Island of the Sun (12 page)

“This is the temple platform,” Amaru said, planting
his feet on the ground as if standing on dry land. “It is six hundred and fifty feet long, and it is much older than the Inca. They don't know who made it. There is a statue ahead. Come.”

They followed him along the terrace, its even surface broken only by the occasional lake weed sprouting from the cracks between the stones. Eleanor wished she could see the whole of it, instead of just the small span their flashlights could illuminate. As they swam on, deeper into the complex, Eleanor thought perhaps she could feel something, down in her stomach. The hum. But then a face leaped at her out of the dark water, and she recoiled, thrashing in the water.

“It is only a statue,” Amaru said. “Try to be calm.”

Eleanor settled herself and saw that it
was
a statue, a face jutting out of a second wall made of stones cut with astonishing precision. The face was highly stylized, with bulging eyes, a prominent brow, and a long nose, and Eleanor felt foolish for reacting to it the way she had. It was actually one of many faces carved in the wall, each one unique.

Amaru led them up a second stairway to an even higher terrace, and here they found the monolithic figure of a man twice as tall as Eleanor. His features were square, his arms and legs mere lines carved from a thick column of stone.

“We do not know the name of this god,” Amaru said.

The statue stared off into the lake with blank eyes, lifeless and forgotten, in that way more like bone than stone. As Eleanor studied it, she tried to imagine the people who had once worshipped here at this temple. How long ago had that been? Eleanor's mind cast back through time, trying to imagine that place, now immersed, above the surface of the lake. This temple was buried, just as Amarok's village had been buried, silent in their graves. That is, until the Concentrator had awoken them . . .

Eleanor slowed her breathing, quieting the hiss of air in her ears, and closed her eyes, searching, listening, reaching.

There it was.

She felt the hum again, stronger than it had been at the base of the temple. She could sense its direction.

“Are we ready to return to the surface?” Amaru asked.

Eleanor shook her head. She had no way of speaking to the others, so she tapped her mom's shoulder to get her attention. Then she stretched her arms up like tree branches and pointed in the direction from which she felt the hum. Her mom and Luke both nodded, having apparently understood what the gestures meant. But Amaru did not.

When Eleanor kicked forward, past the statue, in the direction of the Concentrator, he said, “Wait, stop, where are you going?”

They could not answer, of course, and the three of them simply kept swimming.

“Please,” he said. “Stay with me. It is dangerous.”

But Eleanor ignored him. This was what she had come for, and she wasn't turning back.

T
HE UNDENIABLE AND FAMILIAR HUM GREW STRONGER AS
Eleanor let herself be drawn toward it. Her legs were tired from kicking her flippers, and she wished her flashlight could reach farther. The temple complex through which she swam had begun to feel haunted, the faces and statues its ghosts. Her mom and Luke stayed by her side, while an anxious-sounding Amaru swam slightly ahead, looking back at them, holding his hands out like a crossing guard.

“Please!” he said. “Stop! We must go up.”

Eleanor felt bad for him, but there wasn't any way to explain the situation. She could only press on, and there wasn't really anything he could do about it.

The hum of the Concentrator shook her by the bones. She felt it in her teeth. She could almost see it rippling the water, and even distorting and bending the light from her flashlight. She followed it to the edge of the temple terrace, where the carved stones met a slope of rock. She guessed they stood at the roots of the Isla del Sol some distance away and above them. The humming called her upward, so she swam up the rocky incline.

“Yes,” Amaru said. “This is good. Let's go up.”

But Eleanor wasn't going all the way to the surface. Instead, the hum led her toward a large, anvil-shaped boulder that jutted out from the mountain just above them. Beneath it lay a shadow her flashlight could not fully scatter, a dark opening into the ground. She pointed at it, and her mom and Luke nodded.

It was a cave, and she knew they needed to enter it.

Amaru apparently guessed what they were doing. “No! You are not trained to dive in a cave! That is very dangerous!”

Eleanor knew he was telling the truth. But she could barely hear him anymore, the hum consuming all her senses. The Concentrator was in there, and she had no choice.

She moved toward the entrance, which was about four feet across, and shone her flashlight down the
cave's throat. The illumination did not go far, for the tunnel twisted and turned out of sight, constricting to a very narrow passage. Now, the thought of going in there raised a deafening alarm in Eleanor's head. The panic rising in her chest chilled her, even within her insulated dry suit. Her breathing was a windy storm in her ears, and her heartbeat thundered away beneath it. She had never been particularly claustrophobic, and she'd been stuck in a tunnel before, back at Polaris Station in the Arctic. But this was different.

The hum, meanwhile, continued to radiate from the cave. Eleanor could sense the Concentrator within, draining away the earth's energy, sucking it dry.

She felt a hand on her arm and turned toward her mom. A part of Eleanor hoped she would pull her away, take her back to the surface, and tell her they would find another way. But that wasn't what her mom did. She nodded. So did Luke.

Eleanor didn't know if the trembling in her limbs was visible through the layers she wore, but she tried to still herself, slow her breathing, and make herself do what she needed to do.

“Please,” Amaru said with plaintive finality as Eleanor ducked down and pulled herself into the cave.

Her unsteady flashlight threw chaotic shadows about her. She bumped into the sides of the narrowing
cave, felt the sharp rocks through her suit, and her tank clanged against the ceiling.

“You must be careful!” Amaru said. “If you damage your tank, you will suffocate. If you rip your suit, it will fill with water and you will freeze.”

The ways Eleanor could die were not what she wanted to be told in that moment. She heard the sandpaper sound of the rubber shell of her suit rubbing against the rock, and the panic she had only begun to suppress returned. If she could have turned around, she would have. But the passage was too narrow for that now. All she could do was press forward. The cave angled downward and around a bend, squeezing inward, and Eleanor had to become a snake, twisting and rolling her body around the edges and turns.

“Your mother is now behind you in the cave,” Amaru said. “Luke will go next, and then I will follow him.” He seemed to have accepted that they were doing this over his objections.

Eleanor felt her head getting fuzzy and realized her breathing had become very quick and shallow, just what Amaru had warned her against. She focused on taking deeper breaths, but this took her concentration away from the cave, and her tank banged into the wall again. Her progress became measured in careful inches, and in the times she had to close her eyes and
throw all the weight of her resolve against the fear.

Every so often, her mother touched her foot or her flipper, gently, reassuringly. Eleanor needed that contact as the cave tightened to a mere crack she could barely fit through. She then had the chilling thought that perhaps this cave didn't go anywhere, or perhaps it would eventually grow too narrow to move forward. They would have leave the way they had come, only backward, and Eleanor didn't know if she could.

That would take so long.

She could run out of air.

She had to get out. Now. She had to stretch and kick, but she could do neither, nearly pinned by the rock as she was.

Forward.

That was the only way.

A few more feet in, and she felt her mother tug on her flipper, but not in the gentle way. She shook it. Vigorously. Something was wrong.

“Eleanor,” Amaru said. “Luke's tank isn't working.”

A sudden fear for Luke flooded and drowned Eleanor's fear for herself.

“He isn't getting enough oxygen,” Amaru said. “He is blacking out. We need to find an opening.”

Eleanor shone her flashlight ahead. She still could not see an end to the tunnel, but they had to keep
going. There had to be something up there. The humming had only grown stronger. Her movement lost its hesitancy. She propelled herself forward as fast as she could, wincing at each collision with the cave wall.

“Yes,” Amaru said. “Keep going. Look above you for air pockets.”

The course of the fissure seemed like that of a crack in a cement sidewalk, a winding zigzag path.

Hold on, Luke
, Eleanor thought, wishing she could say it to him aloud.
Stay with us. Keep moving.

Shortly after that, the glow of her flashlight vanished up ahead. The tunnel simply sucked it up, returning little of it to her in reflection, which could only mean an opening of some kind lay ahead of them.

Eleanor scrambled the last few feet and burst from the tunnel into a chamber. She gave no thought to it yet, but turned back and helped pull her mom through the last stretch, and then Luke, who came out of the passage a bit listless and limp. But bubbles still rose from around his head. When Amaru reached the chamber, he hooked an arm under Luke's shoulder and immediately swam upward.

“Come with me,” he said.

Eleanor and her mother followed him, and the combined light of their flashlights illuminated the chamber around them. It was the size of a classroom
at her school, but with a bowl-shaped floor and a ceiling with only three corners. The fourth was a seam of shadow that Eleanor now recognized as another tunnel.

“He has lost consciousness,” Amaru said. “Help me.”

Eleanor's mom kicked up to Luke's side and took his other shoulder. The four of them moved ahead into the darkness, until their flashlights seemed to strike an iridescent mirror.

“There is air ahead,” Amaru said.

Hope and relief proved to be better fuel for driving Eleanor forward than fear had been, and she raced toward the wavering mirror until her face broke the water's surface. They were on a kind of rocky shore, but still underground. The regulator fell from her mouth, and she breathed earthy air as she helped Amaru and her mom drag Luke from the water.

“I know CPR,” Eleanor's mom said, and she started in on the chest compressions, alternating with mouth-to-mouth breathing. This continued for a few moments, and then Luke's chest heaved slightly on its own.

“He's coming around,” Amaru said.

Luke's eyelids fluttered open, and he coughed, and breathed, and then he swore.

“Oh, thank heavens!” Eleanor's mom said.

“Luke,” Eleanor said.

He turned his head toward her and coughed again. “Kid. You're as brave as they come.”

“And as reckless,” her mom added.

Eleanor bent down to hug him, feeling the scratch of his beard against her cheek. “I'm just glad you're all right.”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Now does somebody want to tell me just where the heck we are?”

Eleanor sat upright. Their flashlights danced around the chamber, crisscrossing one another's beams.

“I think we are under the Isla del Sol,” Amaru said.

The chamber was larger than the one they had just swum through, with formations along the ceiling and floor, stalactites and stalagmites, and curtains and ribbons of mineral deposits draped along the walls. They were sitting at one end of it, while the opposite end exceeded the reach of their light.

“Can you walk?” Eleanor asked Luke.

“I think so,” he said, laboring to his feet. “If I can lose this tank.”

Armaru helped him unstrap it and shrug it off. The metal cylinder fell to the ground with the hollow toll of a bell, and the cave rang with the echo. Amaru inspected the tank and kneaded his forehead. “The pillar valve is damaged. I don't know how we'll get you out of here.”

Luke stared at the tank. “Well. We'll deal with that later, I guess.” Then he turned to Eleanor. “You want to lead the way?”

He was referring to her ability to sense the Concentrator, but Eleanor couldn't think about that now. She was too worried about him. It would be impossible for Luke to swim back without a dive tank.

“Is it here?” Luke asked. “Can you feel it?”

“Luke, I—”

“Can you feel it?” he asked.

Eleanor stopped and tuned her mind to the hum. “Yes.”

“Which way?” he asked.

Eleanor pointed into the darkness at the opposite end of the chamber. “It's that way.”

“Then let's do this thing,” he said.

“What are you speaking about?” Amaru asked.

Eleanor looked at her mom. There really wasn't any way to keep Amaru from finding out. It wasn't like they could just ditch him down here. But she figured it might be better to just let him see it for himself than try to explain, and deal with the aftermath of that later.

“You'll know soon enough.” Eleanor unbuckled the dive tank from her back and lowered it to the ground, and so did her mom and Amaru. The cavern felt quite
cool, so Eleanor left her suit on, and together they picked their way slowly across the uneven floor. Their flashlights turned the dripping stone formations into glossy, melted wax.

“This is beautiful,” her mom said. “I've never really studied caves like this one, but I can see the appeal.”

Eleanor felt the hum passing through her, reaching the point where she could almost feel it on her skin. They were very close now.

“What the hell?” Luke said, aiming his flashlight at another tunnel ahead of them. This one, unlike the other, had obviously been carved. Its opening was a square rectangle, slightly taller than Luke, and its floor had been smoothed.

The three of them stared at it for a few moments, trying to make sense of it.

“Maybe it was the same people who built the temple,” Eleanor said.

“There are legends about this,” Amaru said. “They say the Inca had miles and miles of tunnels where they hid their gold, connecting their whole empire.”

“Let's see where this one goes,” Luke said.

Eleanor led the way forward through a corridor much more comfortable than the one she had just passed through. A slight draft blew by her cheeks, the air cool and humid. The tunnel was not uniformly
square and in some places opened wider with the natural, rough cave walls, but it never became narrower than its size at the entrance. It curved and turned, and at times it seemed to be ascending, and other times descending. When the corridor intersected with another tunnel, Eleanor had to use the direction of the hum to guide them down the right path.

“I wonder how many tunnels are down here,” Luke said. “You could get lost.”

“Let's hope not,” Eleanor's mom said.

“The Concentrator is close,” Eleanor said. The hum felt and sounded as though it were right in her ear, setting her jaw throbbing.

Another few turns, and then the tunnel opened into a room that had been similarly shaped by ancient hands. The carved walls bore more of the same faces from the underwater temple, and several monolithic statues stood in a circle, facing an object at their center.

The Concentrator.

The alien device rose to the height and size of a large tree. Halfway up its length the black metallic trunk divided into the chaotic branches that so defied human perception. Eleanor could feel them working, could sense the Concentrator's roots reaching deep into the earth's crust, gathering up telluric energy,
which it folded and twisted into the dark energy the rogue planet needed.

“I always believed you,” Luke said. “But I had no idea.” He twisted the top off his flashlight and set it on the ground, like a lantern.

“It's monstrous,” Eleanor's mom said. “I wish I had my instruments.”

“No time for that,” said Eleanor. “I'm going to shut it down.”

“No, sweetie—” Her mom reached out as if to grab her, but caught herself and pulled back. Eleanor could see the conflict going on inside her, beneath the surface, the skin around her eyes tight and quivering. She didn't want Eleanor connecting with the Concentrator, but she also knew that was the entire reason they had come.

“Mom, it's okay.” Eleanor smiled and stepped toward the device, searching its trunk for the same interface console she had used to stop the other one in the Arctic. Before she'd stepped between the ring of statues around it, she heard a click behind her.