The Camera Loves You
By Girl Who Finally Got Some Sleep
Warning for violence, but nothing you wouldn't see in the game if you messed up a quick-time event. Also, go grab a tea now because you're in for a long one.
"Are you sure that's safe?" Sam nudged the ice axe with the toe of her boot, not looking very convinced. "Because that's a really long way to fall if it's not."
I'd managed to tie the rope to the base of the axe, and then had gone scouting around the edge of the doorway to find somewhere to hook it so we could climb down after Pierre. The doorway seemed the obvious choice, and it seemed secure enough.
"Safe enough to climb down into a hole." I said, and gave it a good tug. It held, and that would have to suffice. "Providing the hole is safe."
Sam had the camera rolling, but wasn't paying it much attention as she watched me. I took the waist harness out of my belt bag, untwisted it and then stepped into it. While I was fiddling with the winches, Sam tried to copy me with one hand. I had actually expected her to get it all wrong – I certainly had the first time I'd tried to rig myself up – but after I'd checked over her straps and knots, it turned out she'd managed well enough on her own.
"Not just a pretty face, hey?" she said, grinning at me.
I slipped the rope through both of our harnesses, and stood against the edge of the hole with my back to it. "I hate this part," I confessed, and put a boot over the edge, leaning backwards until I was at right-angles with the wall. It was the best way to keep the rope taught, but I'd never become completely used to how it felt.
As I lowered myself slowly down the wall into the darkness, I turned my headlamp on. All it basically served to do was show me the rough texture of the wall I was facing. I could see the red flashing LED on Sam's camera against her silhouette in the doorway. "Oh, my God," she said. "I just have this image of myself using this clamp thing wrong and going sliding down the rope and killing us both."
It took some coaxing from me to get her to lean horizontal to the wall, but eventually we were both edging slowly along the rope down into the darkness.
It looked as if the area we were descending into had once been an enormous underground network of walkways and temples. I couldn't see very much except what was in front of me, but I got Sam to use the light-measure function so I could get a glimpse of the whole area. It was far bigger than the folly, and so deep that even with the strobe I couldn't see the floor. The rope ran out well before we reached it.
"Do it again," I told her, and she used the light-measure while I desperately tried to use the half-second it gave me to get an idea of the area around us. "And again."
"It'll run the battery flat if we keep using it," Sam warned me. "And I only bought one replacement. Can you just use the flashlight?"
Since the torch had been no help before, I didn't think it was going to be much use again. "It's not strong enough, and the beam is really narrow."
Sam fiddled with the camera for a few moments. "Hey, I've got an idea," she said. "Night mode." There were a few beeps while she switched it around. I could see her panning around above me. "Wow, this works great. Look!" She leant backwards on the rope and I stretched up to meet her. The picture was in shades of green, but I was able to take aspect of the area. Behind us in the middle was a staircase that looked as if it may once have been linked by bridges to rooms cut into the stone wall. I moved the camera a little, trying to guess how far away it was. I decided I could probably make it, now I knew exactly where to shine the torch.
"Here, hold this," I told Sam, handing her the torch. I showed her where to shine it, and then began to unthread the rope from my harness. When I was just hanging by my hands, I had a good long look at the distance I had to cover, and then pushed myself off the wall toward it. I could hear Sam take a deep breath just before my side connected with the edge of a broken walkway. Grateful for my gloves, I drove my fingertips into the stone until I had a firm grip and then I pulled myself to stand.
"Please tell me I don't need to do that." Sam was shining the torch at me.
"You'll actually have a better chance of making it from up there than I did," I promised her. "After you've undone yourself, throw me the end of the rope and the torch, I'll light the edge for you."
It took her far too long to unthread the rope because she was so preoccupied, but eventually she was free and able to throw me both. She threw them rather wide of me, but I managed to catch both of them without stumbling off the ledge. After several minutes, with the camera hanging around her neck, she talked herself into making the jump. She needn't have been so worried about it, though: she actually landed more or less on her feet. She straightened, looking triumphant. "Must be my sensible shoes," she said.
As she took a couple of steps towards the edge to film down it, I saw again that she was favouring one of her legs over the other. When I asked her about it, she said, "Blisters."
I took the end of the rope and whipped it a few times to try and unhook the axe. When the axe actually came sailing toward us, we scattered with our hands over our heads because we couldn't actually see properly where it was headed.
"That would be total irony," Sam said after it had landed somewhere and I was pulling at the rope to retrieve it. "We survived Yamatai and all the crap that's happening now only to be killed by your axe."
The central staircase was missing a number of sections, but was basically a stable structure leading all the way down. It wouldn't have taken us that long to get to the ground, except that every time we reached a new level, I took the camera off Sam to have a look at the architecture. Makeshift bricks and ledges had been cut into the very rock as if to make the rock appear to be the outside of a temple. I could see where the bridges would once have been, and it looked as if they had been cut out of solid rock, too.
"This is amazing," I told Sam, trying to operate the zoom. "The expertise that must have been required to design something like this…" Sam was giving me the same look I gave her when she was gushing about documentaries. "It's not as if they would just have been able to use excavators and jackhammers to move the rock." I panned around. "I think there's text over the doorways, but I can't see it properly." I held the camera toward her. "How do I make the image sharper?"
"Film in daylight," she said. "Night Mode is always grainy."
That hadn't really been the answer I was looking for. I pointed the camera back at the doorway and pressed the button Sam used to measure the light. It flickered briefly, not long enough for me to read the text while I was filming, but enough for me to rewind the footage and pause it.
"You're going to run it flat," Sam warned me. "We really need to manage the battery power a lot better if we want both my batteries to last the whole time."
I glanced up in the corner of the LCD panel while I was adjusting the zoom on the paused image: 41%. I didn't think that was too concerning, especially since Sam said she had that other battery.
Once I'd centered the image on the screen, I squinted at it. "'Poseidon'," I read, or at least I assume that's what I read, because it was in Greek Alphabet and some of the letters were a little different. It made sense that the rooms would be temples, I thought. All the most amazing ancient architecture was always in honour of deities.
I really wanted to look inside all of the rooms, but I was also aware of the fact that the clock was ticking and somewhere Pierre had a huge head start in getting to the Scion in this Tihocan's tomb.
"Jingle bells, jingle bells..." Sam half-sang to me.
"I know, I know, I'm taking ages," I said. "I know we've got to go, I just wanted..." I looked back towards the rooms that I desperately yearned to explore but didn't have time to. "Okay, I'm coming."
"So's Christmas. Let's get going, this place is giving me the creeps. There's something moving over there and I can't see what it is because you have the camera." I handed the camera back to her, and she pointed it upwards. "Ugh, bats," she said as we continued down the staircase.
The ground was damp and mossy, and there were several bodies of dead lions lying half-submerged in puddles. All of them had bullet wounds, and we followed the trail of bloodied footsteps to an open doorway. There were a number of mechanisms that had already been shifted. I filmed the detail on them, figuring I could examine them later.
"No mystery which way he went," Sam observed.
I took my gun out, just in case. The doorway lead into a long corridor that was, again, half-filled with water. "Give me your phone," I told her, and then wrapped both of them and the iPad very tightly in the plastic shopping bags from the adventure store. "Is that camera water proof?"
She nodded. "Yeah, but when they say 'water proof', they don't actually mean you can take it deep-sea diving or anything. It'll be okay to get splashed." We waded into the water which turned out to only be about waist-height, and were moving through it when the surface of the water move in a way I didn't expect.
I stopped. "Did you feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"That," I said as the water moved again. I looked down at the surface, which was brown and opaque. I couldn't see into it at all, but I could see movement that we weren't causing. "Back, get back!" I yelled at Sam, who didn't waste a second splashing back towards the doorway. I fired into the water as I followed her.
I wasn't until we'd left the water that what had been there emerged to follow us: an enormous ten-foot crocodile. It was moving slowly; someone had already shot it a few times before I had. I finished it off and then put a hand to my chest and felt my heart going at a million miles an hour.
"If the archeology thing doesn't work out, I'm marketing you as a younger, hotter Steve Irwin," Sam said, also breathless, as she walked up to the corpse and filmed up close to it. It jerked as it was dying, and she shrieked and jumped away from it.
"I wonder if there are more?" I said, looking dubiously at the water as it fell still again.
"Probably not," Sam said. "They're pretty territorial." When I narrowed my eyes at her, she explained, "Hey, if you hadn't kept telling me to turn Crocodile Hunter down so you could ace your A-levels, you'd know that, too."
We ventured into the water again and were fortunately not eaten by crocodiles.
As we approached the other end of the corridor, it became increasingly obvious there was a light source that wasn't coming from our headlamps. The corridor opened up into another cavern, but since the room had been cut, the rocks forming the ceiling had cracked. Sunlight streaked in through them far, far above us.
I switched off my lamp, looking upward at the cracks. Sam made a noise next to me and had her camera pointing forwards. A section of a large building lay ahead of us, and the outside of it looked like a multistory Acropolis. Even though it was mostly cracked and crumbling, it still held its basic shape. I could never imagine how people managed to build such incredible places with so little technology: it was the true definition of genius. I'd have put money on the houses that were being built today even with modern technology not even making it to a hundred years, let alone several thousand. We could learn so much from these people, I thought, gazing up at the beautiful ruins.
Underneath the section of building a cut-stone corridor had been dug, and it looked like something that you might use to get into a football stadium. We walked through it.
When we came out on the other side, the sunlight was a lot brighter and I had to shut my eyes against it for a moment after having been underground so long. When I'd adjusted to the light, I heard Sam say beside me, "Whoa..."
We were standing at the edge of an enormous, football-field sized amphitheatre. In every direction there were two levels of seating cut completely into the stone, and the second level towered right up into the roof. I couldn't look at the roof too carefully, because the sun was positioned directly above it, pouring through drilled holes in the shape of star constellations.
Every column was perfectly uniform and had incredible detail, every aspect of this amazing place was beautifully preserved after thousands of years.
Nobody found places like this anymore! This was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, and I was so incredibly lucky to be standing here seeing it with my own two eyes. The vastness of it almost had a tangible weight. It was just so incredible and so unspoilt that I felt a wave of emotion and had to be careful I didn't tear up.
"Glad I bought you so many knickers," Sam said, chuckling at my reaction, and, of course, filming it.
"I can't..." I swallowed. "This can't be real."
She took a full panorama of the stadium. "After Yamatai and the Scion, this is what you think isn't real?"
I wandered into the centre of the sandy field, the fine-grained sand caking around my wet boots. I couldn't have cared less what was happening with my feet, though, except where they were standing. This is where gladiators must have stood, I thought. This is what they must have seen, but with thousands of people seated above them. The noise must have been overwhelming; I tried to imagine it. "It's like the Colloseum," I decided, thinking I would have to visit that again, too.
As we neared the other side of the field, it became clear that what I had just assumed were boulders lying on the field were actually the bodies of freshly-shot lions.
"I guess will follow the corpses," Sam said.
"It's sad they all have to die," I said, bending down beside one. "They're probably the only remaining European lions left in the world. Real, live fossils."
"They might have died anyway when we take the Scion away from here," Sam said. "There's no food here. The water is completely gross. I think it's the only thing keeping them alive anyway."
As I was bent down, I heard gunfire and the suddenness of it surprised me. Sam yelped and jumped back as patches of sand around us sprayed up. Before I could even tell where it was coming from, I shouted to Sam, "Run around, just keep moving all over the place, it's really hard to aim at someone who's moving."
I ran, too, towards where I thought it was coming from. Finally, I saw a figure moving on the steps. When he saw me looking, he ducked behind one of the columns.
You bastard, I thought, I'll get you out of there. As much as I was absolutely loath to damage this ancient structure, I had to keep reminding myself of the reason we were down here in the first place. I aimed my pistol at top of the column he was behind, and fired until a few chunks of rock came loose and fell on him. He ran out from behind the pillar just as planned, and I shot at him as he sprinted across the seating. From what I could tell, though, he was too far away for me to be very accurate so none of the shots connected. While he was under cover, I quickly pushed a few more bullets into the magazine.
Before I'd finished reloading, he ran out from cover again. I hurriedly jammed the magazine back in, lifting the pistol and wondering what possessed a so-called 'professional' to do something so stupid as to run in a straight line across an area I was clearly ready to fire at.
Something was chasing him, something dark.
I dropped my gun a little to try and figure out what it was, but it wasn't until it ran through a streak of sunlight I realized it was a gorilla.
Sam had noticed, too. "Look!" she yelled at me.
It was actually rather comical watching Pierre be chased by it, but as much pleasure as it gave me to let him make a fool of himself, I needed to kill him. I followed his progress with barrel of my gun, shooting each time I thought I had him in aim. He didn't fall, though, he just scrambled up the wall and climbed through a vent on the second level. The gorilla wasn't going to fit through the vent so paced a little at the bottom of it, probably hoping he'd come back.
When he didn't, the gorilla looked at us.
I don't want to kill you, I thought, pointing my gun at it. Please don't make me kill you.
Just like the wolves, it opted to just watch me with interest. I lowered my gun. Sam had stopped weaving all over the place and walked up to me. "I got all of that on film," she said with a big grin on her face.
The gorilla let us follow Pierre through the vent. I had my gun pointed between its eyes as we approached, but since we weren't actually running at it, it was displaying no aggression whatsoever. There was something intelligent and considered about the way it was looking at us that I found very unnerving, but it ended up being just as little threat to us as we were to it.
My main difficulty with the gorilla turned out to be how to get Sam to stop filming it. I took it as a personal victory when I'd finally got both of us into the vent and following Pierre.
The vent we'd climbed into was an aqueduct that led into another series of corridors. I turned my headlamp back on and insisted on walking ahead of Sam through them with my gun drawn. It suited Sam perfectly well because she clearly intended on having that camera pointed at me every possible second she could.
We reached the end of the corridors and there was an open pool which looked like a public bath. All of the tiles were flecked with gold and they sparkled under the light of my headlamp as I examined them. We waded through it, stepping out on the other side in what looked like a huge temple.
I didn't let Sam out into the open until we'd spent a good minute with the camera in Night Mode checking to make sure Pierre wasn't anywhere to be found. He wasn't, and the only structure of consequence in the room was an enormous statue that over the ages had completely collapsed in a pile of shattered limbs. The head had rolled over near the pool and I looked down at it. It had those cherubic features that made it seem like it wouldn't be out of place on any of the statues in Rome.
Sam was conducting her own investigation of the statue and had begun climbing up some of the limbs to get a shot of the pedestal it had been standing on.
The more I looked around the gold-filled room, the more I thought it was less like a temple and more like the throne room of a palace. Perhaps this was his tomb and in his honour the Romans had built him a replica throne room to be buried in? I wondered who the emperor was, though, because that might have given some hint about what this place was supposed to be. I would once have probably been able to guess who this tomb belonged to, but it had been too long since I'd taken classical archaeology classes and I couldn't remember any useful details.
While I had bent down to examine the gold veins in the face of the statue, there was a dull glow coming from the limb that Sam had just stepped onto. She hadn't noticed because she was filming over the other side of it. I had a very bad feeling about it as it intensified.
"Sam!" I shouted, and charged over to push her off it. She fell heavily on her side on the tiles and the camera clattered across the floor.
When she sat up and looked around us, I thought she probably expected to hear gunfire. None came, so she sat up and rubbed her hip. "What happened...?"
"Look!" I had been running my eyes over her to make sure she was okay, when my headlamp touched her feet I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
Her sensible shoes had half-turned to gold.
I reached out and touched it, feeling only cool metal instead of rubber soles.
"No way," Sam said, and stretched above her head to retrieve the camera. I didn't wait for her to take them off for me so I could examine them, I got stuck into the laces myself and tried to pull the stiff boots off. As I was trying to force off her left boot, she made a strangled noise. I looked up at her and she had her eyes jammed shut. When I managed to get her boot actually off, I saw why she'd been favouring her right leg: her left ankle was very swollen and one side of it was a deep red.
"You're hurt!" I forgot completely about the golden boot. "Why didn't you tell me?"
She opened her eyes. "How many times did you get hurt in Yamatai?" she asked, as if that was the answer. "I'll be okay, you were."
"You've been walking on this?" I pressed against where the bones should be with my fingertips, just to make sure they were actually still where I expected them to be. They were, so it was most likely a soft tissue injury, maybe a tendon or a ligament.
She shrugged. "It doesn't hurt as much as you think," she said. "At least, when we're looking at all this cool stuff it doesn't."
I thought about the shrapnel wound in my shoulder that I'd hardly even noticed. "Well, it will hurt," I told her. "It will really hurt, and I don't think you should walk on it anymore."
She snorted. "So are you going to carry me all the way back up again?" It wasn't a genuine question. "It doesn't hurt that much now, I'll be okay." She was trying to reach for her golden boot to put it back on. Before she did, I insisted she let me strap her ankle with a pressure bandage from our small first aid kit. If she was going to be heroic about being hurt, at least I could try and prevent her from worsening the injury.
Once we'd got her standing again, she tested my strapping by taking a few steps. The soles of her boots made a really strange sound against the tiles, but she seemed passable otherwise. "They're really hard now, and really heavy," Sam said, looking down at them. "But I guess it will be okay."
We examined the statue, and the limb that had very nearly turned her to gold was a hand. Camera pointed at the limb, Sam dropped a few rocks onto it and filmed as they turned to gold. She carefully rescued a couple of smaller ones and put them in her belt-bag. "Souvenirs," she explained, choosing a third. "How cool would it be to get jewelry made out of them or something?"
There was almost no point in even trying to find the pedestal to read it anymore, since I knew who the statue was. We filmed a few seconds of it, anyway.
"King Midas," Sam read. "Or, at least, I suppose that's what 'Midas Rex' means. That's just amazing."
Amazing, and dangerous, I thought. It seemed like such a harmless thing to be able to do, to turn anything you want into gold. However, if Ms. Natla was able to rock the global share markets with her meddling, I couldn't imagine what this statue would go to the gold markets. It occurred to me you could also you could also kill someone and melt down their body without a trace. I shivered.
"Let's keep going," I said.
All the doorways had collapsed, and the only way out of the temple was another aqueduct that was at a very steep slope downward. We couldn't see what was at the bottom of it because once again it was pitch black.
"Give me the camera," I asked her, and she did. "I'll go down first and make sure he's not down there just waiting for us."
I sat at the edge of the duct and hopped into it. The tiles were wet enough that I slid down at quite a speed, eyes trained on the LCD to see what was ahead of me. The duct ended and suddenly and just like in Vilcabamba, I was airborne. I cried out for only a second before my back hit the water. I didn't sink very far, though, and I managed to get to the surface and shake the camera out before it stopped working and Sam killed me.
I looked around with it, but soon realized the surfaces were all close enough for me to see with my headlamp.
My first impression of it was that it looked like an enormous public swimming pool, one that could fit practically all of Berkshire in it. I swam over to a wall that was dividing the pools up and put the camera on it. My pullover was heavy in the water, so I opted to just take it off and leave it on the side of the pool. At least the water wasn't freezing like it had been in Peru.
"Lara?" I heard Sam's voice shouting through the duct.
"It's okay, Sam!" I called back. "He's not here!"
I heard the sound of her pants sliding against the tiles and then she emerged in the air, too, landing slightly more gracefully and feet-first into the water. It was only as the gold of her boots glimmered in the lamplight that I realised what was going to happen.
She didn't rise to the surface.
Panic-stricken, I dumped the camera on the wall and dove under the surface of the water. My headlamp failed after only a few seconds of me being completely submerged, and so I was shouting and feeling around, trying to find her. My hand brushed something in the water – her pants, I think – and I pulled at them until I could feel her shoes. Mentally apologizing for how much it would hurt, I planted my own boot against her calf and forced the golden shoes from her feet, laces still tied.
Once they were both off I grabbed her and helped her return to the surface.
I was desperate for breath myself, and I was quite fit. I can't imagine how she must have felt in the minute or two without oxygen. She made the most awful, terrifying noise as she took a breath, crying out and coughing at the same time. I wrapped my arms around her to try and keep her afloat, but her struggling was pushing me under the water, too. She eventually let me take her to the side of the pool.
I nearly threw up from the amount of water in my stomach. Sam was clinging to the edge, half-crying as she coughed.
"That was my fault," I said through heaved breaths. "I didn't even think. God..." I pushed some of her wet hair out of her face. "I'm so sorry!"
She shook her head, but it was a few moments before she could say anything. "You always said my thing about expensive shoes would be the death of me."
I double-took. Did she really just joke about what had happened? When she saw my expression, she chuckled, putting her head against the tiles on the side of the pool. "I think after that I need a hug," she said, and held an arm out to me. I swam underneath it. "Look, I'm still shaking." She was braced against the side, so I was able to put both of my arms around her.
I drew a long, deep breath and then exhaled, resting my cheek against her shoulder. I could hear her doing the same. She's okay, I thought. You can relax.
"I hope that's an axe you're poking me with," she said beside my ear, tone alight with amusement. "Actually, no I don't."
I pulled away a little so that I wasn't pushing it into her. "Sorry to disappoint you, but that's about all I've got to poke you with." Her headlamp was still working, and because it was shining right at me I couldn't see her expression very well.
"Oh, well," Sam said, still trying to sound cheerful despite her ragged breathing, "At least I won't get pregnant."
I had to laugh at that. "I can't believe you, I really can't," I said, pulling myself out of the water and helping her do the same. "You just nearly drowned."
"'Nearly' means I didn't," she pointed out. "Besides, you wouldn't have let that happen." She leaned and looked into the water. "I suppose my camera is down there somewhere with my shoes?"
"No, I put it on the side before I helped you," I said, walking around the outside of the pool to go and retrieve it. "And your complete faith in me is sort of scary."
I walked the camera back to her, and she accepted it and then pointed it at me again. "Here's my thrice heroine, Lara Croft, soaking wet from diving heroically–" she paused, "Whoops, totally shouldn't have bought you that baby blue t-shirt, though." I looked down, and in the light from her headlamp I could see my sports bra through the wet t-shirt. Since my bra wasn't see-through, I wasn't really concerned if the top was. "Or maybe that particular purchase just won us another hundred thousand loyal viewers."
I let her narrate all about what happened while I wrung my hair, smiling.
Pierre wanted to kill us, and would probably make another very good attempt to. Ms. Natla wanted to do God knows what to us, we were deep inside the earth with no guaranteed way to get out. She'd nearly been turned to gold, nearly drowned and had an ankle that looked like a blowfish, and I had a small chunk of flesh missing from my shoulder.
Yet, what struck me was just how very different this experience was to Yamatai. I remembered falling, and climbing and being shot at, but I remembered it so differently. I'd been terrified and so very alone, at least for most of it. This was something else. We were in mortal danger every second, but I was actually having fun with her.
"I love you," I said, interrupting her in the middle of her story.
She stopped talking and gaped over the LCD screen at me.
I had second-thoughts about my decision to tell her at that moment, feeling blood rise to my cheeks. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to–"
"–No, Lara, it's..." She swallowed. "It's… I don't think you've ever said that before."
I didn't think I had, either. It wasn't something I said often. Sam basically told every second person she totally loved them, and yet she wasn't saying anything to me right now, when I really needed her to. At least she had the courtesy to let the camera drop by her side, and I could see the red LED wasn't flashing, either.
"Nothing?" I asked her, and then turned away. "Okay."
"No, Lara…" She came up to me. "It's just…" She put her hand on my forearm. "I didn't know how you meant it."
"I meant it the way I said it." I pretended to be very engrossed in checking the operation of the torch. My heart was pounding just as much as it had been when I was trying to pull her golden boots off in the water. "Come on, let's get going." I made to walk away from her, but she stopped me.
"I can't read you at all," she said to the back of my head. "I really never have any idea what you're thinking when it comes to stuff like this."
I didn't turn to face her, because I was frightened of what she might be able to say, or worse, of what she might not say.
"I think I've told you I love you about a thousand times or something, so even though I mean it, it probably doesn't really mean much if I say it again." She took a breath. "So maybe I should just tell you that there is no part of me that you can't have. I would do anything for you, and I'm not just saying that. I wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for you. Or I would be, but I wouldn't be me."
"You wouldn't have been part of the Sun Queen ritual or in here in the first place if it wasn't for me," I pointed out. "So you'd probably be fine."
"You're completely missing the point," she said. "I can't believe I just told you all of that and you're still stuck on Yamatai."
I nodded, but it felt like I was no closer to having her understand that I loved her than before I told her. While I was looking down at the tiles, I spotted a fluffy explorer sock. Of course, I thought, Sam doesn't have any shoes anymore.
"We can't go anywhere like that," I said, turning and pointing at her feet.
She gave me a frustrated look about the change of subject, but let it go. "They're pretty thick, I'll be okay."
"My feet are only half a size bigger," I bent down with the intention of taking my boots off and giving them to her. "But with those thick socks you're wearing, they'll probably—"
"Lara." She pulled me back up again. "Seriously, if you get to fight demons for me, I get to go barefoot for you." She paused. "Also you're being really weird, and I don't know what to do about it."
You could kiss me, I thought, but didn't say anything. I had already managed to turn what had been quite an enjoyable endeavour — near-death experiences excluded, of course — into something awkward. I didn't want to make it any worse. "It's okay, it'll go away," I told her. "Let's keep going."
She sighed audibly, and held the camera back up. The red LED started flashing again. "Okay, then."
We had to climb out of the room with all the pools, which was difficult because the walls were covered in algae and moss. The surface just gave no friction at all, and in the end, even with the rope ascender, it was incredibly difficult to even just climb off the rope up into the ledge. I'd smacked my shoulders on the wall a number of times, and my hands were really red from holding onto the body of the ascender. Sam hadn't fared much better. Once we were up on the ledge, she sat down and checked her knees. There were already bruises forming on them from when she'd slipped and they'd gone sailing into the wall.
In the room we'd climbed into there were a number of mechanisms that looked operational. I tried one of them experimentally. The immense sound of rushing water carried from the room we'd just finally managed to exit.
We went to stand by the entrance, Night Mode on, trying to figure out what had happened.
"It's full of water again," Sam said. "Right past where we were climbing."
It would have been so much easier to get up to the room if we could have swum up to it, I thought. I angled the camera in her hands towards some enormous grates near the ceiling. "It must have come from those," I guessed. "Like a giant cistern."
It was interesting, but we needed to get the Scion. The only way out of the control room was another aqueduct. We stood together and looked down at it.
"I'm going first this time," Sam told me, and then didn't wait for my response before sitting on the edge and sliding down into it.
I jumped in straight after her and ended up almost with my feet against her back as the duct deposited us on dry soil at the base of an underground temple.
I saw the symbol of Atlantis over the doorway on the other side of the open space, so I guessed this must be the Tihocan's tomb that Pierre had mentioned. The path to what used to be a doorway was beside us, and burners were placed on either side of the path from the door to the temple. Several braziers hung along the far wall, the fire burning as hungrily as if it had only been lit a moment beforehand.
By the doorway to the temple, there were two oversized, grotesque statues. Firelight dances off them; they were centaurs with bird skulls for heads. The way they'd been positioned made it look as if they were guarding the doorway.
There was something about them... They were too detailed, I decided, and had too many textures and surfaces on them. Their skull-heads reminded me of my dream about Qualopec where the holes in his mask suddenly had eyes. I hoped I wouldn't need to walk underneath them.
As we were walking up the path, a figure wandered into the light under the statues.
Pierre had his index finger up, and the Scion threaded through it. He also had a smug grin on his face and a gun in his other hand. "You're too late," he said. "Perhaps if you'd spent less time ooh-ing and ahh-ing over all the broken rubble, you'd have beaten me."
"You're not actually out of here yet," I pointed out. "Maybe something will kill you before you leave."
"Are you suggesting that something might be you, Ms. Croft?" He strolled forward toward us, expertly cocking his pistol with a single hand. "Let me remove that silly idea from your head."
"Do you really want to do this, Pierre? Look at it, can't you feel the magic in it? Aren't you worried about even taking that item near someone like Ms. Natla?"
He pursed his lips, ignoring what I'd said. "Or, better yet, let's just remove that silly head altogether."
I'd drawn my own gun and was about to give him his last chance to reconsider, when he passed under the centaurs. Around his finger, the Scion began to hum and flicker with the sharp little lights I'd seen in Qualopec's fragment. He looked quizzically at it, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
Beside me, I could hear Sam gasp. I had thought it was just about the Scion, but then she started frantically messing about in her bag. "My battery's dead!" she told me. "Fucking timing, I swear!"
As soon as the glow from the Scion fragment was bright enough to light the base of the centaurs, they began to tremble. One of their heads moved, and then the other, and then they were relaxing onto all fours from where they had been rearing. They were mummified like Qualopec's guards, but the bandages were already coming off them. Each time they moved, I could see the red, dried muscle pulling their limbs into action.
The harked back to the Oni on Yamatai, huge and only half-alive. I took a step back even though I was so very far away from them.
Sam was still desperately to load the new battery, muttering, "Come on, come on…" as she stared at the scene unfolding in front of us.
Pierre turned around toward them just as they were fully coming to their senses. He looked from one to the other, and then began to run toward us and the exit, twisting back towards them to fire rounds at them. They seemed startled his behavior and so took a few seconds before they determined what they were going to do about it.
Leaping off their pedestals, they charged after him, the sound of galloping hoof beats drowning out Pierre's gunfire.
I hadn't been able to see the objects they'd each been holding in the half-light of the doorway. As they passed the fires, the light reflected off ten foot spears and wide bronze shields printed with the symbol of Atlantis.
Well, I wasn't going to let Pierre make it to us, not with them following him. He was running in a straight line toward me, too terrified by the centaurs to bother ducking and weaving to evade my bullets. I lifted my gun and fired one round straight into his thigh.
He stumbled and dropped, clutching it and trying to get up again. He couldn't; I must have shattered one of his bones. When he realised what had happened, he looked from the centaurs who were fast approaching him to me, and then pointed his gun at me. "You fucking bitch! You're coming with me!"
"Run!" I yelled to Sam and grabbed her hand, pulling her at full pelt around the boundary of the cavern. I could hear his gunfire ricochet off the rocks behind us. She was crying out — I thought at first in fear, and then I remembered she had no shoes and there was rubble everywhere.
The centaurs made it up to him and raised their spears. I stopped, bracing myself for what I knew I was about to see.
Each of them thrust their spear into him so firmly that they struggled to pull it out of the soil afterwards. One of them lifted him up into the air with his whole body impaled on it; he was clutching at the spear through his stomach and kicking with his legs. There was blood absolutely gushing out of the hole in his pelvis left by the other spear.
"Oh, my God." Sam had her hand over her mouth. "I mean, he's a jerk, but… Oh, my God."
The centaur held him suspended in the air as his struggles became weaker, but lost interest with him after he bled out. It swung the spear in an arc, throwing his body across the whole area toward us. It tumbled at our feet. We both stared down at it, horrified.
The scion was still on his index finger.
Sam saw where I was looking. "Lara…"
We didn't have a choice, this is what we'd come here for. I crouched and pulled it off.
The centaurs reacted immediately as if they could physically feel the Scion fragment being touched. Looking directly toward us, they gave the fires a very wide berth and came thundering in our direction.
Sam screamed at the top of her lungs, and I'm sure I must have done the same. We weren't wounded like Pierre had been, but I couldn't imagine there would be many places we could run that would escape them with the length of those spears.
"Lara!" she was screaming, "Lara, what do we do?"
"I don't know!" I yelled back, my voice covering several octaves.
When we reached the doorway and had to run around the giant burners again, I noticed once again the centaurs were avoiding them.
"Fire!" I said, "Fire, do something with the fire!"
They were quickly closing the distance between us. I tried toppling a burner behind us to give us some extra time. It hardly made any difference, though, they were just much too fast for us.
When they were so close I could feel the vibration of their hooves on the ground, I felt Sam twist. She'd obviously managed to slot the battery into the camera, because she held it up and shone the forward light straight at them like she'd blinded me in the bus.
The vibrations stopped and I looked over my shoulder as we ran – they'd scatted and dropped their weapons, clawing at their 'eyes'. I couldn't believe it.
"Over here," I said, pulling her back over to the burners. I picked up one of them by its handles, dragging it towards the centaurs as they pranced and rubbed their empty sockets.
"No, Lara!" Sam was screaming, "No! No! Don't get that close to them, please!"
I ignored her, rushing straight up to them and flinging the burning embers all over their bandaged bodies.
They caught fire immediately, and the sound they made… God, it can only be described as something from beyond the grave.
I backed away with my gun drawn and my jaw open, but it was clear they were going to keep burning until they fell.
Sam was shaking when I made it back to her, her whole body trembling so violently can I could even feel it as I put an arm around her shoulder. She was breathing unevenly.
We watched the burn into cinders and collapse on the stone of the pathway.
"I think Himiko's going to have some company in my nightmares," Sam murmured as we walked up to their charred bodies. She took some footage of them, anyway.