take the Scepter to the Shrine of the First Sun. There she would find, she hoped, the so-called Secret of First Time that would somehow enable her to stop whatever was happening.
As for Conrad, it was clear she could not trust him, just like she could not trust Yeats. For all she knew she couldn’t trust the pope or even God. How could he let this happen-again? She thought of the girl in the ice. She couldn’t get the expression on her face out of her mind. This had happened once before, so clearly God could let it happen again. But she couldn’t.
She put the obelisk back in her pack, slung the pack over her shoulder, and stepped out of the chamber through the open door. The tunnel led her to a fork at the bottom of the great gallery, and she took the middle tunnel down and out through P4’s entrance.
When Serena emerged from the dark interior of P4 into the light of day, it seemed to her that the sun was more brilliant than ever. It was hot, but it was the dry kind of heat that she liked. Antarctica was a desert climate with or without the ice, she thought as she shaded her eyes. More likely, however, the heat originated from the vast geothermal machinery underground.
A minute later, after her eyes had adjusted, she realized that she was standing in the center of a city at the bottom of some great crater. Walls of ice lifted up in the distance, forming a spectacular backdrop for this desert landscape of pyramids, obelisks, temples, and waterways. She could hear the roar of a distant waterfall.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The rush of fresh, oxygen-rich air overwhelmed her senses. So did the realization that there were probably centuries of research down here, and if she lived a thousand lifetimes she still would just be getting started at unraveling the city’s mysteries.
Whatever else, she realized, this discovery changed everything about human history.
Eyes still closed, she thought she heard a dog barking. Ridiculous, she thought, and realized she should be praying, listening for some inner prompting from the Holy Spirit or direction from God. But all she heard was that barking, and it was getting louder and more annoying. Then she blinked her eyes open to see Yeats’s husky, Nimrod, trotting toward her.
She was surprised by the joy she felt and called out to him, “Here, boy!”
Nimrod ran into her arms and started licking her face.
“Are you OK?” she asked him. “Is everybody else OK?”
Nimrod immediately turned and started running in the other direction, pausing to look back.
“You want me to follow, boy?”
Nimrod barked and kept running and this time did not look back.
Serena followed the canine for a half hour along what appeared to be the main waterway of the empty city. But the longer they walked, the less it felt like a city. There was nothing to suggest anybody ever actually lived hereon the plateau. No streets, just waterways. Some coursing with glistening water, others dry. And the ground between the pavilions was barren. No plant life, nothing. Maybe that would change in a few days.
Perhaps the dwellings were on the outskirts, she wondered, still buried under ice. But these monuments, however coldly magnificent, reminded her of a city of abandoned oil rigs she once toured along the Caspian Sea in the former Soviet Union: miles of rusted pipes you could drive a truck through and ghostly refineries that stretched like heaps of filth across the horizon.
She also had the uneasy feeling of being watched, although she knew that was absurd. There was nobody around to watch her. Then again, Nimrod was here. Maybe there were others. She occasionally lost sight of the dog but always remained within earshot of his barks. Then the barks grew louder, and she realized he was waiting to show her something.
From a distance she could see the object glisten in the sun. Soon she came upon a smashed Hagglunds tractor on the banks of the water channel. The rear cab was crushed to bits, fragments of fiberglass gleaming across the ground. But the front cab seemed intact.
Serena walked over to the driver’s side door, which was ajar, and opened it. She gasped as the body of Colonel O’Dell crumpled to the ground at her feet, his head a bloody mess with bits of the dashboard matted in his hair. Nimrod sniffed the corpse with a whimper.
Poor O’Dell, she thought, realizing she would have to bury his body. It would be only proper. But first she had to see if the tractor’s transmitter was working and if there was any food or water. She hated to admit it, with O’Dell lying there on the ground, but she was famished.
She climbed inside the cab and searched methodically for any SAT phones, weapons, food packs, anything. But the cab had been stripped of everything save for a single meal-ready-to-eat and a shortwave radio.
She tore open the MRE. Nimrod made it clear that he expected a share of the food, nuzzling his way into the cab.
“Oh, OK,” she said. “Come on in.”
Together they split the meal. But the longer she chewed, the more she realized what she was really hungry for was news. She eyed the shortwave radio, wondering if it worked, but perversely almost hoping it didn’t.
Unable to bear it any longer, she turned the radio on. It worked. The static grew louder as she turned up the volume and then searched the band of frequencies to find the BBC. When she did, the announcer’s voice was filled with tension.
“Mass evacuations of U.S. coastal cities are under way,” the announcer said. “The federal government reports that it is opening up the nearly six hundred fifty million acres of public land it owns-almost thirty percent of the United States-for refugees.”
Bit by bit, the details began to fill in: the massive “seismic event” in Antarctica that split off a glacier the size of Texas, the swamping of the Maldives and other Pacific Islands, the meetings of the U.N. Security Council in New York, and accusations of secret American nuclear weapons tests in Antarctica.
Dear Lord, she thought. What have we done? Serena looked at her food and suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t stop Nimrod from finishing the meal.
Various commentators, analysts, and scientists of the international sort soon weighed in, some expressing fears that the ice cap was breaking up, others that rising sea levels would wipe out coastal cities and sink low-lying lands such as Florida. Those with access to the corridors of power confessed to hearing whispers of a potential shift in Earth’s crust and global geological catastrophe.
She turned off the radio and removed the Scepter of Osiris from her backpack. Staring at it, thinking about all that it had wrought thus far, she felt her stomach churn.
She opened the passenger door of the cab. Nimrod jumped out and ran to the river’s edge and began lapping up water. She walked over and squatted next to him and looked across to the other side. It was about five hundred feet away.
Seeing that Nimrod was no worse for his drink, she removed an empty water bottle from her pack and dipped it into the water. The current was so strong it ripped the bottle away in an instant, so she cupped a hand into the water and sipped. She was splashing some water on her oily, dusty face when she heard a yelp.
She looked over to see Nimrod lying on his side, panting heavily, eyes in shock. She spit the water out of her mouth and looked him over.
“What’s wrong, boy?” she asked, suddenly worried as she stroked his ear. “Please don’t tell me it’s the water.”
It wasn’t. There was blood coming from Nimrod’s thigh. She looked closer. It looked like a bullet hole.
“Oh, God,” she began to say when a bright red dot appeared on Nimrod’s furry chest. A second later blood spurted out. She jumped back and screamed.
A dozen soldiers in UNACOM uniforms emerged from the horizon and closed in around her with their AK-47s at the ready. Their commanding officer stepped forward from the circle around her and spoke into his radio.
“This is Jamil,” the man said in Arabic. “We have one survivor, sir. A woman.”
The accent sounded Egyptian to Serena, and this was confirmed when she heard the reply on the radio: “Bring her to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before Serena could move, Jamil motioned to one of his men, and the grunt flung her across the ground, holding her down with one hand and considerable strength. He ripped open her fatigues, slipped a hand inside, and felt her up and down.
“What is this?” the soldier said with a Saudi accent, yanking away a switchblade knife.
The Saudi held up the knife and sprang the blade, eliciting howls of laughter from his comrades. Then he
