“Sei—?”
She cut him off with a finger to his lips. She was done with talking, with trying to put into words what she felt, what he felt.
“What are—?”
She replaced her finger with her lips and answered his question.
Living.
26
November 20, 4:04 A.M. JST
Airborne over the Pacific
Jada jerked her head up as the jet hit an air pocket. Her chin had been resting on her chest, her laptop open before her. She had drifted off as she worked, waiting for some data to collate.
“Push your seat back and get some real sleep,” Duncan recommended, sitting next to her. “Like Monk.”
He thumbed back to the third occupant of the jet’s leather-appointed cabin, who was snoring in a steady drone to match the plane’s engine.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she scolded, covering a yawn with a fist. “Just thinking.”
“Really?” Duncan lifted his arm, revealing Jada’s other hand clasped to his. “Then may I ask what you were thinking about?”
Her face flushed with heat as she jerked her hand back. “Sorry about that.”
He smiled. “I didn’t mind.”
Embarrassed, she glanced out the window and saw a sweep of clouds and water under them. The clock on her laptop said they had been in flight for a little under three hours.
“We just passed Japan,” Duncan said. “Another five hours should have us landing in California.”
As she stared around the cabin, she remembered another plane, another luxury jet. She had begun this adventure in Los Angeles, flown to D.C., then off to Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and now she was headed back to where it all started.
A full circle of the globe.
All in an attempt to save it.
She hoped it wasn’t her farewell tour. If what Duncan saw through the Eye was real, then the entire planet was at risk.
Her eyes drifted to the box on the table. Before departing Ulan Bator, she had sealed the Eye in a makeshift Faraday cage, a box wrapped in copper wiring, to insulate its electromagnetic radiation from interfering with the jet’s electronics. Passing his hands over the box, Duncan had confirmed that her efforts had indeed bottled up the worst of the radiation. But such a cage would have no effect on the Eye’s larger quantum effect.
That was beyond any prison of copper wire.
Noting her attention, Duncan asked, “So why am I the only one who could see the destruction through that Eye?”
Glad for the distraction, she shrugged. “You must be sensitive to whatever quantum effect the Eye manifests. That makes me believe that what happened to the Eye also affected the glass lens of the satellite’s camera, allowing its digital image sensor to record that peek into the near future as light passed through that altered lens.”
“And what about me?”
“As I mentioned before, human consciousness lies in the quantum field. For some reason, you’re more attuned to the quantum changes in the Eye. Whether because you made yourself that way with those magnets in your fingertips . . . or because you’re extrasensitive.”
“Like St. Thomas with his cross.”
“Possibly, but I’m not going to go around calling you St. Duncan.”
“Are you sure? I sort of like the sound of that.”
A small alarm chimed on her laptop, as a new folder popped onto her desktop screen. It was the latest update of data from the SMC, sent via satellite.
Finally . . .
“Back to work?” Duncan asked.
“There’s something I want to check.”
Tapping open the folder, she read through the documents. She planned on building a graph of the comet’s path, tracking its corona of dark energy. Something continued to nag at her, and she hoped more information would jar loose whatever was troubling her.
She began collating the pertinent information and plugging it into a graphing program. She also wanted to compare the latest statistics and numbers to her original equations explaining the nature of dark energy. Her equations beautifully married her theory concerning the source of dark energy—the collapse of virtual particles in the quantum foam of the universe—to the gravitational forces it created. She knew that was the crux of the problem at hand. She could summarize it in one word.
Attraction.
The virtual particles were drawn to each other, and the resulting energy of that annihilation was what imbued mass with the fundamental force of gravity. It was the fuel of weak and strong nuclear forces that drew together electrons, protons, and neutrons to form atoms. It was what made moons circle planets, solar systems churn, and galaxies spin.
As she worked, she began to note errors in the SMC’s equations, assumptions the head physicist had made that were not supported by this latest set of data. She began to work faster, sleep shedding off her shoulders. With growing horror, the truth began to materialize before her mind’s eye.
I have to be wrong . . . I must be.
Her fingers began furiously tapping, knowing a way to double-check.
“What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.
She wanted to voice it aloud, to share it, but she feared doing so would somehow make it more real.
“Jada?”
She finally folded. “The physicist back at the SMC, the one who did the initial estimates determining when we’d cross the point of no return . . . he made a mistake.”
“Are you sure?” Duncan looked at his watch. “He said we had sixteen hours. Which still leaves us about another nine hours.”
“He was wrong. He was basing his extrapolations on the fact that the comet’s gravitational anomalies were increasing in proportion to its approach toward the earth.”
“And he was wrong about that?”
“No, that part was right.” She tapped to bring up the graph she had been compiling earlier. “Here you can see the comet’s corona of dark energy being pulled earthward as it swings nearer, growing an ever longer reach.
Jada continued, “Likewise, the curve of space-time around the earth is responding to that gravitational effect. That curvature is bending outward, the two drawing together, slowly creating that funnel down which that barrage of asteroids will tumble.”
“So if the physicist is right, what’s the problem?”
“He made an error, and I believe the new data supports it.”
“What error?”
“He assumed the growth of the gravitational effect was geometric, growing at a set incremental rate. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s increasing at an exponential rate.” She turned to him. “In other words, much faster.”
“How much faster?”
“I want to run the data through my equations to be certain, but right now I would say we have only five hours until an asteroid strike is inevitable. Not nine.”
“That’s almost half our remaining time.” Duncan leaned back into his seat, immediately understanding the problem. “We’ll be lucky to be touching down in L.A. by then.”
“And considering our past couple of days, I wouldn’t count on luck.”
4:14 A.M.
What the hell . . .
Duncan sat stunned.
Jada urged him to remain calm until she could confirm her estimates. To accomplish that, she was dumping data into an analysis program she had designed based on her equations.
As he waited, Duncan rubbed his temples with his fingers. “Why did that satellite have to crash in the middle of Mongolia of all places? Why not in freakin’ Iowa? We’re losing precious hours flying halfway around the globe.”
Jada’s fingers froze over the keyboard.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s it . . . that’s what was bugging me. I’ve been such a fool.” She closed her eyes. “It’s always been about attraction.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed again to the graph showing the comet’s corona of energy being pulled toward the earth. “The physicist at the SMC theoriz
ed that there was something on the planet that the comet’s energy was responding to. And I agree.”
“You said before that you believed it might be the cross,” Duncan said. “Because it was sculpted out of a piece of that comet when it last appeared.”
“Exactly. The two—the comet and the cross—are most likely quantumly entangled and drawn to each other, at least energetically. I was hoping that if the cross was ever found, that by studying its energy—or even the energy of the Eye—I might find a way to break that entanglement.”
He nodded. It made theoretical sense. “And if you did that, the comet’s energy would no longer be attracted to the earth—and in turn, space-time around the planet would not warp toward it.”
“And the funnel would never form triggering the massive asteroid strike.”
Brilliant, Dr. Shaw.
“Two questions,” Duncan said. “How can you be so sure of this attraction between the comet and the cross? And what can you do to break that entanglement?”
“The answer to both is the same. To quote Einstein again, God does not play dice with the world.”
Jada read his baffled expression. “A moment ago,” she said, “you asked why did the satellite crash in Mongolia? That’s the best question anyone could ask.”
“Thanks . . . ?” he said tentatively.
“To answer it, I’ll ask you another question. Where do we currently believe the cross is hidden?”
“An island in Lake Baikal, about three hundred miles north . . .” Then he understood, his eyes widened. “From a global standpoint, practically in the backyard of where the satellite crashed.”
“And does that not strike you as wildly coincidental?”
He nodded.
And God does not play dice.
He stared at her, wanted to kiss her—more than he usually did. “The satellite fell in that general vicinity because it was drawn there, pulled by the energy of the cross.”
“How could it not? It’s charged with the same dark energy of the comet.”
Duncan glanced again to that graph showing the nimbus of energy being sucked earthward. He pictured the satellite as a disembodied piece of that energy, imagining it being tugged out of orbit by the pull of the cross and dragged down to the planet’s surface.
If true, that definitely supported Jada’s theory of entanglement, but it didn’t answer his other question.
He turned back to her. “You said this fact would also answer how to break this entanglement.”
She smiled. “I thought it was obvious.”
“Not to me.”
“We have to finish what the satellite tried to do. We have to unite the energy of the Eye and the energy of the cross. Think of the pair as a positively charged particle and a negatively charged particle. While their opposite charges draw them together—”
“—when they unite, they cancel each other out.”
“Precisely. The energy equivalent of joining matter and antimatter together. The explosive annihilation of the two opposites should break that entanglement.”
It was beautifully theorized, but . . .
“Why are they opposites?” he asked. “What’s the difference between them?”
“Remember, time is a dimension, too. While both the cross and the Eye are charged with the same quantum of dark energy, they hold two different and distinct flavors of time. Opposite ends of the same axis. One from the past, one from the present. Quantum entanglement means they both want to be one.”
“Meaning they must annihilate each other.”
She nodded. “I believe that will break the entanglement and release the pull on the comet’s energies.”
“Still, that raises the bigger question,” Duncan said. “Where is the cross?”
“I don’t know, but—”
The computer chimed again, interrupting her, announcing the completed run of Dr. Shaw’s program. A number glowed within a blinking results box.
5.68 hrs
“But that’s how long we have to find it.” Jada turned to him. “You know what we have to do.”
He did.
Duncan climbed out of his seat, crossed over to Monk, and shook his partner awake.
“What . . . ?” Monk asked blearily. “Are we there?”
Duncan leaned over. “We need to turn this plane around.”
27
November 20, 6:42 A.M. IRKST
Olkhon Island, Russia
With the sun still down, Gray woke to his limbs tangled with another’s, a warm cheek resting on his chest. The scent of their bodies, their passion, still hung in the air. His left hand clasped her shoulder, as if fearful she would slip between his fingers, turn into a ghost, a fevered dream.
She stretched, a languorous motion that was all soft skin and a hint of sinuous power stirring beneath. She made a contented noise that rumbled into his bones. Tilting her head, she opened her eyes, reflecting what little light there was in the room. She moved her leg lower, stirring him, waking him further.
He reached and touched a finger under her chin, drawing her up to him. Their lips brushed with a promise of—
His phone jangled loudly on the nightstand, breaking the spell, reminding them both of the world beyond this small knot of blankets and bed. He groaned between their lips, pulling her harder against him for a long moment, then let her go and rolled to the phone, keeping one hand on the curve of her hip.
“We’ve landed in Irkutsk,” Monk updated him. “Caught a good tailwind. Got here faster than expected.”
It was the second time his friend had interrupted them; the first time had been a couple of hours ago, informing Gray of his team’s intent to join them out there.
“Understood,” he said tersely. “That means you’re still about two hours out from us.”
The plan was for Seichan and Rachel to wait for Monk’s group at the inn. Gray would take the others, learn what they could from the shaman, and rendezvous back here to regroup.
He checked his watch. They had to depart in forty-five minutes if they wanted to catch the sunrise ceremony at the grotto by eight.
Gray quickly finished his call and dropped the phone on the floor next to his bed. He moved his hand to the small of her back and rolled her under him.
“Now where were we . . .”
Half an hour later, Gray stepped from the room, followed by Seichan, both freshly showered. She wore only a long shirt. To him, there was no reason for her to wear any more clothing—but the chill of the hallway was a reminder of the subzero temperatures awaiting them both. With her hand in his, he swung her forward and kissed her deeply, sealing a promise of more to come.
As he let her go, a door opened down the hall and Rachel stepped out, catching them as they broke apart. She seemed momentarily flustered, then simply ducked her head, embarrassed, but Gray noted the small smile. She already knew of his tentative relationship with Seichan, but apparently now she knew it wasn’t so tentative.
Rachel mumbled a good morning and headed downstairs, where the smell of cooking bacon and fresh-brewed coffee beckoned.
With a final peck, he sent Seichan back to her own room to change and headed below. In the communal space, the inn’s proprietors took the breakfast part of B&B seriously. A lavish spread had been set out: soft cheeses, toasted breads, blackberries, hard-boiled eggs, thick slabs of bacon, fat sausages, along with an assortment of grilled and pickled fish from the lake.
Vigor sat at the table with a cup of tea warming in his hands. He looked tired, pallid in color, but there was an air of contentment about him this morning. Rachel passed behind her uncle, kissed him on top of his head, and grabbed a plate.
Gray headed over to join them, earning a raised eyebrow of amusement from Rachel, as if to say about time. Apparently her initial shock and embarrassment was settling into good-natured teasing. He also thought he noted perhaps a wistful hint of regret. But maybe that was his own ego reading too much into her look.
Changing the subject—
though no one had spoken—Gray asked, “Where’s Kowalski?”
“He’s already eaten.” Vigor nodded toward the door. “He went to check on our mode of transportation.”
Through a side window, Gray spotted his partner’s shaved head out in the dark, inspecting the ATVs parked next to the inn. They’d be taking the big-wheeled vehicles to a small grotto at the farthest point of the bay.
Gray tucked into a big plate of food, while Vigor checked on the duffel holding the cache of relics. Kowalski stamped back inside, bringing the cold with him. He looked anxious to get going.
“Are we ready?” Gray asked as he popped a final few blackberries into his mouth.
“Gassed up,” Kowalski said. “Can go anytime.”
By now, Seichan had returned. She touched Vigor on the shoulder as she slipped past him, her fingers squeezing with some unspoken understanding. The gesture seemed oddly intimate—not so much sympathy as silent support—as if she were acknowledging something that only she knew.
Gray glanced inquiringly at her as she sat down.
She gave a small shake of her head, indicating it was private.
Gray finally stood up, drawing Vigor to his feet, too. “We’ll leave you both to hold down the fort,” he told Seichan and Rachel. “Monk and the others should be here a little before nine, so be watching for them. We’re not going to have a whole lot of time to coordinate. According to Dr. Shaw, it looks like our timetable has shrunk yet again.”
He explained about the revised estimate, about the plan to unite the cross and the Eye.
“And all this must happen before ten o’clock?” Vigor asked, sounding outraged. “Sunrise is at eight. That gives us only a couple of hours to bring the Eye to the cross.”
“Then we’d better get that witch doctor talking fast,” Kowalski said.
“He’s right,” Gray conceded. “But the island isn’t that large. As long as the location is not too remote, it might be doable.”
It must be doable, he silently corrected.
7:44 A.M.
Buried in his parka against the frigid cold, Vigor rode the all-terrain vehicle down a sandy tract through a coastal forest of larch trees, the ground littered with fallen, brown needles, leaving the branches above bare against the brightening sky. Though the sun had not yet risen above the horizon, dawn glowed to the east.