The Pharos Objective by David Sakmyster Read Free Book Online

and the drawing took on a life of its own, tugging him into it.
    A humid blast of air, the scent of cocoa and papaya, the buzzing of insects, the wind through the palms.
    He gasped, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “No,” he whispered, but then he realized this, too, was inevitable. He wasn’t done suffering, paying for his mistakes.
    “No . . .”
    “Yes! Come on!” Phoebe bounds up the steps ahead of him. She’s only twelve, but she is so quick. Her auburn hair is tied back in a pink scrunchy, her t-shirt stained with mud and dust, her jeans rolled up over her ankles. Caleb follows more cautiously, seeking precise footholds on the crumbling stairs. He pauses and looks back down, forty feet below, to where the jungle greedily consumes everything beyond the base of the pyramid, stretching for miles in every direction.
    Back to the north, almost half a mile, is their base camp. Their mother is there with George Waxman and two others. They are all so excited; this is the first inland mission for the Morpheus Initiative. Last month they spent a week in seclusion in Mexico City while Phoebe and Caleb stayed in their room, subsisting on enchiladas and bad attempts at American hamburgers, doing nothing but playing War and Go Fish, and reading, of course. Caleb was always reading. Seven books that week, much to Phoebe’s dismay. But then it happened
:
Helen came in one morning, looking haggard, but excited.
    “We found it!” she exclaimed, and then brought Caleb and Phoebe into the smoke-filled conference room they’d reserved, a room full of drawings, taped sequentially on the walls, all showing a pyramid and a black door. Then distant shots of landscape, and colored thumbtacks placed on geological maps.
    “Found it,” she repeated, and approached Waxman where he pored over a map with a compass and a protractor.
    “Here!” he announced. “We’ll make our approach along this trail, then plot out the course to the tomb.”
    “Tomb?” Phoebe asked, eyes brightening. She was definitely her father’s child. She loved anything ancient, especially anything that might be full of mummies and treasure.
    Now, a month later, in the heart of the darkest, deepest valley in the jungle, they’ve found the small pyramid, the tomb of the sixth-century Mayan King Nu’a Hunasco, inside of which lies the vast wealth he had entombed with himself and his wives.
    The knocking sounds of the recompression chamber thrummed in his skull. White walls bleached over the jungle hues for a moment, and Caleb tried to focus, making a half-hearted attempt to re-entangle himself in the present.
Focus on the vibrations here, in this chamber, the subtle movements of the waves tugging at the hull.
But it was no use. The white chipped away, layer by layer, revealing the alluring scene painted behind it, impatient to be viewed . . .
    Caleb and Phoebe wait on the stones at the top of the tomb an hour after dawn, surrounded by bugs, swarms already alert and hungry, while their mother and the others are still back in their tents, just waking up
.
“Bug spray’s wearing off.” Caleb slaps at plump mosquitoes with annoyance, trying to imagine some purpose to their lives, some ultimate destiny determining the course of their aerial struggles. He sighs and approaches his sister, and then they both put their hands, palms out, on the cool onyx slab that served as the door to Nu’a Hunasco’s tomb.
    “So now what?”
    Phoebe grins. “We both saw it, right?”
    “I saw something,” Caleb admits. “You were the one that drew it.” He looks around, checking the vine-consumed alcoves, the shadows deep with mystery.
    “There, I think.” Phoebe points to the uppermost stone on the left side of the door—an octagonal block, coated with moss. Caleb pulls out his pocket knife and tries to reach it.
    “Too high.”
    “Let me get on your shoulders.”
    Caleb sighs. “All right, but hurry. I don’t want Mom and George to find out we’re