Island of the Sun

  They passed tomb after tomb, dozens of their rectangular entrances, and Eleanor felt nothing. The telluric scanners still hadn’t picked up any traces of current, either. When they reached the foot of the pyramid-mountain at the end of the valley, it appeared they had run out of tombs.

  “What now?” Finn asked.

  “There is one more tomb,” Nathifa said. “Some say it is the oldest tomb in the valley. It is very odd.”

  “Sounds like we should’ve started with that one,” Luke said.

  Nathifa narrowed her eyes at him. “It is also the farthest from the camp, and we would have passed the others anyway. It is called KV39. It’s up there.” She pointed up the mountain, into the nook at the head of a wide ravine.

  “What makes it odd?” Finn asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  So they climbed. The path they took was rocky and narrow, winding up and up. When Eleanor looked back down behind them, she could see the valley below, with its network of tombs, and it made sense to her that, like the Inca, the pharaohs would have been drawn to this place. The Concentrators radiated a power strong enough to resurrect Amarok and his tribe, after all. And it sounded like the Egyptians had an even deeper connection with its power.

  That was when Eleanor felt it. A gentle jolt through the soles of her shoes. The hum. They were getting close, and Luke was right. They should have started with the old, odd KV39.

  When they reached it, the recessed opening appeared far less grand than the entrances below it, almost more of a cave. The tomb was isolated up here as well, far from the others that huddled so tightly together on the valley floor.

  To reach the entrance, they had to shimmy down a rocky slope into a gully. The tomb’s narrow opening reminded Eleanor of the cave she’d entered under the waters of Lake Titicaca, except that something about this place felt more sinister. But the hum had only grown stronger as they had neared it. Eleanor opened her mouth to tell everyone, then shut it, unwilling to speak.

  But this is what you’re here to do, she told herself. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to say anything, not yet.

  “Not very inviting, is it?” Luke said.

  “Top marks for understatement, Fournier,” Betty said.

  “I just don’t want to get cursed,” Luke said.

  “Is there a mummy in there?” Finn asked.

  Nathifa chuckled. “No, it’s empty. Archaeologists have long assumed it was looted thousands of years ago, and they don’t even know who was buried here. They once believed it was Amenhotep the First, but many now doubt that.”

  “Whoever it was,” Eleanor’s mom said, looking back down the ravine, “they liked their privacy.”

  “I am getting some mild telluric signatures,” von Albrecht said, frowning down at his device. “Eleanor, do you sense anything?”

  Eleanor opened her mouth again to speak, but nothing came out. Once more, something in her simply refused to say yes, as though a fail-safe had been tripped, and now she knew what it was.

  The tomb before them led to the Concentrator—Eleanor had no doubts about that. What she doubted were the people around her, specifically Nathifa and von Albrecht. She had been tricked into leading Amaru to the Concentrator in Peru, and that had resulted in his death and the capture of Dr. Powers and Julian. She wasn’t about to make that same mistake again. She needed time to think.

  “Nuh—” She coughed. “No, nothing.”

  “We should investigate it, nevertheless,” von Albrecht said.

  No one seemed to want to be the first to enter KV39. It was Nathifa who finally pulled out a flashlight and led the way, but her steps were slow and tentative. Von Albrecht followed her, and then Luke. Eleanor went next, with her mom behind her, and then Finn and Betty pushed forward into the darkness.

  Just inside the entrance, they found a steep, crumbling stairway that descended through a chamber. The walls and ceiling were rough-hewn and unadorned, not at all how Eleanor imagined an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb would appear. There were also several disconcerting cracks that suggested to Eleanor that the whole place could collapse at any time.

  They descended the staircase, their breathing and movement filling the chamber, and when they spoke, it was in whispers for fear of disturbing . . . something.

  At the bottom of the steps, they passed through a narrow portal, and on the other side of that entered another downward-sloping chamber. But this one had no stairway, only a decrepit wooden ladder Eleanor would not have trusted for two rungs.

  “Be careful,” Nathifa said. “One at a time.”

  She went first. The ladder creaked and quivered but somehow held. Each of them followed after her in turn, and at the bottom they stood in a room whose walls were the color of chalk and much smoother than those they’d passed. Ahead of them, another stairway dropped away into the darkness. To the left, there were two passages, one that led straight forward, and another that doubled back in the direction of the entrance.

  “Which way do we go?” Eleanor’s mom asked.

  Eleanor knew. The hum came from the stairway in front of them. But she said nothing, and von Albrecht checked his telluric scanner.

  “That way,” he said, and pointed in the same direction Eleanor had silently identified.

  This stairway was much narrower and steeper, with deeper steps, and Eleanor used her hands to climb down backward. They were now deep underground, and Eleanor found her heart rate rising. Whether that was from claustrophobia, though, or her nerves about misleading her friends, she couldn’t tell.

  The chamber at the bottom was perhaps twenty feet long and twelve feet wide, with a ceiling several feet above Luke’s head. But it was a dead end.

  Eleanor was confused. The hum was definitely louder down here.

  “You sure you’re reading that thing right, doc?” Luke asked.

  Von Albrecht checked the telluric scanner again and then said, “Dr. Perry, will you please confirm?”

  “Of course.” Eleanor’s mom took her own scanner, made some adjustments to its dials, studied it, and then compared it with von Albrecht’s. “Yes, this is where the signal leads.”

  “What about you, kid?” Luke said. “You still coming up empty?”

  Eleanor could only bring herself to nod. She would find a time and place to tell him the truth when they got back to the camp.

  “You mean we came here for nothing?” Finn said. “My dad might be back in Cairo right now!”

  “No, not for nothing,” Eleanor’s mom said. “It’s here. We’re just missing something.”

  “Perhaps we should explore the rest of the tomb,” Nathifa said. “To be certain.”

  They all agreed with that and climbed back up the staircase. For safety’s sake it was decided that only von Albrecht and Nathifa would go, while the rest of them waited in the central chamber above. Eleanor didn’t mind. She already knew the Concentrator would not be found elsewhere, and as a pharaoh’s tomb, KV39 had disappointed her. There were no paintings of the Egyptian gods, no hieroglyphics, no artifacts, no golden sarcophagi. When von Albrecht and Nathifa returned from their expedition, they reported that both passages, though much longer, had also ended in dead-end chambers.

  “I don’t understand,” von Albrecht said. “The nexus is here. It must be.”

  “Unless you got your map wrong again,” Luke said.

  Von Albrecht smoothed his hair back. “I did not get it wrong.”

  “Perhaps we should return to the camp,” Eleanor’s mom said. “Run another check on the data. Maybe we’re missing something.”

  Everyone agreed, so they climbed out of the tomb and then made their way down the pyramid-mountain. Eleanor glanced back at the opening, still unsure if she had made the right call in withholding what she knew. She needed to talk to someone about it. The one person she knew she could trust.

  Back in the tent, Eleanor’s mom, von Albrecht, and Nathifa pored over his calculations and conclusions, double-checking and triple-checking at every step. W
hile they were occupied with that, Eleanor pulled Luke outside and told him that she had actually sensed the Concentrator back at the tomb.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.

  “I just . . .” She was still figuring that out for herself. “Everyone is trying to save something, right? Amaru wanted to save his family. Nathifa wants to save her Egyptian history. Von Albrecht wants to save his reputation.” She moved on to even harder thoughts. “Even Finn just wants to save his dad now. I don’t know . . . how to trust them.”

  “Ah.” He closed his eyes. “What about your mom?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “She has made it very clear she doesn’t even want me doing this. She wants me to stop.”

  “Well.” Luke looked down at the ground and moved some dirt around with his boot. “I think she’d want to know.”

  “I am not telling her. That’s final.”

  Luke looked at her for a long moment. “She’ll be furious with us both. But I’ll let this be your call.”

  “I can do it without her, or the others. But I’d love your help.”

  “Best option is tonight, when they’ve gone to sleep.” He bent his head to make eye contact with her. “How’re you holding up? With Amaru and everything. You okay?”

  Eleanor almost pulled out her prefabricated, flat response—I’m fine—but decided against it. “It’s hard,” she said. “I still see him when I close my eyes. It feels like everything changed in Peru. Amaru died, and we left Julian and Dr. Powers behind.”

  “It is hard,” he said. “There’s no rule book for this kind of thing. Hard things have to be done. Hard decisions have to be made. And I don’t think it’s going to get any easier.”

  Eleanor hoped he was wrong, but she also knew it to be a false and desperate hope. If she let herself believe she wouldn’t have to make hard decisions, that meant she might not be ready for them when they came.

  “But we’ll get it done,” Luke added.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ll get it done.”

  Several hours later, Eleanor’s mom declared von Albrecht’s data valid and reliable, his conclusions sound. The ley line nexus was in or near the Valley of the Kings, and since Eleanor hadn’t corroborated the signal they had encountered in KV39, it was determined to have been an anomaly, and they planned to do some further exploration the next day.

  “There is the West Valley,” Nathifa said. “It has only five tombs, but it will be worth exploring with the scanners.”

  If Eleanor had told Nathifa the truth about what she had sensed, it might have changed that plan. A pang of guilt struck her, and she wondered how she would tell them the next day what she had done. Her mom would be furious, of course. Finn and Betty might feel a little betrayed, and no doubt Nathifa and Von Albrecht would be very disappointed. Eleanor would just have to deal with all that when the time came. Assuming she was successful in the first place.

  It was after midnight when she and Luke finally felt satisfied that Nathifa and von Albrecht and the others were asleep, and outside the tent, the valley was cold and nearly featureless in the darkness. They used flashlights to hurry back through the valley, past the dozens of tombs Eleanor now tried unsuccessfully to ignore, convinced at times that if she looked, there would be eyes in the doorways looking back.

  The mountain path was a bit more difficult to navigate at night, even with the flashlights, but they picked their way up the ravine and before long stood once more above the opening to KV39.

  “You expecting me to go first?” Luke asked.

  Eleanor pushed past him and climbed down into the draw. “Why would I expect that?”

  Luke skidded down behind her and they entered the tomb, which it turned out did not look very different than it had earlier in the day. Dark was dark.

  They descended the stairs, and then the ladder, and then the second set of stairs, until they stood once again in the bottom dead-end chamber. The hum was still there, confirming to Eleanor that they were getting closer. The room must hold some secret.

  “What now?” Luke asked.

  “We should check for a hidden door or something,” Eleanor said. So the two of them crept along, scanning, scraping, rubbing. Eleanor got so close to the wall that the dust on it made her sneeze.

  Finally Luke whispered, “Over here.”

  Down low, on his hands and knees, he showed her a seam in the wall—the outline of what appeared to be a small door, three feet wide and two feet high.

  “Does it open?” Eleanor asked.

  Luke pushed hard against it. “Not easily. Hang on.” He rolled onto his back with his feet pointed at the wall, and then he kicked straight against it. With the impact, more dust broke free from the walls and the ceiling, while a spiderweb of cracks appeared across the stone door.

  “Keep trying,” Eleanor said.

  Luke kicked again, and then a third time. With the fourth, the wall shattered inward, broken to pieces, and Eleanor realized it wasn’t stone, but a couple of inches of some kind of cement or hard plaster that had simply been smoothed to look like the rest of the wall.

  Luke shone his flashlight through the new opening. “Another tunnel. A long one.”

  “Only one way to go, then,” Eleanor said. “I’m having déjà vu.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” Luke said. “And I will go first, whether you expect me to or not.” With that, he got down on his belly and shimmied through the little doorway.

  Then Eleanor got down and followed. The feeling of claustrophobia that rushed through her wasn’t quite as bad as it had been in the underwater cave. On the other side, she climbed to her feet and found herself in a narrow passageway.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Luke said

  Eleanor’s earlier disappointment turned to awe. Paintings and hieroglyphics covered the walls in brightly colored, carved relief. A procession of animal-headed Egyptian gods held court down the length of the corridor, surrounded by other figures, vanishing beyond the limits of their flashlights’ reach. Some of them carried what Eleanor guessed to be lightning bolts in reed baskets and boats, and they surrounded the image of a tree, which she assumed represented the Concentrator.

  “Oh my God,” Eleanor said.

  “You mean gods, don’t you?” Luke said.

  “I mean this is incredible,” she said. “Could we be the first people in thousands of years to see this?”

  Eleanor found that thought almost frightening in how small it made her feel. In the years between the sealing of that wall and Luke’s breaking of it, the Egyptian empire had long since fallen, and dozens of nations had risen and fallen since. In the vastness of time and space, in the cavalcade of human communities rising and vanishing, life’s evolutions and extinctions, it was hard to believe that any of it mattered. Von Albrecht was trying to leave his mark, like his father, but the problem with marks was that they eventually faded.

  But Eleanor wasn’t doing this to leave a mark. Hardly anyone would ever know what she had done, anyway. She was doing this simply to survive.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “The Concentrator is this way.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  THE CORRIDOR STRETCHED ON FOR SEVERAL YARDS AND then stepped down another stairway. In addition to the gods, whose names Eleanor didn’t know but whose jackal, ibis, and alligator heads looked familiar, the walls bore depictions of Egyptian life. Rows of identical workers harvested wheat and fished the Nile with nets from shallow boats, charged into battle riding chariots, and held court before a figure on a throne. Floor-to-ceiling panels of hieroglyphics gave Eleanor the impression of walking through a book, or a papyrus scroll.

  The passage continued a regular descent, hallways followed by stairways, followed by hallways, followed by stairways.

  “We must be under the mountain by now,” Eleanor said.

  “You notice it kind of looks like a pyramid?” Luke asked.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said.

  “Kind of a coi
ncidence,” Luke said. “Maybe they built the pyramids at Giza as a kind of tribute to the mountain where the energy came from.”

  “Maybe,” Eleanor said.

  “If you think about it, it is pretty incredible, though. That they were able to use the Concentrator’s energy. Maybe that explains how their empire lasted for so long.”

  “Maybe,” Eleanor said again. It seemed the Egyptians had basically done what Watkins hoped to do. They had harnessed the energy of the Concentrator. But then, they didn’t have to worry about a rogue world, or the whole earth turning into an ice cube. And they weren’t sacrificing the rest of the planet to ensure their survival.

  Eventually, the corridor bottomed out and they reached a doorway. Through that they entered into an improbably cavernous chamber, with a ceiling more than fifty feet high, supported by thick columns in regular formation, and distant walls far outside their sphere of light. Even their voices seemed to get a bit lost in there. Every surface was decorated with the same kinds of artwork and writings. Eleanor wondered how long this would have taken to create, and what it all meant—whether any of it might be the instruction guide for how to run the ancient Egyptian power grid. The humming was more forceful here, too, and coming from a direction up ahead of them.

  “This way,” Eleanor said.

  They set out across the chamber, and before long they lost sight of the doorway through which they’d come and were surrounded on all sides by retreating columns.

  “Keep track of the exit,” Luke said. “It would be easy to get turned around in here. Every direction looks the same.”

  Eleanor wondered how big the chamber actually was, and whether its size and features were a part of how the Egyptians harnessed the Concentrator. When she posed this idea to Luke, he stopped and took another slow glance around them.

  “You know, it almost has the feel of a capacitor network, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “Uh, sure?” Eleanor said.