Nothing happens at first, but after a tense moment the carved lines begin to deepen and spread towards each other. Eight lets the pendant drop down to his chest. Dust shoots into the passage and we move back a few feet. When all the lines touch and there is a perfect outline of a door, the right edge separates from the face of the cavern, and swings open. A blast of warm air hits us, and we all stand still, mesmerized by a blue glow coming from inside.
The energy I feel coursing through me is overwhelming and I become completely and utterly calm. ‘What’s the blue light?’ I finally ask.
‘That’s what makes me able to teleport around the world,’ Eight responds, as if this were the simplest concept to grasp.
Ella walks towards the opening. ‘I feel weird inside.’
Marina says, ‘Me too.’
With a smile, Eight ducks through the doorway; Crayton and Ella are quick to follow. I bring up the rear. As we climb up another staircase Eight talks.
‘A couple years ago, as my Legacies grew, I started having these very vivid dreams, like the ones I’m having now with Setrákus and Four. I learned more about Lorien, and about the Elders. Learned about our history here on Earth, how we helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, how the Greek gods were actually Loric, how we taught the Romans military strategy, and so on. In one of the dreams, there was all this stuff about moving around on earth, and how the Loric used to do it. This mountain was in my dream. We’d already moved to India and I recognized it. After the dream, I came up here and started looking around. That’s when I found all of this.’
‘That’s amazing,’ says Marina.
The stairs end in another room. The ceiling is domed and several jagged columns hold it up. I realize we’re inside the peak of the mountain. The room is empty except at its very center, where an intricate set of rocks form a whirlpool-like pattern, radiating out from one central blue stone that’s the size of a basketball.
‘Loralite,’ Crayton whispers. He walks towards the center of the cave and sets Marina’s Chest down. ‘That is the biggest Loralite stone I have ever seen.’
‘Is the Loralite the reason you can go anywhere you want?’ Marina asks, turning to Eight.
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Eight sighs. ‘I can’t go anywhere I want. More like six or seven far-off places. It took a lot of messing around and landing places I didn’t mean to before I figured out I can only teleport where there’s another one of these big Loralite rocks around.’
‘So where can we go?’ I ask.
‘Well, so far I’ve gone to Peru, to Easter Island, to Stonehenge, the Gulf of Aden near Somalia – but I really don’t recommend that one for a lot of reasons – and I’ve ended up in the desert in New Mexico.’
‘New Mexico,’ I say immediately, turning to Crayton. ‘If we go there we could be across the country and with John in less than a day. We know we can move around easily once we are in the U.S.’
Crayton walks over to the wall, looking around at some markings on it. ‘Wait. You’re saying you can’t control where you go? That’s not as promising as I had hoped.’
‘No, but if we end up somewhere besides New Mexico – if that’s where we want to go – we just teleport again until we get there. It’s not so bad,’ Eight says.
‘And do you know if you can take all of us with you?’ I ask. ‘If it’s anything like my Legacy of invisibility, we may have a problem. I can only turn other people invisible if they’re holding my hands.’
‘I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve never tried to bring anyone else,’ Eight admits.
‘Maybe you can take two trips,’ Marina suggests.
‘These drawings are amazing,’ Crayton interrupts, motioning us over to the cave walls. ‘Maybe there are some clues for us here.’
He’s right. The orange walls are covered with hundreds of symbols, paintings and carvings, reaching as high as the very tip of the dome.
I walk over and my eyes are drawn to a faint green painting of a planet. Instantly, I know it’s Lorien, and a lump catches in my throat. Below it, scratched in blue, is a female figure standing over a male, and both are holding sleeping babies. Rays of interrupted white lines come off the bottom of Lorien, ending just above the four figures. Carved next to the female’s head, in a different drawing style, are three columns of alien symbols. ‘What the hell?’ I whisper, confused.
A few feet to my left is a simple black sketch of a triangular spaceship. There are intricate spirals and symbols on its wings, and a tiny, swirling constellation of stars on the blunt nose. Eight walks up next to me and points to the constellation. ‘Do you see? It’s the same pattern as the stones in here.’
I turn around to compare – he’s right. Immediately, I wish Katarina were here to see all this. I wonder if she even knew about it. I turn to Crayton, who is examining drawings on the ceiling. ‘Did you know about any of this?’ I ask.
‘We left Lorien in a very big hurry. The planet was under attack from the Mogadorians. We didn’t have time to gather as much information as we should have. We knew places like this existed, but no one knew exactly where they were, or what they did. Clearly, for all the information we did manage to gather before we left, there were important things that we didn’t get,’ he explains.
‘Follow me, everybody,’ Eight calls out, gesturing for us to follow his lead towards a dark corner of the room. ‘It just gets weirder and weirder.’
He stops in front of a huge carving. It is ten feet high and twenty feet long, split into different scenes. Kind of like a comic book. The first panel shows a spaceship with nine children standing in front of it. Their faces are drawn with detail, and I’m able to pick myself out immediately. The sight of me as a toddler rocks me back on my heels.
‘Was this here when you first saw the cave?’ Crayton turns away from the wall to ask Eight.