The ever-present hum ceased, but the silence that followed seemed to take something vital out of Eleanor. She felt weakened and out of breath, but not from the altitude or from everything that had just happened. The drain on her ran deeper than that, deeper even than her bones. But she managed to open her eyes.
“It’s done,” she said.
“I’ll be damned,” Luke said. “It’s like it just went quiet.”
“You can tell?” Eleanor asked.
“Yeah, I can tell,” he said. “Can’t say how, though.”
“I think we should save this discussion for later,” Eleanor’s mom said, still eyeing the branches of the Concentrator overhead. “The G.E.T. are probably mobilizing right now. Coming this way.”
“Right,” Luke said. “Then let’s figure out how we can get out of here.”
“But . . . ,” Eleanor said. They couldn’t go back the way they had come. “Your air tank is broken.”
“You could use . . . ,” her mom said, but didn’t finish. They all went quiet as they looked at Amaru’s lifeless body.
“I don’t know if we can use any of the tanks,” Luke finally said. “I don’t know how to work ’em. Hell, I don’t even know how to tell if they have air left in ’em.” He looked at Eleanor’s mom. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t pay close enough attention.”
“Seems awful risky trying to dive that tunnel again,” Luke said. “I barely made it the first time.”
Eleanor shone her flashlight around the chamber, sending the shadows of the statues chasing each other along the walls. “Maybe there’s another way out,” she said. “But should we do something about Amaru? I hate to just . . . leave him here.”
“I feel the same,” her mom said. “But we can’t carry him out, and we can’t bury him.”
“I’m sorry, kid,” Luke said.
He screwed the top back on his own flashlight, and the three of them searched the chamber for openings. Before long, in a far corner, they found a second corridor like the one that had brought them there: carved out of the stone by something other than nature. Eleanor’s mom was about to lead the way into it when Luke stopped her.
“Hang on,” he said, and jogged back toward the Concentrator.
“What’s he doing?” Eleanor’s mom asked.
Eleanor shrugged, and a minute or two later Luke returned, jangling some keys in his hand. “We need a way off this island,” he said. “Amaru’s boat won’t start without these.”
“Good thinking,” Eleanor’s mom said, and then she entered the tunnel.
They had not walked far before the corridor curved to the right and slightly upward. It continued along that course, around and around, up and up. That seemed like a good sign to Eleanor. If the Concentrator was located under the island, as it seemed to have been, then they were now climbing up through it.
The air grew warmer as they went, and Eleanor thought about removing at least the outer rubber shell of her dry suit. But her mom said to leave it on, because they might still need it. The physical exertion of the climb sapped Eleanor’s air, her gasping made worse by the weakness left by the Concentrator’s silence, and she wondered how long it would take for them to reach the end of wherever this tunnel was leading them.
A short distance on, Eleanor’s mom stopped, bringing their climb to a halt. “Turn off your flashlights,” she said, switching off her own. Eleanor and Luke did the same, plunging them all into a moment of total darkness, but then Eleanor’s eyes began to adjust, and she saw there was a very faint glow spilling down the walls and floor toward them.
“I think we’re almost at the top,” her mom said.
They switched their flashlights back on and hurried up the remaining turns of the tunnel until they reached its end, where they met with a stone wall. Eleanor felt an initial flutter of panic.
“I don’t understand,” her mom said. “Why go to all this work carving a path to the surface, and then leave it blocked?”
“Maybe it’s not,” Eleanor said. “Turn off your flashlights again.”
They did, and Eleanor saw a thin thread of light outlining the edges of a door in the rock.
“I guess we push?” said Luke.
All three of them leaned against the stone, straining, over and over again, but no matter which direction they tried, it wouldn’t budge. Eleanor used her flashlight to study the door and realized the stone sat in a kind of channel, or track, that had been carved in the rock. On one side, down in the bottom corner of the door, she noticed a smaller rock lodged in a little notch.
“Stand back,” she said, and after her mom and Luke had backed up a couple of steps, she pulled the little rock out.
The door rolled slowly and ponderously along the track with a grating sound that raised chills along Eleanor’s back. A spreading crack of light appeared, which grew wider and brighter by inches, until the opening was a few feet wide. Eleanor shielded her eyes against the blinding brightness until the view settled, and she looked out of the doorway toward the stone altar that they’d seen at the top of the island the day before.
“It’s . . . the Titikala,” she said. “We’re inside it!”
“Makes sense,” Luke said. “I suppose.”
They stepped through the opening, out into the sunlight, and Eleanor took a long, deep breath. Then she turned around and regarded the entrance. It was there under the outcropping she had seen the day before, but hidden. She smiled to herself, proud that her first hunch had proven correct.
“Fascinating,” her mom said. “Apparently, the people who lived here incorporated the Concentrator into their religion.” Now that she and Eleanor and Luke were out of danger, it seemed her scientific mind had returned. “Perhaps they worshipped it. Maybe they even used it somehow. Von Albrecht has speculated that some ancient people may have made use of telluric energy.”
“Who is this von Albrecht you keep talking about?” Luke asked.
“A fringe scientist,” her mom said, “who until now was not taken seriously.”
“Bet he’d like to get a look at this. Have the last laugh. Where’s he at now?”
“I have no idea. It’s been years since anyone in the academic community has heard from him.”
“That’s all very interesting,” Eleanor said. “But I think we should go find the others and get the heck out of here.”
After a last lingering glance at the Titikala, her mom nodded. “I agree.”
They crossed the plateau at the top of the hill and took the path down to the Chinkana, where they tried to retrace their steps through it as they had done before. At one point, a vista opened up through an archway, and Eleanor looked down over the terraces of the labyrinth, all the way to the shoreline and pier below.
Amaru’s boat was there. But there were other boats, too. Three of them. And even from that far away, Eleanor could read the G.E.T. logo painted on their sides.
CHAPTER
14
“THEY’RE ALREADY HERE,” SHE WHISPERED.
Luke and Eleanor’s mom followed her gaze down through the archway.
“That’s not good,” Luke said.
“Where’s Simon?” Eleanor’s mom asked. “And the boys?”
“And Betty?” Luke said.
They were too fa
r away to discern the identities of the people moving around on the dock and the shore. They could’ve been G.E.T. agents, or Finn and Julian, or even Watkins. But even at this distance Eleanor could see that some of them were getting into diving suits, and several of them were wading into the lake. There wasn’t any way Eleanor and the others could get to Amaru’s boat now.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We stay here in the labyrinth,” Eleanor’s mom said. “We wait and we watch.”
“Let’s find someplace more hidden, though,” Luke said. “They could spot us here with binoculars.”
They ducked down and moved deeper into the Chinkana, off the main path into the smaller chambers, but no hiding place they considered seemed secret or safe enough. If the G.E.T. decided to make a thorough search of the ruin, the agents would eventually find them. The G.E.T. had tracked them this far, after all, and Watkins knew they were somewhere on the island. Amaru’s locator had made sure of that, and it seemed likely that Amaru had also been reporting back since meeting up with Eleanor and the others in Puno. The agents down on the shore knew this. It was only a matter of time.
“Psst,” someone said behind them.
Eleanor spun around. So did her mom, and Luke had his fists up, like a boxer.
It was Betty. “You’re alive,” she whispered. “I was afraid you all had drowned.”
“Almost did,” Luke said.
“What happened?” Eleanor’s mom asked. “Where—”
“Not here,” Betty whispered. “Come on.”
She led them back through the labyrinth toward one of its far corners. When they reached it, they found an alcove in the wall of an upper chamber that was much deeper than it first appeared, most of its length choked with shadow. Betty ushered them all in, and they found Finn crouching at the back end of it.
“Eleanor!” he whispered.
“Finn!” Eleanor’s mom said. “Where’s your father?”
“They have him!” Finn said. He was scared; Finn was never scared. “They caught Julian, too. They— Is that blood on your hands?”
“The G.E.T. has them, you mean?” Eleanor’s mom asked, ignoring Finn’s question.