Island of the Sun (16 page)

Her mom didn't answer for several moments. “Self-reflection is a good thing,” she said. “Second-guessing is not.”

“What's the difference?”

“Self-reflection is about the future. Doing better next time. Second-guessing is stuck in the past. Beating yourself up over things you can't change.”

That made sense but didn't really do anything to make Eleanor feel better about the fact that Dr. Powers and Julian were now prisoners. She wondered where they were, what was happening to them. Were they in a jail cell? Were they frightened? Were they waiting—hoping—for rescue, not knowing they'd been abandoned?

“I wish it were different,” her mom said. “But . . .” And here she brought her hand down before her as if laying it on a table. “We made the only choice we could with the information we had.”

She sounded much more definite than Eleanor felt, almost practiced, but everything she'd said struck Eleanor as false reassurance. Like she was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince her daughter. Eleanor listened to the plane engines for a few moments, no clearer than she'd been before.

“I just . . . ,” her mom started, but the strength went out of her voice. “I just hope they're okay.”

Now it was Eleanor's turn to reassure. “Watkins said they hadn't been hurt.”

“I don't trust him for a moment.”

But Amaru had believed Watkins was an honorable man. Right now, Eleanor could only hope that was true.

V
ERY QUICKLY, DISCUSSION ON THE PLANE TURNED TO
where they should go, and what they should do. Eleanor had successfully shut down two Concentrators, which emboldened her, and her thoughts on their plan were clear.

“We go to Egypt,” she said. “We find the third Concentrator, and I shut it down. Then we go to the Himalayas.”

Just a few weeks ago, the idea of going to Egypt, let alone the Arctic or Peru, would never have crossed her mind, but now she said it as if it were the most obvious choice they could make.

The rest of the passengers on the plane didn't
seem as certain as Eleanor that their next move was to immediately go looking for a third Concentrator—Watkins was clearly onto their plan now, and he would anticipate this move—but they soon came to the shared conclusion that they didn't really have a choice. If they were going to pursue their original mission, even without Dr. Powers and Julian, it was Egypt or the Himalayas, and Egypt sounded like the better choice of the two at the moment.

The only other alternative was to abandon the mission altogether. No one brought up that idea directly, but as Eleanor glanced from face to face, she was pretty sure they were all thinking about it. Why wouldn't they be?

But the Freeze was still happening. The rogue planet was still up there. Two of the Concentrators were still feeding it. Nothing about their situation had changed, other than having achieved a few first successes and getting themselves branded as terrorists. To give up now was to give up on the human race, and none of them seemed prepared to do that just yet.

“As the chauffeur here,” Luke said from the cockpit, “I agree that Egypt is the better choice. The Himalayas are twelve thousand miles from here. Egypt is seven thousand, and generally on the way. I'll still need to refuel twice to get there, which, by the way, will just
about be the end of my petty cash. We need to fly north, then east. So where should we stop?”

“Cuba?” Eleanor's mom asked.

“Too many eyes there,” Luke said. “With all the folks from Florida trying to move south, there are lots of bureaucratic hoops to jump through if we want to land in Cuba.”

“Venezuela, then,” Betty said.

“Too risky,” Eleanor's mom said. “With their oil reserves, the G.E.T. has a huge presence there.”

“What about Florida?” Eleanor asked.

“Florida makes sense,” Luke said. “Miami. From there, Spain. Madrid or Barcelona. Then on to Egypt.”

“My mom lives in Florida,” Finn said.

His statement hung in the pressurized air of the cabin for several moments, unacknowledged, but taking up a lot of room.

Eleanor's mom cleared her throat. “I assume the G.E.T. are watching her very closely. In case you try to make contact with her.”

“I know,” Finn said.

“I'm afraid it would be too risky to try to—”

“Yeah, I get it,” Finn interrupted.

Eleanor wanted to reassure him somehow. “It's the same reason we didn't go to get my uncle Jack.”

Finn nodded. “Sure. And once you've watched your
dad and your brother get captured, and then abandoned them, not stopping to see your mom isn't really a big deal.”

That statement hit the air too, but much heavier.

“Besides,” Finn added, “what would I say to her?”

Eleanor had not thought about that, but the minute Finn posed the question, she saw what he meant. His mom would obviously want to know where Julian and Dr. Powers were, she'd want to know about everything that had happened, and Eleanor certainly wouldn't be able to formulate a way to explain it all.

Luke said the flight to Miami would take them a little over nine hours. During the first part of the flight, Eleanor slept some more, as did the others in the cabin. When she woke up, she snacked on some potato chips and another granola bar, wishing she had something to read.

Eventually, she found herself up in the cockpit with Luke.

“Don't you ever get tired?” she asked him.

“I've never needed much sleep,” he said. “Back when I was a kid, I had the worst insomnia. Always restless. My grandma used to say I was half firecracker.”

“Is that why you became a pilot? So you could keep moving all the time?”

“No,” he said. “I became a pilot because I hate
people, and up here is about as far away from them as I can get.”

“You don't hate people,” Eleanor said.

He opened his mouth as if he were about to argue, paused, and then nodded. “Maybe it's just most people.”

“So nice of you to give some of us a chance.”

“I never said I was perfect,” he said. “What about you? Things any better with your mom?”

“I don't know. I think the whole thing still freaks her out.”

“Well, now that I've seen it . . .” But he didn't finish that, and instead asked, “What's it like when you connect with that thing?”

Eleanor stared out the window at the ocean below them, endless in every direction. “It's hard to explain. It's kind of like when you learn something, and it makes so much sense to you, it's like you already knew it, you just didn't know you knew it.”

“Hmm,” he said. “That kinda makes sense.”

“Really? It doesn't to me. I just want to know what makes me different.”

“That's natural,” he said. “But you ask me, the rest of us should simply be grateful that you are different. If it wasn't for you, we'd still be up in the Arctic right now, trying to figure out what that thing did. Or, you know, dead.”

“Thanks, Fournier.”

“You're sounding like Betty.”

Eleanor smiled and laid her head back against the seat.

A few hours later, they landed in Miami. While Luke refueled and swept the plane for tracking devices as best he could, Eleanor's mom decided to run over to the airport terminal to buy some new clothes for herself and Eleanor. They both still wore the thermal suits from their diving equipment, and the only clothing they had on the plane was their polar gear, the rest of it either lost in the Arctic or left on Amaru's boat. Eleanor wanted to go with her, but her mom worried it would be too risky and insisted she go alone. A short while later she returned with sweatpants, sweatshirts, and T-shirts, the only things she could find, all of them branded
Florida: the Sunshine State!

For the length of their stopover, Finn sat off by himself, and though Eleanor could guess what he was thinking about, she knew she didn't really understand what it was like for him. After she'd changed into her new clothes, with their new-clothes smell, and they boarded the plane once more, she went over and sat down next to him, much in the same way he had sat next to her in the cargo hold.

“Are you okay?” She knew what a dumb question it
was, how annoyed she'd be if someone asked her in the same situation. But she didn't know what else to say.

“In general, or considering what we've been through?” he asked. “In general, life sucks. But considering in the past couple of weeks we've nearly frozen to death, been shot at a couple of times, and lost my dad and brother, I'm doing pretty well at this precise moment.”

“Point taken. I deserved that.”

“No, you didn't,” he said. But he didn't apologize, either.

“Do you still think you should be with them?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I guess so. But I know how that sounds. My dad would say I'm being
irrational
.” He deepened his voice when he said it, imitating Dr. Powers.

“I don't know about irrational,” Eleanor said. “But I think I kinda get it.”

“It's not that I wish I got caught. I just . . . I wish I was with them, I guess.”

Just then Luke rushed on board. “Everybody ready?”

They all took their seats and buckled in, Luke performed his flight checks, and thirty minutes later, they were once again in the air with nothing below
them but ocean. Before long, they flew over the United Lucayan Archipelago—a sprawling, dense network of islands, land bridges, saltwater lakes, and waterways. Eleanor's mom said the region was once very different, decades ago, with much smaller islands, like the Bahamas. The falling sea levels had reshaped it.

Their journey across the Atlantic took them nearly ten hours, and during that time they flew in and out of night, so that with the change in time zones they finally reached Barcelona early the next morning. Eleanor, like most of the kids she'd known back home, had never been to Europe before, but she had learned about it in school.

The European ice sheet now completely covered all of Scandinavia, most of the United Kingdom, Germany, and some of France. Spain, still generally free of ice, had received many of the refugees, as had Italy and Greece, though most were now spilling down into Africa, but also the Middle East, where Eleanor's mom believed a war would soon break out between the refugees and the nationals living there. A devastating conflict had already swept through central Africa, ending with the formation of the Union of the Congo Republics, but not before a lot of people had died.

The last thing the world needed was another war.

They didn't stay in Barcelona long—just enough time for Luke to refuel
Consuelo
and take care of some routine maintenance. There was no sign of the G.E.T., and no indication that they were being followed, but that didn't stop Eleanor from worrying. Then they were back in the air, bound for Cairo. They flew over the Mediterranean and its many islands and peninsulas, but when they reached northern Africa, the view below changed from a sea of blue to a sea of beige desert. It wasn't until they neared Egypt that Eleanor saw any green, a long, wide swath of it.

“That's the Nile floodplain,” her mom said. She sounded exhausted, which wasn't surprising. “This region has supported human societies for a hundred and twenty thousand years, longer than any other place on earth. Africa is the birthplace of humanity.”

Eleanor remembered that the Arctic Concentrator had been in place for at least fifteen thousand years, based on what Amarok's tribe had known about it. “That means the ancient Egyptians might have been around when the Concentrator was . . . installed, or whatever. They might have known about it.”

“It's possible that people here did, yes,” her mom said. “Though the ancient Egyptian empire as we know it didn't emerge until five thousand years ago.”

“So what are you saying?” Eleanor put on mock
heartbreak. “That aliens
didn't
build the pyramids?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” her mom said, but with only a weak smile behind it.

Luke decided to land
Consuelo
at an airstrip outside the Sixth of October City, a little over twenty miles southwest of Cairo. Much like the area surrounding Mexico City, this part of Egypt had become a refugee settlement, mainly for Europeans, and it appeared from the air as if conditions here weren't any better than in Mexico City. There were millions of refugees, densely packed in ramshackle houses that were small and close together. But at least they weren't tents.

“So what's the plan when we land?” Luke asked from the cockpit.

Eleanor's mom pulled out the Sync to look at von Albrecht's map. “The nexus of the ley lines is right over the Giza Plateau, near the pyramids. If what we've come to believe is true, the Concentrator must be somewhere around there.”

Everyone agreed, nodding, but said nothing. As Eleanor looked around at her mom, and Betty, and Finn, she noted circles under their eyes, their rounded shoulders. Their journey, from the Arctic to Peru and now here, was taking a toll.

They landed late in the morning without incident. Luke said cargo planes came in all the time to that
airfield, because of the refugees, so theirs wouldn't stand out—at least not until someone came looking for them specifically. They deplaned onto the sandy tarmac, the air dry, the sun warm on Eleanor's skin, the horizon flat and featureless in every direction she looked, a mix of sand and grass and fields of grain.

At the airport terminal, they arranged for a taxi van to pick them up and then waited outside. When it arrived, they piled in and Luke asked the driver, a very friendly, middle-aged man named Youssef, if they could be taken to the pyramids.

“No, no.” He waved both hands across the air above the steering wheel. “Closed.”

“Closed?” Eleanor's mom asked.

“Yes, closed.”

“Why?” Luke asked.

“The G.E.T.,” he said, and did not sound happy about it. “They block off the whole area. Why? I don't know. No oil there!” He stuck his open hands out in front of him, over the dashboard, his shoulders raised.

If the G.E.T. had closed off access to the pyramids, that surely meant they knew about, and had possibly found, the Concentrator. This was exactly what Eleanor had worried she would find when they arrived. She wiped some sweat from her forehead. Youssef's van was getting uncomfortably warm. He didn't have
the air-conditioning turned on, and the windows were all up.

“Could we get close enough to see them?” Eleanor's mom asked.

Eleanor didn't know what good that would do. If the G.E.T. had taken control of the site, would it even be possible to get close enough to the Concentrator to do what she had come to do?

“Yes, yes,” Youssef said, and turned the key. “I take you to a good place. Good view. Good food. You will like it.”

He pulled the van away from the terminal and onto a two-lane road. As they drove across the desert, they passed several cars, as well as groups of people leading camels. Before long, they reached the refugee community and skirted along its edge, the small, severe structures made of cinder block and seemingly constructed only for basic shelter without giving any thought to comfort. From the look of it, they had no power or running water. People loitered outside them and stood in the doorways, staring at the cars driving past.