Dark Oracle (17 page)

“I’m grateful that Major Gabriel found you. You’ve been out of touch.”

Harry remained stubbornly silent. Gabriel had thrown him in the back of the SUV, blindfolded. Harry had no idea where he was, only that their location was somewhere off a gravel road. The place smelled strongly of earth, of metal, with a close, strange echo that seemed to travel through the glass and roll up to the walls. Harry thought they might be underground, given the deadening of sound, but he couldn’t be certain.

“Where the hell are we?” he countered with a question of his own. This pretending, this false civility, the talking around the fact that Harry had been essentially abducted, pissed him off.

“You know that I can’t say.” Corvus thinned his lips. “Where’s Magnusson’s daughter?”

Harry looked Corvus directly in the eye. “I don’t know.” He could answer that truthfully, at least.

Corvus crossed his arms, brushed some imaginary dirt from his fingers onto his suit jacket. “Is she with Dr. Sheridan?” When he spoke Tara’s name, something dark, like guilt, glinted across his vision.

“I don’t know where either of them are.”

Corvus leaned across his desk. “Listen to me, Agent Li. You’re an inch away from obstruction of justice and kidnapping charges. I can salvage what little remains of your career if you work with me.” Corvus’s left eye twitched, and Harry noticed his shirt was wrinkled. Signs of high stress for a fastidious man like Corvus.

“Look,” Harry said. “I don’t appreciate being trussed up like a pig, sandbagged, and then accused of kidnapping. You and Gabriel have been waiting in the shrubbery to pounce on whatever we can beat out of it.” Rebellion scalded his throat, tasting both foreign and pure. “I’m not playing the game.”

Corvus’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think you fully appreciate your predicament. You can either work with me, now, or. . .” His eyes flickered to the figure blowing smoke outside the door. “Gabriel will get the information from you in a much less pleasant way. It’ll be out of my hands. You saw what happened to DiRosa.”

The threat slithered across the desk.

Harry weighed his options. Corvus had him backed into a corner, and there was only one course of action.

Harry stood up and approached Corvus’s desk with his hands folded respectfully at his sides. He spat blood on the immaculate glass surface.

Corvus kicked back from the desk in horror, flecks of blood peppering his snow-white shirt. His chair fell backward, and his shoe tipped over the desk. It shattered in a jingling rain of safety-glass fragments on the gray carpet.

Gabriel and his men burst through the door, ground Harry’s face into the carpet, and twisted his arms behind his back.

Harry could hear Corvus sputtering in panic, and smiled against the itchy carpet.
Bastard.

His smile faltered as Gabriel kicked him over, driving the breath from his lungs, and stood on his sternum. Harry could feel the pattern of Gabriel’s boot tread pressing into his flesh.

“I gave Corvus the courtesy of letting you hide behind his skirt. You’re all mine now.”

Chapter Sixteen

T
HE SWELLING
moon rode low over the desert, bleaching the earth pale gray and white. Frost shimmered with the illusion of movement as the serene light played over ice crystals. Its light burned away all but the brightest stars, casting their distant gazes on the ground below.

Tara wound the truck around the northern edge of the caldera cradling the remnants of Magnusson’s lab. The moon illuminated enough of the colorless landscape that she could cut the lights for the dark, silent drive. Frost from her breath accumulated on the inside of the windshield in spidery tendrils. She paused to wipe them away with her sleeve, only for her breath to conjure them anew in minutes.

Her fingers twitched at the radio dial, trying to summon something human in the darkness. The dial grazed only static, and she wondered if it was some side effect of military technology in the area, or whether the radio was simply shot.

The cold and silence of the dark had settled into her. Her fingers fused with the radiating chill of the steering wheel, the icy metal of the gas pedal flowing through the sole of her shoe. She felt drawn, as if pulled by fishing line through the surface of cold water. Her reflection, glimpsed in the rearview mirror, seemed inhumanly surreal: winter had drained the color out of her face, the moonlight casting planes and shadows over her unbound hair and eyelashes. She looked like a ghostly figure from a fairy-tale: the Queen of Swords, the Snow Queen. She felt the power of the ancient archetype settle deep within her chest: the sorrow of loss, the resolute sense of duty, staring into a desolate kingdom.

She parked the truck at the rim above the caldera, looked down at the plastic-wrapped remains of the lab. At this distance, it seemed that a ghost paused at the bottom of the crater, shrouded in pulsing white. The figure eight of the accelerator track was merely a silver path on which that ghost might travel, retracing its steps for eternity. The pinging of the truck engine as it cooled was the only sound in this barren place.

She reached into her purse for her cold cards, shuffled them in her chapped hands. She nestled her chin into her coat. It wasn’t hers; the Pythia had left it behind for her. It smelled like cigarette smoke and made her eyes itch. But itching was better than freezing.

“What do I need to know?” she asked the cards.

She pulled one card with numb and clumsy fingers: the Hanged Man. A man was suspended by his foot from a tree. His hands were laced behind his back, and serenity glowed in his expression. The card suggested sacrifice, a transformation. Her intuition shivered over her, despite the cold.

She drew a second card, and her hands stilled in contemplation. Judgment. A man, woman, and child rose up out of coffins to herald an angel trumpeting them awake. This card suggested finality, that a permanent decision for good or ill was to be made. But the symbol of the coffin, especially the woman in it, chilled her. It struck far too close to her own experience at the hands of the Gardener.

Movement in the bowl of the caldera seized her eye. Dark violet sparks seethed into the darkness, vanished. She’d seen that glimmer before, when she’d found Magnusson’s watch.

Her breath obscured too much of her view, and she climbed out of the truck. The squeak of the rusty door hinges seemed to pierce some of the crystalline silence. The image of the Magician stepped into her thoughts, standing alone with the glowing symbol of infinity drawn in the ether above his head, paralleling the track of the particle accelerator below. Was this truly where Magnusson destroyed himself?

Her eyes narrowed, and she descended farther into the field, gun drawn. Dried grass lashed against her legs. Was this some manipulation of radiation, some trace of light left behind? Or was this some aftereffect of the dark matter pulled from the ether?

She walked up to the fence, cast a pebble at it. No arc or sparking lanced across its surface. Scanning east and west for video surveillance, she saw no signs of it. She took her coat off. The cold air cut through her shirt and skin like a slap. Digging her fingers into the fence, she climbed up to the edge of the razor wire. She slung her coat over the tangle of razor wire, clambered over it, and dropped back to the other side.

She’d half expected flashlights and men with guns to appear from the dark, to corner her immediately. But there was only silence, the cold, and the moon. Tara walked down the caldera to where she’d seen the milling fragments of light, shivering. She’d stopped feeling her face, and when she touched it with her hand, it felt rubbery, like stone. Her wounded arm ached hotly, and it seemed the cold settled more deeply into the scars lacing her body.

“Magnusson,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

She felt this place was too strongly tied to him, that perhaps he had never left it. There was no other sign of him, anywhere. The last traces of him had been found here, this place with the mysterious light.

She paused, looking down. Faint specks of violet light appeared and disappeared along the grasses. They glinted very faintly, and Tara had to look slightly away from them to truly see them, as one does with dim stars. These last bits of fallout from Magnusson’s experiment disappeared within the earth, then reappeared.

Tara remembered the devoured walls of the laboratory, the missing guts of Magnusson’s watch. Still, she felt inexorably drawn to these faint pinpoints of light, and reached toward them with her bare hand, adorned only with Magnusson’s watch. Some distant part of her mind chided her for her fearlessness of bodily harm. There were much worse things than the scars she bore, that small voice warned her.

Several tiny particles hovered over the grasses and swarmed over her hand. She held her breath, half expecting to have her flesh disassembled at a subatomic level. . .

But they dissolved into the watch, vanishing painlessly.

Tara stared at the watch, stripped it off her wrist. She turned it over and ran her finger over the engraved infinity loop on the reverse. She popped open the back with the truck keys, wanting to know where that light had gone.

She gasped. The interior of the watch glowed, the violet particles racing along the remaining bits of circuitry. In a flash, she understood. In her hands lay a battery Magnusson had created to attract and hold dark energy, cleverly disguised as a watch.

She put it back together, dousing the light trickling inside it, and snapped it back on her wrist. She stood, eye roving over the landscape. Magnusson, whatever his condition, would never have left this behind.

Some yards distant, she spied something irregular in the earth, a lump seeming out of place for this perfectly sculpted place. It looked like a buried tree branch, jammed into the ground and twisted, like driftwood. Around it, the rocks and soil had swirled in on themselves, as if a dust devil had died there.

She remembered the Hanged Man, suspended from the tree. She trudged to the spot and scraped aside grasses and loose gravel with her numb hands. The hard earth cut into her hands and drew blood. But she kept digging, driven by her own sense of magnetic north. She dug until her blood mixed with the hard soil and she’d excavated a hole reaching into the earth.

She sat back on her heels, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth and suppressing a violent shudder.

Magnusson.

Or what was left of him. She recognized the line of the physicist’s jaw from his photos, judged the dark eye socket to be similar to his. But the skeleton wasn’t pale bone; it was rock melted and twisted like iron in a forge. A shoulder turned in the wrong direction; an arm and part of his face were half buried in the earth, fused to the stones and rocks and part of a cactus. She ran her finger over his brow. His hair had melted into the grass, and his cheekbone melded with a piece of basalt that glittered in the night. His fingers dribbled away into pebbles that dislodged their delicate formation at her touch. He reminded her, at a deep level, of renderings she’d seen of the Celtic Green Man, at one with the earth. No wonder the investigators had missed him; even with ground-penetrating radar, Magnusson’s remains had fused with the earth so thoroughly that it might not have registered to the technician. He was one with the hard-packed earth, and there was no disturbance or foreign substance intrusion for the radar to detect.

This had to be the worst way to die: buried alive.

She understood the Hanged Man and the final Judgment now. Magnusson had made the ultimate sacrifice to destroy his research. She guessed he’d been caught by one of the mini black holes he’d opened up, and when it had finally winked out of existence, the black hole didn’t differentiate among the animals, plants, and minerals left behind. And the bits of dark energy remaining here. . . without the battery or a black hole to attract them. . . they were fading fast.

She stood, dejected for both the brilliance that had been lost and Cassie’s loss of a father. She climbed up the slope to the fence, arms wrapped around herself, eager to leave this alien place as desolate as the heart of space. She clambered gracelessly over the fence, managed to swipe down the tattered remains of her coat.

She turned the key in the pickup’s engine. To her dismay, it failed to turn over. It seemed the silent vacuum had claimed it, as well. She tried again, willing it to start, but the key only clicked in the ignition, creating no spark to warm the cold metal.

Slinging her purse and Cassie’s backpack over her good shoulder, she opened the creaking door of the pickup into the frigid night once more. Putting one foot in front of the other, she walked down the moonlit dirt road. The moon above drew her on, exercising its magnetism over her. She could feel its cold, soft light settling over her, settling into her frozen skin.

A coyote crept out of the sage on the road before her, its shadow cast long over the frost-hardened dirt. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, sauntering into the shadows. Tara’s eyes followed its path, glimpsing a dead scorpion lying in the dirt, its glossy black claws raised up to the moon.

Symbols from the Moon Tarot card. She could feel their power mingling with her unconscious mind, shaking awake her intuition, even as the cold splintered her thoughts. She nearly walked past a tiny path branching to the left of the road, and she thought about the white and black pillars depicted in the card: a choice. The right-hand road stretched out broadly, smeared with the impressions of tire marks. The tracks were broadly spaced; Tara guessed military jeeps or trucks. There had been traffic, here. The left-hand path was narrow, a footpath dropping away over a slope. Anyone driving through here in a vehicle would easily miss it. She took the left-hand path, the way the coyote had come. The coyote was alive, and she accepted that as a good omen.

The narrow path pitched down into a shallow ravine. Brittle sagebrush raked against her clothes as she walked. Once or twice, she glimpsed the wash of headlights on the horizon. . . The destination of the other path, she guessed. The path Tara had taken circled around, avoiding that light. Tara guessed it might have been made by deer or other animals wanting to avoid human activity.

The path dissolved before a wall of rock and earth. An opening roughly the size of a man pierced the jagged stone surface. Old timbers supported and bracketed the uneven doorway. This doorway had been made by men.

Tara pulled a small flashlight from her bag and switched it on. Deep inside, she could see traces of guano, broken wood debris, and ropes. It was an old mineshaft. She guessed miners would have been searching for silver in this part of the country. Judging by the litter, this place was long abandoned.

Tara sat back on her heels. There was no way of knowing how big the mine was, or where it led. She dared to hope the traffic she’d seen on the main road had been leading to another arm of the mine—one modified for current covert use—and that she could find her way to it through this passage. Her intuition pulled her to this place, and she strongly felt Harry was somewhere near.

But fear trickled through her. The last time she’d been underground, she’d been imprisoned by the Gardener. Since that time, she’d even avoided subways and tunnels. The thought of entering the mine made sweat trickle down the back of her neck, as she felt the stirring of claustrophobia uncoiling in her gut. What if the passage narrowed, and she were trapped? What if she couldn’t find her way out?
What if—?

She took a deep breath, steadying the shaking flashlight, and approached the crevasse in the rock. Harry was in danger and needed help, whether he wanted her at his side, or not. Her feelings, and his, were beside the point.

The shadow of the earth fell over her, and she immediately missed the illuminating light of the moon in that sudden eclipse. She supposed some fragments of it still existed in the traces of silver in the mine, and she tried to imagine that some bit of silvery moonlight remained hidden just beyond her reach, embedded in this total darkness. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the ancients believed that the moon’s rays created silver. But she could detect none of that comforting light now. Gravel crunched underfoot, and her flashlight beam wavered, casting angular shadows against the debris: discarded, bent metal tools; splintered wood beams; an abandoned shoe.

Her breath scraped the inside of her lungs, and her pulse thudded too quickly in her throat. She could feel it hammering against the shoulder strap of the backpack. The passage narrowed, and she took deep gulps of air to steady herself. She was alone, she reminded herself. The Gardener was long dead. Her flesh was whole, and she was perfectly capable of running back into the lighter darkness of night. She was in control.

Breathe,
she told herself.

The ceiling of the shaft scraped her head, and she shivered. It smelled too much like earth here. Not the Gardener’s fresh, upturned loam fortified with humus, but stale, forgotten dirt broken into pieces and cast aside.

She forced herself to move forward for what seemed like hours, the flashlight slick in her hand. The beam flickered and yellowed, and the fear of being alone in the darkness nearly turned her around. Sweat slid into the wound on her arm, stinging, reminding her of the smell and taste of blood.