Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

Rick stared into the crack and was amazed. Then heard that in his head and thought it sounded a bit weird – but that did not rob it of its truth.

They were lit by the dishes of perpetual fire which had seemed to be a trademark of the original Temple. Clearly, the Temple Builders had not needed a Zippo – and somehow managed to at least pass that knowledge onto the Greek imp who’d built the Library. Whoever he had hired to build the place was probably a cowboy though – considering one tiny grenade and suddenly the whole thing begins to collapse.

Well, one crack in a wall – but who knew it could be more? In fact, with tons of ocean above them, it was probably the single most terrifying musing he could have had.

Because of the light around them, the light he saw coming through the crack was faint but it was most definitely there. It was most striking because of its stark dissimilarity to the orange glow around them. It seemed colder, pulsing and somehow strangely familiar.

“What do you think?” he asked Andrew, “Ancient fire exit?”

“That makes me a little worried the door might be alarmed,” Andrew answered.

Rick considered for a moment, on the one hand, they could stay where they were – hoped that Ruth would send someone else to come and pick them up in time – though with the remaining powers that they had between them they’d need James Cameron’s expedition crew and Celine Dion’s warbling voice to get them back to the surface; or they could press forward – open up perhaps a second structurally unsound room and find themselves crushed by the remaining rock and certainly in Andrew’s case by the cold unrelenting oceanic pressure Rick could feel at the back of his lizard brain.

When faced with a decision like that he knew most people froze, unable to choose between the two (even if in this case that meant a default to one). Rick was not so indecisive and so swung the nearest pick-up-able object (a black marble statue of the Egyptian goddess Bastet) directly into the point nearest the crack.

“What are you doing?” Andrew cried at him, obviously having the same fears Rick had just worked his way through.

“Well, there’s something back there and I for one don’t want to sit around waiting for trench-bollock to develop, do you?” he threw back.

“That is not a real thing.”

“It is, a friend of mine nearly died from it in ’Nam.”

“You were not in Vietnam.”

“Sure I was, Shrinks Without Borders – 2011. Although by the end of it we referred to it as Shrivels Without Borders. He didn’t find it particularly funny. Still has ten kids now with only one bollock, bloody breeders.”

“You have so much wrong with you in one sentence.”

“Give me a hand and call me a dick later.”

Andrew did pick up a rather hefty looking gold-plated staff that he hoped (quite faintly) wasn’t valuable and began to attack the crumbling section of the mural. They struck in rhythm, slowly but surely widening the crack, each blow causing an involuntary raising of the hackles sure that it would be the one which broke the ceiling’s back and ended it all.

Only it didn’t end, there was no collapse and the ceiling didn’t come down. Instead, the crack widened to the point where it seemed possible for a person to get through. They abruptly stopped, Rick chucking the now battered remains of a goddess onto a pile of gold coins looking rather worse for the wear. There was not much guilt, after all, she was a bit of a knob. Andrew placed the staff down carefully – as though not to damage it yet further and Rick couldn’t help but roll his eyes.

He went first, Andrew following closely behind. The opening they had created was just wide enough for a person though it seemed beyond that the passage was not much wider. Certainly, it was not the whole mural that was hollow behind, it seemed more like they had found the secret path. Perhaps there would have been some mechanism, some slate to press, some combination to enter and hey-presto-Indiana they would have been able to get entry to the passageway without having to risk a collapse. But they were past it now and Rick felt quite happy just to leave fate where it was.

The light came from further up the path which sloped moderately upwards. Again, the echoing feeling of familiarity tingled at the back of his mind. He struggled to push it away. He walked forward, knowing Andrew was close behind, feeling as though two years had not passed. As though he was somehow still walking through those caves, deep in the dark, walking towards a destiny that was not as written as it had seemed to be.

Once more déjà vu struck him as the close-by rock walls slid away abruptly, opening up into a cavern. Underwhelmingly small considering the view they’d been treated to when emerging to the edifice of the Temple – but still a decent size for the two of them to walk around. This time there was no awesome Temple front. Instead, there was only a simple pedestal upon which stood the source of the light.

It hit him as soon as he saw it – he was not absently making comparisons to the entrance to the Temple. The light he saw now had come later than that – inside the Temple itself. In the innermost chamber where everything had changed for all of them. The light, soft and diffuse but shimmering through the colours of the spectrum. Shifting like warm crystal Christmas lights. One moment deep purple, the next ice blue, the next a fire blazing – but somehow through it all still pure, still white.

It was the colour of the radiation, the thing which they believed had activated their junk DNA – had ‘turned on’ their powers in superhero speak. Some remnant, some trick of the Temple Builders which they had not been able to fully understand.

When the excavation of the Temple had been completed and they had managed to re-open the Revelation Room (as Rick came to think of it) they had found it cold and black. There was no light, no radiation, no liquid, no nothing. It was dead, its job done. Rick had not visited but had been shown pictures by the excavation team a few weeks earlier. He had seen the crack that ran along the first of the seven circular slabs around the room form – cut straight through the Latin phrase meaning ‘white horse’. He had seen that happen first hand as they were swept from the Temple in its collapse – in fact, had taken that as a sign in the beginning.

On the first black and white photo he’d been shown, he saw now there were two cracks. The second cut through ‘Equus Rufus’. Red horse. He’d fulfilled his promise to Ben the very next day, certain then that events were about to begin.

The source of the light in the Revelation Room had been a pool of glowing liquid in the centre. This was again different. Here the light seemed contained in a glowing sphere. As he and Andrew got close to the pedestal he saw it was indeed encased in an intricately woven pattern of metal he was sure the scientists back at Biogenesis would be unable to identify. The light did not spill through the porous holes in the surface, instead, it seemed to remain inside. Solid yet shifting. Slowly pulsating. Mesmeric.

That everything was suddenly true, he was finally certain. The glowing orb in front of them was a remnant of the Temple Builders. That Atlantis, as bizarre conspiracy bull as it sounded, was perhaps a second Temple – he was now all but convinced. That the orb would somehow be the key to unlocking its location – that would remain to be seen.

“Stop,” Andrew’s voice commanded suddenly.

He was drawn back from his dazed state, a mind he hadn’t even realised he’d been in. His hand was poised, reaching out towards the orb – a completely unconscious action. It was almost as though it called to him, it sought him out. A siren song and sirens were damned dangerous. Andrew seemed to feel it too, Rick could feel his tension from across the room.

“What?” he asked him.

“Well, perhaps before you go grabbing the ‘golden statue’ you should check for rolling boulders,” Andrew chided him, “I would have thought a movie buff like you would know the basics like that.”

“Well, do you see any rolling boulders?” Rick challenged him. It was true, his entire focus had been on the glowing orb – he hadn’t taken the time to look around the cavern properly. When they did it seemed very much as it was on the tin – a dead end. Smooth walls, simple volcanic rock. No other exits, nothing dangling from the ceiling, they were fine.

“No,” Andrew admitted, “but surely if this is something as valuable as the key to an ancient city then perhaps it would have been wise of them to protect it somehow.”

“What about through the radiation?” he countered, “I mean, we’ve never seen enough of it to know what it does to someone who doesn’t have the junk DNA bits that we’ve got. For all we know they grow a third nipple or become a raging maniac. Maybe that in itself means we’re the only people who can handle it and find the way to the Temple.”

“You’re right, we don’t know anything about it,” Andrew agreed, “which means we don’t know if what we got last time was just a ‘normal’ dose – or whether repeat exposure could prove lethal. Hell, you could dissolve, I could float into nothingness and Sandy could implode.”

“She does that when you eat the last of the Cheerio’s,” he snarked back, knowing full well Andrew had a point. “Look, at the end of the day we’re going to get nowhere by just bickering about it, it’s the same principle as back in that main room – we can either sit on our arses and do nothing, or we can get off them and take a risk. I never thought about whether I want to be dissolved, suffocate or be crushed to death – but I figured the last of those would be in flagrante with Vin Diesel.”

“You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, aren’t you?” Andrew challenged.

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

Despite his bravado, Rick knew the risk he was taking, the potential consequences and did feel a tinge of fear. Then he quit thinking and in one smooth movement removed the orb from its pedestal. All conscious thought gone, replaced by a simple moment of action.

The moment burdened him with clarity. A split second became forever in a day, allowing the feeling of pure knowledge to enter him. He saw the vastness of it all, truth glowing and shimmering like the light beneath his fingers. It was too vast – what was, what is and what would be – in this and any other world. It slipped past him, through him, like grains of sand.

One grain lodged in his mind’s eye – he saw it and suddenly knew it. Where they needed to go, what they would find. It was just enough for him to handle. The rest, that was already gone by, meant for some other consciousness. Reality came back to the present moment, collapsed in on itself until he was just once more Rick Carter, holding an unusually warm metal orb in his hand, feeling a sudden shift in pressure that made everything inside him drop.

Andrew had been right, there were safeguards – and it was not simply the ‘radiation’ which seemed contained by the metal husk. Who knew what set off the chain reaction. Whether it was some ancient form of pressure switch, whether it was the movement of light, whether it was just the pressures of time and a whole heap of coincidence – whatever it was it happened.

The wall to their left, opposite from their entrance, blew out. Simply was sucked out into the vastness of the ocean. He saw a wall of water in front of him, realised only faintly somehow he was controlling it – only to realise how little in control he was.

The main room destabilised, the water that had been pressing at the edges of the galleon blew inwards – he could feel it as well as hear the roaring. Countless precious and priceless artefacts were swept around like kid’s toys in the bath as the churning, sweeping oceans reclaimed them. He felt the passage behind them fill – the monster coming for them. He could not hold it all, so instead, he clamped his free hand around Andrew’s wrist and held the orb tightly. Everything else, he let go.

He felt the water pass through him, was not even rocked by the momentous force it would have held. Andrew, however, was a different story – when it hit him they were swept in the direction of their new opening – ejected as though into space from an airlock. They tumbled, spinning out of control as everything tried to equalise and then as suddenly as it began they were in pure simple peace.

He closed his eyes once more and felt. All directions seemed to exist at once, almost endless. There in the cold depths, he felt calm serenity wash over him, quelling the pain he’d been feeling for so long. The simple beauty of the ocean, the feeling of belonging, kept him there longer than he dared to admit. The deadweight of his companion brought him back, Andrew having been knocked unconscious in the blast. Rick realised how lucky it was he didn’t try to escape through disappearing – the grasp on his wrist was the only thing that had kept them together. He felt a steady pulse though, strong.

They rose, swiftly and without encounter, they rose through the depths to a sudden breach. Impossibly hot sunshine beat down on his face and when he opened his eyes he saw they weren’t too far from where they started. In front of them as Rick trod water and Andrew burst into gasping life once more – he saw the shattered remains of the boat, a smoking husk which had been left to shit now doubt on the callous orders of the blonde army prick with the stupid name. It was half sunk, slowly dragging itself down into the depths they’d just risen from.

After his half-panicked reaction subsided and Andrew realised he was able to breathe and tread water on his own, he finally saw the boat and the reality of their position began to dawn on him.

“What are we going to do now?” he snapped, “Call Aquaman?”

“How’s about a sunburnt couple of Brits?” Rick responded. For a moment Andrew’s look clouded until he followed Rick’s gaze and saw, in the distance the growing hull of a fishing vessel. At the front, both looking hot and mad as hell were two very pale women. The red-head of the two was shouting but it was only when they got closer he could make out the words,

“What the hell have you blown up now?!”