The morning of day three started off on the wrong foot. Rowen was missing.
I must’ve drifted off at sunrise because I was jolted out of sleep by the sound of Lori screaming. Still shaken from my nightmarish experience, I was drafted into a panicked search effort. I had no time to dwell on whether what happened to me last night was a horrid dream or some kind of actual spiritual encounter. And now we had a real crisis on our hands.
“Who saw Rowen last?” I asked Tommy as the two of us headed into one of the denser parts of the oasis. Minh and Lori were going in the opposite direction, while Luke stayed where he was, uncaring and unwilling to move. Tommy got his bowie knife out and used it to hack at the low-hanging fronds of the palm trees blocking our way.
“I’m guessing Lori, since she sounded the alarm, but everything’s really jumbled in my mind right now. This place is messing with my head…,” Tommy said, leaving me to wonder what exactly he meant by that. I agonized over whether I should tell him about my own increasingly unsettling nighttime experiences, but we had to stop talking when our sloppy advance through the jungle disturbed a horde of black flies. I clenched my mouth shut and followed Tommy as he raced the hell out of there. After breaking through some more of the same tight green shrubbery, we stumbled onto a miniature clearing, a smaller replica of our current sleeping grounds. That’s where we found Rowen.
He sat in the middle of the clearing, arms circling his knees.
“What are you doing out here?” Tommy asked. “Lori’s been really worried about you—” He stopped talking when he saw what I was seeing—a sea of white-and- gold foil wrappers, spread over the ground all around Rowen—wrappers from those Al Nassma candies he liked so much.
Just noticing us, Rowen’s red, tear-stained eyes rattled me. His lips were bitten bloody.
“What happened here?” I perched on the ground next to him, balancing on my heels, foil wrappers rustling under my feet.
“Where did you get all this candy?” Tommy asked, incredulous. Good question. If Rowen had all this chocolate on him when we got stranded in the desert, he must’ve hidden it somewhere in the oasis the moment we’d arrived. But surely we would’ve noticed if at any stage of our ordeal Rowen was bursting with chocolate? And surely he would’ve shared it with us? Right?
Rowen muttered an inaudible response into his knees.
“What happened?” I repeated.
“I found it…,” Rowen said. “I found it all, and I couldn’t stop. I was so hungry.”
“You found all this candy and you ate it all because you were hungry,” I said, fully aware of how thick I sounded.
“Yeah … There was a voice. It told me it was all for me. That it was a reward.”
“A reward for what?” Tommy asked.
“For telling everyone who poisoned our water stream.”
My eyes sought Rowen’s, but he was evading me. I silently begged him not to say it. Not in Tommy’s presence. Please.
“It was Alif who contaminated the spring.” Rowen looked up at me briefly, then let go of my gaze, but not before I saw her reflection in his eyes—the Queen of Giants, the lonely spark.
“Why would you do that?” Tommy asked under his breath once we’d started walking back. Unsure what to do with him, we left Rowen on his own, but after a few steps, I could hear the telltale noises of him following after us, tearing his way through the trees.
“It’s … I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing until I woke up in the morning and my fingers were numb from handling the flowers. Until that moment, I thought it was a dream.”
“Do you sleepwalk?”
“Not that I know of. It’s never happened before … I’m scared, Tommy. I’m fucking terrified!” I stopped, growing dizzy on my feet, as cold waves of dread battered me from all angles. Tommy did the thing I least expected. He hugged me. It was a short-lived but fierce hug that consumed all my senses and ignited a strange fire in my chest. When Tommy let go of me, I remained motionless, still dazed but happy in an unrestrained kind of way.
“Wait here,” Tommy said before disappearing back into the thickness of the trees we’d left behind. I heard him talking something over with Rowen but couldn’t discern what it was about. When they both emerged from the trees, we resumed walking. Tommy whispered to me, “Rowen won’t say anything to anyone about the spring if we keep our mouths shut about the candy incident. Right, Rowen?” Tommy looked in the direction of my friend.
Rowen nodded. I tried finding his eyes again, but his gaze was unfocused. I guessed this place was affecting us all in different ways.
In a few minutes the three of us made it back to the others. At seeing Rowen, Lori flung herself into his arms. He came to slowly embrace her, his movements shaky with uncertainty.
I had exactly one apple left in my allocated food pile. When I bit into it, it tasted bitter.
Rowen became more talkative after drinking from the spring and conferring with Lori in the shadows of the palm trees before the two of them joined our loose circle on the ground. This entire time, Luke avoided looking at me directly, but I could sense his stare drilling a hole into the side of my head every time I looked away. A purplish bruise around his left eye stood out on his swollen face. Tommy looked slightly better off—his face had taken less assault from Luke—but his knuckles were the bad kind of red and scraped.
Our group felt sluggish and in discord, but we had to start discussing our plans for survival—for real.
Nobody was taking the initiative, so I said, “We need to go deeper into the oasis and look for food. If our group has to split up, so be it. In that case, I’ll go with Tommy and we’ll walk the length of the oasis to the west. Depending on how we fare, we might follow the length of the entire perimeter. That’ll give us a good idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“I’ll come with you two,” Minh said, reinforcing her words with a nod. She started braiding her long hair—her way of getting ready to tough it out. I envied that she could just pull her hair up into a bun or braid it like that. I couldn’t do anything of the kind with my shoulder-length mess, which was only getting messier every minute I went without giving it a proper wash.
“And the rest of you?” I looked between those still undecided.
Rowen gave me a quick nod, which I took as a yes on behalf of Lori as well since Lori just stared back at me.
“Luke?” I made a point of saying his name, but he insisted on glaring down at his feet and not acknowledging me. Rivulets of sweat were running down his face and neck.
But after a long, awkward minute, Luke caved, and the six of us got on with our quest.
Staying under the protection of the shadows, we all headed west, keeping to the outer edge of the oasis, following the line where the sand encroached on the grass. No words were exchanged. Bound by an unspoken agreement and a sense of self-preservation, we stuck close to one another, forming a tight formation. After some twenty or thirty minutes of walking, our path dead-ended into a deep and wide arroyo. Jagged rocks framed its outer edge, coloring my thoughts with imagined pain brought on by a myriad of cuts to the skin. Not needing to confer with one another, we bore right alongside the arroyo’s outline and deeper into the oasis proper.
The arroyo turned out to be bigger than expected. Before we knew it, we were deep enough into the oasis that whatever light had been sneaking through the tight canopy overhead all but disappeared. Reaching almost to my knees, the undergrowth put snakes and scorpions on my mind. The palm trees’ trunks were so closely spaced, at times we had to take turns squeezing in between them before we could proceed. Aside from our collective heavy breathing and an occasional swear word uttered when skin was grazed by a stick or a foot slid off a rock, there was no sound. No insects buzzing. No birds cooing. None of the signs of animal life.
The oasis was holding its breath as it spied on us, waiting to see what we’d do next. Every shadow seemed to move in a deliberate way. My mind wandered, making me fixate on Noam and Alain—and their respective fates. Noam was missing for two years before walking into my father’s camp. And Alain? How long had he actually been stuck in here before finally making what turned out to be a fatal decision to leave the oasis? I imagined him collapsing on the sands and staying there, the sun melting his flesh and bleaching his bones. It was quite an effort to exorcise that image out of my mind. Alain insisted on returning, again and again, a broken record trapped under the cursed needle of an otherworldly gramophone.
I’d long lost any idea of time, and the trees and the shadows got almost too tight, almost too suffocating for us to keep pushing in. Yet, stubbornly, we kept on. The alternative to that was starving, as our fruit piles were all but gone. But the deeper we went, the more uncertain our steps became.
Rowen was the first to voice his doubts. “Okay, should we go back? Is this enough exploring for one day?” His words were ignored. We were a herd of mindless robots hell-bent on our (probably futile) mission. But then we ran into yet another natural barrier when the land started to curve, going up higher and higher. Following the elevation, the forest of palms thinned until it released us at last. We came to a narrow stretch of barren land, with the palm trees behind us and an unclimbable rocky formation before us.
I tipped my head up high to take all of it in. I’d long stopped questioning whether what I was seeing was possible. The size and scale of the oasis that emerged out of sizzling thin air to save us, the impossibility of fruit and berries in these arid parts, my all-too-realistic night terrors, the ghosts of jeeps passing through us, and now this—a mighty rock blocking our way.
We spread out to check the footing of what upon closer inspection appeared to be a hybrid between a dune and a rock. A solidified dune? I heard the spring before I saw it, its thin line of bubbling water emerging from the palms somewhere behind us and racing down the natural rocky steps to our side before vanishing into a large opening in the rocks.
We crowded around the opening. It was cut into the monolith with humanlike precision.
The entrance was wide enough to accommodate the spring and still allow narrow pathways on either side. How deep did it go? Beckoned by the darkness, I approached the entrance. I started to slide on the slippery ground but managed to hold my own. I only half felt Tommy’s hand holding on to my shoulder.
“Careful now,” he said.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I gazed into the opening, a whiff of its winter breath on my face. As if moving of its own accord, my right hand reached out, fingertips brushing against the surface of the rock. I was half expecting my touch to reveal some secret message, for letters of a forgotten alphabet to materialize, but the surface remained unchanged.
“I don’t like this place. I don’t like it at all. It reminds me of a cemetery. And what’s with that smell?” Minh’s anxiety brought me back to reality.
“What smell?” I asked.
“It smells like an old, stuffy cave,” Minh said, stating the obvious. But it was her choice of a word—cave—that struck me as wrong. A cave implied a naturally occurring formation, created by water and time. This place before us was anything but natural. Too seamless. Too perfect.
“It’s a temple,” I blurted out. What possessed me to say that? It must’ve been this place itself, the slabs of sleek rock practically vibrating with want. Though what this place wanted wasn’t clear.
Judging from five pairs of very confused eyes drilling into me right then, I was the only one thinking those thoughts. Tommy’s concerned expression in particular prompted me to explain myself. “I mean, it feels like a temple. The rock is so flat, it seems man-made.” I looked between my friends’ faces, expecting someone to disagree. I zeroed in on Tommy, since he tended to be the voice of reason during our ordeal.
“Don’t look at me!” Tommy raised his hands in a defensive gesture. “It might as well be man-made. Who knows with this place?”
“Why does it matter?” Minh interrupted him. “We shouldn’t have left our spot. What if the cars come back? We’re going to miss our own rescue!”
“You can go back, if you’d like.” I didn’t recognize my own voice—edgy, even rude. This place was messing with my very essence. Regardless, I couldn’t stop this new me. “I mean it. You know the way back. In fact, everyone who wants to return to our spot can go now. I’ll join you all there.” I took another step toward the entry into what had now solidified in my head as the temple.
In an act of support, Lori came forward to stand next to me, but instead of reassuring me, her presence made me want to flinch. Half her face was lit by the blazing sun and the other was shadowed. “I’ll go with you. At least it’s cool down there.”
“We’ll all go in there. Or we’ll all go back to the clearing,” Tommy said.
Minh still didn’t look impressed. I sought out her eyes and told her, “I just want to see if any light gets inside. Because if it does, maybe this place could be our new shelter. You know, in case there’s another sandstorm.”
Minh nodded, a mechanical movement. Her resistance appeared to have fizzled out. Or maybe she just didn’t relish the idea of being left alone out here.
Not so sure anymore if going down into the temple was such an awesome idea, I had to force my unsteady feet to move. The opening’s ceiling was high enough to accommodate me and Lori, but the taller people in our group, like Minh and Tommy, had to lower their heads as they entered.
All life was sucked out of this place. If the tightly woven forest we had to cross to get here was silent like an empty house, the temple’s silence was nothingness embodied. I touched the walls on my way in, only to pull back my hand in disgust. They were covered with gelatinous sludge. I cleaned my hand off on my pants, which were filthy anyway. After we returned to our sleeping grounds, I had to find a private moment and wash my clothes—and myself—properly in the spring.
“Minh was right. It does stink in here,” Luke commented from somewhere behind me. Or maybe it was Rowen who spoke. All voices sounded the same in here, distorted by echoes bouncing off uneven walls.
Stuck at the front of the line, I ended up leading our group. Whatever would happen to us would happen to me first. But at least it was cool inside here and I was no longer sweating or burning up in the sun. Also, we were all alive and in relatively good moods. Well, as much as possible, considering the circumstances. On the negative side, we were still stranded in the desert. So there was that.
My eyes were quick to adjust to the semidarkness; there were cracks in the ceiling and the walls, allowing some light to seep through. I could distinguish the shapes of stalactites, their gleam infusing this whole experience with eerie beauty. Right behind me, Lori flicked on a lighter (it must have been Rowen’s) and held it high. My shadow, long and ugly, materialized at my feet, stretching farther out into the temple.
“Better save that for when we really need it,” Minh said to Lori, and the light vanished as quickly as it appeared.
With no forks or other openings appearing, we continued on straight, the water stream always burbling below. More natural light illuminated our path now, and we stopped when the tunnel expanded into a wide-open space. The stream we’d been following seemed to run around the entire length of this area, disappearing into a passage to our left. “We could throw a couple of beanbags into that corner and have a plasma TV mounted on this wall,” Luke said, briefly back to his old sarcastic self.
Minh, who had wandered farther up ahead, was now waving a hand in the air, urging us to join her at the far end of this cavernous room. “Just look at these walls!”
“Am I allowed to use the lighter now?” Lori flicked it on without waiting for a response. With her hand held up high and close to the wall, I could see the drawings that had gotten Minh so riled up.
Jet-black, glowing-white, and reddish-okra colors intermingled, dancing on the brown surface of the wall. A series of images followed the circumference of this space—like a strip of pictures arranged in a storyboard. It told of an exploding star, or maybe some kind of asteroid hitting Earth but burning up in the atmosphere to the point where only one tiny white piece remained. The next image showed people on their knees, forming a circle around a white hexagon, rays of light surrounding it like a halo. The fever dreams I’d been having in the oasis flickered through my mind, but my memories of them were already fuzzy, ill defined. There was the queen on her throne, but she was also a fallen star, or at least a part of one. And she was hungry. That much I could recall.
There was some scuffling noise in the distance. Where was the rest of our group? The lighter wavered in Lori’s hand, casting weird shadows on the walls.
“Rowen?” she yelled. Her retreating footsteps clapped against the rock-hard floors. I turned just in time to see her enter the passage to the left where the stream flowed.
“Lori, wait up!” I called after her, echoes exaggerating my call, as if the walls were making fun of me. I sprinted after Lori as fast as the semidarkness allowed. I could hear some of the others dashing after me in the dark, intermixed with the sounds of water splashing and Tommy or Luke swearing. Together, we were creating a strange cacophony.
Somewhere ahead of us Lori screamed, the sound twisted, desperate. I still couldn’t see her. When I caught up to her at last, I halted to a stop as I caught a glimpse of what lay ahead. My feet skidded against the ground and I came dangerously close to an open pit that yawned beneath me. Lori was crouching by the pit’s edge, close to the drop. After I braved another step toward it, I could see that the bottom of the pit was covered with sharp objects, like spikes.
Rowen was down there, his body skewered on several spikes. Illuminated by some dull light streaming from above, Rowen’s face stared back at us, eyes open but sightless. My own eyes were frozen and unable to blink; all I could see were the spikes coming out of his torso. The material of his T-shirt was turning dark red.
“No…,” I whispered.
The semidarkness wavered around me. How did Rowen end up in the pit? We were all together just moments ago—when did he wander off? This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
I was hit with the ghost of a pain in my own gut. Everything slowed down, the walls and the ground beneath my feet vibrating. I lost track of where I was, where my friends were. I was standing by the edge of the pit, but I was also in the pit. Everyone, Rowen included, was looking down at me from above. Their faces were twisted masks; and there were spikes coming out of Rowen’s stomach and chest. I strained to snap out of it. There was a movement next to me, displacing the air. Stubbornly rejecting the new reality, I thought maybe it was Rowen. When I managed to tear my eyes away from my friend’s unmoving body in the pit, I came face-to-face with Tommy. He was right next to me, close to the pit, and he was horrified. His hands were shaking.
To my other side, Lori started to wail. What came next was a mess. Chaos. At first, I couldn’t move, petrified. I was losing time. I could’ve stayed down there for months or years. It didn’t really matter to me. And then there were hands dragging me away.
As Tommy ushered me away from the pit, my eyes sought out Lori. She was fighting against Luke, who was, in turn, pulling her away. Before I gave in to Tommy and left the edge of the pit, I caught another glimpse of Rowen’s body down below. I knew with absolute clarity that my mind would never be able to revisit this memory and not glitch out in shock. That lifeless mass of flesh on the bottom of the pit, that grotesque, bleeding rag doll, was once my friend. He was one of the good guys. Sometimes jaded, sometimes a jerk, but overall okay. And now, the Queen of Giants had claimed him as her sacrifice. Better him than me, a horrible part of me thought before it slithered back into the darkness from which it had briefly raised its scaly head.