The chamber was warm.
Lindiwe stood near the entrance, although she could not remember arriving there. Light moved across the walls from a flame somewhere behind her, bringing the painted figures briefly into focus before they slipped back into shadow.
She knew the room.
That certainty came before she noticed her hands.
They were older. The skin was creased, the fingers broader than her own. The object rested against her palm with a familiarity she had never felt towards anything she possessed.
Somebody spoke behind her.
She turned.
A young man stood in the passage, holding a lamp. She understood the concern in his face, but the words themselves were gone before she could keep them.
She answered him in a voice that was not hers, then moved past the raised stone in the centre of the room towards a wall where the painted figure stood between two groups carrying weapons.
There was another marking below it.
Her hand went to the stone.
“Mara, take her arm.”
Vale’s voice cut through the hotel room.
Lindiwe hadn’t fallen. She stood beside the desk, the artefact held between her hands, staring at something none of them could see.
Mara moved to support her.
“Lindiwe?”
Daniel was already pulling a chair closer.
“Should we take it from her?”
“No,” Vale said.
Jonathan looked at him.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t know what you’d interrupt.”
“And you do?”
Vale ignored him for the moment.
He stepped into Lindiwe’s line of sight.
“Listen to my voice.”
Her eyes moved slightly.
“You’re in a hotel. You’re standing beside a desk.”
Daniel watched him. The man wasn’t guessing. There was a steadiness in his voice that made the instructions feel practised.
“Feel what’s beneath your feet,” Vale said. “Stay with that.”
Lindiwe drew a sharp breath.
The wall had opened.
She saw it move, but the sequence was already slipping away. Her hand had done something below the painted figure. Pressed, perhaps. Turned.
The young man lifted his lamp, revealing a smaller room beyond. Something rested inside it, a crystal catching the light. It was another amulet, separate from the one she held.
She tried to look more closely, and the scene changed.
Now the young man was beside her, taking her elbow. She felt a weariness that belonged to the older body, a deep exhaustion she knew had been growing for some time.
When he spoke again, she understood that he didn’t want her to go. A grief she could not separate from her own overcame her, until someone said her name.
The desk returned.
So did the ache in her shoulder.
Mara was holding her arm. An unfamiliar man stood close in front of her, although a moment later she remembered that he wasn’t unfamiliar at all.
She remembered the house, the car and the man who had pulled her out.
“Sit down,” he said.
She let Daniel guide the chair beneath her.
Jonathan crouched beside the desk, watching the artefact as though it might change again.
Lindiwe looked down at her hands. They were her own. She turned one over, then the other.
“What happened?”
“You went somewhere,” Mara said quietly.
Lindiwe looked at her.
Mara shook her head.
“Not physically.”
The central crystal was still lit. Three smaller ones glowed around it.
Jonathan glanced towards Vale.
“You seemed remarkably prepared for that.”
Vale checked Lindiwe’s face before answering.
“Has it happened to either of you?”
Daniel looked at Mara.
“Something like it,” she said.
“When?”
“In New York. Then again at the museum.”
Vale nodded once.
Jonathan straightened.
“I think we’ve reached the point where you tell us who you are.”
“Adrian Vale.”
The name meant nothing to Jonathan.
Daniel frowned.
“Vale?”
The older man looked at him.
“My headmaster knew someone called Vale.”
“I knew Arthur.”
Daniel became very still.
Jonathan looked between them.
“You know his headmaster?”
Vale kept his attention on Daniel.
“I visited your school when you were six.”
Daniel tried to find the memory. There were adults he vaguely remembered seeing in corridors, visitors whose importance had belonged entirely to the teachers.
Nothing clear came.
“Why?”
Vale glanced towards the artefact.
“Because you did something unusual.”
“The DNA model?”
“Yes.”
Daniel sat on the edge of the bed.
For a moment the room seemed to recede around him. He had remembered that afternoon as one of the small stories adults told about his childhood.
Somebody else had remembered it differently.
“You’ve known about me since then?”
Vale didn’t answer quickly enough.
Daniel looked up.
“You have.”
“Yes.”
Lindiwe shifted in the chair.
“Not now.”
The words were quiet, but everybody turned towards her.
She hadn’t meant to speak so firmly. Daniel’s alarm, Jonathan’s suspicion and Vale’s caution had become almost tangible around her. She could feel each one pushing against the others.
“The room,” she said. “There’s another room.”
Jonathan’s attention changed immediately.
“Where?”
“Behind the wall.”
“At the caves?”
She nodded.
He reached for his notebook.
“Which wall?”
“The people with the weapons. The picture where they’ve put them down.”
Mara remembered it.
“That’s beside the one we were looking at.”
Jonathan began drawing a rough shape of the chamber.
Lindiwe watched his pencil.
“There was a mark underneath. Low down.”
“How low?”
She held her hand a short distance above her knee, then hesitated.
“I was taller.”
The pencil stopped. Nobody spoke. She looked towards Vale.
“My hands were different.”
He nodded.
“Keep what you remember. Don’t try to fill in what’s missing.”
“How do you know?”
His expression softened slightly.
“Because that’s how you lose it.”
They gave her paper.
At first Lindiwe could draw only the curve she had seen beneath the painted figures. Then a short line returned, followed by the position of the opening.
Jonathan stopped asking questions and let her work.
Daniel remained beside the bed. Mara sat near Lindiwe, close enough to steady the paper when it slipped.
Vale watched from the doorway.
After several minutes, Lindiwe put down the pencil.
“There was something inside.”
Jonathan leaned forward.
“What?”
She looked at the object in her lap.
“Another one.”
His eyes moved towards the cloth on the desk, then the open canvas bag. The hat lay beside it, flattened where he had used it to protect the frame.
For the second time that day, he thought of what he would have to say when they returned to the site.
Mara studied the drawing.
“You’re certain?”
Lindiwe looked down at her hands again.
“About that part. Yes.”
Jonathan picked up the paper carefully.
“Then tomorrow,” he said, “we have another wall to look at.”
Vale moved away from the doorway.
“Tomorrow, you’re not going alone.”
Daniel looked at him.
“We haven’t invited you.”
“I know.”
Their eyes met. Lindiwe felt the tension return, quieter this time but no less real. She looked at the glowing crystal in her hands.
Whatever had brought them together had done nothing to make trust easier.