"Alright, we should get moving again, I think," Liz decided, as I finished writing. "I hope we don't have that much further to go."
"I hope not," I said, though I really wasn't sure. I got up and handed the pen and the journal back to her. "What do you think?"
Liz automatically leaned in close as we started walking, pressing her side against me and letting her left arm circle me, the hand resting somewhere between my hip and bum, near the back pocket of my jeans. I had to struggle against the usual 'Liz effect' of her touch and nearness just to keep walking, but something daring inside of me wanted to make a slightly comparable gesture, so I let my own arm drape across her shoulders, touching the back of her neck through my jacket. She didn't close the journal's pages or put it in her purse, but went to the start of what I'd written and began to read aloud, quietly but not so quietly that I couldn't hear my own words in her voice, as near as we were to each other like this.
"My name is Max Evans, and I'm trying to find the heart of my courage, to fight back my fears," she repeated. "I've already done some things, since meeting you, that I'd call brave. I didn't hesitate when somebody pulled a gun in the Crashdown, I just did what I knew needed to be done, and didn't think about the danger. I walked into that geodesic dome house in Marathon, and down into the secret room underneath, even though I was scared of both, and I found enough courage to kiss you the night after the heat wave broke.
"But there are still things that I'm scared of. I'm afraid of FBI alien hunters like Topolsky - I didn't stand up to her, I let you and Alex run her out of town for all of our sakes - and of finding out that people like me are killers, like the stories that Valenti told. And I'm very scared of - of opening up my heart and letting you in, not because I don't think that you care about me and would try to spare my feelings if you could, but because taking a chance like that makes you the most vulnerable that any person can ever be, and good intentions are no guarantees of happily ever after. There are no guarantees about that.
"And there are no rational arguments about a decision like this. Courage or caution? Do you see the glass half empty or half full, the risks or the rewards? Jump off the diving board or climb down the stairs backwards? It's a choice you have to make in your heart, not your head, and I'm not there yet."
I went over the double page with that, just a little bit, but Liz didn't seem to mind. "That - that helps, Max," Liz said after a moment. "It's very honest, and I guess I should thank you for sharing it with me." She sighed. "But it means that trying to persuade you is pointless, doesn't it? When it's right, you'll know."
"Trying to persuade me with logical arguments won't work," I said. "Who knows what might make a connection in my subconscious or whatever? Either way, so beware before taking your chances."
"I'll always take a chance for your sake, Max," Liz repeated immediately. "That's what today is about."
"Umm, okay," I mumbled, not quite sure what to say at once. "Do you want to read something more of yours, as we go?"
"Hmm." Liz considered that, and flipped back quite a few pages in the journal. "This one I actually wrote on the drive back from Marathon."
"Yeah, I remembered that you had your pen out in the back of the Jeep," I pointed out. "Okay, say on,"
"All logic is gone," she read as the two of us walked side by side. "Here were my plans last night - finish my shift, dinner with the parents, half hour of talking to Maria on the phone, then dive into this issue I've been having with geometry, and hopefully finish in time to watch this A&E biography on Madame Curie. Instead, I took off in an open-air vehicle that probably shouldn't be allowed on the road to begin with, broke into a house, essentially stole things from it, and engaged in general bonding with aliens. Welcome to my world."
"Yeah, that sounds about right," I agreed, laughing, once Liz paused for long enough to signal that she'd either read the entire entry, or as much as she wanted to share just then.
"My life has definitely-" Just at that moment, literally in mid-word, things suddenly went wrong. I never saw exactly what had happened with her feet but when Liz stopped speaking I realized that she was pitching forward, her balance hopelessly lost, and instinctively I reached out for her - and could only catch her near forearm with my hand. "Urrkg!" she went as the shock of most of her weight and momentum went through her arm and mine, and her course towards the ground was disturbed into a circular arc that brought her around in front of me, but though she scrabbled with her feet a little bit, she still couldn't get them flat on the ground from that angle.
A second or two later, Liz's body swung gently to a stop, nearly horizontal, and she wheezed faintly and then whined a little bit later. Her left arm was still bearing nearly all of her weight, and I could tell that had to be very uncomfortable for her. (My right had the same amount of strain on it, but I would tend to assume that my upper body is a bit stronger than hers and I'm used to supporting a little bit more weight.) A few fancy manoeuvres ran through my head, mostly attempts to turn this haphazard partial save into something a bit more dashing and noble, ideally with Liz cradled in my arms by the end of it - but all of them involved too much of a risk of dropping her into absolute ignominy. So, figuring that sticking with a partial save was better than taking a chance of losing it all, I gently lowered her onto the uneven rocks that passed for 'ground' at this spot. Liz groaned with something like relief, and didn't complain, so I counted that as appreciation for my choice. "How's the arm?" I asked.
"My shoulder hurts something awful," Liz admitted. "Probably not dislocated or anything, though. Thanks for trying to catch me, though I have to admit I'm not sure it wouldn't have been just as bad to take the fall directly."
"I wasn't thinking of it in those terms in that moment," I admitted. "You were falling away from me, and there was no time to weigh the pros and cons - I reached out for you instinctively."
"Interesting," Liz said, with a faint chuckle, and stretched out her right arm. "First step, could you help pull me up to a sitting position, so that I don't have to deal with this sharp rock pointing into the back of my neck?"
"Sure - I think that I can do something else to help out too," I said, reaching out both hands to take hers. Once Liz was sitting up, the first thing that she did was flex her left upper arm through a wide circle of motion, wonderingly.
"You fixed it that quickly?" she said, wonderingly.
"I've been practicing with minor injuries," I said. "Seemed like it would come in handy at some point, though I didn't expect as random an incident as that. What did you trip over, anyway? Just a jagged rock outcropping on the ground?"
"Well, I think so," Liz said, getting to her feet herself, (and spinning around in the process so I had a good look at her butt flexing back and forth - in those tight jeans.) "I didn't really get a good look at it, now did I? If I did, I probably wouldn't have lost my balance so badly. It's all that journal's fault - and do you have any idea where it landed?"
"Umm, not immediately, but..." It only took a few seconds for Liz to find the book, which had landed open on its back, and she immediately stowed it back into her purse, deciding that it had caused enough trouble. I could hardly argue with that decision.
For one thing, we were definitely getting into rougher territory, that was on the very fringe of what I'd explored before, and I had to concentrate hard on dream imagery (and keep looking around behind me and squatting down to six-year old height every so often,) to avoid simply blundering along by blind luck. Liz stayed mostly silent, as if she thought that I needed that to concentrate, and though a part of me wanted to hear her voice, I couldn't really think of anything to start a conversation about, so we continued on in the quiet.
It was maybe ten minutes later that I did the turn-and-crouch manoeuvre one last time - and laughed, hardly sure whether to believe that it was going to be this easy. "What, we're here?" Liz said, quickly tuning into what my mood could mean.
"Nearly," I explained, pointing up a rough, rocky hill. I could remember climbing down a pathway on that hill so vividly, it surprised me that that impression hadn't always been something that I could describe in detail. "The cave entrance is about halfway up. There should be a kind of a path."
"Really?" Liz repeated. "I guess this wasn't what I pictured when you said a cave - one of the openings in the desert ground or something like that."
I hadn't been clear enough on what I remembered until just a few minutes before to rule that out, I realized, but didn't want to say that out loud, at least, not yet. It almost felt as if admitting my doubts in this mountain might affect our chances of finding what I wanted so desperately to find there. So I just took Liz's hand in mine again, feeling a trace of her apprehension and hope as I did so, and walked slantwise towards the rock. As we approached it, the pathway became clear, and it was wide enough for us to climb side by side. I took the outer edge, just in case.
The path took us both most of the way up the rock - and then sort of petered out into a ledge that could only have been navigated with a lot of risk, even on tiptoe pointing in at the hillside, and though that ledge wandered around a corner, out of sight, it didn't exactly promise to widen out any time soon. Looking at it, I could feel more and more strongly that that was not the way that I'd come, as a little boy. But if not, then... "No, stay well away from there, please," I said softly to Liz, who seemed to be cautiously inching forwards to that perilous way. "I - I think that it's back here." Just a few paces back, the pathway was at its widest, almost a sort of a rough landing made of stone, and the hillside was particularly straight, and flat, and featureless.
"Well, what now?" Liz asked. "I don't see any sort of a - a button, or handle, or anything. Do we have to stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks? Or just call 'Open Sesame?'"
"Somehow I love you more than ever for the Tolkien reference," I said with a big grin spreading over my face. "But no, we're not in 'The Hobbit', or Ali Baba or any other story. If there's a hidden door here, then it's alien, not magic... and I think I have a clue as to how the mechanism would work. Remember how this whole thing got started?" I held up my right hand, all the fingers splayed nearly as far as they would go, and Liz jumped a little, startled by that reference to my saving her life, and the silver handprint that had been on her skin as a sign of my power for a few days after.
But after an instant's surprise, Liz nodded, accepting this guess of mine. "Yeah, okay, but - if that's the key, then we still need to find the lock."
"Right," I agreed, and stepped towards the wall of stone, because if there was going to be a door, it seemingly had to be in there somewhere. At first I couldn't detect any real sign that this approach would work, but as I moved my hand back and forth, trying to keep a faint current of energy running through it, I could feel something like a very faint magnetic attraction, making it easier to pull my hand further out to the right and harder to draw it back to the left. Extending my arm all the way out wasn't far enough, so I stepped in that direction, being very careful about my footing and how close the edges were. But after only a few feet, we could both see a spot glowing on the rock in a faint silvery-blue. Probably nothing that I could have spotted with my eyes in the bright morning light - this ledge faced east, back towards the distant highway, and the sun was nearly down to the hill by this point. But I could have told that right alignment from the feel of it.
The shining handprint on the rock was impressive though, and served as a clue to Liz. Handy for making the placement of my fingers exactly right, too.
As soon as I made contact, some unknown mechanism started to rumble to life inside the hill, retracting a section of the smooth stone surface - a mostly rectangular shape with rounded corners. Once a depression several inches deep had been revealed, that same section slid very slowly and creakily to the side, affording us an entrance into the Pod Cave.
"Come on!" I said, excitedly stretching my hand out to Liz. She seemed to be almost stock still with astonishment at all this, but when I grasped her hand that startled her back into action, and we climbed through the open doorway that had been revealed nearly together. We had hardly finished passing through when it began to close again, and Liz gasped in shock. "Max, what if you can't..." she breathed, stepping back as if she was hoping to slip through again before the way was closed off entirely.
"I'm not worried," I told her, refusing to let go. "Whatever this place is, we found our way out somehow, when we were practically newborn children. And obviously something believes that I have a right to come in again, or it wouldn't have opened the door. It doesn't make sense to trap us inside now."
"It doesn't have to make sense by human terms," Liz grumbled. "It's alien."
"Don't knock aliens too much," I joked with her, as the door-rock slid closed and started to work its way back to the position where it would sit flush with the rest of the rock face. That meant, of course, that bright outside light was not flooding in any more, and for a few seconds neither of us could see much at all, because the interior of the Pod Cave was not well lit at all. But eventually my eyes adjusted enough to what seemed like faintly blue glowing moulding that I could make out some details, and judging by the tension in Liz's hand, she was starting to feel less frightened too, so I guessed that maybe she could make do with the light as well.
There wasn't much to see where we were, just a sort of a bare vestibule space near the door, but I could see that a larger chamber was further along, deeper inside the rocky hill. I couldn't see that much of the room, but there was one thing that I thought I could certainly see. I looked over to Liz and whispered in a certain bemused delight, "Four incubation pods?"
"Umm, I'm not sure, but I don't think I can see four of anything, from here," she replied in a more normal speaking voice. "If the things that I can see are incubation pods, then I only see two of them." For a few seconds I was disappointed, then tried to judge the angles somewhat, (don't tell me that trig and geometry have no application in real life!) and realized that yes, the foot and a half of separation between our viewpoints was probably enough to hide some of the pods from her view, if they were about as far away as I thought they were. (I couldn't see all of that set myself, just a slice.)
Liz must have thought of the same thing, because she leaned way over, until her head was more or less in front of my upper chest, hair just a few inches below my nose. "Okay, yeah, there's two more." I couldn't resist the urge to run a few fingers through her soft dark hair when it had started to brush against the back of my hand, and once I'd tucked enough of it behind Liz's ear to expose most of the ear itself, it was even harder to fight against another affectionate impulse. Liz cooed and sighed deep in her chest when I licked the rim of her ear and sucked gently on the earlobe, but after only a few seconds, she managed to mumble, "I hate to even bring up the rules, but does this count as kissing before midnight?"
"Oooh." Most of me hated that she'd mentioned it as well, but, well... "Um." I disengaged lips from earlobe. "Maybe. Probably not, as such, by the letter of the rules, but by the spirit in which I instituted the 'no kissing' rule, ear-play or whatever is probably something that we should also stay away from. If only because it would be too easy to slip from there to lip-on-lip action without caring about the rules, once we really got started." Liz went uh-huh regretfully. "So I guess we call this a warning, not a true violation."
"You can worry about warning yourself," Liz told me with a faint giggle. "I'm going to take a look inside the pod cave proper."
"Not without me, you're not," I said as sternly as I could manage, and we stepped into the open room more or less together. I didn't really think that there were likely any traps or features that would be dangerous to somebody who wasn't an alien - but it was hard to be sure. Whoever had originally put us (the three of us plus a mysterious one?) here might have been worried that the palm-print door wasn't sufficient protection against 'meddling humans' finding the cave and investigating its secrets. And what would Topolsky or the people behind her in the FBI have made out of a place like this, anyway?
But nothing dangerous seemed to manifest immediately, and though I kept up my guard, most of our attention was taken up by the bank of four pods, two high and two wide, at the far end of the room. And, of course, the innate mystery that they represented. "So, any ideas who the fourth pod was for?" Liz asked, her voice starting to become softer as she approached them. "Nasedo?"
"I - I don't know," I had to admit. "I guess if I had any guesses about Nasedo and - and this place that we came from, I would have guessed that he was the one who put our pods here in the fourth - err, sorry, I meant to say the first place."
"Freudian slip?" Liz asked, gesturing again to the four pods.
"Yeah. And there would definitely have had to be an alien to build all of this - the door and the lighting and all. So if that wasn't Nasedo, who was it?"
"Good point." Liz sighed. "So I guess Occam's razor won't slice through this for us. There has to be one more alien entity running around... oh, no, there's at least one other possibility. Could one of these pods be a spare? Never used?"
"Hmm... worth considering," I shot back, loving this sort of investigation and detective work into an alien mystery, with Liz by my side and challenging my assumptions. I moved close enough to the pods that I could touch them if I wanted to, (though I didn't, yet.) The ambient light didn't seem to be enough for a close examination, so I used the glowing hand trick to shed a bit more light on the pods, and cringed slightly. Liz jumped back a fraction of an inch in alarm. There were fibres of white stuff hanging off the pod openings, and lying on the floor just below them, and some sort of dried gelatinous goo still inside the pod cavities. The white fibres reminded me of the ones that had grown around Michael's body, cocooning him when he went into a coma after being in River Dog's sweat lodge, a few weeks ago.
"I - I think that they must be remnants of whatever was used to feed us and keep us safe when we were growing inside the pods," I told Liz, though I wasn't sure that I could defend this guess if she challenged it. "And there are these traces around and inside all four pods. I really do think that all four of them were used."
"So there's some other alien kid out there, maybe one who's only been around since 1989, like the three of you?" Liz summarized, turning away from the pods and wandering towards some nearly empty shelves that were sitting to the left of the exit, when I was looking at them from the pods at least. (They would have been to our right as we entered.) I hurried over, just in case one of the few dimly visible relics that I could see sitting there might be dangerous. "Okay, umm - we should search the entire - the entire chamber. I can't really call it a cave, now that I've seen the inside of it. There might be more mysteries that we haven't even seen yet."
"No, we need to leave soon," I countered. Liz stared at me, looking disappointed. "I'm somewhat sorry, but - well, there are a lot of good reasons. The afternoon was already getting away from us when we went in here, and we need to find our way back to the Jeep before full night hits, or it'll be much harder to navigate on foot in the desert. I'm still a little worried about something that might be dangerous if it's handled by a - well, a human, and..."
"And you want to give Isabel and Michael the chance to call part of this place their own," Liz guessed, with a resigned sigh. "It's going to be hard enough on Michael that I was the one with you when you found it." I nodded. "Okay, umm - we need to take a few pictures, though. To show them." She pulled the little camera out of her bag.
"Okay, umm - you realize that these photos can't possibly be showed to..."
"Come on, Max, I'm not stupid," Liz insisted. "Of course I'll take good care of them. Umm - do you want to pose next to the pods or something like that?" She laughed at the notion, so went and stood next to them, resting one hand on the top of an upper-row pod and gesturing with my other arm like it was up for bidding on the Price is Right's contestants row. The flash of the camera seemed dazzlingly bright in that dim chamber, and I stared at the pod for a moment as my eyes gradually recovered, wondering what it would be like to climb out of the top row of pods as a little alien kid. And that managed to jog my memory.
"I was on the top row, and I had to figure out how to climb down after I tore open the - the membrane across the front of the pod," I whispered, reaching out to poke my fingers through that circular opening that was now unblocked. "I - I remember seeing Isabel and Michael for the first time here, in this chamber, before we went outside to explore the great wide world. We must all have been still covered with the - well, whatever goo it was inside the pods. They both looked sticky with it, and I remember feeling it on my arms, all over my skin." I took a deep breath. "And - and I think I can remember looking at the one pod that was still sealed. That one, down there, on the bottom left."
"Oh my god, Max," Liz breathed. "Was - was there someone inside it?"
"Yes. I - I can't remember much, just a faint impression of a face - a little girl sleeping, with her eyes still closed and blonde curly hair floating around her head. She had a kind of triangular face, I guess, and her eyebrows were scrunched up as if she was having a bad dream in there."
"Wow." Liz crossed close to take my hand again. "You - you've never seen her since? I mean, do you think you would recognize this girl if you came across her in school or something, and she was sixteen like the rest of us are?"
"Umm - yeah, I think I'd remember if I'd seen her, but I can't be sure," Max said. "I'll definitely know if I see her again, now that I've remembered seeing her here."
"Okay, umm - do you want to go now?" Liz asked.
"How many more exposures are left on that film?" I put to her in turn.
"Umm." Liz squinted cutely at the camera. "I can't read it." I gave her some silvery glow. "Okay, seven more shots."
"Take five of them in here," I suggested. "I'd suggest mostly concentrating on the pods - close-ups and different angles. Then give the camera to me, and we'll head out."
"Okay - do you have plans for those last two spots on the roll?" she said.
"Why, I believe that I just might," I told her in my best 'banter' tone of voice.
#
"Okay, that makes some sense," Liz said as I snapped a picture of the chamber door from outside, just as it was about halfway through closing. (It hadn't been hard at all to open the door from inside - hadn't even taken my handprint, actually - it had opened as soon as Liz touched the wall near the door.) "That was impressive enough to take a visual record of. Are - are you going to use the last picture on the hill from a little ways away?"
"Umm, no, that wasn't what I'd planned on," I admitted, as we started down the rock path, the camera still in my hands. "Wouldn't that mean that somebody might be able to use it to find this particular piece of rock out of the whole desert?"
"Well - yeah, I guess that was what I had in mind," Liz admitted uncertainly. "That Michael and Isabel might want to come here without you being around to lead them, or having to give them terribly detailed directions beforehand. Are - are you terribly worried about somebody else finding the pictures, still?"
"I guess so," I admitted slowly. "Paranoia starts to make sense after you find out that somebody really is out to get you, after all. But even if we discount that kind of reasoning, I do have some better use to put that last picture to, okay?"
"Umm, sure, of course," Liz said, and nodded. As we reached the bottom of the hill, she offered her hand to me, and I took it - and gasped as a rush of images overcame me - that stunned look on her face before she was shot, the cool breeze of the night that we first kissed, after the heat wave broke, the sound of the Jeep's engine as we rode together on the old Highway. Liz turned to me and smiled. "Okay, so any updates on the subject of you and me?" she asked teasingly.
"You - you drive me crazy, and I think you like knowing that," I accused, and Liz giggled nervously. "But in general - I think that I'm ready to take that leap of faith, if you are. I can't put my fears to rest in a single day, but I don't have to let them call the shots. You're worth facing my fears for, Liz Parker." Deep breath. "That is, if you'll have me, on those terms - if you wouldn't be too worried that I might push you away some day next week. I'll try my best not to, try to always let you share what's going on with me and carry the load as best you can, but that's about all that I can promise. And bearing that in mind, you can have your kiss at midnight."
"Of course I'll be with you no matter what you're still struggling with, Max," Liz told me, the tenderness nearly coating her words. "I'll be struggling too - this is heavy stuff, and no matter how smart, brave, or in love two teenagers are, few of them manage to make even an ordinary relationship work long-term. We'll have all of the challenges that they struggle with and more to contend with - but I think that we also have a few more advantages to help us out. But whether we can hang together and keep our love strong - that's still up to us." She pulled me close in a side-to-side hug that kept me from making any forward progress - not that I was complaining. "I'm so glad that I came to your door this morning."
"Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don't you," I laughed back. We started walking back hand in hand again, and I set the course a little to the left of the way that we'd come. It didn't take too long for Liz to notice that little detail.
"What's the idea?" was all she said.
"Just wait and see," I advised, picking up the pace slightly because I knew that Liz wouldn't wait patiently for too long. Thankfully, the spot that I had in mind wasn't far off. I wasn't sure what made me think of that particular place in the desert, except that looking back east, someone could stand in the light of the setting sun and be framed between a five-foot high rock to the left, and a much higher, much more distant one off to the right. With a few words I directed Liz into the spot I had in mind, and brought out the camera.
"Okay, okay, I guess I can't make too much of a fuss," she said, delivering a sigh that I thought was probably overdramatic. "But take the picture and let's get on with it. The sun's not too far from setting, and it's annoying having to face into it like this."
"Okay, I'll be quick," I told her, putting my eye to the little viewfinder. The framing was just as great as I'd imagined - there was a little ravine or crack in the desert a few feet behind her, but it somehow added to the visual effect, so I pushed the shutter button and it went click. No flash, but then, there wasn't enough light for it. I checked and the dial for the film was down to zero.
"I think it was a great shot, sweetie," I said, stepping forward towards Liz, and taking a great and foolish pleasure in being able to call her that. I was even holding the camera out towards her, as if I expected her to be able to take a look at the picture that I'd just taken, like it was a Polaroid or one of those digital cameras that I'd seen on television. And that was the moment where everything went wrong.
Because, you see, it was my turn to trip on a stone ridge and lose my balance for a moment. I stumbled for only a moment and then caught it again, but the damage was done.
The camera had flown out of my hand. Liz tried to step over and catch it once she realized what was happening, but she wasn't in time.
And the darn thing bounced once and went over the edge of the drop!
It was only a few seconds before Liz and I were standing at the lip of the precipice, staring down it. We could just make out a small black shape against the ivory sand down there, even though nothing was in direct light.
"I don't think it's even broken or anything," Liz mentioned.
"I'd almost rather it were," I muttered under my breath. Liz gasped. "If the film was ruined, at least we wouldn't need to worry about someone else finding it first."
"Oh, right - I see." Liz sighed. "I - I don't really see a way down there."
"Not an easy way." I made a big production out of taking off my backpack and pulling out the rope. There was even a smaller rock very close to the edge that I could tie it around. "I know that this is probably crazy - that we'll be losing light even before we can climb down there, but right now I'm hell-bent on trying. Are you going to make an effort to talk me out of craziness, or are you going to let me do this?"
"Let you do it?" Liz exclaimed. "Don't be crazy, Max, of course I'm not going to let you do this!"
We just stared at each other for a long moment.