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‘I’ll heal you if that happens,’ Marina offers over her shoulder.
‘I don’t understand,’ Adam says. He turns to look up at the temple, his hands on his hips. He looks nervous. ‘Why would you even want me to go in there? It’s a Loric place.’
‘Like that Phiri bitch said, you’re part Garde now,’ I explain. ‘You’re not Loric, but you’ve got Legacies.’
‘I’ve got one Legacy,’ Adam clarifies. ‘And it wasn’t even mine to start with. I – I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to have it.’
‘Doesn’t matter. If I understood what Malcolm told us – and I guess that’s maybe a big if – there’s a living piece of Lorien in that temple. That’s where our Legacies come from. Which means you’re connected to it, just like us.’
‘Everything has happened for a reason,’ Marina says as she climbs up on to our ship’s hull. She looks back at us, a thoughtful frown straining her soft features. ‘Just look at Eight’s prophecies.’
Adam looks unconvinced. He swallows hard.
‘We don’t know what’s waiting for us in there or what to expect. We might need you in there. So man up.’
I’m not sure how Adam will respond to being called out. A smile flickers across his face, like that one in the cockpit when he was spacing out.
‘I’m in,’ he says. ‘Assuming that invisible wall doesn’t burn my face off.’
We walk over to the ship to help Marina. She pulls the Chest with our gathered Inheritance out of the cockpit and floats it down to me with telekinesis. Then, she carefully floats Eight’s body out of the ship. She has him hover right in front of her, almost like she was carrying him in her arms. To my surprise, she unzips the top half of the body bag. There’s Eight, looking just as he did when he was alive, those Mogadorian electrodes preserving him.
‘Marina? What are you doing?’
‘I want him to see the Sanctuary,’ she says, then gently smooths some of Eight’s curly hair back from his forehead. ‘You’re going home,’ she whispers to him.
Marina climbs down from the ship, focusing her telekinesis so that Eight’s body stays with her the entire way. There’s a look of deep purpose on her face, and she doesn’t even look at me or Adam before walking towards the temple. I realize that she’s been waiting days for this moment, the time when she can properly lay Eight to rest. Wordlessly, Adam and I join her somber procession.
As we approach the edge of the land the Mogs cleared, the wild and overgrown temple looming before us, I feel a strange tickle against my chest. I look down to find John’s pendant glowing brightly and rising up against the front of my tank top. I adjust my shirt and the pendant floats out in front of me, straining against its chain. It’s like it’s magnetically drawn to the Sanctuary. The two pendants Marina wears are doing the same thing.
Adam gives me a look and arches an eyebrow at my gravity-defying jewelry. I shrug in response. This is all new to me, too.
Marina is the first to pass over the threshold. The force field appears again, cobalt and electric, and there’s a static popping as she passes through it. Loose tangles of her hair charged by the energy float up around her head, but otherwise nothing happens.
I’m only a few steps behind her. The force field gives my skin a fizzy feeling. It only lasts a second and then I’m standing on the other side, the cracked and vine-riddled steps of the Sanctuary rising up before me.
I turn back to check on Adam. He’s stopped right in front of the force field. Cautiously, he extends his index finger and makes contact with the energy. It pops loudly and he jumps back, but he isn’t scorched like the other Mogadorian was.
‘You’re sure this is a good idea?’
‘Don’t be a wimp,’ I reply.
Adam sighs, steels himself, and reaches forward again, this time with his whole hand. The energy crackles and sparks against his pale skin way more than it did with Marina and me, but it lets him through without incinerating him. I grin at him and he gives me a relieved look, wiping some sweat off his forehead.
‘Now what?’ he asks.
Marina has paused a few yards in front of us, still floating Eight’s body. She reaches behind her head and takes off one of her pendants. Loosed from her neck, the pendant bobs slowly towards the stone steps of the temple, and then begins to rise up them.
‘We climb,’ Marina says.
Her pendant glints blue in the sunlight and it occurs to me that the Loralite is glowing a little brighter. Like it’s charged up or something. I feel it, too. The Sanctuary is giving off some kind of energy beyond just the force field. There’s a sense that every cell in my body has been suddenly invigorated. I glance up to the sky and know that I could call up a larger storm than ever before. I feel more in touch with my Legacies. And somehow, it all seems so natural – like I’ve known this feeling before.
Marina was right, I realize. We’re home.
25
It takes us about thirty minutes to climb to the top of the Mayan pyramid. I try passing the time by counting the steps, but I lose track somewhere around two hundred. There are sections where the stone steps have crumbled into ankle-twisting crevices, and other spots where rain has eroded the ancient stonework down to smooth slopes. We use the overgrown vines that spill forth from the jungle to assist us over the difficult parts, ascending hand over hand. We don’t talk much, except to tell each other when a particularly tricky section of steps is coming. Somehow, it seems rude to disturb the silence of the Sanctuary.
We take a break once we reach the top of the temple. Marina is sweating from the heat, the climb and the exertion of using her telekinesis to carry Eight’s body for so long. I set down the Chest I’ve been carrying and flex my fingers. Adam stands with his hands on his hips and gazes out over the temple’s edge.
‘Some view,’ he says.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I agree.
At the temple’s pinnacle, we are above the treetops. It’s possible to see beyond the overgrown trees that crowd the pyramid, beyond the stripped ring of land the Mogs cleared and out to the rest of the Mayan ruins and the thriving jungle beyond. I imagine some old Mayan ruler standing up here and gazing out at his domain. And then, I imagine that same ruler turning his eyes to the heavens as a Loric ship descends from the clouds. The image seems so real and vivid; I get the strange feeling that my imagination didn’t just conjure it up. Centuries ago, something like that really happened here – the Loric visited, and the Sanctuary remembers.
‘You guys, look at this,’ Marina calls to us.
Adam and I turn away from the view and walk across the flat roof of the temple. At the centermost point is a stone door. At first, I think the door is carved from the same pale stone as the rest of the pyramid, but as I draw closer it becomes obvious that the door is smooth and unblemished, the ivory-colored material not showing the same effects of age as the rest of the temple. The door may have been here for some time, yet it’s apparent that it was plunked down on top of the already built pyramid.
The door doesn’t lead anywhere, a fact Marina demonstrates by walking in a circle around it. Her floating pendant hovers in front of the door, waiting for us to catch up.
I stop in front of the door and examine its surface. It is completely smooth – no handles, knobs, or anything like that – with the exception of nine round divots arranged in a circle at the door’s center.
‘The pendants,’ I say, brushing my fingers over cool stone.
Marina plucks her pendant out of the air and guides the stone into one of the notches. It fits perfectly and emits a crisp clicking sound. The door doesn’t move, though.
‘We only have three,’ I say, grimacing. ‘It isn’t enough.’
‘We have to try,’ Marina says, already pulling off her remaining pendant.
She’s right. We’ve come too far to turn back now. I pull off John’s pendant and fit it into the notches on the stone door.
‘Here goes nothing,’ I say, as I push the final pendant home.
Immediately, the Loralite stones begin to glow with the same energy as the force field. The glow spreads between the stones, connecting them, the energy filling the gaps where we’re missing pendants. The circular symbol that takes shape on the door reminds me of the scars we get on our legs when one of the Garde dies.
And then, with an ancient grinding noise, the stone door slides down into the temple, leaving behind only a thin frame. Instead of jungle through the doorframe, I see a dusty room lit by the dim blue glow of Loralite.
‘I thought we’d need more,’ I say. ‘We don’t even have a majority.’
‘Or maybe the Sanctuary knows how badly we need to enter,’ Marina suggests.
‘It’s some kind of portal,’ Adam says, squinting into the room beyond the doorframe. ‘Is that inside the temple?’
‘Let’s find out,’ I say. I pick up Marina’s Chest and step over the threshold.
Immediately, I get that disorienting, end-over-end, roller-coaster feeling that I used to have whenever Eight would use his teleportation Legacy. It only lasts a second, and then I’m blinking my eyes to adjust to the dimmer lighting of this inner sanctum. My ears pop from the pressure change, and I get the sense that I just stepped through a portal into the middle of the Mayan temple. Or maybe, considering the way the jungle sounds have been completely sealed out, we’re even deeper than that. Maybe this Sanctuary is completely beneath the pyramid.
