James Rollins - Innocent Blood

Where was Arella taking them?

The woman continued to navigate for Christian, her back to them.

Rhun gave Erin a puzzled look, just as confused, but she shrugged. They had come this far based upon the word of this angelic woman. It was too late to distrust her now.

The helicopter skirted past the occasional broken hill and flew over undulating dunes of sand. Overhead, the sky continued to grow a deeper gray as the ash cloud moved farther upon them.

Finally, the helicopter began to lower. Erin searched for any landmarks, but it appeared they were picking a random stretch of dunes on which to land. Their rotors tore ribbons of sand from the closest ridges.

The pitch of the engines changed, and the helicopter hovered in place.

But why here?

Jordan sounded no happier. “Looks like the hundreds of miles of desert we’ve already flown over.”

Erin was tempted to agree with him, but then her eyes began to detect subtle differences. The closest ridge of dunes did not follow the pattern of the surrounding desert. She glanced out both windows to confirm it. The ridge curved completely around, to form a circle, framing a giant bowl a hundred feet across and about twenty deep.

“Looks like a crater,” Erin said, pointing Jordan to the raised lip all around.

“Another volcano?” Jordan asked.

“I think it might be a meteor strike.”

Erin looked to Arella for an answer, but the woman simply directed Christian down.

A moment later the skids touched the sand. The helicopter came to a rest, canted slightly at an angle inside the bowl, not far from the center. Christian kept the rotors turning, as if deliberately blowing sand from the crater.

That’s one way to excavate .

Golden-tan sand whirled in the wash of the rotors, momentarily blinding them.

Then the engines finally stopped, the rotors slowing. After so many hours of constant droning, the silence rushed over her like a wave. The blown-up sand settled, pattering to the ground like a golden rain.

Arella finally faced them again, placing a hand on Christian’s shoulder, thanking him. “We may go now.”

Rhun cracked open the door and hopped out first. He held them back, ever wary, which Erin knew was well warranted.

“There is nothing to fear here,” Arella assured them.

After Rhun confirmed this with an all-clear, the woman climbed out next, followed by Erin.

Once on her feet, Erin stretched, drawing in a deep breath, sucking the dryness deep into her lungs, smelling the rocky scent of pure desert. She let herself bask for a moment in the heat. Sand meant the luxury of time at excavations — hours spent in the sun digging to free secrets long buried from the patient grains that had concealed them.

She didn’t have that luxury now.

She squinted at the sun. This late in winter, it would set at five o’clock, less than three hours from now. She recalled Bernard’s warning about the gates of Hell opening, but she pushed such fears aside for now.

Tommy certainly did not have even those three hours.

She turned as Jordan’s boots hit the sand next to her, helping Christian carry Tommy’s body into the desert, into this strange crater.

“Where are we?” Christian asked, his eyes narrowing in the sunlight, even though it was dimmed by ash to a harsh glare.

“Don’t know,” Erin said softly, feeling like she should whisper for some reason.

She studied the sides that curved up around her, noting the ridgeline was not as smooth as she had thought from the air, but looked rather more jagged, forming a natural palisade at the bowl’s rim. Heat radiated underfoot, more than she would have expected from this ash-covered day. It shimmered across the sand-filled crater, dancing with motes of dust.

Arella stepped away from them, heading toward the center of the crater. “Quickly with the boy” was all she said.

They followed her, mystified and confused — especially when she dropped to her knees in the sand and began digging with both hands.

Jordan cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe we should help her.”

Erin agreed. As Christian stood with Tommy in his arms, she joined Jordan and Rhun, digging shoulder to shoulder, scooping out the hot sand. Thankfully, the deeper she dug, the cooler the sand became.

Arella knelt back, letting them work, clearly still weak.

A half foot down, Erin’s fingertips hit something hard. A heady mix of anticipation and wonder rolled through her. What lay hidden here? How many times had it been buried and uncovered by passing sandstorms?

“Careful,” she warned the others. “It might be fragile.”

She slowed her movements, removing smaller amounts of sand, wishing that she had her digging tools, her whisks and brushes. Then a flake of black ash fell and stung her eye, reminding her that they needed to hurry.

Her pace picked up again, the others following her example.

“What is it?” Jordan asked, as it became clear that a layer of glass lay beneath them, swirling and rough, natural, as if something had melted the sand.

“I think it’s impact glass, maybe secondary to a meteor strike.” Erin tapped the surface with a fingernail, making it clink. “There’s a large deposit of such meteoric glass out in the Libyan desert. The yellow scarab on King Tut’s pendant was carved from a chunk of it.”

“Cool,” Jordan mumbled and returned to his labors.

Erin took a breath to wipe her brow with the back of her wrist. As Jordan and Rhun continued to clear the sand off the glass, she realized who worked so hard to free what lay buried here.

They were the prophesied trio… together again.

Taking heart in that, she redoubled her efforts, and in a few more minutes, they had cleared enough sand away to reveal edges to the glass — though more extended outward. Erin glanced all around.

Was the entire crater glass ?

Had some meteor hit and melted this perfect bowl?

Was that possible?

It seemed unlikely. When the meteor hit Libya twenty-six million years ago, giving birth to Tut’s pendant, it had scattered broken glass for miles around.

With no answers at hand, she returned her attention to what they had exposed. It was as if someone had taken a diamond-tipped knife and cut a perfect circle in the glass floor here, forming a disk four feet across.

It looked not unlike a plug in a bathtub.

Erin bent to examine its surface closer, cocking her head at various angles. The disk was translucent amber, darker on one side than the other, the two shades split by an S-shaped line of faint silver, forming a melted version of a yin-yang symbol.

She noted the same pattern extended outward from here.

The glass on the eastern half of the crater appeared to be dark amber, the western half distinctly lighter.

But what was this in the center?

“Looks like a giant manhole cover,” Jordan said.

She saw he was right. She carefully fingered the edges of the large plate of glass, feeling enough of a ridge that someone might be able to lift it free if they were strong enough.

“But what’s under it?” Erin glanced to Arella. “And how does this help Tommy?”

Arella turned her face from the skies to the north and nodded to Erin. “Place the boy near my feet,” she instructed. “Then lift the stone you have uncovered.”

Christian gently lowered Tommy to the sand. Then he and Rhun took to opposite sides of the disk-shaped plug. They grabbed hold with the very tips of their fingers and lifted it cleanly up with a grating of glass and sand. The plate looked to be a foot thick and must have weighed hundreds of pounds, reminding Erin yet again of the herculean strength of the Sanguinists.

Carrying it at waist height, they stepped it over a few paces and dropped it to the sand. Erin crawled forward and looked down at what was revealed. It appeared to be a shaft, with a mirror shining back at her from a few feet down, reflecting the sky and her face.