HalfWorlder #Wattys2017

Chapter 7-The orphan in the barn

I walked around the corner but stopped short. The voices coming from the room were too low and soft for normal conversation. The two sat staring at his computer, rapt in their discussion.

"You really think the Aten caused the power surge?" Mom leaned over Morty who sat behind a grand mahogany desk in the middle of his dark wood-paneled library. They were looking at something on the monitor. A small morning fire burned needlessly in the fireplace. The day was already warming.

"I think it's likely, Helen, it is what we think it is." He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. "No matter how many times you ask me for another explanation. He must have found it this time." There was excitement in his voice, but he tried to mask it. "The power surge was in the southern hemisphere near their last known location. Look." He pointed at the screen and she leaned closer.

They were talking about the power surge Neter tapped into to repair herself.

"I hope he's okay somehow." There was nothing convincing about the way she said it. Dad and Elaine had been missing for nearly two weeks now. "And now apparently one of the other dig students has taken off to only god knows where too, took his things and everything. It looks suspicious with them being missing, but it doesn't make sense either if Joe found the Aten."

"That is something. But it has to be a coincidence. How else do you explain the surge?"

"True." She seemed to file that thought away and paced behind the desk in a tight circle, staying close to keep her voice low. "The team you sent, they did find traces of them but little else. I thought we'd at least pick up a Bau signature on Elaine, but it's like she tried to hide her trail. It's the only thing that gives me hope, Morty. It's as if they're hiding."

For once, I understood her. Ryan went over this in my crash-course in Oasen history. The Bau of an Oasen can be identified and dated like human DNA. Bau signatures are much more resilient than physical DNA, even though Oasen's have that too, so people in mom's profession, biology-based genealogists, rely on old, even ancient Bau signatures to create a picture of history.

"I can't believe he found it, Morty." She seemed resigned to the fact that's what he did. "Do you know how mad I was at him for wasting his time on this? Not in a million years did I think that temple could be the match. It's not even in Egypt." She finally stilled herself and pointed at the screen.

I tried to lean around the corner, but the computer faced away from me. I hid again.

"The blue print fragment he found at Het Benben last year, the one at the unfinished temple of Aten at Khut-Aten, there was a sketch of a temple on it with traces of Ra's actual DNA – almost like he drew it in ink mixed with his own blood. We knew it was important, but we could never match it to anything in Egypt. We spent weeks searching through thermal images of the dessert combing for undiscovered temple sites. We found nothing – well, no matches, that is."

She inhaled deeply through her nose, remembering it with agitation. "So we widened the search area." Her voice lilted up like the action had been the most reasonable thing to do in the world, but her words were hinged with sadness. "Joe even ran it on the world-wide database and got an unlikely match here." She pointed at the screen again. "At the temple in Palenque."

She paused, remembering things far away.

"I thought he was crazy." She pointed yet again. "That temple is nearly 1,000 years younger than Het Benben and nowhere near the center of ancient Oasen-Earth civilization. But he insisted it was there."

Her eyes wandered remembering my dad's words. "He told me only 10 percent of Palenque had been excavated and there were older structures there, hidden by the jungle, that may predate the exposed temple site. He was convinced an earlier version of the temple might lie hidden there. He told me he was going to find it Morty. He told me it was there. I was so mad at him Morty. I wouldn't even say goodbye."