The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Read online

  She put her hand on his arm. “Let’s go,” she said gently. “Let’s go to these ruins and see what you saw in the tea.”

  “I don’t know...” he began.

  She didn’t want to say it, but he was making her say it. “What would your brother want you to do right now?” she asked.

  He winced.

  “Darius—would he want you to turn around and just go back to working at a gift shop?”

  He sighed.

  “We both saw things in that tea, Darius. We saw things that we can’t turn away from now. Your brother saw it too, and it made him demand a promise from you. A promise to keep fighting, even as he lay dying. Because it was greater than him. It’s greater than me, and you. We can’t let him sacrifice his life for nothing.” She looked down at the ruins below. “Like you said...the only way out is through.” She shouldered her rucksack onto her back. “So let’s go. We have some time before whomever that squad worked for sends more people. Let’s use it.”

  She didn’t want to talk to him like that. But sometimes people just don’t give you a choice.

  Nadira wended her way down the ridge to the ruins below. She did not look back.

  -7-

  The ruins of Baloneth had a perimeter defined by sunbaked stone walls three meters high. They were covered in lichen and moss. A few trees and mushrooms grew amid the crumbling temples and halls within. Others sprouted through what remained of the flagstone pathways. But for the most part, the jungle did not enter.

  From the eastern gate to the western gate, or what was left of them, the ruins were about a kilometer across. It didn’t take much time for Darius and Nadira to survey the grounds.

  “Any of this look familiar?” he asked her. “Based on what you saw with the tea?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know how much more time we have, Nadira. Whoever sent that squad is bound to send more soon. And this time, they’ll probably send twice as many. Or...maybe they’ll just call in an airstrike.”

  “I know, D, I’m looking at everything. But I’m just not—” She stopped and stared ahead.

  “What?” asked Darius. He followed her gaze to the back of a building that they’d passed on the way in.

  There was a plaque with a trident on it.

  “Oh.”

  She nodded. “Let’s take a look inside.”

  The edifice was in the center of town, such as it was, and cube-shaped. It was about 12 meters tall. It had a simple, four-sided hip roof. It looked like the oldest structure in the ruins, yet it was the most intact. The implication was that its builders had used their best materials to construct it. Darius’s father had taught him that bit of architectural history.

  Narrow horizontal windows decorated the walls of the structure at about three-meter intervals. They were positioned well above the height of a man. Perhaps they had been designed more for illumination than for viewing.

  As Darius and Nadira entered, they could see a circular hole in the ceiling, perhaps two meters across. Between the windows and the hole, the sun could cast a respectable amount of light within. Its rays were a thick pillar of dust beaming down through the center of the structure.

  The floor was made of a white marble-like stone streaked with thin purple clouds of some unknown mineral. It had been carved into dozens of concentric rings that nearly took up the whole room. Instead of grout, the gaps between the segments were filled with some kind of silvery metal.

  It was a work of art that Darius had not come to expect from the ruins of Telamat. Something was different about this place.

  “I’m sensing a theme here,” he said. “What does your visor say?”

  “One hundred and thirteen.”

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Rings. Rings in the floor.”

  “I don’t know what that would mean.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a prime number, I guess.”

  Darius beheld the far wall for the first time. It contained a tile mural of some kind, but the ages had not been gentle. All that could be clearly discerned at this point were two plaques, one on each side of the wall.

  He went up to one of them. There was a trident shape here too. This one had deep grooves, like it had been touched by hands over and over again. He put his right hand into the grooves: thumb in the left-hand tine, index finger and middle finger in the middle tine, and his ring and pinky fingers in the right-hand tine.

  It fit perfectly.

  “Nadira,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come see this.”

  She looked at it. “I see.”

  “Do you...do you want to try it?” he asked. “On the other plaque. I don’t know, it seems right.”

  “It does,” she said.

  She walked over to the other plaque and placed her hand in it.

  His plaque seemed to pulse at the same time that she put her hand in. He pulled his hand back instinctively. He looked over to Nadira. She had had the same reaction.

  They looked at each other.

  “That was strange,” he said.

  She nodded.

  They both stared at their plaques.

  “Let’s do it again,” she said. “Let’s keep our hands there, and...Let’s see if something happens. I know it sounds silly, but—what’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Let’s try it.”

  They put their hands back in the grooves. The plaques pulsed again. Nothing happened.

  They waited, then they pulled their hands back out.

  Nadira looked disappointed. He was disappointed too.

  “Nadira,” he asked her, “Maybe there’s a clue in the mushroom trip. You talked about what you saw when you drank the tea. Do remember anything that you touched, or heard, or even smelled?”

  “Well...I remember one thing very distinctly. Your father looked up at me, and he said something in a language I didn’t understand. I looked it up, but there was no translation.”

  “My father looked at you?”

  “Yeah, I thought it was a good idea to leave that part out earlier. He wasn’t exactly...alive.”

  “Let’s...deal with that later. What did he say?”

  “He said ‘Ku atta kané.’ I heard it several times, actually. What? Why are you looking at me like that? Never mind, don’t tell me. You’ve heard it too.”

  He gulped and nodded. “I was kind of hoping that you wouldn’t say that.”

  “What do you suppose it means?” she asked.

  He knew, but he didn’t know. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He looked at his plaque again. “But I have an idea.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  They put their hands back into the grooves. The plaques pulsed. “On one,” he said. “Three, two, one...”

  They said it together.

  “Ku atta kané.”

  They waited. They looked at each other. They kept their hands in the grooves.

  Nadira said to him, “Do you feel anyth—”

  Suddenly, the floor bounced and rolled like the wave of an earthquake was passing through it. It was just a single wave, but it was powerful enough to knock them both off their feet.

  They lay on the cool marble floor and stared at each other. Everything was silent. Nothing rolled or bounced. It was almost as if it had been their imagination.

  “Well,” she said, “it didn’t kill us, so there’s that.”

  He said, “I don’t know if that was a greeting, a warning, or something else.”

  Nadira put the palm of her hand flat against the marble. “Wait. Is the floor...getting warmer?”

  “Get off the circle!” he said.

  They scurried back until they were flat against opposite walls of the cube.

  “I hope it’s a greeting!” said Nadira.

  They watched as the circle in the floor began to sink mechanically, from the center outward. Darius’s eyes shot to the door, and he wondered if he should run.

  Each r
ing clicked as it descended one at a time into the depths.

  As the rings disappeared, they revealed a spiral staircase below. Then all the sliding and clicking noises were gone, and it was just the two of them and the dusty sunbeams.

  Nadira said, “Well, I don’t remember seeing that on the schematics...”

  Then there was a snapping sound, and a soft yellow-white light embedded in the wall around the staircase lit up. The fixture was narrow and horizontal. It was just a few inches wide and maybe an inch tall. Every second or so, Darius could hear another snap, going lower and lower into the ground. He detected maybe a dozen of them before the sound faded off into the depths.

  They looked at each other from across the room. They knew what had to happen next. Without a word, they gathered their rucksacks and headed carefully down the stairs.

  To the real ruins. Or perhaps something else altogether.

  ✽✽✽

  The air gradually cooled as they made their way down. By the time they got to the bottom of the stairwell, Darius had counted one hundred and thirteen steps. He mentioned this to her.

  “Sounds about right,” she said.

  He agreed.

  There was a door at the bottom of the stairwell.

  There was no knob or handle. Just the seam of a door frame. He pushed, and the door slid open smoothly, as though it were used all the time.

  Open sesame, he thought.

  Beyond was a room roughly the size of the building at the top of the stairwell. There were no yellow fixtures on the walls down here. The illumination came from a bright indigo pulse of light that ran down a seam in the center of the floor like a wave. This pulse made its way from them to the other side every few seconds.

  On the left and right walls were large black circles made of a rough material like hand-carved obsidian. They were perhaps a meter in diameter. There were three on each wall, spaced evenly apart. They looked decorative to Darius, but he wasn’t eager to confirm it.

  At the opposite end of the room was a slightly raised platform set into the wall. It was about two meters deep, three meters wide, and its height went clear to the ceiling. It had what looked like railing. The railing had several thin horizontal balusters rimmed in a yellow glow, and they were not connected to anything. They simply floated in the air. They were black, and smooth whereas the circles on the walls were rough.

  A faint, low humming emanated from all around.

  Darius and Nadira looked at each other. They saw the truth of what they needed to do in each other’s eyes.

  They stepped into the room. The air was cool and crisp here, as though the jungle had just been a dream. Darius still felt the sticky sweat on his back and under his arms. If not for that, he would have wondered if he’d actually been swatting insects just minutes earlier.

  They approached the platform, and its floor began to pulse in that same shade of indigo. It pulsed every time the light in the seam reached it. The low humming was getting louder.

  They stepped onto the platform.

  It began to descend like an elevator. Nadira took his hand.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “It will be all right. I feel it.”

  His pulse quickened anyway.

  He could not tell how long they descended. It felt like a very long time. It felt like minutes. And it was not a slow ride, either. Wherever they were going...it was deep.

  The shaft of the elevator suddenly fell away, and for a moment, the two of them were surrounded only by a featureless black expanse. There seemed to be only the platform that they were standing on, surrounded by a void. As Darius’s eyes adjusted, he made out distant points of illumination. He looked up and gawked.

  The platform had just dropped into an enormous dome-shaped cavern. The shape of the space was defined by scattered indigo lights set into the stone walls. It felt like they had entered into a colossal planetarium. It might have been large enough to cover the whole of New Caledonia.

  Nothing physical supported the platform now, but it did not seem to be falling. It just continued its smooth descent at the same speed as before.

  Seemingly miles away from them, Darius spotted a glowing indigo arch that looked hundreds of meters high. The arch began to pulse as the platform came down. Each time it pulsed, the “stars” pulsed as well, in a wave that went from one end of the cavern to another. And every time it pulsed, a deep booming sound followed right behind.

  The platform began to slow.

  It was almost cold down here. The only odor was a faint ozone.

  The platform came to a gentle stop. It hovered about a meter above the cavern floor.

  The booming and the pulsing stopped. Between the platform and the distant arch, two glowing lines lit up. They floated on either side of the platform and slightly below it, like a cosmic railroad.

  There was a faint clicking noise, and the platform shot itself down the rail at incredible speed. Darius expected to be flung off, but something like a mass of very thick air supported him from behind. No wind swirled around him like he would have expected. There was only the muffled sound of it, as though they were enveloped by an invisible pocket of protection.

  “I wish Rali could have seen this,” said Darius.

  “Maybe he did.”

  A lump rose in his throat. “I wish I could have saved him.”

  They passed through the arch and into a small tunnel. It was lit only by the glowing white rail. The walls of the tunnel were squared off and covered in more obsidian.

  She took his arm. “Maybe you did.”

  The platform slowed down. The thick mass of air behind him began to dissipate. It was replaced by a mass of air in front of him.

  “It’s a dance,” he said. “It’s all just a dance—right?”

  The platform glided smoothly to another stop. Before them stood a set of thick stone doors. They were the pale color of moonlight, and they took up the entire tunnel. There were no handles or knobs.

  “It’s all right, she said. “It’ll be all right.”

  Darius pushed at the doors, and they glided open silently.

  Darius and Nadira made their way in. What lay beyond appeared to be some kind of control room. More of those small yellow lights snapped on. The walls were as milky white as the stone doors they'd just passed through. This space was shaped like an ampitheater. Three rows of console-like stations spanned from one end of the room to the other. Each station had a dark-colored chair that looked like it could reasonably accomodate a human being. They did not have legs. They simply floated.

  Darius touched one of them. The material was pliant. It felt somewhat like animal leather. He pressed down gently, and the chair came lower to the ground. He let go, and it slowly rose back up.

  Everything was covered with the kind of dirt and dust that came from time and disuse. The whole place had a musty, forgotten smell. And there was the undercurrent of something else that he couldn't quite place.

  Along the back wall appeared to be several shelves of equipment. It was equally coated in a history of dust. Darius couldn’t begin to guess the functions of these tools. They looked vaguely scientific. Maybe this one was a handheld scanner. That one could have been a containment unit. Another reminded him of a vintage metal detector.

  There was a large and very tall chair at the front of the control room, or theater, or whatever it was. Whatever it had been. This chair was white, unlike the others. And it was not as dusty or dirty.

  But the chair was not the centerpiece. The centerpiece lay beyond, where an amphitheater's stage would have been: a vast disc of cloudy darkness that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, some ten meters high. Darius didn’t like the look of it. The light did not enter.

  “Darius...” She touched his shoulder.

  “I know. I feel it too.”

  Darius positioned himself so that he was standing directly behind the tall white chair. Something about this looked familiar.

  Then he had it. “This looks like my fa
ther’s drawings. The ones that...that Rali showed me years ago. I saw them again when I drank the tea.”

  He crept up to the chair from behind. The mustiness was getting worse. It was more than mustiness.

  “Darius, before we—”

  He swung the chair around.

  He understood that smell now. It was the stink of death.

  “Darius,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. It didn’t even make sense to me. Not until we walked in here.”

  Darius pulled a sheet out of his rucksack and covered his father’s desiccated body.

  ✽✽✽

  Darius took Saeed’s body back to the entrance of the room, and he set it down as gently as he could. Then he returned to the chair, and he gazed at the strange void beyond.

  “Why did my father sit here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Darius. I guess that’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “There’s much less dust and dirt on this chair. As though he used it several times.” He tested the pliant material with his hands. He decided to sit on it himself. He was feeling shaky.

  “Darius, are you sure that’s safe?”

  He looked over at her. “No, I’m not.” He took a seat and swung the chair back to its original position.

  The clouded void was gone. The control room was gone. He looked around and found himself in a different place.

  It still seemed to be a control room of a kind, but definitely not on Telamat. Before him was a giant half-dome window perhaps 50 meters tall. He was standing directly below its highest point. This place was not lit from within. He was able to see because there was starlight pouring through the transglass, if that’s what it was. These stars did not twinkle—the sign of cold vacuum on the other side.

  Whereas the first control room had whiteness and rounded shapes, this one was dominated by angles and shades of slate and a very dark red. It was unlike any other architecture he’d ever seen. Severe. Timelessly durable. Ominous.

  He looked through the half-dome window, and he beheld a circular outline in space. It betrayed itself with a subdued but shimmering rim.

  He appeared to be looking at a hole in the stars that led to...a different set of stars.