Black Rain

“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t trust the system. And why should you? They burned you for something, exiled you. I don’t even know what it was; I have a fifty-page file on you and two-thirds of it’s blacked out. But from what I’ve seen, you do what you think is right, even when it costs you.”

“Not always,” he assured her.

“The point is, that’s what I’m trying to do here,” she said. “And if you help me, I promise you, it will be worth it. This is your chance, Hawker. It may be the last chance you ever get. You can change your life and if you look at it from the bigger picture, you can change a lot of lives.”

The bigger picture. It was something he’d always had a hard time focusing on, especially when the smaller, local picture was so painful to see.

“Hawker,” she continued, “I know you want to leave, to take everyone home. But if you go, they will stamp this file closed as a failure and things will be worse for you. Not by my doing,” she insisted. “God knows I owe you my life. But those same people who exiled you, they still run things, and they have an interest in this. And they will want someone to blame. This time exile won’t be enough. They’ll come for you. They’ll hound you.”

He turned away, angry and confused. Tell them to bring it on, he thought, catching the words just before they could escape his mouth. “People are dying out here,” he said. “Good people—our people. You lied and I helped you lie and we walked them, smiling, right into hell. If you don’t think there’s going to be a price to pay for that, then you are sadly in the dark.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she said. “People I cared about are dead as well. Leaving won’t bring them back. But finishing the job will make their sacrifice have some purpose.”

She gazed into his eyes. “I have to go back in there, Hawker. Whether you want to or not, I have to. I’ll go in alone if you make me. But I’m not leaving here empty-handed.”

He could feel the price getting steeper for both of them. “Before this is over,” he warned, “I think you’re going to wish you had.”

She looked at the ground and then briefly back up at him before turning and marching away, off toward the center of camp.

Hawker shook his head, dropping the piece of equipment he’d found and kicking it across the clearing in frustration. It skipped and rolled and then broke into several pieces. For a long moment, he stared at the shattered remnants as if they held some great meaning.

It took the sound of distant shouting to tear him away.

Professor McCarter was running across the camp, carrying something and waving. McCarter arrived at Danielle first. They spoke briefly before he took her by the hand and led her back toward Hawker. By the time they reached him, McCarter was out of breath.

“We’ve got to go back inside the temple,” he said, panting. “We’ve got to do it now.”

Hawker shook his head in disbelief. “This is like some kind of disease with you guys.”

McCarter didn’t waste time explaining; instead, he held out a bright orange object he’d been carrying: Kaufman’s ELF radio. He turned the volume up.

“Can anybody hea …? Mr … aufman … please answer …” It was Susan Briggs, attempting to reach Kaufman on the low-frequency transmitter.

“She’s alive,” McCarter said. “We can hear her transmission, but she can’t hear ours. She hasn’t responded to anything we’ve sent.”

“Where?” Hawker asked. “How?”

“She’s in the cave beneath the temple somewhere, and if Kaufman’s right, those animals are in there with her. She’ll never make it out on her own. We have to go in and get her. We have to go now.”

Hawker glanced sideways at Danielle; both of them knew what this meant: she would get her chance to explore the cave after all. “You must have nine lives,” he said to her. “Try not to forget which number you’re on.”

CHAPTER 35

In the darkness of the cave beneath the temple, Hawker stood back from the edge of the lake and gazed into the clear water ahead of him. The bottom was lined with a smooth layer of whitish calcite, dotted in random places by pea-sized spheres called cave pearls. And in the glare of his flashlight, everything shimmered as if covered in a coat of wet lacquer.

He redirected his light toward the ceiling, forty feet above. Different formations loomed there: huge stalactites hanging in clumps, great daggers of stone pointed toward them, some of them fifteen feet long, three feet thick at the base. Cutting between them was an angled row of smaller, jagged spikes, like an endless row of shark’s teeth, a formation known as a welt line, and farther off an array of delicate strands called soda straws dangled from an overhang, their tips glistening with moisture.

“Hell of a cave,” he said. The words echoed.