Chapter 34: "Her name is Juliet…"

The jet had seemed empty without Maggie or his father. It had been agreed that Maggie should stay behind, both to watch over Solomon and to work on what had been found in the Eratosthenes manuscript. It had only been partially translated, but hadn't taken long for Calvin and Juliet to work through. Compared to Nabatean, Greek was a walk in the park! Between photographs of the original and a live feed from the jet to Maggie's lab, the team had spent a busy few hours comparing the contents to the various versions of the legend now in their possession. All the while, Nikko sat, staring blankly ahead of him, rolling his coin around his fingers and saying nothing. Slowly, his eyes drifted closed.

The steps lay before him, just as he remembered them. There was Mikhail, reaching out to him: to his younger self. There was the light filled chamber. There was his younger body, reaching out to where his mother should have been. There were the snaking tendrils of light, reaching out to him, wrapping themselves around his small arm like ivy around a tree. He walked on. Before him lay the strange heliocentric system that had fascinated his mother so much, the massive symbol of the sun with its eight rays reaching out across the door.

"It's not here," said a gentle voice behind him.

Nikko turned, already knowing what he would see. Of all the things he had made a point of remembering about her, his mother's voice was top of the list. "What's not here, Mom?"

Haley smiled at her son, now a grown man. Once, she had had to crouch to speak to him at eye level, now it was he who looked down slightly to her. "You're so like your father," she smiled.

"What isn't here, Mom?" Nikko repeated. "I need to know."

"What you seek," Haley answered with a shrug. "The knowledge you seek. The power you seek. The truth. It's not here any more."

"Then where is it?" Nikko pushed, though part of him screamed the answer. "Was it destroyed when the temple collapsed?"

"No," laughed Haley. She raised a hand and placed it over Nikko's heart. It was warm. Solid. Real. "You know where it is. It's in here." She tapped his chest. "It's in you."

"Then what's behind the door?" Nikko continued, not daring to touch his mother's hand lest it crumble to dust before his eyes. "The solar system: it's on a door. Why have a door if there's nothing behind it?"

"I didn't say there was nothing," chided Haley, moving her hand to her son's face. She sighed. "You're so like him. I've missed you both so much."

When Nikko spoke, he could hear in his voice the childish tremor he thought he had laid to rest so many years ago. "Mom, Dad's sick. He got hurt. Really hurt. Mom, if he… if he dies, will he be here? Will he be with you?"

A frown wrinkled Haley's forehead. She shook her head, dropping her eyes away from her son's. Her hand fell away. She stepped back. "He won't come here," she murmured. "Not if he's dead. This is not a place for the dead."

Haley stepped back again and, before Nikko could say a word, she was gone. He searched the blinding light filling the room for the slightest sign of her, but all he could see was Mikhail reaching out to his younger self. Turning back to the door, and the glowing sun symbol, Nikko scanned the surrounding walls. The glyphs were there, just as he remembered. They were familiar, but still he could not place them. He searched further, ducking under the sinuous beam of light to reach the other side of the door. Then he saw it: the symbol he had first seen in Paris, and in his mother's journal.

Nikko woke up. "She's not dead!"

The quiet conversation on the other side of the jet stopped. Vincent, now seated opposite Nikko, studied him with narrowed eyes. Calvin and Juliet exchanged wary glances and turned to him.

"Who, Nikko?" Vincent asked, his voice soft and steady as always: as if he had all the answers and everything was just a test to see if you could keep up. "Who is not dead?"

Nikko sat up and shook his head as if to dislodge something. What? The memory? The dream? The truth? "I was dreaming," he admitted, eventually. From the corner of his eye he saw Calvin and Juliet leave their seats and edge closer. "It wasn't like a normal dream though. It felt real. Like a memory. But it couldn't be a memory, because I could see myself. It was like I was outside of myself, watching it all happen. I saw the temple door. I saw the light, the symbols, the glyphs. I saw Mom. She spoke to me."

"What did she say?" Vincent queried smoothly, as if Nikko had just mentioned meeting someone on a trip to the supermarket.

"She said it wasn't there, what we were looking for," answered Nikko, watching his mentor as closely as he was being watched by him. "Knowledge, power, truth: it's all gone. It's all… she said it's all in me now."

"Then Calvin was right," began Vincent, stopping when Nikko raised a hand.

"No," he said. "There's still something there, behind the door. She told me that much. She just didn't say what."

"Can I ask a really stupid question," mused Calvin, looking from Nikko to Vincent.

"Never stopped you before," grinned Nikko.

Cal bit back a sharp retort. The tone was right, the grin was right, but it didn't quite reach Nikko's eyes. Instead he looked back at Vincent. "Are we sure the temple where Haley vanished leads to the Sacred City?"

"Solomon excavated there the years after Haley disappeared," replied Vincent. "He had a team strip the place down to the bedrock, at least as much as they could. The roof of the chamber where the event occurred was too large to move. They never got in there."

Nikko sat up. "Are you saying my Mom could still be down there?"

"No," Vincent replied, shaking his head. "They could not get a person down there, but even then technology was advanced enough to get a fibreoptic camera through the rubble. The chamber was empty. The door was blocked, but the carvings on it and around it were, at least mostly, intact."

"Then why are we going, if we can't get in?" Juliet frowned.

"Solomon used every trick he could try to remove the rubble, and there were many, but he was unwilling to use the one thing that might have made the difference," shrugged Vincent. "He had no idea then of any possibility of the powers you possess, Nikko, but he did hypothesise that there may have been some sort of connection formed between you and the sphere, through the light that hit you. He was, however, unwilling to take you back to the place that had caused you so much trauma."

"Wait a minute," said Nikko, holding up his hands. "The biggest thing I've moved is a drinks table. You want me to shift how many tons of solid rock now?"

"You will never know unless you try," shrugged Vincent. "As for the temple leading to or being a part of the Sacred City, I don't know. Solomon always thought it was a key location in Haley's research, even that it might be an entrance to the city itself, but unable to get to the chamber he turned back to finding another clue, another way in. I am no expert and only know this second hand, from many discussions with your father, Nikko; however, whatever it may be, it was an important site for Haley. Perhaps it is the Sacred City, or where the star fell, or simply another stopping point along the way: we will know more when we get there."

"My money's on the landing site of the 'star'," muttered Calvin. "That seemed to be what the Nabatean parchment was saying."

"How goes your progress with the Eratosthenes manuscript?" Vincent enquired, turning to Cal and Juliet.

"For the most part, it's done," replied Juliet. "We're just translating the place names now. Maggie's trying to overlay his map on a modern one."

"Map? What map?" Nikko blinked, the shiver of a frown passing over his face. "We have a map?"

Juliet nodded. "That's what makes the Eratosthenes manuscript so unique: it has a map in it. It looks like the document is a part of the lost Geographika. The first ever textbook on geography. We know of some parts of it from other writings by people like Strabo and Pliny, and we have a copy of his first map of the world, but so much was lost!"

"Wait, if we already have his first map, what's different with this one?" Nikko asked, rising and heading for the desk.

"Eratosthenes first map showed all of the known world, with basic lines of longitude and latitude," began Calvin.

"This map shows all of that, but in place on a map of the whole planet," continued Juliet. "Eratosthenes worked out the diameter of the Earth, remember. He knew that, and he knew how far it was from, say, Alexandria to Cyrene. He used the latter to calculate the former. That also meant, however, that he could work out the scale. The first map is very rough around the areas he had never visited or was not sufficiently familiar with personally. This one is more accurate. It also includes something else. It contains places, plotted on the map, that Eratosthenes could not possibly have known about. Places that are plotted in areas as yet unexplored by the known peoples of that world!"

Nikko looked from Juliet to Cal to the printed copy of the map. Sure enough, out in the blank, uncharted areas were labels. Labels written in something that definitely wasn't Greek. He said as much to Juliet.

"It's hieratic," she replied. "Not much of a problem on its own but this is also in some type of code."

"Remind me again how exactly you found this thing?"

9 days after the fall

Calvin rubbed at wrists red raw with the imprint of ropes. His feet were still tied and his body bound to the chair he now found himself in, but they needed his hands free if they wanted him to get anywhere with the task before him. Instead, two guards loomed over him, which was absolutely not distracting at all! He racked his brain, flicking through files and folders as he went, determined to look busy even if he was getting nowhere fast. The laptop itself had been easy enough to hack: he and Ibrahim had seen breaking into each other's work stations as entry level practical jokes. Even the desktop background was the one he had last loaded up before Ibrahim left the group. It was the same shot of them both at Guatemala, but with a speech bubble added from Ibrahim's mouth, declaring Cal "the greatest scientist who ever lived" and other such compliments. That had made Cal smile, albeit briefly. The joke, of course, was not in the words, but in the speaker and he knew Ibrahim knew that. Had known that.

He had started his search with the obvious, systematically working his way through the neatly arranged folders and their files. Then he'd moved on to that which was only obvious to him: the places he had known Ibrahim to hide things, on either of their computers. He had flicked through photos, recalling the time Ibrahim had locked the keys to Calvin's apartment in the laboratory safe, changed the code and left clues to it scattered among photographs of their latest project. Nothing. He could see nothing. No clues whatsoever to help him locate the manuscript, and his captors were starting to get impatient. It didn't help that he didn't even know what the manuscript looked like.

A trawl through the depths of the computer's filing system was interrupted by the sound of doors opening and carefully closing again. He didn't bother looking round. Only Righetti was that exact in the closing of a door. The neat, expensively clad footsteps, tip-tapping like the hooves of a satyr, stepped steadily towards him. The equally expensive suit stepped into view. Calvin looked up.

"What progress, Doctor Banks?" Righetti enquired, as evenly as if he had been speaking to a lab assistant working through a series of analytical tests.

"Well, I think I've identified a few hundred places where it isn't," quipped Cal, leaning back in his chair.

"Really," murmured Righetti, dryly. "If I didn't know any better, Doctor Banks, I might think you were trying to stall. All the hours you have been searching that computer and still not even the slightest idea where your so-called friend might have hidden the manuscript. Either you are not as intelligent as my information suggests, were not as close to your friend as my information suggests, or have some misguided belief that, if you drag this out long enough, your other friend will save you. As I know my information to be accurate, I can only assume the latter. That, Doctor Banks, I feel I must now disprove. Your colleague did well in tracking you, I will admit. Better than I expected her to. However, she did make the mistake of trying to sneak into this building on her own, without any form of back-up."

Righetti turned and nodded to someone in the direction of the door. Calvin heard the door open and heavy footsteps enter. A wave of nausea crept over him as the limp figure was placed in the chair opposite him. She was here. She was alive: she had to be. That was the one thing he was sure of even before the guards started tying her hands and feet in place.

"Unconscious, merely, Doctor Banks, but I can assure you I personally will make her wish she had stayed that way when she awakes if you do not find me that manuscript. We have cleared your friend's home and workplace of all that may contain the item or clues to its location. We have searched both places thoroughly. Everything has been moved here. It surrounds you as you see. All you need do is instruct myself or my men on where and how to look when you decide to find something."

"There is nothing here," Calvin enunciated carefully, glaring at Righetti. "Hurting her will achieve nothing! I can't find what isn't here!"

"Wrong on two counts, Doctor Banks," sighed Righetti. "Firstly: either the manuscript or a clue to its whereabouts are most definitely here. They can be no place else: everything is here. Secondly, whether you are ultimately able to aid us in our search or not, I personally will find much entertainment in the interesting and detailed ways in which we can hurt your beautiful colleague here."

"Her name is Juliet," growled Calvin, "and if you hurt her, I swear I will end you."

Righetti laughed. "Ah, the same old story! Doctor Banks: you are in no position to be making threats! One word from me and my men will make sure you can't even end a sentence! Besides: her name means nothing to me! Why would it? She is a toy: a pawn in a game that you are rapidly losing! I have no interest in her name! My only interest is in how many of her screams it takes for you to do what I want. Not too few, I hope."