Chapter 24: "I'm gonna vote no on that!"

Dinner over, Cal and Juliet returned to their work on the parchment. Juliet had won her argument to stay the night by pointing out the greater urgency of the translation in view of Nikko's revelations. The others retired to the lounge, where at least the seating would be comfortable even if the conversation wasn't. Solomon was the last to arrive, a pair of beers in each hand. He handed them out, one by one, pausing when it came to his son.

"Go easy," he warned Nikko. "I'm not making a second trip and this is going to be difficult for both of us, Maggie too."

Nikko nodded and set the beer to one side. "This is about Mom, isn't it," he said, far more a statement than a question.

Solomon took a sip of his beer and put it down. "How much do you remember about what happened?"

"Not a lot," frowned Nikko. "Why?"

"When Haley vanished there were only two witnesses: you and Mikhail. Now, the stuff leading up to that you could remember, both of you, but after Mikhail took you out of the chamber, you always said you couldn't remember anything: just light. You turned back and all you saw was light, then nothing. Mikhail picked you up and carried you back to camp. The next thing you remember was waking up there with him using the satellite phone to call for help."

"Yeah, pretty much," Nikko nodded.

"Anything to add? Anything you've remembered since?" Solomon pressed.

Something tugged at Nikko's memory. Something that hadn't meant anything special at the time. "There was something," he said, staring at the floor in thought. "A symbol or a carving or something. Something I saw there and have seen since, but I didn't connect the two at the time. Why? Do you have something to add, Dad?"

Solomon cast his eyes over his son, so changed now from the child he had been. It was time. If anyone could handle this, Nikko could. That was a trait he inherited from Haley. "Yeah," he mused. "Yes. Yes, there is something we didn't tell you. Something Mikhail saw, but either you didn't, or you didn't remember it. I don't know which. I don't know if telling you this is going to have some weird effect on these new abilities. Back in the early days, when you woke up screaming every other night, I thought maybe you did remember, but your memory had walled it off. I thought, if I told you then, it might make things worse."

"What?" Nikko begged, residual Zond impatience pushing him onward no matter the cost. "Dad, you gotta tell me now. You can't just leave it at that."

"I will, I will," placated Solomon, matching gesture to words. "I just wanted to know if there was anything in those nightmares that you remembered. You always just said there was light. Did you… Do you remember if the light did anything in those dreams?"

"You think they were repressed memories?" Nikko blinked. "No, I don't. There was just Mom, reaching out to this glowing sun symbol…"

Nikko's sudden silence and dropped eyes made the rest of the room sit a little straighter in their seats.

"What?" Solomon breathed, returning his son's question to him with the look of a true scientists on the verge of a breakthrough. Hope sang through that one word.

"The sun symbol," Nikko muttered, casting about for paper and pen. His eye settled on a half completed crossword. He grabbed it and scribbled in the margin. "The symbol on the temple wall, it was a depiction of the solar system. Mom was amazed because it was a heliocentric system that dated back way before Copernicus. The sun, in the middle, looked like this: a circular hemisphere protruding from the wall with eight raised relief rays reaching out from it, each gradually tapering to a point." He tapped the diagram as he spoke. "As Mom raised her hand to the hemisphere, it started glowing and she sent me away. I remember feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck as I was leaving, and the light reflecting off the walls of the passage, and I just knew something was wrong, so I turned and ran back. I just got to see this light fill the temple, then nothing until I was back at camp. But I saw that symbol again, only once." This time Nikko drew a double layered circle around the sun symbol. He turned the diagram back to his audience. "When I saw that hallucination of the Ring."

The look that passed from Solomon to Vincent to Maggie and back was unmistakeable. Solomon sat back and took another swig of beer. Maggie watched him, a silent conversation passing between them. Vincent watched Nikko and considered the diagram. He was the first of the three to break the silence.

"Do you believe the temple your mother found will lead us to this piece of the Ring?" Vincent enquired, sanguine as ever.

Nikko, trying to translate the apparent telepathy of Solomon and Maggie, did a double take at this. His attention settled on his mentor. "What? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe… Maybe it's something else."

"Such as?" Vincent pressed.

"The night before we went to the temple," Nikko began, noting, out of the corner of his eye, the return of his father's attention, "just before we called Dad, Mom was telling me this story…"

"The star that fell, or that Sagittarius shot down or however that legend went," Solomon supplied, sitting up again. "She used to tell it to you all the time when you were little. It was one of your favourite bedtime stories. All the old legends were, really, but that one you both loved."

"And then, when we got the translation of the Elm Island tablet back," Nikko continued, "we found out that the Ring was something else that fell, or was thrown in this case, to Earth."

Maggie was swiftest on the uptake. "You think they're the same thing?"

"Well, it would make sense, wouldn't it?" Nikko replied, leaning forward in his chair. "Anything that size falling to Earth – whether shot down, thrown down, or otherwise – would light up in the atmosphere like a falling star. Everything else is just people scrambling to explain the unexplainable. That temple was on the site: the site where the star fell. Mom was sure of it. What if that's why it was there? It was built on the site where the Ring landed, not necessarily where a part of the Ring is hidden!" Nikko paused. "I mean it might be both, but…"

"But either way," continued Solomon, "it now means we've got three continents to search for clues instead of two."

"Now what were you going to tell me?" Nikko asked, sitting back again. He reached a hand out to the bottle of beer by his side and took a shaky sip. "That's everything I can add, so now it's your turn Dad: what did Mikhail say that you didn't want me to know?"

"When you saw the light fill the room, did it fill it evenly?" Solomon enquired, gently, rolling the beer bottle back and forth between his hands.

"I… I guess so," shrugged Nikko. "It was just… There was just light, everywhere. Why? What did Mikhail see?"

Solomon nodded. "He was a little further back and higher up than you, Nikko" he began. "Before the room filled with light, he saw a pulse."

"A pulse?" Nikko frowned.

"A pulse," repeated Solomon, "of golden light. He said it formed a ring, or a circle," Solomon paused, glancing down then up at his son again. "And he said it hit you full force. It didn't just hit you either: it went into you. The steps were slightly curved and he was a little off to one side. He saw this circle of light, golden light, shoot out from the door and collide with you. It didn't go beyond you, just to you, and into you, or so we've thought."

"So what? You think this light is why I can play baseball without a bat now?" Nikko queried, watching his father's face more carefully than he had done in years. "If that's so, why did it only start when we, I, put the pieces of the ring together?"

Solomon shook his head. "I don't know, but I'm sure there's a link there somehow."

"Perhaps the light itself is the link," offered Vincent. The others seemed to consider this in silent confusion. Vincent decided to explain. "It has struck me, recently, how our quest for the Ring only seems to advance in any great way when Nikko is a part of the team. Perhaps the light formed a link between him and the Ring somehow: a link that guides him to the fragments or their clues."

"Okay," nodded Solomon, still folding his thought processes around the influx of new information. "I can see that."

"Would explain a lot," added Maggie, watching Solomon.

Solomon's eyes did not come up from the spot on the carpet they seemed to be examining.

"Dad, if you're about to suggest I sit on a computer chair with my arm out and you guys spin me round and see which way I end up facing, I'm gonna vote no on that!" Nikko quipped.

Solomon blinked out of his reverie and looked up with a laugh. "Well, now that you mention it, that's not a half bad idea!" Nikko gave him a look. Solomon laughed again. "Okay, I'm kidding about the chair, but I do think we ought to go with your gut from hereon out."

"So glad to know my skills are appreciated," quipped the glorified compass dryly.

"So, what's your next move?" Vincent asked father and son. "Stay on the parchment and the box or start looking into Haley's temple?"

Zond senior rubbed his chin and looked up to the floors above. "Cal and Juliet are on the parchment," he said. "Let's split the rest. Maggie, Nikko: keep working on the box. Nikko, why don't you try out your skills on it, see if it responds to that. Vincent and I will start going back through the relevant parts of Haley's journals."

The three nodded, though Maggie frowned a little at Solomon's pensive expression. "Okay," she said, rising. "I'll go tell Cal and Juliet we're all staying here tonight and to put a hold on Plan Tony until we get things sorted out. We're a little busy to be adding counter espionage to our to do list right now."

"Yeah, I guess," murmured Solomon. He looked at Nikko, who nodded and followed Maggie out.

"Are we really going over Haley's notes?" Vincent enquired once the coast was clear.

"Of course," nodded Solomon, getting to his feet.

Vincent stood and looked his friend in the eye. "Just Haley's notes?"

"Well, now, I never said that," admitted Solomon with a smirk.

"You enjoy keeping secrets too much," Vincent scolded with a smile. "It is unhealthy."

"Everyone has their secrets," shrugged Solomon. "It's normal."

"Normal it may be," admitted Vincent, "but these are the kind of secrets that could seriously damage your wellbeing."

"I don't see how," breezed Solomon, leading the way to the elevator.

Vincent came up to stand beside him at the metal doors. "Not telling your team in time might get you killed, for one thing."

XXXX

De Molay took a book from the quietly ostentatious bookcase in his library. He ran delicate fingers over the title embossed on the front cover. Once it had been inlaid with gold, now it only glittered if the light hit it at just the right angle, and only at the edges of the letters. Still, it's title was as well known to him as the tales within it. he had read them to his children, centuries ago, as they lay in their beds before sleep welcomed them. They had read them to their children, and to their children's children, until the book had been returned to him and only the memory of the tales had been passed on through the generations. Eventually, one enterprising descendant, not knowing any better, had written his inherited memory of the legends into a new book, new at the time, anyway. That book had spread, taking the muddled renderings of tales handed down the generations and selling them to an increasingly literate populace hungry for an escape from the humdrum of their ordinary lives. It was, he supposed, a magic accessible to all: the art of the story. Whether written or spoken, such things had the unique ability to transport the mind, if not the body, to a world beyond our own. Would those readers now cheer or tremble were they to discover how much truth lay in the origin of those very tales?