The Coordinate, page 21
He returned to the main road, walked back toward Stonehenge and disappeared into the long-grass field surrounding the ancient monument. Guards patrolled the area, so Logan stayed low to the ground, repeatedly dropping to his stomach to avoid detection. Steadily, he moved closer to the stones.
When Logan got within sprinting distance of Stonehenge, he laid flat on the ground and pulled out the pamphlet again. He needed to orient himself to which side of the monument he was coming up on and where the stones he needed to touch would be located. Feeling like he might only get one shot at this, he needed to get it right the first time.
In Norway, to activate the portals, Emma first touched the rock corresponding with the Norwegian Albo’s home, TYC 129-75-1, then she touched all the other stones in random order, before finishing by touching TYC 129-75-1 one more time. Assuming it was the same here, all he had to do was figure out which rock in the Stonehenge diagram was the equivalent of TYC 129-75-1, a star in the Orion constellation found just below and slightly to the left of Betelgeuse in the night sky.
Logan looked at the Stonehenge illustration in the brochure, and sure enough, there was a small bluestone just below and slightly to the left of the stone that matched Orion’s right shoulder, or Betelgeuse. That small bluestone corresponded almost perfectly with the location of TYC 129-75-1:
All Logan had to do now, presumably, was touch the small bluestone, then touch all sixteen stones forming the Orion constellation inside of Stonehenge and return to touch the stone representing TYC 129-75-1 one last time. He hoped that would work. If it did not, assuming the guards hadn’t arrested him already for trespassing on a national monument (a big if), he would try other combinations.
Logan resumed his approach. After a few steps, just when he thought his window of opportunity to do this could not get any smaller, it did.
A car pulled up to the Stonehenge parking lot. Logan could not see it because he was coming up from the opposite end of Stonehenge, but he heard two doors open, two doors close, and two voices talking to the guards who intercepted them. Logan gulped. He recognized the voices. They belonged to the international criminals who he once called Agent Uptin and Commander Lewis. Damn it.
With Uptin and Lewis or whatever their real names were trying to talk their way onto the Stonehenge site, no doubt with fake credentials, the National Monument Guards were all temporarily distracted. Logan decided to make a break for it. He made a labored sprint toward Stonehenge’s center, grimacing from the sharp sting of the bullet wound in his calf.
Before he reached the stone he believed represented TYC 129-75-1, Logan heard sirens off in the distance. In this sleepy town where crime rarely occurred, Logan knew those sirens were coming for him; what he did not know was how Karpyn’s team had found him so fast and coordinated with British authorities. Then again, it was the CIA. Double damn it, Logan muttered.
Now, he really did have only one shot at this and he had to do it quickly. Logan touched the first stone and then promptly rushed to touch each of the subsequent stones. After half a minute, several guards who were busy dealing with Lewis and Uptin saw Logan and shouted, “Hey you!!! Stop right now!! Down on the ground!!!” A couple guards started heading for Logan.
The commotion directed at Logan drew Uptin and Lewis’ attention. They spotted Logan and started running toward Stonehenge also. When the guards protested and told Bailey’s henchmen to stay back, Uptin and Lewis simply shot them. Cold-blooded and cruel.
“Oh no!! Oh no!!” mumbled Logan, worrying he wasn’t going to make it.
As soon as Uptin and Lewis started shooting, the guards heading for Logan scattered for cover, ironically affording Logan additional time to complete the sequence.
Logan kept running and touching stones. He had only three more to go when the patrol cars arrived. Authorities jumped out of their vehicles, communicating instructions to one another. Lewis provided cover for Uptin who entered Stonehenge’s center theatre.
Logan had made all the rounds, and now, he just needed to get back to the center to touch TYC 129-75-1 one more time. He was only a few feet from the stone, but Uptin stood in the way.
Uptin fired at Logan who darted behind one of the tall standing sandstones.
“You can’t hide back there forever, West,” uttered Uptin.
“Sure, I can... you’re about to be surrounded by officers itching to shoot you after what you just did to one of their own. Does Bailey pay you enough to die for her?”
Uptin did not respond. As Logan predicted, British cops started swarming around the perimeter.
“The game’s up,” said Logan who, while hiding on the other side of the stone, kept his hands high in the air so the police would not shoot him.
Rather than surrender, Lewis started firing back. Seeking cover from the guards and officers returning fire, Lewis hid behind one of the outer standing sarsen stones on the opposite side from where Logan was hiding. Lewis kept leaking out around the edge of the stone to shoot, sending officers ducking for cover. One officer attempted to sneak up on Lewis from the side, but Lewis picked him off. As the officers closed in, Lewis peeked around the stone’s edge to fire, but this time, he took a bullet in the back. He never saw the Monument Guard creeping up from behind. Lewis slumped to the ground. Uptin knew he was trapped.
“No matter what Bailey’s paying you, you can’t take it with you if you’re dead,” said Logan.
“Drop your gun! Hands up!” the officers ordered Uptin.
Uptin didn’t listen. After all of the things he had done over the last decade, there was nothing but a lifetime of prison, or worse, waiting for him if he gave himself up. He was not about to let that happen.
“Drop the gun now!” yelled the authorities one last time, but Uptin had other plans. Instead, as soon as Logan peeked out from behind the stone, Uptin pulled his trigger and leaped behind a fallen sarsen to avoid fire. Logan snapped his head back just in time.
Uptin, meanwhile, darted for the north side of Stonehenge. Officers shot at him, but Uptin dove and rolled to avoid the bullets. He fired back, taking out several guards and officers while making a desperate run to avoid capture. He managed to get all the way into the fields behind Stonehenge, disappearing in the darkness.
At night, and blocked by several trilithons, Logan could not see what was happening, but he could hear confused officers shouting at one another, searching for Uptin. While the officers struggled to figure out what to do, Uptin kept firing at them from a concealed hiding place behind a chunk of broken stone in the outer field. The sparks from his gun after his last round tipped authorities off to his location. The officers dropped low to the ground and steadily surrounded Uptin. Unwilling to surrender, Uptin fired his remaining bullets and scurried toward a road at the back of the field. Although he managed to avoid a few bullets, several shots struck him in the back. Uptin dropped to the field to die.
Meanwhile, back inside Stonehenge’s inner circle of trilithons, two officers commanded Logan to move out into the open with his hands up. With his hands held high, Logan walked out into Stonehenge’s center from behind the sarsen stone where he had been hiding, very close to the TYC 129-75-1 stone he needed to touch.
“Down on the ground, now!” the officers shouted. No longer having a choice, Logan dropped face first onto the ground right next to the TYC 129-75-1 stone.
Logan reached out barely an inch farther, and with the slightest touch of his finger, touched TYC 129-75-1. The portals activated. Three of the trilithons within Stonehenge’s inner circle erupted in blue light and hummed. After a few seconds, just like they did inside the Norwegian cave, the portals crystallized to reveal other destinations behind them. The officers each stopped what they were doing, stunned by the standing trilithons’ mysterious transformation.
The one to Logan’s right projected a white light reminiscent of the doorway Emma had disappeared into earlier in the day. It was only a few steps from his position.
With the authorities’ eyes momentarily fixated on the portals, Logan jumped up and ran to the light portal. Despite hearing the officers demanding that he stop, Logan dove into the portal before any of them could shoot. By the time the British officers realized what happened, Logan was gone, and the portal doorways disappeared.
Chapter 21 – Déjà Vu
The instant Logan went through the Stonehenge portal, he emerged somewhere else. He found himself standing inside a large white pyramid on top of an oval-shaped platform. Below the platform, he did not see a floor but rather multi-colored clouds swirling about, obscuring the ground beneath the pyramid, if there even was ground down below. Was he floating up in the sky? Up in the clouds? In the heavens? Wherever he was, there was no wind or noise. It was perfectly still inside the pyramid.
When Logan re-oriented himself, he saw ethereal beings of light, humanoid in shape but without any visible features behind their blinding illumination, gathering around him, moving silently and effortlessly. Logan counted a dozen or so, maybe more. They spoke to him, but he did not understand what they were saying, at least, not at first. Then, someone or something commandeered the thoughts inside his head, reading his mind and manipulating his words to form sentences he could understand, only he was not controlling what they were saying...
You will find the truth in her eyes, his thoughts said, although the thoughts were not his own.
“The truth about what,” he asked.
Everything.
“I don’t understand.”
It is time.
“Time for what?”
To help her.
“Help her how?”
Find the star that rises before the brightest of them all.
“But, I don’t underst—”
It is time to go back to the beginning...
Before Logan could ask another question, the platform beneath his feet disappeared, everything got blurry, everything faded and...
ΔΔΔΔΔΔΔΔΔΔΔ
Click. The alarm went off and out blasted MegaWave’s ‘Jagged Edge of the Sun’ smack in the middle of its chorus. Logan woke up, groaned, and opened his eyes. Only eight months and thirty-four Mondays to go until graduation. Wait a second... where was he?
He sat up. He looked around. He was back in his own bed. Logan instinctively reached for the side table where he normally kept his cell phone. He grabbed it and pulled it close; it was his phone alright, not the one Karpyn had given him. And the date on the screen read Monday, October 17, the same day he first received the Copán Temple project from Mr. Jackson. What was going on? Was it all a dream?
“That can’t be,” mumbled a confused Logan, feeling like Dorothy waking up from her long dream at the end of the Wizard of Oz.
He reached down to feel his calf. No bullet wound. He searched his cell phone for emails to see if today was any day other than October 17th, but the slew of incoming texts and emails confirmed the same thing: it was October 17th. He opened his text messages and perhaps most distressing of all, there were no texts from Emma James.
Logan sat there in disbelief as a disappointing realization came over him: his connection to Emma James and everything they had experienced together over the last two weeks was nothing more than a figment of his imagination. The doors he was hoping to open for himself and his mom, had been slammed shut. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, because what else could he do, he had to tell himself something. If it was only a dream, think of all the people who lost their lives in his Copán Temple fantasy who survived in reality. Yet it all seemed so real. The heartbreak of losing Emma felt so real and it hurt.
“Wait a second, why don’t you just text her,” he said out loud. He considered the possibility that if none of it really happened, Emma would not understand why he was texting. After all, prior to two weeks ago, which was now suddenly today, or so it seemed, they hadn’t texted in years. Still, he had to try.
Logan went into his phone to pull up her contact info. It was not until just then that he realized he did not have her telephone number in his ‘Contacts,’ nor did he have it memorized. Even in his dying fantasy, when Emma programmed her number into his phone after class on the first day when they received the Copán assignment, he never looked at it. He just touched her name in ‘Contacts,’ ‘recent calls’ or ‘recent texts’ to call or text her. He had no idea what her number was.
Maybe he could talk to her at school instead which, if that was his plan, he had to get ready for and fast. Logan threw some clothes on and rushed out the door. When he got to Jersey North High, he went looking for Emma in the courtyard where she typically hung out before class, but she was nowhere to be found. And she did not show up for 1st-period.
Increasingly desperate and refusing to let go of his delusional fantasy that he had traveled back in time, Logan decided to ditch school and go directly to Emma’s house. Yet when he got there and knocked on the door, no one answered. He left more confused than before.
By the time Logan got back to Jersey North again, 3rd-period had already started. Entering full stalker mode at this point, Logan waited outside Emma’s 3rd-period class, but when the lunch bell rang, she did not come out with the rest of the students. Logan next headed out to the lunch courtyard to see if she might be out there. Unfortunately, Emma wasn’t in the courtyard either, but David and Patrick were, and they walked up behind him.
“Bro, you look lost,” said Patrick, catching up to Logan who was oddly meandering along.
Logan snapped out of it and looked at his friends who were now walking beside him. “Um...”
“Dude, you okay?” joked David, mocking Logan’s uncertainty.
“Yeah, totally,” feigned Logan while continuing to look for Emma. They stopped at a lunch table and the three friends sat down.
David pulled a sealed plastic bag filled with cold pizza out of his backpack, while Patrick retrieved a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from his bag.
“You bring anything today?” David asked Logan. “No rich person’s leftovers from your mom’s restaurant?”
Distracted, Logan replied, “Uh, no… forgot.”
“You want in on this?” offered David, lifting up a piece of pizza for him.
Logan shook his head and kept looking for Emma.
“Who are you looking for?” wondered Patrick, noticing Logan’s eyes scanning the courtyard.
“I’m, um, looking for Emma,” replied Logan.
“James??” questioned David.
“Yeah.”
“Why?” asked David.
“‘Cause he’s had a thing for her since elementary school, that’s why,” answered Patrick.
“It’s for the proje…” Logan stopped before finishing the sentence. They hadn’t been given their history project yet from Mr. Jackson. Saying that he was looking for Emma ‘for the project’ would have made no sense to them.
“For the what?” asked Patrick. “You high or something?”
“Obviously he is, if he’s planning to make a move on Emma James,” said David. “Chad’s going to squash you.”
“Chad’s not going to squash me,” replied Logan.
“Hope you’re right,” responded David, “‘cause the guy bench presses like three hundred pounds, and you, not so much…”
“I’ll be fine,” said Logan.
“Well, if you’re wrong, I’m calling dibs on your Xbox,” announced David.
“Like hell you do,” snapped Patrick. “I practically broke that thing in with Logan, taught him everything he knows.”
“No wonder he sucks,” replied David.
“Hate to break the fun up, but I’ll see you guys later,” announced Logan, abruptly standing up and walking off without saying another word.
“Umm… okay… see you later,” said a confused Patrick as Logan uncharacteristically walked away.
Logan felt bad for ditching his friends like that, but he was too anxious to just sit there and shoot the breeze with them. He needed to do something. He needed to keep looking for Emma and, for the remainder of the lunch period, he did just that, walking the entire school campus. Still, he couldn’t find her anywhere. Where could she be?
When the end of lunch bell rang, the moment of truth had arrived... 4th-period with Mr. Jackson. If there was one place Logan remembered Emma being on October 17th, it was Mr. Jackson’s history class when they first got the Copán assignment...
Logan entered Mr. Jackson’s classroom with his fellow students, anxious to see her. He found his seat and waited. And he waited. Her seat across the classroom remained empty. When David and Patrick got to class, they immediately approached Logan.
