Page 5

My destination.

Asher

I stared atthe digits on the timer, my scalp bristling.

87:01.

At the foot of this stalagmite, only eighty-seven seconds had elapsed—three seconds lessthan had elapsed everywhere else in the cave.

Three seconds less. Which meant that, in this particular location, time movedslower.

Definitely not allowed.

This was the spot. The location of the anomaly.

Slowly, my gaze gravitated up the stalagmite, up the hideous, lumpy growth to where it fused with a glistening stalactite hanging from the ceiling, forming a natural pillar. I was no geologist, but the thing looked ancient.

Whatever lay entombed in the limestone, it had been here for hundreds of thousands of years.

Now how to unearth it...

I reached for one of my explosives, then paused. Thinking it through, the dynamite tactic seemed suicidal. If I knocked out the pillar, it would destabilize the entire cavern, probably cause the whole thing to collapse on my idiot face.

Bright idea, Asher... detonating explosives in a confined space under eight trillion tons of precariously balanced rock.

Pickaxe and shovel then.

But first, I read the times off the rest of my oscillators.

Out of the thirty, four more registered time anomalies, also near prominent stalagmites. Pockets of space where time passed a little slower. Without synchronized clocks, you wouldn’t notice.

I took one step out between the columns, and a wave of vertigo nearly made me upchuck.

My assyou wouldn’t notice.

Feeling seasick, I had to brace myself on one of the spires. Up close, they reeked of ash, that smell I had grown to despise. I recoiled with a grimace.

There were five anomalous stalagmites in total.

Five of the oldest, baddest, foulest looking stalagmites in the cave.

With a tape measure, I took the distance between them.

Equal.

They formed the corners of a perfect pentagon.

Or, more precisely, the five corners of a star. A pentagram.

Truth was, I didn’t give much of a fuck what shape they made. For all I cared, they could make Mickey Mouse ears.

I didn’t come here to play connect-the-dots.

I fetched my pickaxe and took a good, hard swing at the base of the first stalagmite. Rock shards splintered off, ricocheting between the other spires.

I pried out a chunk of limestone with the flat end of the axe, then let it fly again. More fragments sprayed off into the darkness.

Pausing to wipe my damp forehead, I slid out of my breast pocket the dog-eared photo of my dead wife, age twenty-six, blonde and blue-eyed and fucking gorgeous, and kissed it. “This is for you, Nikki.”