Black Sun

CHAPTER 68

Hawker became aware of being conscious, and by extension alive, when the pounding in his head became too much to bear. He woke with his back to the stony ground and some type of wet cloth over his eyes.

The quiet around him seemed complete — the exact opposite of all he remembered.

He tried to move but found it too painful.

“Hawker?” a voice called to him. “Can you hear me?” The voice was kind but worried. He recognized it as Danielle’s.

He managed to move his hand, trying to bring it up toward the cloth, but he lacked the strength even to do that.

Danielle pulled the cloth from his eyes.

At first he saw only shadows, blurs of light, and the outline of her face. But slowly his eyes focused and the details appeared. She was a mess, but God she was beautiful.

“What happened?” The words croaked from his throat, dry as dust.

“You put the stone into place,” she said. “The blast knocked you a hundred feet, and you landed in the water.”

He looked at her. Her clothes were damp, and muddy in places instead of dusty. “You end up in the water, too?”

“I didn’t want you to drown.”

He was thankful for that. He tried to prop himself up. She helped him.

“How long have I been out?”

“Two hours,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

They were up on the mesa. It was completely dark. “Aside from getting my ass kicked, did anything happen?”

She smiled for the first time, but there was still a sense of sadness in her eyes. “See for yourself.”

She helped him turn around.

Out over the cenote, against the backdrop of the night, he could see ghostly filaments of light rising upward. They poured from the island at its center, a twisting, almost invisible column of light.

He followed the strands upward, into the dark of the sky, where they spread into a shimmering curtain of white and blue. The display moved in a curious fashion, flowing and bending back in upon itself. At times it seemed to flicker and fade, as if it might be a mirage, but then the brightness would grow once again and the color would become more intense than it had been before.

“What is it?” Hawker asked.

“Charged particles in the atmosphere, channeling along the magnetic lines and funneling themselves harmlessly into space,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s an aurora,” she said. “I’ve seen one before, although normally the charged particles are coming down into the planet.”

“Shield of the Jaguar,” Hawker said.

She nodded, but the sad look returned.

Suddenly he remembered about Yuri.

He looked around. Back toward the cenote he saw a man whose features he couldn’t make out sitting and staring at the curtain of light in the sky. Beside them a smaller figure lay draped beneath a jacket.

“Please tell me …,” he began.

She shook her head. “It was too much for him,” she said.

Hawker closed his eyes, choking back a wave of emotion.

“He fell limp the instant it happened,” she said. “The soul stone flew out of his hands toward the well at the same moment you were being flung away from it.”

Danielle paused, trying to control her own sadness. “There was a trickle of blood near the base of his skull. A tiny hole like he’d been hit by a dart. I think the sliver was pulled from his body in the same way.”

A wave of numbness flowed through Hawker’s body. He’d known, even before he released the counterweights. He’d known what was going to happen to Yuri, but in that moment he realized that something far worse was going to happen if he didn’t. The only comfort he could find was that Yuri had given his life for many, perhaps for billions around the globe.

Sacrifice of the Body.

It was a Mayan belief, a Christian belief, a Jewish and Muslim belief as well. Innocent blood, shed for the rest of us. To make the rains come, to make the crops grow. To save the world.

Four days before Christmas, on the turning point of the Mayan calendar, a day known as 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, the story found truth once again.