Disclaimer: same
A/N: Thanks to ArodLoverus2001, Eyghon, Danielle87, Dalla7, tine, Mizzle fo' Rizzle, and Unsigned for reviewing chapter 48! I know, I know, I can't seem to make up my mind which characters are good and which ones are evil. I guess that's just the curse of this story - everyone is doomed to switch sides at least half a dozen times before I get to the end to facilitate what I want to do with the plot. I'm sorry about that, but at least it keeps things interesting, right? I promise there's a reason for it, and things will eventually get a little more clear-cut. But, hey, it's like mid-season, right? Nothing's supposed to make sense. Anyway, thanks again for reviewing and continuing to read despite the fact that I seem to go over the same old territory over and over, and here's chapter 49. Please review!
Confrontations
EPISODE 4.13
"They should be here by now," I stated, glancing at my watch for probably the hundredth time since Nadia and I arrived at Rambaldi's temple. She looked over at me, but chose not to reply. I shook my head, standing and shielding my eyes against the sun as I looked out over the desert. The two of us stood in the literal middle of nowhere. Most of the temple seemed to be underground, a small structure not much taller than I was all that we could see from the surface. It took me all of three minutes to realize how our plan would never work – Sloane would see us from miles away.
"Maybe they're lost," Nadia replied. I knew Sloane was on the way, and that meant our backup was getting dangerously late. Not that I knew what the hell we would do with support when and if it ever showed up, but it still worried me that we didn't see another soul after leaving the library in the middle of the night. It was just after sunrise, and I already felt the heat rising in the sand around me. "We didn't have the most direct route either."
I nodded, pacing back to the small structure and leaning back against the wall again. Nadia stood across from me, leaning on the wall at the other side of the doorway. She glanced out at the desert, squinting into the light.
"I don't like this," I finally added, shaking my head in disbelief. "There's no way Sloane will get anywhere near this place with the two of us standing out in plain sight."
"Jack warned us not to go inside," Nadia replied without looking over at me. I sighed, nodding a little and glancing over at her. After a long moment, she looked over at me in question.
"Are you sure you're all right with this?" I asked. She paused for a moment before nodding.
"If Rambaldi was right, we have to keep the power away from my father," she answered with a small shrug, looking away again. "Besides, we've already got this plan anyway."
"Right," I agreed. For a long moment, neither of us said anything. "Maybe there's more space around back. I'll go check."
"I'll wait here," Nadia stated. I agreed and started off. "I'll yell if I see them," she called after me.
I circled around the small entryway, looking around as I did so. The desert seemed completely devoid of anything even resembling life, which I supposed was pretty common. Even as I walked, I could tell this structure offered no cover whatsoever. It was made of stone, the whole thing very flat and stout, save the doorway in the front. There wasn't even any kind of an alcove that a person could fit into in order to hide. The entire structure was about ten feet long, maybe four feet wide. And, as Nadia and I discovered by walking past the structure twice before finally spotting it, it was difficult to see if you didn't look right at it.
"Figures," I muttered under my breath, realizing that something like this was pretty typical of Rambaldi. One thing was for certain about all of his artifacts and puzzles, and even his words to me when I met him inside the Sphere of Life – nothing was ever what I expected.
I figured I might as well check the other side of the structure as well, though I found exactly what I expected – more of the same. Straight, flat, brick wall. Even the corners were useless, because anyone moving towards the structure could see almost all the way around it.
"There's nothing there," I said as I came back around to the front of the small entryway. As I stepped back to the doorway, however, I noticed that Nadia was no longer there. I glanced around, but knew if she went off into the desert somewhere, I would see her almost immediately. That left only one other option.
She went inside.
Despite the warning my father gave us about not going into the temple – that it would be much easier to handle Sloane out in the open – I started in. There was a small platform through the door that dropped into a steep staircase. I couldn't see a thing, immediately going for a small utility flashlight clipped to my belt. My father gave it to me, along with a gun, before Nadia and I left the library. Since we left in the middle of the night, he knew we would need something to navigate the desert.
I turned the small light on, trying to gauge how far the stairs descended. I didn't know if it was just the distance or something more ominous that seemed to swallow up the beam of the flashlight, and decided I didn't care. Glancing back over my shoulder one last time, I started down the steps.
The corridor smelled like mildew and ancient air. It didn't seem like anyone came this way in a very long time. It briefly struck me that someone could have passed this way long ago and stolen whatever was inside the temple, leaving us on a wild goose chase. When I considered that every other Rambaldi artifact I came across in the last several years remained perfectly in tact, despite five hundred years of age and god knew what else, I doubted the robbery theory held much weight.
I thought about calling out to Nadia, trying to determine how far ahead of me she went, but decided against it. For one, I didn't know if she was on my side of all of this in the first place. If she thought I followed her, she might disappear further into the temple. Or, if she had a weapon on her as well – which I assumed she did – she might just shoot me and keep moving.
It was that last thought that influenced me to have my weapon in one hand and the flashlight in the other as I moved through the corridors of the temple. My eyes scanned over the walls as I continued down the stairs, finally stepping into a slightly wider hallway. I could tell by the chill coming off the rocks that I traveled far underground now, though I couldn't make a reasonable guess as to exactly how far. Glancing back up the stairs gave me no information whatsoever – the ceiling was so low that the doorway vanished long before I reached the bottom.
Once I stepped into the corridors of the temple itself, things started to look different. The stone forming the stairway was uneven, and covered in dust and grime. The walls around me now were smooth, and because of the construction of the entrance, none of the sand from the desert above reached this far. There was some kind of writing all over the walls as well. It took me a moment to recognize it – Rambaldi's code.
Despite the fact that I wanted to stay here a moment and look over whatever I saw written on the walls, I continued after my sister. I knew that, if everything went well, there would be plenty of time to examine everything inside the temple in greater detail. For now, my priority remained to find out where Nadia went, and why she vanished without saying a word to me. She obviously wanted to get away from me, but why?
I moved as quietly as I could through the stone corridor, all the way to the end and around another sharp corner. In front of me I saw another stairway, leading even further down. I took a moment to look around, hoping there was another path somewhere. I knew the further down I went, the less chance there was to make it back to the surface in time. Still, leaving Nadia inside wasn't the ideal situation either. I didn't know what her agenda was, and I couldn't let her get to the artifact alone.
With that in mind, I continued down.
The air got even thicker as I went, making it difficult to breathe. The second staircase was shorter than the first, and opened into a larger room. It was still pitch black inside, and I couldn't see anything other than what the thin beam of my flashlight illuminated. I lowered the light to the ground for a moment, hoping to catch another flicker of light from somewhere that might lead me to Nadia's location. There was nothing. I knew she didn't go inside without a light – it would be crazy to do so. But, I didn't see any sign of her here.
I started to turn back to the stairway, wanting to get back to the surface and take another look around. I figured maybe my initial suspicion was wrong, and that Nadia wasn't down here, when I saw a faint glow coming from the left corner of the room. It barely lit another passage, curving back under the second staircase. Leaving my own light trained on the ground, I went to this new opening and looked inside.
All I could see from where I stood was a sharp corner leading off to another room. I glanced back over my shoulder at the larger room, knowing that going back to the surface was the smartest option. I could wait for backup and then venture back down here, see where that light came from. But, my curiosity eventually got the best of me, and I stepped into the corridor.
Whatever produced this new light gave the hall a very dull amber glow, but even that seemed bright compared to the complete darkness of the upstairs corridor and the room I just left. I turned off my flashlight, returning it to my belt and stretching one hand out to follow the wall, weapon still at the ready. Just like the wall upstairs, this wall was smooth and had the same writing all over it, in small lettering written with thick black ink. I imagined that someone painted all of these words here after Rambaldi's greatest power was left here, and it must have taken months of work, if not more.
Suddenly, the wall fell away from my fingertips. I turned, seeing a large arch in the stone before me, opening this hallway up to a large room. The light I saw came from here, a soft glow coming off several small metallic objects scattered all over the floor. I didn't have a clue as to where the light came from before reflecting off these objects, but something else held my attention right off.
Every few feet, in all three of the other walls of this large room I saw a doorway. Each doorway led off into a different corridor, creating a very complicated maze of paths for me to choose from. I had no idea where Nadia went, if she even came down here in the first place. I saw at least a dozen different doors, most of them probably coming to dead-ends or connecting to one another, just to make navigating around in here more complicated.
"Great," I said to myself with a tired sigh. "This should be fun."
Deciding whether or not to call Weiss and have him and Dixon come to the library before going to the temple didn't take very long. If I left things the way they stood, Sloane and the others would get to the temple. No one there had any idea that he knew of our plan, and that Irina was apparently on his side. Sydney and Nadia didn't stand a chance against that.
So, barely twenty minutes after Sloane's car drove away, Weiss and Dixon showed up in a military-issue Jeep. Thankfully, it looked like it this vehicle was used to travel over the desert, which gave us a definite advantage over Sloane's sedan. I still didn't know how much time we had at this point, and wasted none getting back on the road to the temple.
"What the hell happened?" Weiss asked, looking at me like I lost my mind the second I was in the car. Dixon knew not to waste time, gunning the engine and roaring off again. I told Weiss I would explain on the way, sighing and shaking my head a little at his lack of patience. I did explain that Irina had her own agenda, and put a gun to Jack's head before she and my father both joined Sloane and Sark. I also told him that it seemed my father was on Sloane's side of all of this, and that this knowledge didn't really surprise me.
"We need to get out there before Sloane does," I stated. "Sydney and Nadia don't know any of this."
"They don't have a radio or something?" Weiss asked.
"We didn't have any gear with us, and the only cell phone we had was the one Sloane used to contact me. Irina said they couldn't take it, because if Sloane couldn't reach me he would know," I explained.
"Which she would say because she's a part of his endgame. Giving Sydney the cell phone would allow her to be compromised," Dixon added, glancing in the rearview mirror to look back at Weiss and I, seated in the back of the Jeep. I just nodded tiredly, and Weiss looked annoyed with this turn of events.
"Well, I'm never trusting anyone again, ever," he whispered sarcastically, turning his attention to the one map I grabbed off the table before meeting them outside. "You said this place is right out here somewhere?" He pointed to a general area of the map.
"Yeah, but I don't have direct instructions. I think Jack wanted to ignore me at the time," I stated, shaking my head in disbelief. Bet he wishes he handled that one differently right about now, I added silently.
"And Sloane doesn't have a vehicle capable of driving all that way. We should get there first," Dixon threw in.
"Unless they switched cars somewhere," Weiss added. Both Dixon and I glared at him. "Okay, I'll pretend I didn't just say that."
For several minutes, no one said anything. Weiss crawled up to the front seat of the vehicle, a scene that I might have found incredibly funny if it weren't for the gravity of the situation. He and Dixon conversed about the map for a moment, trying to find the most direct route to the very generalized area we had to work with. After a bit of bickering and more of an argument than a discussion, they fell silent again.
I glanced out the window, seeing that reached the middle of the desert now. It was morning, and while that did give us certain advantages, there would be difficulties as well. It would be easier to see Sloane, of course, but it also made it easier for him to see us. If he beat us to the temple, he would either see us coming or already be inside when we arrived.
"Hey." I looked up, seeing Weiss staring at me, concern evident in his eyes as he noted the expression on my face. "We're gonna make it, all right?" I nodded a little; even though it seemed perfectly clear to everyone in the vehicle that I didn't believe a word he said. "We'll make it."
