Changeling

PROLOGUE

The boy became a man but he never forgot what he had seen that day.

Ten years later, the memory was as clear to him as his own reflection in a pool of still water. Ten years spent waiting, but also growing, learning… preparing for this moment.

His name was Apollonius, and his earliest memories were of the siege. He did not remember a time before that, before the Romans came with their ships and their armies. The siege lasted nearly two years, but what he remembered from that time was not the hardship of being bottled up in the city by the armies of General Marcellus, but rather the battles, for they were unlike anything ever imagined by the poets. Marcellus had come with his mighty engines of war — the Sambucae, great siege ladders, taller than the city walls, each borne by a pair of quinqueremes which bristled with artillery weapons to drive the defenders away as the ships made their approach — but the Roman general was no match for the genius of Syracuse, Archimedes.

Under his direction, the men of the city had constructed an enormous claw of iron that reached out over the harbor like the hand of Zeus himself, plucking the ships from the water as a child might pick up a pebble, and then letting them fall to be dashed apart. He constructed a wall of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on the enemy, blinding their artilleryman and even setting fire to Marcellus’ ships.

For a time, it seemed that no threat could prevail against the city. The favor of the gods was upon them. Indeed, if not for the withdrawal of support from their Carthaginian allies, the Syracusians might have defeated Marcellus, but even without such assistance, they could outlast the Romans.

The arrogance of the city was its undoing.

Assured of their eventual victory, the citizens of Syracuse proclaimed a festival to honor Artemis, the goddess who had protected them. Marcellus, learning of this diversion, sent his soldiers to scale the walls of the outer city. Caught by surprise, the defenders were overwhelmed. Although the inner citadel remained intact, the survivors holding out for another eight months, the city’s greatest weapon was lost.

That was the part that remained etched in his memory.

When the attack began, steel ringing on steel as the Romans swept over the walls and fell upon the defenders, the commander had dispatched Apollonius to the workshop of Archimedes. With the noise of battle in his ears and the smell of death in his nostrils, the boy ran through the streets, desperate to warn the genius of the enemy’s approach.

He found the famed mathematician bent over one of the great sand tables where he drew diagrams and performed elaborate computations. The wet sand was the perfect medium for temporarily holding his ideas until a scribe could record them on wax tablets. There was no scribe in the workshop on this night though. Archimedes was alone, drawing furiously with his finger, first in the air and then in the sand, which was already covered with an elaborate design of circles within circles. He did not look up when the boy burst into the workshop.

“My lord, the Romans are within the walls. You must flee to the fortress.”

The old man shook his head without raising his eyes, his jaw grinding with determination. “So close.” He pointed at the picture he had drawn. “It’s almost complete. I must finish it.”

“The Romans will kill you if you stay.” As if to underscore the urgency of the plea, the noise of fighting echoed in the street behind him. The enemy was close.

Archimedes waved a hand, dismissively. “I very much doubt that. Marcellus knows I’m far more valuable to him alive.”

Apollonius gaped in astonishment. “You would surrender to the Romans?”

“Romans. Greeks. Syracusians. It makes no differences. This…” He held his hands above the table. “This is all that matters.”

“You can finish it in the citadel,” the boy pleaded. He hastened forward, intending to obliterate the design and force the old man to comply, but a mere glimpse of what Archimedes had inscribed in the sand stopped him.

It was indescribably beautiful. Ten years later, he had no difficulty recalling it to mind, but that was perhaps not surprising since he had spent the better part of those years tracing the design, scratching it in the dirt and on tablets of soft clay, drawing it with ink upon leaves of papyrus.

Archimedes, sensing his intent, deflected him with a backhanded slap. The mathematician had seen more than seventy summers and the siege had left him weak and frail, but the intensity of the blow stunned the boy, leaving little question about the old man’s intention.

“Go boy! The Romans will spare me, but I do not think you will be so fortunate.” A shriek from the street outside, abruptly cut short, revealed that it was already too late for either of them to reach the citadel. Archimedes grabbed hold of his arm and propelled him deeper into the workshop sanctuary. “Hide,” he hissed.

Apollonius hid, scrambling beneath some half-finished contraption that rested on a wheeled platform. He was burrowing deeper into the shadows when he heard the voice.

“There you are, old man.”

The boy froze, then with painstaking care, turned around and crept out into the open until he could see what was happening.

A legionary stood in the doorway, blood dripping from the tip of his gladius. He was a tall man with features as shapeless as unleavened bread. That face was the only thing about the events of that night that the man the boy grew up to be could not recall, but the man’s eyes — charcoal-black, absorbing the flickering lamplight without even a glimmer of a reflection — those he remembered.

“Yes, here I am,” Archimedes said, disdainfully. “You have caught me. Now, run off and tell Marcellus where to find me.”

The soldier advanced into the room. His black eyes glanced at the table, scrutinizing the design. “You solved it,” he said, his tone grave. “Unfortunate.”

“The circles?” Apollonius could not see Archimedes’ face, but he heard the surprise in the old man’s voice. “You’re no centurion. Who are—?”

The man stepped close to Archimedes, so close that the boy could no longer see his bland face or jet-black eyes. “This is not for you.”

There was a crunching sound and Archimedes gave a loud sigh as the sword point burst from the center of his back.

Apollonius clamped his hands over his mouth to stifle a whimper of grief. As the old man crumpled to the floor, the killer wrenched his weapon free, and in the same motion, swiped the bloody blade across the design, obliterating it. Then, just as quickly as he had arrived, the man disappeared.

In the days that followed, as the boy scurried about in the darkness, hiding from the occupying Romans, he searched their faces, seeing something of the killer in every one, but none had his eyes.

It had taken him considerably longer to grasp the meaning behind the design that Archimedes had died for, but as he began to do so, peeling away the layers of the mystery, Apollonius understood why the mathematician had been willing to risk capture in order to see his work completed. What he could not understand, even ten years later, was why the black-eyed man would have wanted to destroy it.

Perhaps the answer to that riddle would become clear once he entered the vault.

That it was a vault, a storehouse of secrets, he could only infer. His study of the design had revealed many things to him — secrets woven into the fabric of human belief, hidden in the mathematical precision of the universe — but sometimes those messages were ambiguous, contradictory.

The journey had been long and full of peril, but the design he had glimpsed and studied and ultimately completed had not led him astray. He had found the vault right where he knew it would be. From a distance, he thought he was approaching a city, with great red towers looking out across the wilderness. An abandoned city, surely, for only savages inhabited the land through which he passed — foragers and hunters who moved with the seasons and followed the animal herds. As he drew near, he saw that the towers and pillars were merely rock formations, the citadels and fortresses carved from the landscape, not by men, but by the gods. What better place to hide the secrets of the cosmos?

Unfortunately, where was not as important as when, but there too, the design had not failed him.

He had crossed oceans in ships, and trekked across barren landscapes on foot, always guided by the stars, counting the days. As the voyage stretched out into weeks and months, he began to despair of reaching his destination in time. If he failed, the task would fall to someone else, and perhaps what he had learned would illuminate the path of some distant descendant. Or perhaps not. The design was more than just a map, more than just a key to unlock the door. It was a test of intellect, of worthiness.

A test he had passed, evidently. He was not late.

Apollonius approached the cave on the morning of the vernal equinox. It looked like nothing more than a scalloped recess, scooped out by the elements, a place for wild animals to take refuge from the sun, but up close he saw that it was a concealed passage leading deeper into the great fortress-shaped rock.

He coaxed his tinder into a flame on the end of a brand and crawled into the sloping passage. The red rock seemed to constrict around him, so tight that his shoulders were scraped raw, but he kept moving, kept pushing the torch ahead of him to light the way, trusting that the design had not led him astray. If he was wrong, if the passage closed in even more, he would be caught like a fish in a net, unable to extricate himself.

I’m not wrong, he told himself. This is just another test.

He shoved the torch forward again. The smoke from it was filling the passage, stinging his eyes, but it had not been smothered which meant that there was plenty of air to keep it burning. He pushed it out further and was about to squirm forward again when the flame abruptly disappeared, leaving him in darkness.

He whispered a curse, but kept moving forward, groping for the torch. Instead, his hands found nothing, not even the stone of the passage. He pondered this for a moment before grasping the significance of it. He had reached the end of the passage and the entrance to a much larger cave. He felt warm, humid air on his face, and heard the trickling of water all around. The torch, he surmised, had fallen down into the darkness to be extinguished in an unseen pool on the cavern floor.

No matter. He had several more in a sack which he dragged along behind him. He probed the darkness until he found the edge of the precipice. The walls beyond felt smooth, curving gently away, and although the cavern floor was out of reach, from the drip of water, he knew that it was not too much of a drop. He kept crawling until he was able to lower himself down, and then simply let go, sliding the rest of the way to splash into the knee-deep water.

Working by touch alone, careful to keep his equipment dry, he got another torch lit, and in its faint orange-yellow glow, got his first look at where Archimedes’ design had brought him.

The cavern was not large, the walls only a stone’s throw apart, but the space was completely open. He realized immediately that he was standing inside a sphere too perfect to be the work of nature. Strange relief patterns, squares of varying depth, adorned the walls, forming a maze through which dribbles of water oozed down the walls to accumulate at the bottom of the sphere. At the very center of the pool, where the water was surely deepest, his first torch now rotated lazily.

The water must be draining out there, he thought. Otherwise, this whole chamber would be flooded.

After a moment of watching the torch spin, he realized that the water was draining away faster than the seepage replenishing it.

This revelation filled him with excitement. He understood now how his predecessor, the man who had unknowingly launched him on this quest, must have felt on that day when he had grasped the relationship between volume and density while bathing, a day that, if the stories were true, had seen him running naked through the streets shouting “Eureka! Eureka!”

The chamber would be dry soon, and then he would use Archimedes’ design to unlock the vault.

“This is not for you.”

The voice startled him, nearly causing him to drop his second torch. He whirled toward the opening high on the wall above, seized by fear, his hand instinctively seeking the sheathed dagger that hung from his belt, but there was no one there.

Those words. He remembered them vividly, too. Was that all this was? His imagination running wild? The sound of the water playing tricks on his ears? The ghost of a memory, reaching out across the years to frighten him?

He took a deep breath, then another, and when his racing heart was becalmed, he turned back to the center.

The man with black eyes stood there.

Ten years had passed and the boy Apollonius had grown up, but the man with the face that looked like nothing and no one, and the eyes that seemed to drink the life out of anyone who gazed into them, had not changed at all. He looked exactly the same as he had that fateful night when he had put his sword through the chest of Archimedes of Syracuse.

The same sword that he held in his right hand.

Apollonius threw up his hands in a show of surrender. “Mercy, sir. Please. I’ve come so far.”

“I know,” the man replied, his voice as flat and emotionless as his visage. “I had hoped that you would fail.”

“But why? I have passed the test. I am worthy to enter the vault.”

“This is not for you.”

The blade flashed and the torch fell from Apollonius’ hands, plunging the chamber once more into darkness. As his life drained away, along with the water in which he lay, Apollonius heard a sound like the grinding of a millstone. The vault was opening, but he would not live to see what lay within.

First Officer Jeanne Carrera was surprised to see Captain Seth Norris already seated in the cockpit, idly thumbing through a printed weather report. Norris was punctual, always arriving on time but he rarely showed up early and never got to a plane ahead of her.

“Turning over a new leaf?” she remarked as she stowed her carry-on.

“Hmm?” Norris glanced up and offered a polite smile.

“You’re early. You’re never early.”

He shook his head dismissively. “Traffic was lighter than I expected. I made good time.”

She settled into the right seat. “How was your weekend?”

“Good. Amelia’s birthday was yesterday. I’m still coming down from all the sugar.”

Carrera laughed, but her mirth hid a strange disquiet. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something felt wrong, like déjà vu but different. She knew that Norris’ had been looking forward to his daughter’s party almost as much as he had been dreading having to interact with the eight-, now nine-year-old girl’s mother — his ex-wife. Nothing strange about that.

So why do I feel like I stepped into the wrong scene in a movie?

She wondered, for a fleeting instant, if she was dreaming but the moment passed as quickly as it had come and she dismissed her reaction.

Yet, as they worked through the pre-flight checklist, exchanging idle banter, the feeling kept coming back intermittently, like the flicker of a fluorescent light bulb about to die. Eventually, Norris took note.

“Are you feeling okay, Jeanne?”

There it is again. What the hell is going on? She managed a wan smile and a shrug. “Yeah. Just…weird.”

The captain straightened in his seat, his expression instantly serious. “What’s weird?”

“It’s nothing. Just a little spooked.”

“A little spooked isn’t nothing. Your subconscious might be picking up on something that your conscious mind is missing.”

She laughed, though it was an uncomfortable sound. “Since when did you become so superstitious?”

Even as she said it, she realized that the source of the strange feeling was Norris himself.

Amelia’s birthday.

Norris never called his daughter by her given name. Whenever he spoke of her, he almost always said, “my little girl” or sometimes “my daughter.” When he called her by name, which was rare, he always used the pet name “Mellie.” But today, he had called her “Amelia.”

Despite the still-unexplained incongruity, Carrera felt an odd sense of relief. Simply knowing what it was that felt out of place had eased her concerns. She felt as if a bothersome sliver had finally been tweezed out of her subconscious.

“It’s nothing,” she reiterated, and this time she meant it. Maybe the birthday girl had scolded him about his refusal to use her proper name. Carrera could remember when she had demanded that her own parents cease and desist from using nicknames. I was probably about the same age as Amelia.

“You’re sure?” Norris pressed. “Four hundred and twenty-two people are about to put their lives in our hands, so if for any reason you don’t want to fly, you need to let me know.”

“Seth, it’s fine. I’m good.” And she was, even though she didn’t know why Norris had started referring to his daughter in a different way, or why he had shown up early when he almost never did, or why he was suddenly insisting that she pay attention to her intuition when she had never known him to do that….

Even though there was no explanation for any of those things, the satisfaction of having figured it out was enough to put her mind at ease.

Mostly.

They concluded the pre-flight checks and finished boarding, and as Norris greeted the passengers and briefed them on the itinerary for the trans-Pacific flight, Carrera made the final preparations for take-off. As she watched him work and listened to his voice on the public address system, she found herself scrutinizing everything he did, every minor perceived deviation from his normal routine. She could not tell if he was acting differently, or if she was merely being hypersensitive, but from a technical standpoint, his flying was spot on.

About two hours after take-off, Norris handed the controls over to Carrera and rose from his chair to stretch his legs. There was nothing unusual about this. Flying, particularly on a long trans-oceanic route, was mostly a struggle against tedium. There was very little for the pilot to do aside from remaining vigilant and ready to respond to the unexpected, which could mean anything from steering around pockets of turbulence to coping with mechanical or electrical failures. Carrera focused her attention on the instrument panel while Norris stepped into the lavatory.

Although her initial discomfort had long since passed, Carrera continued to be plagued by the surreal sense of dislocation she had experienced before take-off. She could not shake the feeling that she was actually asleep and dreaming everything. The phenomena was so persistent that she felt compelled to test the reality of her circumstances by checking to see if the printed weather report made sense. She had heard that, in dreams, written text often changed or was illegible, but the weather reports were completely normal. She was not dreaming then, but she definitely felt like she was in the Twilight Zone.

“Still spooked?” Norris asked from behind her.

“Is it that obvious?” She smiled without looking back and quickly added. “Not spooked exactly, just feeling a bit…odd.”

“If I may ask, when did it start?”

Carrera craned her head around to look at him. Norris was standing just behind her, his arms crossed over his chest. The pose was all wrong; he never stood like that. Or did he? She shook her head. “Honestly, it was when you called your daughter ‘Amelia.’”

“Ah. And that’s not something I usually do.” Norris said it more like a statement than a question. He tilted his head back as if embarrassed by the mistake. “Well, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.”

Carrera’s forehead creased in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Norris smiled and then moved with the speed of striking viper. Carrera did not even have time to yelp in alarm. The captain clapped his left hand over her mouth, stifling any potential cry for assistance. His right drove something into the side of her neck.

Carrera felt a sharp twinge, like a bee sting, followed by a bloom of icy cold radiating away from the spot. She caught a glimpse of a discarded syringe falling to the carpeted floor, and then his right arm snaked around to immobilize her. She tried to struggle out of his grasp, but whatever he had injected into her neck was already having an effect. Her muscles felt leaden. Even breathing was an ordeal.

She gasped a word, a single question that was muffled by the hand still clamped over her mouth. Why?

Norris however seemed to understand. As darkness closed in from the edges of her vision, Carrera thought she heard him say, “Not for you.”