The Auriga Project Read online

  “As you know, the LTA is primarily funded by the United States government. National security is a priority.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Lucas grumbled.

  Reuben, with his arms crossed, remained stoically silent.

  Amon picked up the phone and dialed the number of Dr. Badeux. No answer or answering machine. The line rang and rang. He tried the deputy administrator then on down the line. But after four attempts, he sat back in his chair and met Fowler’s level gaze.

  “They’ll call back,” Lucas said.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen, Mr. Fisk.” Fowler’s smile had vanished. “You’re going to give that statement to the press this afternoon. And then you’re going to shut down the Auriga Project.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then the LTA will withdraw your funding, and you’ll be forced to shut down anyway.”

  “You can’t be serious. We’ve spent ten years and billions of dollars on the program.”

  “With the death of your wife—”

  “She’s not dead.”

  Montoya snorted. Amon noticed a bulge under the right arm of the man’s suit.

  Reuben pinned him with a look. “Listen, you little…”

  “Easy,” Amon said.

  Fowler interlaced her fingers. “The decision was not mine, but I have the full authority of the FBI and the LTA in this matter.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Amon said.

  “Your belief is none of my concern.”

  “I won’t give this statement.”

  “This was a courtesy, Mr. Fisk. I didn’t have to come here at all.”

  “Then get the hell out.”

  Her cold smile returned. “As you wish,” she said, standing. “The Auriga Project will be shut down. It’s just a matter of time. You’ll see.”

  She left. Montoya followed her, flipping Reuben off through the glass wall of the conference room.

  “Real professional,” Reuben said.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Lucas mumbled.

  “Calm down,” Amon said.

  “Calm down!?” Lucas’s voice rose an octave. “How can you say calm down? I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Amon didn’t reply. He knew the feeling. First the board meeting, and now this. Any normal person would have been grateful that Wes had the best interests of the company at heart in the wake of such a tragedy; had it been Amon who had disappeared onstage that night, he’d have been able to rest easy knowing Wes and Lucas were at the helm.

  But it wasn’t, and he couldn’t. And now, on top of the search for Eliana, in spite of the fact that he had barely avoided mutiny at the board meeting, the FBI was manipulating the LTA to shut him down.

  It sounded paranoid when he said it out loud, but the only thing that was clear to him was that someone was trying to sabotage his search for Eliana. He had to move faster, to stay ahead of their machinations. So he and Reuben climbed into Reuben’s Ford Taurus and left the Fisk Industries campus without telling anyone.

  7

  The Color of Sacrifice

  Eliana lost her mind for the next while. Her sense of time distorted. Two days or ten: She couldn’t tell. A parade of spirits from her past life came and left, entering and exiting through walls of stone that rippled like the surface of a roiling sea.

  Once she figured out the visions were the result of some kind of psychoactive agent she had ingested rather than a forestalled symptom caused by the molecular reassembly process, she managed to relax and let them come rather than fight against the inexorable tide of chemicals that flooded her brain.

  From time to time, the door would crack open and food and water would be set down inside her cell, no doubt laced with more of whatever it was they were feeding her. Twice, a chamber pot in the far corner was carried out to be emptied, and returned to its place.

  She ate the salted fish and dried fruits and bitter nuts they left because her body demanded fuel. Sweat poured down her skin, and her palms were constantly damp.

  At first, she tried to drink as little of the water as possible, knowing it was drugged. But even with a draft from the half-inch gap around the door, the stifling heat of the cell was intolerable. In the end, she always drank the water, and it was fresh and sweet, and she continued to hallucinate.

  Elevated to this state, her mind reacted slowly when the door to her cell was thrown wide. The shaman she had seen through the crack in the door entered. A black-and-red band was painted across his eyes and the lower half of his unusually flat, wrinkled forehead. He carried a torch in his ancient hand—a pitch torch the likes of which Eliana had only seen in movies—and held it away from his elaborate feathered headdress.

  Two women, barely older than teenagers by contemporary American standards, stepped into the cell from behind him with laden arms. They set pots of water, incensarios, and dried gourds on the floor around her.

  Eliana didn’t realize her visitors and their supplies were more than hallucinations until the two women began to wash her feet with wet rags. The water felt incredible on her skin, so at first she simply reveled in the sensation.

  Before she could react, they pulled her dress halfway up her torso. She scrambled away, pulling her dress down and blushing. Their shy smiles flickered in the dancing torchlight, but the shaman snapped an order, and they hurriedly pulled Eliana’s dress over her shoulders in spite of her protests.

  She covered herself with her hands while the women finished bathing her. Their motions were smooth and practiced, firm but gentle. They did her no harm, and after enough complaining, Eliana dropped her arms and let them work.

  The shaman leered at her naked breasts then stepped out of the room.

  She breathed easier with him gone and gazed around to take stock of her situation. Through the open door, a sliver of a moon hung low, bright enough to cast the shadows of tree branches onto the ground. The door remained open, like her captors had no intention of closing it again.

  Yet the shaman waited outside while the women prepared her for something. It was not unusual for a culture to include bathing as part of a ritual, but if she was being bathed now, what ritual was she about to undergo? She searched for clues. Incensarios, big clay mugs thatched with holes to hold incense for spiritual cleansing, lay next to dried gourds filled with purple liquid. Eliana noted the fine craftsmanship of the tools, particularly the coarse brushes whose bristles poked out of a square of cloth.

  Something about the purple paint gave Eliana pause, but she couldn’t pair it with any particular meaning from her own studies, nor from her memory of research trips she had taken to Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, or one of a myriad of other countries. The work her company had done, while it was still solvent, consisted mostly of repairs and restoration work to minor structures. A few promising leads had come in, like the jawbone fragment they uncovered in Belize but which turned out to belong to a female ape. Maybe things would have turned out differently, she reflected, if she had swallowed her pride and asked Amon for money instead of begging for spare change and odd jobs from the dwindling number of cultural institutions left on Earth.

  Her mind wandered, taken again by the drugs, and she forgot what she was looking for. Fingers brushed her thighs as one of the women tried to remove her panties. Eliana yelped and smacked the woman’s hand away. The archaeologist in her wanted to provide a justification for the woman’s violation, but it didn’t seem right. It was one thing to be comfortable with nudity, another to strip someone without permission.

  “No,” she said. “No freaking way.”

  The women glanced to the door. The shaman appeared, shrugged, and they let her be.

  So she stood wearing nothing but her underwear and Amon’s ring. Eliana saw how the women’s eyes fixed on the ring. As for how much of their words she understood, she might as well not have been present. In the end, they came to a decision and tied a loincloth around Eliana’s waist then fitted her with some plain jewelry pulled from the supplies the
y brought: a necklace of seashells, a bracelet of stones.

  Finally, taking up brushes, they began to apply purple paint to Eliana’s skin, starting with her feet.

  Her heart beat faster, imagining herself as a piece of meat being basted in some kind of marinade. Could she make it through the door before they caught her if she kicked the young one in the face and made a break for it? She didn’t think these people were cannibals, but what kind of outward evidence would one look for? She had seen bones used as decoration, but were they human bones?

  Maybe they did plan to eat her. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Amon would say.

  The next step after marinating a piece of meat is to lash it to a spit and hang it over a fire.

  At that thought, she lost her composure. She jerked away. The women grabbed her, and she fought back with nails and elbows and knees.

  While she was trying to wrap her fingers around the long strands of one woman’s braids, someone lifted her off her feet.

  The shaman’s arms gripped Eliana around the midsection while she writhed. His torch had been set down inside the stone room.

  “Please,” she sobbed, scratching at his forearms. “Let me go!”

  The women resumed painting her stomach.

  “No,” Eliana moaned. “No, no, no.”

  She whipped her body back and forth and succeeded in taking the old man down.

  He rolled on top of her and held her down with a knee across her waist. He was much stronger than he looked. He gripped her wrists over her head with one hand and pressed his other hand down on top of her bare chest.

  She froze when the realization hit her. Early in the twentieth century, an explorer named Edward Thompson had dredged the bottom of the Sacred Cenote, a huge rainwater reservoir the Maya associated with the sky god, Chaak. From that well in the famous late city of Chichen Itza, they pulled pottery, pieces of jade, and not a few skeletons. What made the story incredible, however, was not what they pulled out, but what they left in: they discovered that a fourteen-foot layer of blue sediment coated the bottom of the cenote.

  Empty blue skies spelled trouble for an ancient people reliant on seasonal rain to grow their food. Thus, the researchers concluded, the Maya used the color blue, in honor of Chaak, to represent sacrifice—they painted the pots and jewels with an azure dye and cast their prayers into the deep.

  The color difference was why she’d missed the connection at first. But wasn’t it obvious? On this planet, where the sky was a violet hue, the color of sacrifice was purple like the paint drying on her skin.

  This thought passed through Eliana’s mind in an instant. The women’s brushes continued to tickle her shoulders. The shaman pinned her down, his knee crushing her, making it impossible to breathe, and yet she found a reserve of energy within her deep enough to let out a piercing scream that reverberated around the small stone room. Eliana cried for her husband.

  “Get off me, you bastards! Amon! AMON!”

  He didn’t come, and eventually she ran out of breath. Tears blurred her vision when she looked down and saw that her torso, her arms and legs, her hands, even her face was purple.

  Voices called out in the jungle. The shaman pulled an obsidian knife from his side and held it to Eliana’s throat. He said something then backed off her slowly and stood.

  She remained on the ground.

  He walked out of the cell, waved to someone out of view, then came back in. He dismissed the women. Picking Eliana up by the elbow, he marched her out the door.

  They stepped between two buildings and emerged on a long path of white paving stones. The road had been cracked and tilted by the passage of time, and weeds grew up through the fissures.

  The pitch torch had been left in the cell. Exposed beneath the night sky, they didn’t need it. Two full moons overhead provided perfect visibility. Not as bright as daylight, but bright enough to see clearly. The large moon was pockmarked like Earth’s moon, and was a similar dirty opal in color. It was nearly twice as large as Earth’s moon in the night sky. The smaller satellite appeared as a glowing red circle in the inky sky.

  A group of men waited for them. The big man she recognized immediately. He was the one who had come into her cell with Ixchel before. The tallest of anyone there, his broad shoulders were draped with skull-carved shoulder pauldrons. Seeing his bearing and dress compared to the other men—who, while painted, showed more skin and were less elaborately costumed—convinced her that he was the chief.

  The only one decorated more elaborately than the chief was the shaman.

  After gazing at the painted faces of the other men, all younger, she recognized the older of the two boys from the beach. He stood at the chief’s right shoulder and looked exactly like a younger version of the big man: same square cleft chin, same prominent nose, same copper skin. Perhaps it was the drugs, but she saw clearly how one day the boy’s chest and arms would fill out to match his father’s.

  From the jungle surrounding them, a deep humming like a low-powered engine began to vibrate. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the noise, but it only increased in volume.

  The chief held his hand out toward Eliana and beckoned. The shaman pulled her forward.

  Eliana blinked, and a new figure, dressed in black from head to foot, appeared between them. He said something, one garbled, metallic string of words that echoed off the stone walls and mingled with the humming noise.

  The chief argued, slicing his hand down through the air.

  The shaman halted his forward motion. He glanced sidelong at the dark figure then at the ground while he waited obediently for the argument with the chief to be resolved. While the shaman seemed willing enough to give Eliana over to the chief a moment ago, he now held her back with a firm grip.

  The dark figure said nothing else. His command had been given, and he stood there waiting. Eliana examined his back. He was clothed in some kind of synthetic cloth from head to foot, and a reflective helmet covered his head.

  She didn’t get to look long. The chief clenched his fists and lunged forward, dodging around the dark figure and closing the gap to Eliana in a couple strides. A vein bulged in his forehead as he advanced.

  She instinctively brought her hands up in a feeble attempt to protect herself. Thinking he would barrel right through her, she tensed. But Amon’s ring pulsed, and a wave of energy swept out of her hand, pulling at the air and whipping her hair into her eyes.

  Everyone except Eliana and the dark man were thrown to the ground.

  When her vision cleared, the chief was sprawled on his back, his decorative clothing torn and scattered in pieces beneath him. A bright, bloody scrape fanned out like road rash across his chest.

  The dark figure morphed into a jaguar and shambled over toward the chief with a yawn, baring bloody yellowed teeth. The jungle cat and the chief locked eyes for a long moment. Then the chief inclined his head. The jaguar licked its lips and sauntered away, sitting patiently to one side.

  Eliana felt her whole body go slack with fear. She sank to the ground and pushed dirt around with frantic feet until she felt a solid stone wall at her back. She pressed her hands to the cold stone. Please, she prayed, let this be just another hallucination!

  The shaman stood and approached the chief. He asked him a question and held out his hand. The chief nodded and allowed the shaman to pull him to his feet.

  They stood facing each other, the jaguar watching. The way the chief’s shoulders slumped, Eliana thought he might be seeking an apology from his elder, who had shamed him before the others. The shaman seemed to accept the chief’s apology, gripping his shoulders with gnarled hands and embracing him.

  But then the shaman’s eyes bulged, the color drained from his face, and when the chief stepped away he held a bloody shard of sharpened obsidian in his hand—the knife from the shaman’s belt.

  The jaguar growled and stepped toward the chief. The chief stared the cat down, an evil smirk twisting his mouth. Finally, the jagua
r yowled into the night, then bounded into the jungle and disappeared.

  Before she knew what was happening, the chief was barking orders at his men, and they were rushing around and past her. Two men returned with the remainder of the purple paint and the brushes they had used to paint Eliana. As they coated the gasping shaman’s body with dye, they stripped him of his headdress and accoutrements with obvious haste.

  The chief donned the headdress. He glanced at her for a moment, stepped forward. Then, seeming to change his mind, returned to his grim task.

  Eliana curled her knees to her chest and pulled her legs tight. She wanted to run, but where would she go? Certainly not back to the dark cell. She fingered the diamond set into her ring. It was warm.

  A moment later, the chief and his men were leading the shaman, brushed with purple paint and bleeding from the hole in his lower back, down the paved white path.

  The chief’s son separated from the group. He came over to Eliana and placed a damp rag in her hands.

  She hurried after the villagers, afraid to be left alone in this strange jungle. She scrubbed at her skin as she followed, desperate to remove every trace of the purple paint.

  The deep thrum of steady drums sounded and grew louder, reverberating and echoing off the stone walls and steps of the structures she passed. She could not help noticing that every wall, every stone staircase railing, was carved with elaborate reliefs and colored with chipped paint. Old, but not so old as to be forgotten.

  The cracked path of white stones opened into a vast courtyard. She trembled, for a massive stepped pyramid rose into the night sky on the other side.

  A thousand people or more gathered around the base of the pyramid, caught up in a riotous celebration. They danced and sang and mingled together to the beat of the drums.

  Despite the humid air, Eliana gripped herself while she hurried around the edge of the courtyard. The loincloth she wore did little to suppress the shivers of fear that wracked her body.

  Ixchel spotted her and rushed over. She took the wet cloth from Eliana’s hand and scrubbed a few spots on her face until she was satisfied. Then she demanded a sarong from one of the other women who had clothing to spare and wrapped it around Eliana tightly, covering up the remainder of the purple paint as best she could. Most of the women, especially the younger ones, were sparely dressed. They stared at her and pointed without embarrassment for a moment then returned their attention to the ceremony.