Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,100

self-loathing, she had one more question. “Are they quartz?”

“They’re part quartz, of that I’m sure,” Weston said, “but they taste of salt if you lick them.”

“That’s why the air is so fresh. They’re ionizing it.”

Weston nodded and took another deep breath. “Invigorating.”

Sara didn’t think so. It was as though the crystals in the cave, having realigned her neural pathways, had corrected the way she sensed the world, making her whole and healthy. As the detachment from the sensory input she’d been born with grew more profound, nausea twisted in her gut. She had never experienced the world through normal senses. People suffering from a blocked ear often found themselves disoriented and dizzy. Sometimes sick. Sara thought this was far worse. And for the first time in her life she realized that having the mixed-up senses that caused her to lose sleep, appear spacey, and get annoyed at small things other people failed to notice, wasn’t a curse. It was who she was.

How she’d been made.

And like a person switching abruptly from espresso to decaf, she didn’t handle the transition with grace. The room swirled before her eyes, moving back and forth like the carriage of a typewriter in the hands of a frantic author. She fought the urge to fall to her knees. To puke. She couldn’t show Weston her weakness.

She took a deep breath. The air, at least, was cool, clean, and well oxygenated. With each breath she felt her emotions level out. As her mind cleared, she realized that distraction had been her key to ignoring the world through her previously cross-wired senses. She would make it her key to ignoring a world experienced through normal senses, too.

She opened her eyes and looked down over the edge. A river flowed around the outskirts of the city. It entered through the far wall, flowing from a tunnel that had been arched with large stones fit perfectly together. The flow wrapped around the city, nearly all the way around, before exiting through a second tunnel, identical to the first. It was a moat, a fast-moving wall of water. It seemed more like a fortress than a city, and for a moment she wondered how the Neanderthal civilization had been wiped out.

Competition, she thought. They had been starved to death as humanity moved into the surrounding area, using up resources. Afraid of annihilation, the Neanderthals must have hunkered down while their population dwindled until just a few were left. And then . . . either a hyperevolution or genetic assimilation over a few short generations led to something different. Something capable of wiping out entire villages.

A superpredator.

But when Weston entered the picture, when he brought his human genetics and skills to the superpredator table, the small group of superpredators had entered a season of plasticity. The population boomed. And would continue to grow until conflict with the outside world, with humanity, brought the Neanderthal to the brink of extinction once again. Of course, they’ll have the run of the planet soon enough, she thought.

Another flicker of rainbow light caught her attention and brought her eyes to the city’s center where atop the peak of the hill, a tall temple stood. Five towers rose from the temple, each looking like a serrated stone spear tip. The design seemed familiar to Sara. She’d seen it before. On a postcard from a college roommate who’d traveled . . . where? Then it came to her. “Angkor Wat.”

“Very good,” Weston said.

She glanced at him and realized she might be able to heave him over the edge. Then she saw the gun in his crossed arms, still trained on her. He’d thought the same thing.

“Have you heard,” Weston said, “that Angkor Wat was built to symbolically represent Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods? That’s actually incorrect. Most people think the spires represent mountains, but what they don’t know is that Angkor Wat is a crude facsimile of the original temple constructed here. The first humans to reach this far into Asia were enslaved. Escapees spread the story of this place to humanity and a religion was born, or at least added to. This is the legendary Mount Meru. Revered by Hindu and Buddhist alike. The axis of all real and mythological universes. Surya the sun god is said to circumambulate Mount Meru daily.

“As you can see . . .” Weston motioned his arms at the array of circular holes cut into the mountain through which the sun spilled. “The sun does indeed walk around the