after him. Nina and Eddie followed, and the four met again in Nina’s office.
‘Okay,’ said Eddie, ‘what the hell was all that about?’
‘A good question,’ said Penrose. ‘I take it you’ve realised something, Nina.’
‘I think so,’ she replied, shoving the papers – and the sandwich – on her desk aside to clear a space. ‘Macy, put the case down here.’
Macy obeyed. Nina opened the case and regarded the two crude statues. ‘When Bellfriar mentioned carbon nanotubes, it made me think of something I’ve seen before. Excalibur.’
‘Excalibur?’ exclaimed Macy. ‘What, the Excalibur? As in King Arthur?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Eddie.
‘Wow! I knew you found King Arthur’s tomb, but I didn’t know you found Excalibur as well.’
‘We did, but we . . . lost it,’ said Nina. That wasn’t quite true, as she knew exactly where it was: she and Eddie had decided to hide it again to keep it out of the wrong hands. ‘But it had some very special properties . . . and they sounded a lot like what Bellfriar just described. Eddie, can you close the blinds? I need the room as dark as possible.’
Eddie began to lower the blinds. ‘We’ve been married for a year and a half – we don’t have to do it with the lights off any more.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Nina, not amused. ‘Ignore him, he’s joking,’ she added to Macy, sensing that the younger, far less inhibited woman was about to ask a very personal question. ‘But one of Excalibur’s properties was that it was made from a superconductive metal – and it could conduct more than just electricity.’
The blinds were now closed, the office in a gloomy twilight. Nina reached for a statue. ‘Okay, let’s see if I’m right . . . ’
She picked it up – and the stone glowed faintly, the light quickly fading to nothing.
Penrose’s eyes widened, and Macy gasped. ‘What was that?’ she said.
‘That was earth energy,’ said Nina. ‘It’s a network of lines of natural power that flow around the planet, and converge in certain places. If you’re in one of those places and the earth energy is strong enough, you can tap into it and use it – if you have a superconducting material to make the connection.’
‘Should Miss Sharif be seeing this?’ asked Penrose, a stern tinge to his voice making it clear that he thought she definitely shouldn’t.
‘I’ll vouch for her,’ said Nina, giving Macy a quick reassuring smile. ‘Besides, she discovered this statue, and I gave her the job of finding out more about it – I think this counts. And it beats making PowerPoint slides.’
‘Nice slides, by the way,’ Eddie told Macy with a grin. ‘Almost no spelling mistakes!’
Macy pouted as Nina returned the first statue to the case and picked up the other. Again, a shimmering glow ran briefly over the figure’s surface before disappearing. Nina was about to put the statue back down, then changed her mind and picked up the first once more. This time, nothing happened – until she put the two figurines together, linking them shoulder to shoulder in the same way as Bellfriar’s slide. Both statues glowed, the light slightly stronger than before. The effect lasted for a few seconds before dwindling.
Macy hesitantly touched the figures, but nothing happened. ‘Why did they do that? And how come it never happened before? Dr Bellfriar had them for months, and he never saw anything like this.’
‘It never happened before because only certain people can cause the effect,’ said Nina. ‘People like . . . me. I don’t know how or why – the best theory is that it’s genetic – but there’s something about my body’s bioelectric field that lets me channel earth energy through a superconductor.’ She opted, for now, not to explain to her friend that her genetic heritage went all the way back to the lost civilisation of Atlantis, destroyed eleven thousand years before – and that the actions of other Atlantean descendants had almost brought about a global genocide. ‘We discovered it when we found Excalibur.’
‘But you’ve held the statues before,’ said Eddie. ‘Loads of times. They never lit up like that.’
‘Maybe they did, and we just didn’t notice. Open the blinds.’ Nina put down the figures as Eddie did so, daylight flooding back into the room. She picked up the statues again. If the strange glow had returned, it was impossible to tell, the feeble effect overwhelmed even by indirect sunlight from outside.
‘So how are we going to proceed?’ asked Penrose. ‘The statues