Part Eighteen

Jack first grunted and then moaned as he woke up again, his head feeling as if had swelled to at least twice its normal size. He could already sense fresh bruises forming from his shoulders all the way down to the backs of his knees. Jesus, Jack thought as dizzy bits of his own consciousness began to come back to him, he was lucky that he hadn't broken his back. He groaned again.

"Shh, shh," a feminine voice said above him, as hands that he knew traced patterns over his chest and face. "Jack, Jack, please, you have to be quiet and you have to get up."

Jack opened his eyes and blinked several times before he was able to bring Kate's face back into focus. He thought for certain that he had to be imagining the light that shone from behind Kate's face, making a corona out of her hair though it left her face in shadow.

Kate was no angel. There were lights, actual fluorescent lights, set into what looked like a mixture of thatch and raw earth about ten or twelve feet above the place where Kate was crouched beside him. "Oh, my God," Jack croaked. He tried to sit up, winced as his head and back scolded him for it, and decided that it would be a good idea to stay still for a few moments longer.

Kate snuck a quick glance over her shoulder at the artificial light, which was refusing to dissolve away like a good hallucination should. When she turned back to Jack, her expression was dazzled. "Yeah," she said, a little breathlessly. "I didn't believe it at first, either, but Locke and I jumped down after you when we saw you fall. No head trauma involved."

Staring directly in the light like that was beginning to make his eyes burn. Jack blinked and looked away. He had landed flat on his back on a floor that had once been made of rough-hewn wood but was now worn smooth by many feet traveling across it over the course of many years. The walls were packed dirt that looked as if they had been carved straight from the earth and designed strictly for the purposes of utility rather than aesthetics. The ragged ends of thatch that Jack could see handing down through the hole that he had fallen through looked dark and rotted, contributing to an overall air of a structure that might have once had its own rough majesty, but was now dying slowly.

Jack thought of Walt and the ease with which Ethan had infiltrated their camp. Dying slowly, maybe, but surely not going quietly.

"How long was I out?" Jack asked. Turning his head too quickly still made the world double and triple. Cautious exploration revealed a knot that was already the size of a robin's egg and growing quickly.

"Only a few minutes," Kate answered. She went behind him, put her hands beneath his arms, and began struggling to pull him to his feet. "Jack, we need to go-"

"Yes," Locke said, speaking for the first time. His face was pale and closer to worry than Jack had ever seen before. "It would be a good idea if we weren't still here when the Others realize that their castle is no longer secure." So he and Jack had looked around and immediately drawn the same conclusions about the place.

Jack pushed himself back up to his feet and then heard it: a faraway sounding of many feet and voices working in unison, coming closer. The rough hallway stretched out a seemingly interminable distance in either directions and had many other corridors branching off of it. The labyrinth picked up sounds and bounced them back and forth like playthings, so that Jack could not tell which direction they were coming from. Other than finding a way to go straight back up, moving anywhere at all seemed to be their best option at the moment.

Jack waved Kate off when she tried to put her shoulder beneath his and support some of his weight for him. "I'm all right, I'm fine." He ignored Kate's dubious expression as he noticed that she was walking with a slight limp. "Are you okay?"

Kate's expression went from dubious to flat-out incredulous. "You're asking me that?" When Jack only continued to stare at her, she shook her head and managed a faint smile. "I'm fine. Ankle just went wobbly for a minute when I jumped down after you." She patted at his arm and then turned to face Locke, her expression growing fearful as the sounds of approach grew louder. The walls were still playing havoc with sound, echoing and reechoing and, Jack hoped, making it sound like a much larger force was coming towards them than it actually was. "What should we do, John?" Locke, for all the urgency with which he had told them that they needed to leave moments before, was staring about the hallway with a look of awe and something else that Jack could not quite define.

No, he realized a moment later. Jack knew exactly what it was. A few more inches in the right direction, and he would have called it a look of recognition. "John?" Jack asked slowly. His instincts were screaming a message at him that he could not yet decipher wasn't sure what he would do about once he did. "See something you like there?"

Locke blinked, the expression of transcendence leaving his face between one second and the next. He looked almost like a man coming out of a religious experience. "Do you realize who long it must have taken to carve all of this out?" He gestured to the curving network of hallways all around them. "To thatch a roof, to make sure that it was structurally sound, to-" Locke paused and looked up at the fluorescent lights, which had a few moths beating listlessly against their plastic covers. Another small change that Jack could not decipher moved across his face. It did not soothe him any more than did the ones which had come before it. "To find a power source?"

"Does any of that really matter right now?" Jack asked. He glanced up at the hole through which he had fallen again, but they had no tools with which they could take the direct route and simply scramble up to safety. Meanwhile, his people were still trapped up there with the monster. Sawyer was still up there with the monster.

Locke shook his head slowly, reluctantly. Jack thought that Locke was doing it more to appease him than anything else, for his eyes as they moved over the walls were still bright and eager to learn. "Probably not," he said, "but tropical islands are frequently centered over fault lines. They're built up on volcanoes." Locke reached out and touched one of the walls briefly, rubbing the dirt against his fingers. "Prone to earthquakes. I wonder what they knew, to make them think that it was safe to build beneath the ground like this?" A note of anger skimmed through Locke's voice for a second like a rock across the surface of a pond, gone again before Jack could even be sure that it had been real.

"Can we save the geology lesson for later?" When Kate was scared, really scared, there was a rough and almost dangerous quality that took over her voice, and it did not go away within a few seconds like Locke's anger had. Jack reached for her hand and squeezed it briefly. Kate's fingers spasmed around his for a moment before she pulled away.

Locke blinked, shivered again as if he had been on the verge of disappearing into some private world. Jack could not entirely take him to task for it, for there was a quality to the air itself here that made it seem thick and not quite real. Jack shivered himself and decided that all three of them must surely be on the verge of nervous breakdowns.

"Kate's right," Locke said. "Let's go." He began jogging down the hallway with the ease and grace of a man at least two decades younger and without glancing back once, though he was clearly slowing down to make allowances for both Kate's and Jack's injuries. Protestations that she was fine or not, Jack saw Kate continually sucking her lower lip between her teeth and biting down hard on it as she was forced to run on her bad ankle, and her face would go momentarily bloodless each time. Jack could not really pause to argue with her about it, for the world was still going lopsided on him at odd moments, causing him to wobble each time and Kate to sneak him feminine versions of the exact same look that he suspected he was giving her from beneath his lashes.

The sounds of people were fading behind, clustering together as they likely found the place were Jack had made his graceful entry into the Others' world, when Locke said abruptly, "Here." He stopped and pointed to a door of the same rough wood that made up the floor, blocking another hole that had been cut straight out of the earth. The hinges were sinew wrapped around a bamboo pole of the same sort that they used as framework for their shelters back on the beach, causing the entire door to sag alarmingly. There was no handle, only a patch worn smooth in roughly the same size and shape as a hand to mark where people had been opening it. Jack wondered how many years this place had to have been in use in order to acquire these signs of wear. At least sixteen, he decided, thinking of Danielle Rousseau and her broken mind. If Locke was right, then probably a lot longer than that.

There was a green glow creeping along the edges of the door, startling against the black. Jack very much doubted that they were looking at the reflection from an exit light. He opened his mouth to say so, but Locke had already opened the door and slid inside before the first syllable could even exit Jack's mouth. Kate barely hesitated for a second before she followed. Jack muttered an oath beneath his breath, looked quickly over his shoulder, and made sure that the door shut behind him as he entered the room.

"Oh, my God," Jack found himself saying for the second time in under thirty minutes as his eyes tried to adjust to the relative shadow again after becoming so accustomed to the bright artificial lights outside. There was a single fluorescent long-bulb set into the ceiling here, but it was so close to burning out and flickering so rapidly that it almost seemed to be a strobe, more useful for atmosphere than for illumination. What light it did cast down was primarily centered on a crude wooden table upon which was scattered a variety of tools and small mechanical things that Jack did not recognize. A part of Jack's brain wanted to drift closer to the table and examine the things on it at his leisure, but a large part, a dominant part, was still in awe and struggling to catch up.

Upon first entering the room Jack's impression had been one of a small workshop, scarcely large enough for the table of curiosities and perhaps three or four people to stand around it. As his eyes adjusted further, he rapidly realized how wrong he had been. The blow that he had seen along the edges of the door was in fact the cumulative effect of a series of hundreds in not thousands of tiny green lights set into rows on the oldest and largest computer than Jack had ever seen. What he had at first assumed to be the room's back wall had really only been the computer's face, and what he had thought was a tiny workroom snugged out of the way where it wouldn't bother anyone was in fact a cavern.

He started closer to the computer so that he could examine it more closely, stopped only when he heard Kate calling his name. She was lingering by the table instead, picking up tools that Jack could not begin to recognize one by one and examining them for a few seconds each before she set them back down and moved on. Hands trembling so badly that it was visible to Jack even from a distance of several feet, Kate reached out and picked up of the small pieces of metal that lay scattered among the tools. "I think you need to see this."

Though Locke was already kneeling eagerly to examine the behemoth computer at a closer level and Jack cast a longing look over his shoulder towards doing the same, he walked over to see what Kate was holding. "What is it?"

Though her hands were still trembling so badly that it was a wonder she didn't drop the object and lose it among the dust and dirt of a floor that had not seen the loving touch of a broom for a very long time and there was not a spare drop of blood left in her face, Kate's voice was hard and cold. "Is this one of the things that Sawyer described to you?"

Jack had not been aware that anyone had realized that Sawyer had told him about the monster before he had told the group at large. He looked at Kate hard, but her face was giving away nothing and Locke for the moment at least did not seem to be paying any attention. Jack came even closer, until he was directly beneath the light. The mechanical thing that Kate was holding in her hands was smooth and cylindrical, with rows of serrated blades on each end that could function as propellers or teeth depending on what the situation demanded. It was larger than her thumb, but Jack could see why Sawyer had judged his own to be a fairly accurate measurement. "Looks like."

"Oh. So this is what killed the pilot." Kate set the tiny monster down on the table and regarded it solemnly for a long moment before she picked up one of the tools and flipped it around in her hand so that she could, just as solemnly, bring the handle of it down on the machine with all of the strength that she had. Bits of metal flew in all directions and they both flinched back for a moment, shielding their eyes. Jack watched impassively as Kate collected all of the other little robots into a pile and repeated the process on them one by one, until the table was littered with scrap. A few of them buzzed to life and tried to skitter away in an eerie pantomime of intelligence. Kate calmly gathered them back up again, wincing and swearing when one or two tried to bite her, until there was nothing left moving on the table.

"Good," Jack said when it was done, before he went back to check on what Locke was doing.

Locke was kneeling by a box set down in front of the computer on the floor, flicking through hundreds of what Jack at first thought were filing cards and a few seconds later realized were in fact rectangles of heavy paper, almost cardboard, with dozens upon dozens of tiny notches cut into each one like a code.

"The first computer was built in 1947," Locke said without looking up when he heard Jack approaching behind him. "It filled up a whole room, and yet it was not even as powerful as a child's video game." Locke paused long enough to look up at the fluorescent light that still glowed above the table. The much stronger lights in the hallway crept in around the edges of the door. "Think this one's a little more powerful than that, but it's probably just as old."

"Just a little," Jack echoed, staring up at the lights himself. He turned back to Locke and nudged at the box of cards that Locke was paging through, struggling to remember all of the facts about old computers that he could from movies and television. "Isn't someone supposed to be feeding these things into there?"

"Supposed to be." Locke threw the cards that he had been looking at back into the box; a cloud of dust rose up. The angry expression did not dissolve away from his face within a few seconds this time.

Kate had finished up her destruction at the table and, slipping one or two of the heavier tools into her pack, crept back over to the door. She tilted her head to one side for a moment and listened hard for a moment before signaling to them that it was all clear. Jack shook his head at her to wait for a moment longer, and a frustrated look crossed her face.

Claire had several days of her life missing. Scott was dead. Walt was missing, Sayid, Shannon, and several of their other people were missing, and Sawyer had been shot twice. So far as Jack could see, he didn't have one good reason to be lenient or otherwise play nice with them. He backed up a step and took a long, long look at the computer, with its rows of lights like eyes. In the gloom and the shadow, it was very easy to believe in a thinking machine.

"Did you see Sawyer, Charlie, or Michael before you came in after me?" Jack turned long enough to ask Kate.

She shook her head, her eyes dark and worried. "We barely saw you fall. You were alone."

The Others had unleashed a monster that could at this very moment be killing people, one person in particular, that Jack would move the earth itself in order to protect. He took a step back.

"Is this their power source?" Jack asked Locke.

Locke stood and brushed the dust from his hands. His eyes were every bit as dark as Kate's and even more unreadable. "Doubt it," he said. "Even if they were somehow able to rig up a system of batteries, the sheer amount needed to keep all of these lights on all the time…" Locke exhaled slowly. His shoulders had been growing steadily more tense over the past several moments, Jack realized, until he hardly looked like the same man any longer. "I've seen a computer like this before, Jack. I was a boy. It's been here for decades."

"Fine." Jack circled back towards the table and picked up a wrench that Kate had left behind. It was much too large to have possibly been on any use on the maintenance and repair of the Others' cloud of monsters, but Jack had a slightly different use in mind for it. He hefted it in his hand to get a feel for it as he returned to the computer, reared back, and swung.

The lights broke first, with a satisfying sound of shattering glass. Jack paused only long enough to back away and shield his eyes from flying shards before he came back and swung again. The metal face on the computer dented inward with a tremendous banging sound as wisps of smoke began to curl out form beneath the dented metal.

"Jack!" Kate hissed when she heard the sound begin to echo and reecho about the room, throwing a wide-eyed look towards the door. Locke's eyes, though, were gleaming with something that was either anger or triumph. Possibly it was even pride. He went to the table behind Jack without a word, selected a tool, and came back to make his own contribution to the Others and their way of life. The sound was enormous, but Jack did not care, because none of the lights on that damned thing were still shining when he was done.

Kate stayed by the door, not even maintaining the pretense that she was listening for the Others' approach any longer. Had she had the option of committing them both to an asylum right then, Jack thought that she might have taken it.

Breathing heavily, Jack tossed the wrench back down on the table and paused to survey the damage that he had done. Even if it could be repaired, it would be days or weeks of work before those lights began blinking again. Jack flashed a tight, gleaming smile at Locke, who was looking at him with something very much like approval.

"That felt good," Jack said, flexing his fingers to work out the cramps that had developed there during his rampage.

The light above the table flickered once, twice, and then went out abruptly, plunging the room into a total darkness. Even the glow around the doorway was cut off, as all of the florescent lights in the hallway followed suit only a second later. Jack did not need to see Locke's face to know that he was smiling as he said, "Oh, yes, that was a very good thing."

Kate's disembodied voice was the only one that didn't sound pleased as she said, "If that computer kept everything organized, then the Others will know that we did something here. We're not safe."

They had not been safe since the second that they had tumbled down this rabbit hole and for a long time before that, Jack thought but did not say. Kate was right. Something about the air here even felt different, thicker and more pregnant, as if there was some kind of current running through the air and only waiting for a spark to set it off. It made Jack feel as if there was a faint coating of slime over his skin, and he didn't like it. He liked it even less for the fact that he could not come up with any rational explanation for it or for the set of nerves that it was causing.

"So let's find out if Walt's here and then get the hell out," Jack said rather than dwelling on it. He moved past Kate's form in the dark and reached for the door, already fumbling about in his pack for a flashlight.

In the end, he didn't need it. Though every single one of the lights in the corridor had been put out by the death of the computer, it was still lit as brightly as the day. Jack took an instinctive step back, throwing his arms up over his eyes to protect them, lowering them a second later when he realized that there was a girl.

It took Jack a moment to discover that she was not an Other, for she made no hostile move towards any of them, and that she was carrying no torch or flashlight that could explain the brilliant illumination that had blinded Jack upon first catching sight of her. A beat after that, and he realized that he could see every detail of the dirt wall behind the girl straight through her body.

There were no chairs in the room, which was a shame. Jack suddenly needed to sit down very badly.

The girl-the woman-Jack could not really tell, for she had an odd ageless quality that made even the most tentative guesses seem suspect. The long, dark hair that fell past her shoulders was the only thing that made Jack realize that she was not in fact an albino, for her skin was the color of new porcelain and her eyes were an eerie, bleached-sky blue.

And the fact that he could see through her. Jack's mind kept circling back, trying to process that into a rational worldview, and retreating into a shocked silence when it could not.

"Yes," the girl said, looking past them and into the room, where the broken computer still smoked. If there had been any force in the world strong enough to make Jack regret that action, it would have been the note of pure and savage triumph that colored her voice.

The girl turned slowly to regard them all; they could see one another's faces clearly by her reflected light. Locke in particular she paid special attention to, drawing her lips back and sneering, "You can't stop me and she can't stop me. I'm going to get mine back."

"It's not possible," Locke told her in response. "Even for you. And besides the fact that you can't, more to the point, you shouldn't."

Two very different emotions ran across the girl's face, as if a toddler and an adult woman were battling for control of the same territory. Jack thought that she might be on the verge of bursting into tears, if in fact that it turned out that… 'Oh, God, just say it.' That ghosts were capable of crying.

"I didn't deserve it!" she shrieked at Locke, her voice cracking and her hands clenching themselves into fists. Yes, ghosts could cry, if one ignored the fact that the tears dropped away into nothing as soon as they rolled off the edge of her chin. "I didn't deserve what they did to me, but she does. She's terrible, and you know that she's terrible, and if she gets to choose a knight for her side then so do I!"

Locke's face cleared when she said 'knight', and he made a soft 'Ah' sound as if he was finally receiving confirmation of something that he had suspected for a long time. The girl had grown more substantial in the meanwhile, until Jack could now only see hazy details of the wall behind her. He could not shake the feeling that this was a very bad thing. "Her end is nature," Locke went on, very, very gently. "Yours is abomination." As gentle as his voice was, he could have been telling a child that their grandmother had just died.

The girl bared her teeth at them all, so broadly and in such a powerful fit of emotion that she hardly seemed human. "Watch," she said with a terrible satisfaction, and was gone. She didn't walk off down the hallway, she did not fade away, she was gone, plunging the corridor into a darkness that seemed even thicker than the one that had reigned before her arrival.

Sitting down seemed like a better idea by the second. Jack staggered back until he felt the earthen wall supporting him at his spine and began fumbling through his pack for the flashlight again. He could hear Kate panting harshly from a few feet away. Only Locke seemed unruffled by what had just happened.

Yeah, Jack meant to ask him a few questions about that.

He found the flashlight in his pack at long last and flicked it on, spinning the light immediately and shining it into Locke's face. Locke squinted and turned away, putting his hand up to prevent himself from being blinded. "You think that's a good idea, Jack?" he asked mildly.

Jack could think of several reasons why holding the only point of light in a place filled with their enemies might not be a brilliant plan, but right at the moment he did not care. Lowering the light by an inch or two, he demanded, "How did that-" His throat closed up around the words and refused to allow them out. "How does she know you?"

Locke gave him an infuriating, steady stare. "I've been telling you for weeks that we're not in a normal place, Jack. About time you started listening to me."

Jack curled his hand into a fist and, before he even realized what he was doing, had punched Locke squarely in the mouth. Kate called his name sharply and jumped forward to grab at his arm, pulling him back before he could punch Locke again. Jack panted harshly, realizing how very badly he wanted to, so badly that his hand had already curled itself back into a first and it was a struggle to uncurl it again. If not Locke then he wanted to at least hit something, anything, so that he could pound his fists against something and demand that the world be forced to make sense again.

"Ghosts?" Jack said finally, almost choking on the word. "Your idea of a strange island where there are ghosts? That's not-"

"Rational?" Locke finished for him. "That doesn't make sense?" He sounded angry again; no, furious. He stabbed his finger at the place where the girl had been only seconds before. "You saw it for yourself, Jack." He turned his head and spat quickly to one side. Blood glittered for a moment before being swallowed by the dirt. Though Jack could not be sure, he thought he felt the ground beneath him tremble. "You just walked out of a workshop where technology from first years in the past is sitting side by side with technology that shouldn't exist for another fifty, and you want to talk about things that don't make sense? How many times have unexplained events happened to us since we've crashed, Jack, things that we don't talk about because talking about them is too hard?"

It would be so much easier to punch Locke again if he was not making a twisted kind of sense there. Jack backed off a step, still breathing hard. He would have loved to find a chair to sink into, because before too much more time went by it was not going to be a matter of choice. "And you've been talking to that thing since the beginning."

"Not her." There were some things that Jack was just going to gloss over, purely for the sake of his own sanity. He could have himself a nice little breakdown later. Locke's eyes glittered for a moment before he said, "And while you're so interested in yelling at me right now, haven't you wondered about Sawyer's dreams lately?"

'I'll tell you as soon as I've figured it out myself.' Jack felt all of the blood drain from his face and head for parts unknown, and he would have lunged forward again and physically put himself between them. "So I guess it really comes down to how much faith you have in Sawyer, doesn't it?"

Sawyer who was still keeping secrets from him, Sawyer who might be in league with something the likes of which Jack did not even want to think about, Sawyer who had painfully few bright spots in a history of looking out solely for himself. Jack exhaled a long stream of air through his nose and, rather than answering Locke directly, said, "You said that the computer was not the source."

"I did." There was a loud popping sound, as if they were all in an airplane-again-and all of their eardrums had blown at once. Jack blinked and swore that he saw a ripple travel through the air, blowing all of their hair back. He decided to push it to the back of his mind, to the place where there was already a long list of things waiting for when his sanity was better equipped to deal with them. "But I don't think that's going to be an issue."

A finger of foreboding ran down Jack's spine. 'How much faith do you have in Sawyer?' It became an echo. 'How much faith do you have?' Jack grit his teeth until his jaw ached.

A breeze traveled down the hallway to them, bringing with it the smell of the sea.

End Part Eighteen