His girlfriend Bridgette was visiting her parents for the weekend, so he was alone in the house. Still, he felt rushed, as if someone was pulling him along. Or pushing.

  That’s when he glanced at the stacks he’d placed on the couch in the study, across from his desk. He often spent afternoons there, curled up with a book when the summertime sun prohibited him from walking the gardens or watching the boats out front. The books and looseleaf notebooks were scattered about the space, no discernible organization to them. He had thrown them there hours ago, assuming they were of no use to his current quest.

  Perhaps there’s something there I need, he thought.

  He racked his brain. There were no obvious connections or he would already have realized it. These books were philosophical, not practical, treatises on religion and power and politics, not matters of hard science.

  He had assumed he’d needed something ‘tangible,’ an answer that made sense in scientific terms. He knew the answer should be here. He had a veritable library of information in his home, so if the answer they were looking for was not in his stash of hard-copy materials than it would exist somewhere in his online catalog of research papers.

  It’s just a matter of time, he told himself. The answer is out there.

  He gave up on the books on the couch — they might lead him the right direction, but he no longer had the luxury of time. He needed to find out now what the missing piece to all of this was.

  He heard a knock on his door. Nearly inaudible, just a set of raps that made him freeze immediately. He could hear the gentle sounds of the hikers out in the garden, the birds flitting back and forth as they searched for their dusk meal, and the tourists, laughing and conversing in one of the three cafes within walking distance.

  But the knock on the door seemed louder than everything else. It pierced his ears, pierced his core. Even though he had been expecting it, it was still somehow the most startling sound he’d ever heard, and in this moment he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  The knock came again. No voice to go alongside it, no person on the other side to announce their presence.

  But he knew they were there. He knew they would wait. Patiently.

  They knew his schedule, and they knew he was alone.

  He shuddered, feeling the goosebumps rise on the back of his neck.

  I’m out of time.

  He walked to the door, still shaking. He considered not opening the door, but he knew that was stupid. There was nowhere to hide, and they surely knew he was home. Besides, there was no other way out of the apartment unless he wanted to risk a multi-story fall from his balcony.

  He unlatched the lock and turned the handle. He pulled the door toward him, allowing the cooling evening air to rush inside.

  “Good evening, professor,” the man on the threshold said. “Ms. Rascher tells me that you have been ignoring her calls. May I come in?”

  CHAPTER 11

  SARAH

  Jennifer Ortiz. Jennifer was another of her assistants, older than the others but still working on her first undergraduate degree. She was a hard worker, earning her place on the team, but Sarah had been a bit cold to her from the beginning of the trip. She felt Jennifer was a bit of a ‘teacher’s pet,’ a know-it-all who liked being the best and the smartest in the class.

  Admittedly, Sarah was probably a bit harsh on the girl, and she also knew it had nothing to do with the young woman’s attitude.

  “Hey Jen,” Alexander said as Jennifer walked in, his voice warm and friendly.

  Instead, it had everything to do with the fact that it was clear to the entire four-person crew that Jennifer Ortiz had a major crush on Alexander Whipple.

  Sarah swallowed, hoping her cheeks hadn’t reddened. Her dark skin would mostly hide it if they had, but she didn’t want to take the chance.

  “Al — Alex. Hi.” Jennifer stood there, smiling and swooning over the tall, drop-dead gorgeous undergraduate dominating the scene in the interior of the tent. “I just — I just…” she cleared her throat. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were in here, Alex,” she muttered.

  Bull, Sarah thought. That’s why you came in.

  “What’s up, Jen?” Sarah asked, not doing well to hide the fact that she was irritated at the interruption.

  “Dr. Lindgren,” Jennifer began, “I wanted to ask about, uh, our next…”

  Her face fell, and Sarah knew immediately what was happening. Talking about money was awkward, especially for these younger kids who had no idea what it was like to have a rent, a car payment, student loans, medical bills for a parent —

  “Will you be cutting our checks on time this month?” Alex asked, interrupting her thoughts. It was an abrupt question, but he asked it in a tactful, respectful way.

  She looked at her students. Both intelligent, studious, and valuable to her work.

  Both also very expensive.

  “Yes, uh, well, I believe we might have to —”

  Alex put a hand up. “Dr. Lindgren, I —”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah,” Alex said. “I don’t want to make things awkward. I understand that things are tight, so I wanted to let you know that I would be heading back to Cairo in a week. I’ve truly enjoyed my time here, but —”

  “No,” Sarah said, taking a small step forward. “No, don’t do that. Both of you —” she looked at them again, taking time to study each of their faces. As irritating as she thought Jen could be, she was a killer student and had a future in whatever field she’d land in. “I value you both too much. We’re close here, I can feel it.”

  Jen and Alex waited.

  “I’m going to pay you on time. I promise you that. Stick it out and let’s get through the next month. If nothing turns up by then, we’ll call it.”

  You can’t afford to pay them both, she thought. Much less all three.

  The three students she’d brought with her — Alex, Jennifer, and a nerdy graduate student named Russell — were each being paid a reasonable hourly rate plus per diem, but the university’s funding of her pet project had run out a month ago. She’d been bootstrapping the operation with her savings account, credit cards, and the petty amount she received from her publisher.

  By her rough calculations, she could afford to pay them all once more, but that would mean she’d be eating a bit lighter by the end of the month.

  “It’s really not a problem, Sarah,” Alex said. “I have work lined up there, and if it takes the burden off you here, then —”

  Sarah shook her head. “You’re both free to leave whenever you want, you know that. But please don’t think that I want you to. You’re part of this team, and I need you. I’ll pay you, and I don’t want either of you worrying about it for another second.”

  She felt her heart begin to beat faster. She’d meant every word, but it was still a tough call — if she finished her work here, successfully, things would work out.

  But if she didn’t — if there was no evidence to suggest that human life in the Americas flourished long before the established date academia had assigned — she was going to spend the next few years of her life grading papers as a teaching assistant for a graduate student.

  Or worse, if there is such a thing.

  She knew what they were both thinking: just call your father. He can help us.

  They were right, and that just made it worse. If her old man was anything, it was a decent, compassionate human being, and a wonderful father. He’d drop everything for her and her team without question.

  She hated that it was true. She wanted success on her own terms, not with the help of her famous father. Her research needed to be her own, not his. But if she couldn’t figure out how to make things work here, there would be no research to turn in.

  Jen left the tent to resume her dinner preparations for the evening, and Alex went back to reading some of the early research they’d been trying to fit together.

  “You really think there’s anything here, Sarah?” he asked. “It just doesn’t — none of this makes any sense.”

  “There’s evidence, we just have to piece it together the right way.”

  Alex nodded. “I know, but I’m not sure how. The American Indians who lived here didn’t leave much in the way of ancient artifacts. All we’ve got is their historical record.”

  “Then that’s going to have to be enough.”

  Sarah had had this argument before, plenty of times. If the American Indians from this region — and plenty of other regions dotting the Americas — had so many similar myths and shared legends, it stood to reason they were all derived from the same common ancestors. Many historians believed this ‘common ancestor’ was the group of people — or groups of people — who traveled over Berengia when it was an ice bridge, connecting modern-day Alaska with Russia.

  The issue she had with this belief was that the myths that were common to the otherwise disparate tribes were all stories that reflected the memory of a cataclysmic event that flooded the world ten thousand or so years ago. The well-known ‘flood myth,’ as it was called, was a myth Sarah had tracked nearly all around the globe, from the ancestors of the Europeans and North African and Indian peoples to North and South American civilizations.

  The flood myth had turned up everywhere on Earth, it seemed, but one place: The vast, wide plateau that made up most of the present-day continent of Asia. As this was the same area the early nomadic peoples that settled the American continent had supposedly descended from, the fact that the early American settlers had the same flood legend meant that they had to have learned of it from someone besides the Berengia nomadic peoples.

  Sarah’s hypothesis was simple: the Americas were not settled just by the Berengia travelers, but by peoples that predated their arrival by millennia: a people who came not from the East, but from the West.

  She wasn’t sure how or when it had all happened, but her heart told her that she was on the right track. This research project might not be as fruitful as she’d hoped, but she wouldn’t give it up. It may cost her a career, but she’d find her answer.

  Jennifer left the tent, and Alex turned to face his team lead. “Are you sure about this, Sarah?”

  She looked him over, trying to figure out what he was playing at. “I’m positive. The evidence is there, we just have to find —”

  “No, I’m not talking about the prehistoric link,” he answered, “I’m talking about the money. Are you sure you can afford it?”

  She sighed. He wasn’t stupid; none of them were. Her students knew full well that she would be paying them out of her own pocket, and they also knew how shallow those pockets were at the moment.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Thank you, Alex. Speaking of, I wanted to give you your bonus.” Sarah reached into a pocket of her khakis and pulled out an envelope. “It’s not much, but with the usual pay, it’ll make for a decent night out on the town.”

  “Sarah — Dr. Lindgren,” he said, falling back into the more formal address. “I can’t accept that. You’ve already done too much, paying us from your own account and all. It’s honestly no big deal to head back to Egypt, just for the —”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Take it. And don’t get any ideas. There’s one for each of you.”

  She made a show of grabbing the other two envelopes from her pocket, one for Jennifer Ortiz and another for Russell Aronson, the graduate student she’d brought on the trip. She set the two envelopes on the camp table next to a pile of small instruments and gear.

  “I’ll tell Jennifer hers is here,” she said. “Any idea where Russell is?”

  Alex nodded. He pulled out his phone, opened an app, and showed her on the map. A blinking dot appeared on the screen — the location of Aronson’s phone. “He’s in town, getting supplies, just like you told him to do. But —” he double-tapped the screen, zooming in a bit, and held it up to her face again as he smiled. “Looks like he stopped for a burger.”

  Sarah had instructed her field students to download the app and install it on their smartphones. She had done the same, and it allowed the group to know where the other members of the team were at any time. It was a requirement of the university, for liability reasons, but it was also an extremely handy apparatus. Sarah only had to pull it up and let it load to see how spread out her team might be at any given moment.

  “Well let him know I’ve got something for him if you see him before I do,” she said.

  “You got it, boss.”

  Alex turned back to the work table and started fiddling with something. Sarah watched the muscles in his triceps bulge a few times, then forced herself to turn around and leave, the envelope with her father’s letter and the artifact under her arm.

  Just as she reached the front flap of the tent, Jennifer appeared.

  “Jenny,” she said, “I have something for you. It’s over on —”

  “There’s a call for you,” Jennifer said. “On the sat phone. Apparently urgent.”

  CHAPTER 12

  RACHEL

  “Hello, Ms. Polanski,” Rachel said. “I hope you are well.”

  It was small talk, something of which Rachel was not a fan, but she was hoping to break the ice with this woman, just a bit.

  After all, she thought, she could be one of us.

  It was unlikely, but the test would tell them.

  The trial had been a success. News reports were now calling the event a ‘massive terrorist attack,’ but to Rachel it was simply a public reveal of what she and her team had been working on for nearly a decade. It was the first of hopefully many trials.

  They were getting closer, but they weren’t there yet. This woman, Jennifer Polanski, was but the latest in a never-ending stream of evidence to that fact. She had passed the trial at the museum, but she still needed to pass one more test.

  This test.

  Jennifer looked up at Rachel with puffy, confused eyes. Her face was burned, shining red where the bandages on her neck and cheeks ended. The hospital had done their best with her, but burn scars were going to cover most of her body for the rest of her life.

  A life, Rachel knew, that might end right now.

  “I want to apologize, Ms. Polanski, for the loss of your husband.”

  Jennifer sniffed, or did something that seemed to be a sniff, and her eyes welled up. She tried to say something, but her mouth was swollen shut.

  “It’s okay,” Rachel said. “I hear he was a jerk anyway.” She snickered. “You’re probably not even upset about that.”

  She looked down at the patient on the hospital bed, a questioning look on her face. After a few moments of silence, Rachel began again. “Shh,” she said. “No need to respond. I know you’re in pain. I want to end that pain for you, Jennifer.”

  Jennifer was on a bed that had been cleaned and sterilized, then rolled into one of the many chambers inside the facility. This room, like all of them, was nothing but four walls of stone, with a stone floor and a stone ceiling. It had no natural light, but her team had mounted lighting fixtures — simple bulbs — to provide a bit of workspace illumination.

  The rest of the room was empty, save for a cabinet and a coiled hose in the corner.

  “It took a bit of persuading, but I was able to convince the hospital to allow my team to bring you back for rehabilitation efforts.

  “Jennifer, you’ve been through a lot,” Rachel continued. “You were the only survivor who was in the room. The only one who came in direct contact with our trial and yet still made it out alive. That is quite the feat.

  “It wasn’t easy, but you passed the first of our tests. Your genetics are strong, Jennifer, and they got you this far. I almost didn’t believe it when they told me, but seeing you here — right now — it’s miraculous.”

  Jennifer frowned a bit, her face scrunching up in a painful, forced way. Her eyes watched Rachel with interest, curiosity, and not a little bit of terror.

  “We need to make sure you’re one of us, Jennifer. That your genetics are pure. We’ve almost perfected the synthetic mixture, the one we used in the museum, but — as you can see — it’s not quite ready. It is close, but it leaves… side effects.” Rachel waved her hand up and down above Jennifer’s body to underline her point. “I wish it wasn’t painful for those who are able to make it through, and that is what my team is working on. Once we have a perfect copy of the original compound, our trials can run indefinitely. We’ll have an endless supply of the compound, and we won’t need to worry about less-than-effective copies, or losing the precious originals any longer.

  “Until then, our trials will have to be a bit… rough.”

  She paused, making sure Jennifer was still with her. She was, barely. Her eyes were still puffy, and there was a glassiness to them Rachel hadn’t noticed before. “My team is going to bring in the bell, but this time we’re going to use a small amount of the original compound inside it. This one is the real deal, Jennifer. It’s what the Ancients left us, and it is what will tell us, without a doubt, if you are one of us.”

  Rachel shifted on her feet, then smiled. “We will be able to tell right away if you are actually as pure as our trial originally thought.”

  She didn’t feel it was necessary to tell Ms. Polanski what would happen if she failed the test.

  She backed away a few steps, then motioned to the door. A staff member wheeled in a cart that had a pedestal balanced on it. On the top of the pedestal sat a small, foot-tall bell-shaped object. It was congruent to the bell that had been on display in the Antiquities of Thera exhibit at the National Museum of Archeology in Athens, but this was a smaller copy. And, unlike the artifact in Athens, this bell had been manufactured here in her laboratory. It had a piped-in power supply, using the lab’s power to run the heat source within it.

  The technician rolled the pedestal to the center of the room, about five feet away from Jennifer’s bed. He plugged in the power source to the back of the bell, then checked his work. Satisfied, he turned back to Rachel and waited for her approval.

 

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