Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Chapter 6

  Dream #19: I’m in homeroom. It’s morning. All the desks have names on them, like Mom has on her desk at work. But the kids are sitting in different places from where they regularly sit, and when I go to my desk a girl is already there and her name is on the desk too. I check all the desks and my name isn’t on any of them. I think I’ve been expelled, then a kid tells me that my new place is at the front of the classroom so I go look at the teacher’s desk and my name is on it.

  Friday. My only chance to get back inside the ToT apartment and see this crazy-ass pyramid for myself. Over breakfast I could hardly contain myself. I was itching to crawl down the tunnel (though I couldn’t have imagined myself feeling that way a few weeks earlier) and I think Mom could sense my antsy-ness, but I passed it off as Christmastime excitement. She smiled at me like I was her cute little pumpkin again. I swear she almost pinched my cheeks. Oh wait – there was going to be plenty of that down in Florida on the weekend.

  She closed the front door behind her and I looked at the time on my phone. Give it two minutes, I thought, just in case she’s forgotten something and comes back to get it. A buzz. George had responded to my FB friend request so I sent him the photo of the page filled with Greek text and asked him if it was a big deal to translate it for me. Then I went into the tunnel, armed with the screwdriver and an insane confidence that I was going to get to the bottom of all this insane stuff.

  When I reached the grille I listened intently for a while. The last thing I wanted was to get caught. But there was no sign of life in there. I removed the grille quickly and crawled through into the musty dining room. Looking at the table and thinking back to the first time I saw the Temple of Truth members sitting around it holding hands in the middle of the night, something struck me. It was hard to put my finger on it. Although it looked like a dining room, it didn’t feel like one. I went into the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. They were all empty. So was the fridge. What’s more, it wasn’t even switched on. The under-sink garbage was pristine. Whoever “lived” here certainly didn’t eat here. Ever.

  This was bizarre enough in itself, but it wasn’t why I was here, so I made my way carefully along the hallway past the identical bedrooms. The front door beckoned up ahead. If it opened now and someone came in, I’d be screwed.

  Keep it together, Kari...

  I reached the door to the pyramid room and turned the handle. Suddenly my phone beeped loudly. It was a Facebook message. Oh-em-gee, Kari – you frickin idiot! Why didn’t you put it on vibrate? I scrambled to get it out of my jeans pocket. As I was muting it, I saw that it was George replying to my translation question. I glanced at the front door. It wasn’t exactly the ideal time to read stuff on FB, but as usual I couldn’t resist and clicked on the message.

  George said how it was lucky he was at his grandparents’ place because he was really struggling to translate the text himself. But there was a good reason why. The page contained a section of the Minotaur myth, a story he was very familiar with. But the problem was that the text was written in ancient Greek. Not some kind of modern approximation of ancient Greek, but Greek that was actually written 2,500 years ago. He said that his grandfather wanted to know which book it was reproduced in. And that’s when it dawned on me that the book I’d photographed wasn’t a reproduction at all. It was literally twenty-five centuries old!

  I went into the living room and looked across the bookcase shelves. The Greek book was easy to spot, so I pulled it out and opened the cover. I was looking for a title page, a copyright symbol or something that would disprove what I was thinking. The leather creaked and crackled. This time I handled it a lot more carefully – no way did I want to be responsible for ruining a cultural artifact. But there was no sign that the book was a copy. In fact, now that I was looking more closely at the lettering inside, I could tell that it was handwritten. I couldn’t even imagine what a book like this would be worth. And here it was, sitting in a bookcase with a whole bunch of other volumes that could be just as valuable.

  I wondered if it would be obvious if I were to take one of the smaller, less conspicuous ones away with me. Maybe the one in French? Surely they’d never know...

  I heard a creak coming from above me. The kind of noise that you hear all the time in an apartment building and never notice. But this one brought me back to reality. This was no time to act like I was hanging out in a reading library. I impulsively grabbed the small French book, shifted the rest of the row slightly to get rid of the space, and put the big Greek one back on its shelf.

  Glancing nervously at the front door, I tiptoed toward the pyramid room. Inside, the sight that met my eyes made my blood run cold. It was just an enormous empty room. The pyramid was either never there, or, unbelievably, had gone.

  I was in such a state of disbelief that I even walked into the middle of the room, feeling around like a blind woman in case the pyramid was there but invisible. Honestly, it would have been a better explanation than the other alternatives: that Cruz had hallucinated the whole thing, he had lied, he had gone crazy, or that the pyramid had actually vanished.

  I walked around the enormous room, totally bewildered. The room itself was exactly how Cruz had described it. The windows were boarded up and the walls were bare. The large black-and-white floor tiles made an almost hypnotic pattern. I felt like I was a pawn on a huge, freaky, empty chessboard. Then I noticed something on one of the tiles – the black one right at the center of the room. As I walked toward it, I saw a twinkling. I crouched down to get a closer look. Embedded precisely in the center of the center tile was a tiny crystal. I ran my finger over it. The raised part was a geometrically perfect four-sided point that was almost sharp to the touch at its very tip. It was incredibly pure and beautiful. It sparkled like a... like a... could it be a diamond? I tried to pick it out with my fingernails, but couldn’t. A diamond is set in a ring with the narrower part facing downward and the smooth facets on the surface, but this was the opposite way around. Somehow the wider part was inside the tile, making it impossible to remove.

  Bending down more, I put my cheek to the floor to look at it from the side. It was barely visible, protruding by maybe an eighth of an inch. Then I realized that it formed an exquisite miniature pyramid. WTF? I took out a quarter and ran the face across the top of the crystal. It scratched the metal easily, making a big scar across George Washington’s cheek. But when I checked the crystal, sure enough it was totally undamaged. It really did seem to be a diamond. I spent a few seconds wondering what it all meant, but there were just too many questions. If I was going to have any hope of answering them, I knew that I absolutely had to find Noon.

  I left the room, switched off the light and closed the door. I really wanted to hang around there and explore the only thing that was worth exploring in the entire apartment – the bookcases. But it was too risky, especially being there on my own. So I crawled back into the tunnel. This time I managed to replace the grille without needing the screws to hold it. Could be handy if ever I need to open it fast.

  As soon as I was back home I called Cruz to tell him about the pyramid.

  My voicemail went something like this: “Hey. Yo.” (Wonderful, he’s going to think I’m making fun of him.) “So, like, I went back to the apartment to check out the pyramid and, well, crazy – it’s, like, gone. And even more crazy – there was this tiny pyramid-shaped diamond in the middle of the floor. So, like, call me back whenever.”

  What a loser I am. Yesterday’s uncomfortable goodbye had gotten the better of me and I sounded like dork. As the day progressed, things got worse, because he never called back. I knew he wasn’t working that day as he only had Monday and Tuesday shifts in the small restaurant he’d just started working in. So I could tell he was screening my calls. And then at 10 p.m. I got the confirmation that things had taken a turn for the weird between us – the following text message:

  Got yr msg. Ask Noon, I guess.

  Oh, man. Cruz is amazing.
How can I be messing this up? Noon is somehow inside me, like a brain implant. Maybe going away for a couple of weeks over Christmas will clear the air. Clear my head. Clear Noon out of my system.