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“They’re the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors that come forth from their burial places to roam the countryside at night,” Alani said.
Vernon looked a little nervous. “Do they roam in caves?”
Alani nodded. “Absolutely. Caves are what they like best of all.”
Vernon looked up in the air. “Oh Lordy. This just keeps getting worse and worse.” He narrowed his eyes at Alani. “Are you joshing me? Are they for real?”
“They’re no less real than Bigfoot.”
“Oh Lordy,” Vernon repeated. “Assuming we get through the maze without getting raped by a Bigfoot or a ghost, what’s next?”
Emerson pointed to the section above Sexton’s marked Ola’a. “We have to navigate through a series of lava falls.”
“Lava falls,” Vernon said. “Seriously.”
“There hasn’t been any lava in the Kazumura for five hundred years, so they’re more or less just cliffs we’ll need to scale. There are at least twelve falls in this section, some as tall as forty-five feet. Hopefully, we’ll see something while we’re exploring that leads us to where they’re keeping Riley.”
“It’s a good theory,” Alani said. “But what if we’re wrong and Riley isn’t there?”
Emerson shrugged. “We have until morning to try. If we fail, then we still have the option of bargaining with Tin Man.”
“It’s a three-hour drive just to Volcano,” Vernon said. “By the time we get to the Kazumura it’ll be past midnight. That’s going to put us way behind schedule.”
Emerson smiled. “Not to worry. I’ve already arranged for a ride and supplies. We should be at the entrance to Sexton’s Maze in less than an hour.”
—
Riley jiggled the handcuffs binding her to the heavy metal desk in the corner of the cavern and looked around the room. Tin Man, Bart Young, and the other Rough Riders were nowhere to be seen. Berta was at a workstation across the room, calibrating what looked to be a large, complicated bomb. A couple dozen similar devices were stacked neatly nearby.
“What are you working on?” Riley asked.
Berta continued her work. “It’s a delivery system for the strange matter.”
“You mean a bomb.”
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“Then you’re Bart Young’s bomb maker.”
Berta looked up. “I’m a mechanical engineer. Spiro and I spent the past ten years designing the technology to harvest and contain the strange matter.”
“Spiro is dead,” Riley said.
Berta went back to her work. Riley guessed she had nothing more to say on that subject.
“If you’ve really discovered strange matter, you deserve a Nobel Prize in Physics,” Riley said.
“I didn’t discover anything. It was discovered more than a century ago when the U.S. government was exploring the area known today as Yellowstone. Of course, all they knew at the time was that once in a very rare while a little blob of matter, which was like nothing ever seen before, would bubble to the surface of a mud pit or a hot spring and, well, you’ve seen what it can do under the right conditions.”
“It was horrible,” Riley said. “What did they think it was?”
“They didn’t know. It was impossible to collect and study because it bubbled to the surface so rarely and randomly and always in such small quantities. The reaction would be over in seconds and, as you saw, there was nothing left to study. Later, they discovered more in Hawaii and then in Samoa and so on. The government decided to create the National Park system to protect and study the mysterious substance that had such an enormous destructive potential. They didn’t know what it was at the time. They only knew that it was connected to volcanic activity. The real breakthrough was in 1970.”
“What happened in 1970?” Riley asked.
“We realized that certain volcanoes were formed over mantle plumes and were drawing magma directly from the earth’s core.”
“Cosmic leftovers from the big bang,” Riley said.
