The sun dipped closer to the horizon, but we didn't seem any closer to our goal. The trail seemed to go on and on, with no definite endpoint or deviation--the latter unless Derrick looked up from studying the GPS device and told us to turn this way and that. For a while, it would seem that we were headed toward the middle of the island, but then Derrick would sing out, "Okay, now this way!" and he'd take off toward the edge of the island.
Kayce unfolded the map, which I saw was marked with pencil notes in the margins. He frowned and scanned these, looking for something in particular.
His puzzled eyes caught me watching, and he sighed. "I tried to put in as much as I could remember of the different accounts and references. By all rights, at this point," he pointed to a long note with a string of Greek words, "we should be seeing some sort of..." he broke off without finishing his thought as he crouched down to run his fingers over something in the dirt.
Tony leaned over his shoulder, peering at whatever had caught Kayce's attention. "What is it?"
"I thought I saw something..." Kayce scraped away the dirt with his fingers, all around a certain point. The more he dug around its angular sides, the more we realized that it was definitely a shard of something. He pushed away the hard clay dirt, until he could finally dislodge the thing. "Ah-ha!" He crowed, holding it up so we could see. "A piece of something! It's definitely man-made--look at the design."
I stared at the bright-red baked shard in my hand. Now this was archaeology! "Judging by these marks here," I pointed to the scrapes along the edge, "this was probably some kind of sacrificial crock."
Jordyn came up to see. "What about a sacrifice?"
Around the next bend, we could still hear Derrick yell, "Hey! Where did everybody go?"
I spread my arms. "Okay, everybody start looking for more shards. We've got one piece of evidence that we're headed in the right direction, but I think it would be better if we found more pieces of the pot."
"Got one!" Tony sang out, pulling a red shard out from deep in a tangle of tree roots.
"Here's another!" Jordyn's excited squeal came from the other side of the trail.
Altogether, we found five pot shards, relatively close together.
I smiled as Jordyn held a small bag from among our supplies to put them in. It felt good to know that we'd presumed correctly, to imagine the line of worshippers trekking out to the altar site, one of them carrying a red clay pot. Maybe he stumbled, maybe there was an attack of some sort--but smash went the pot, and there it lay for how many centuries before we managed to pick up these last few pieces.
Derrick was waiting on a rock, scratching its surface with something in his hand, when we finally caught up to him.
He stood as we approached.
"Finally, you guys got here!" he chided. "I was waiting a long time, wondering if you'd all just given up, or I was being pranked or something." He stopped and noticed that we were all grinning. "What did I miss?"
I rolled my eyes and waved my hand. "Oh, not much... just the archaeological find of the century!"
Derrick's reaction was instantaneous. "WHAT?" he gaped.
Jordyn burst out laughing. "Way to over-sell," she teased me. "We just found a bunch of pot-shards, is all."
"Aw, man, really?" Derrick scuffed his toe in the dirt. "You all find some ancient artifacts and all I found was this lousy bead stuck in a crack on the rock." He opened his hand and showed us the rounded, scuffed surface.
"Hey!" I gasped, "That's exactly like the komboloi that the worshippers would wear!"
"Worshippers of what?" Derrick asked, while Jordyn absently hummed a few bars of "Kum-bah-yah."
"They're like prayer beads, or the Catholic rosary," Tony supplied, flopping down on a rock and taking a huge swig of his water bottle. "Anyway, I think that counts as evidence that people came all this way so many centuries ago."
Jordyn rubbed her ankles and winced. "How much further do we have to go till we get to that epicenter?"
Derrick checked his GPS. "Well, we've been about ten miles already... and we have about thirty more to go."
The whole group let out a collective groan.
Kayce squinted up at the sky. "It's going to be dark soon. We probably won't make it very far before the sun sets. I vote we spend the rest of the daylight finding somewhere to set up camp for the night." He looked around at us. "All in favor?"
Tony nodded and Jordyn and I chorused, "Aye!"
The dark-haired girl seemed to recover her energy somewhat, and she made her way up the narrow path we were on, looking this way and that through the trees.
"It's gotta be some place with enough clear ground to accommodate us," she said. "And look out for animal signs."
Derrick snorted. "It's not like there are many animals here, since it's an island, anything that can't fly or swim would have a hard time getting here!"
Jordyn wasn't paying attention to him. "Got it!" she called, taking off into the trees.
The place she found was a short hollow, hemmed in by trees, and relatively dry. I nearly freaked out when I heard a high-pitched whine like some gigantic beetle--but by the time I looked, the sound had already started to fade. I never did find out what it was.
Kayce and Tony set up a large tarp tent, and we all spread our sleeping bags beneath it. Night came sweeping in on a chilly breeze, but we all huddled together and shared warmth between us. I closed my eyes and tried not to think of what hazards might be in store for us as we got closer to the epicenter--if indeed we found the Inner Temple there.
The image of my mother's face appeared in my mind's eye, as she smiled and said something like, "Have faith."
I popped awake to the sensation of tears on my face. I wiped them away, and held my locket again, whispering a prayer to my parents.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
We woke up to the sound of multiple birds calling to one another, screaming at the intrusion of humans into their previously-untouched spaces, and the ominous whine of buzzing insects.
I choked back a laugh when Jordyn sat up, her head a mass of frizzy, dark hair. She moaned and thrust her hand through the tangle to rub her face, and wiped the locks aside.
"Gosh darn this humidity!" she growled.
Me and my straight hair couldn't always identify with her struggle, but even I could feel the grungy stiffness in every tiny hair that stood out from my sweaty scalp. Frizz city, indeed!
Kayce was already on his feet and stretching out the kinks in his back. Tony reached over to give Derrick a shove.
"Mmmph, five more minutes..." our intrepid guide groaned.
I heard the creaking groan in the trees just before the tremors started. Instinct kicked in, and I scrambled to my feet and staggered toward the rest of the group. The shaking increased, sending the branches and trunks around us swinging wildly.
"Not again!" Jordyn groaned, crawling over to us on all fours as we huddled together.
Derrick rocketed out of his bag, grabbing for his backpack. "Everybody grab your bags!" He hollered. "Get to a secure place. This is just like an earthquake drill at school!"
For myself, I was wondering how we would be able to get clear of all these trees, should one decide to fall over.
As if in answer to my worried thoughts, our heads jerked up at the ominous crack, and the top of a tree came swinging down toward us.
"Split up!" Kayce hollered, and we scattered in all directions as the massive crown smashed down over our little camp.
"Not the tent!" I wailed. A small orange corner still protruded from underneath the trunk that was about as thick as Jordyn was tall. There was no way of salvaging that.
Tony clapped a hand over my shoulder and hugged me close. "Well, I guess we're finding that temple today," he murmured. "Since we won't have any protection for another night."
"Everybody okay?" Kayce hollered from somewhere on the other side of the massive pile of branches. We made our way around the edge, careful to keep our footing as the path took us right to the edge of the rocky slope we'd been climbing across.
Jordyn sat on a rock, wincing as Derrick covered a small cut on her ankle with a bandage. Kayce had a compass in his hand and he twisted different directions, gauging our bearings.
"Whew! Good thing the tree didn't end up blocking us," He said as Tony and I approached. "Looks like we can keep heading in the same direction, that path is clear, at least."
"I think I'd be more concerned if it ended up crushing any of us, or the equipment we brought along!" Jordyn said, standing up and wincing a little as the bandage rubbed against her skin. "That was a close one, and it felt a lot stronger up here than it did down in the camp."
Derrick patted his pockets and rummaged around a little before retrieving the small yellow device. "Let's just hope it came from the same epicenter where we're headed," he said as he frowned at something on the display. I watched him slap the GPS device against his palm a couple times. "Come on, you stupid thing..." he muttered. "That's not what I wanted. Just--"
My heart jumped into my throat as one of my worst fears--getting lost in some wilderness with no way to contact anyone who would know better--materialized right in front of me. I forced myself to stay rational as I asked calmly, "What's going on over there?"
His dark head swung around to look at me. "Oh, well, ah--the GPS must have gotten a little banged up during the earthquake..."
"You're doing some banging, yourself," Jordyn noted wryly.
Derrick squinted at her. "It's called blunt-force recalibration, thank you very much!" he retorted. "And I think I just need to--" he never told us what it was, but after flipping a few switches and pressing some buttons (and a couple more whacks), his face cleared and he raised it in victory. "Ah-ha! And we're back!"
Kayce came up behind us, shifting his backpack straps over his shoulders. "So, we move forward?"
Derrick pointed decisively toward the path winding in front of us. "Forward!" he declared.
Three hours later, we'd traveled across the ridge down the center of the island, but the path showed no sign of dropping down lower, as Tony had mentioned.
"Um, Derrick?" I pointed out, as we stopped to take out some food for lunch and drink some water. The bugs attacked my face something fierce, but at least there were enough clouds in the sky to shade us every so often. "I thought we were headed toward the epicenter of the earthquake, and that it was located somewhere down low."
He bit off a piece of jerky and chewed it with a stiff edge to his jaw. "Listen, Pris--I know where I'm going. I've got the device, remember?" he held up the GPS unit. "And its telling me that we should be going--" he looked at the display and his mask of confidence slipped, revealing a brief glimpse of the panic underneath. "Oh heck!"
He stood quickly, brushing granola bar crumbs off his jeans.
Jordyn shot me a look before asking, "What is it?"
"What did you do now?" Kayce groaned.
"I didn't do anything!" Derrick snapped. "The coordinates must have gotten messed up. We missed one lousy turn-off, that's all!"
I rolled my eyes and started mentally preparing myself for another leg of the hike. "And just how far off-track are we?"
Derrick squinted at the GPS display and started turning this way and that on the path. He retraced our steps a short ways, and even tried lifting the device high over his head, as one does to supposedly improve one's cell reception. Finally he lowered it to study the map closer. "Okay! It just lost the signal a little bit, but it's back, and it says that we have to head back this way for, like, a mile."
"A whole mile!" Jordyn protested.
Tony snorted. "Relax! It's not like we can't cover that distance in a short amount of time."
"Yeah, well," Kayce inserted, "if Derrick hadn't screwed up the reading the first time, we wouldn't have to backtrack at all."
"Hey!" Cried the self-appointed guide. "I'm trying as hard as I can, here, okay? It's not an exact science!"
Kayce chuckled. "Except, you're using GPS coordinates, so... yeah, it kind of is."
"Shut up!"
We followed Derrick all the way back to the point he said, "And now we have to go this way!"
The new path turned out to be a small trail leading down off the ridge, back into the thick trees. We saw more devastation from the earthquake: downed trees, rock slides, and even a few fresh gaps in the earth. In spite of this, our current trajectory gave me more hope, as it felt like heading in the right direction, still. Occasionally, Derrick would stop and have to fiddle with the GPS more than he did before, but we kept on, anyway.
After another hour of hiking, climbing, and wearing out our muscles, we got another short break when the path we headed on ended at a wide crevasse that had opened up in the stone roots of the mountain.
Derrick scowled at the GPS unit. "This can't be right!" he snapped.
"Doesn't that thing have a re-routing feature, like avoiding the places where the trail just ends?" Kayce scoffed.
Jordyn was examining the edge of the fifteen-foot cliff. "This looks newly-sheared," she said, running her fingers along it. "You can see some of the same flora on the other side," she pointed across the span, which looked about ten yards wide. She stood and pivoted back to us. "It must have split during the earthquake."
Kayce cocked an eyebrow at her. "Meaning?"
I sighed. "Meaning that Derrick is right, we are supposed to keep going this way, and we're not going to find another way across. It's not his fault the map on there didn't update to reflect the topographical changes of this morning's quake."
Tony walked up to the edge, juggling a stone in one hand. Pensively, he chucked the rock over the edge. "Great!" he mused sarcastically. "Anybody have any ideas as to how we can get across, with only the simple tools and the limited knowledge we have?"
Derrick sat on a nearby raised tree root and asked, "Anybody have a rock-climbing harness or some kind of rappelling know-how?"
Kayce raised his hand. "I've done a little rappelling." He leaned over and surveyed the cliff. "But that's not going to get us all across that, for sure!"
Tony reached into Derrick's pack and pulled out a radio. "Perfect, well, why don't I take one of these, and the GPS unit, and go scout out the extent of this crack, see if there really isn't another way across somewhere else?" He held out his hand toward Derrick.
The engineering student rolled his eyes and handed the yellow device over. "Good luck with that," he muttered. "It's really on the fritz!"
Tony switched on the radio, made sure to set it to channel 4, and clipped it onto his belt. "I'll let you all know if I find anything," he said as he walked away.
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