The blast threw them off their feet. Morgan instinctively rolled to soften her landing. Jake took the force of the fall to protect Camara and landed hard against some rocks with a groan.
A crevasse opened up behind them and a fiery pillar twisted into the sky as if reaching toward Heaven. It burned with the colors of the Garden, the bright carnelian and violet of its flowers with forest green at its heart, washed with the blood of those it devoured.
Morgan scrambled over to Jake. “Are you alright?”
He groaned and rolled onto his back. “Just about. But I don’t think I can carry the professor much further.”
Camara lay prone next to him, her eyelids fluttering, still deep in a fever.
Morgan stood up, testing her strength as she looked back at the chasm, a fresh scar on an ancient mountain. The monks had mined it well. Everything was gone, burned to ash. But something about that ancient tree made her think that perhaps something remained under it all, and life would rise again from the embers. Nature always found a way.
“Hello! Mr Jake!”
The voice came from lower down the mountain. Morgan turned to see Darius with his donkey and she sighed with relief. They would have much to explain but at least they had a way out of here and ARKANE’s budget would go a long way to making this whole situation just a natural occurrence in a faraway corner of the world.
As they waited for Darius to reach them, Morgan took Camara’s hand. The professor had spent a lifetime searching for Eden, and it had almost killed her. Aurelia and the Brotherhood had perished at its heart. The Garden was no haven, and the expulsion from Eden, whether myth or history, was clearly for good reason.
The silver pendant around her neck lay heavy on her skin, the Seed inside a potential threat to humanity. The Abbot had charged her with taking it to the Adana monastery, to give to the Brothers to keep safe from the world. But would it be better off in the vaults of ARKANE far away from religious fanatics? Or were even they enough to hold its terrifying potential in check?
Morgan thought of the ecological groups who believed humanity to be a stain upon the Earth, that Nature would do better without their species. Those people would love to get their hands on the Seed. Some part of her even wanted to see what would happen if it was planted, whether it truly would take over the Earth in a new Eden, or find itself tamed in a far different environment than its former incarnations.
There were many possible futures for the Seed, but she had one idea that seemed the safest. A way to preserve it far away from humanity’s worst intentions.
Svalbard, Norway. One week later.
The military plane touched down just after a storm had passed. The sky was washed clean, and the sun shone against the ice-blue fjord that flowed out into the Greenland Sea.
Clouds whipped past high above in the grey sky and a biting wind chilled Morgan to the bone, even through her insulated jacket. She hurried over to the snowmobile, backpack securely in place, revved up the vehicle and crossed the snowy peninsula to her final destination.
Svalbard was a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, north of mainland Europe and halfway to the North Pole. It really was the edge of the world and difficult to get to, even in decent weather.
Martin Klein had arranged Morgan’s trip, hiding her itinerary from the public record and even from Director Marietti and Jake. Something about her vision of the women in the cave made Morgan uneasy about anyone knowing of the potential of the Seed. Camara and Sebastian were recovering well — and seeing a lot of each other, apparently — and the Garden was gone, but she didn’t feel that the mission was over yet. This would hopefully be the last stop on her journey.
There were nearly two thousand different seed banks around the world with teams that collected and preserved samples from every eco-system. The Svalbard Seed Bank was a backup of genetic material in one of the most remote places on Earth, in case natural or human-driven disaster destroyed any of the others. Some seed banks had already been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and many considered this place to be one of the most secure due to its remoteness.
A wedge-shaped metal structure emerged from the ice with a square array of mirrors at the top and stainless steel panels reflecting the turquoise sky. A narrow bridge led over the icy ground to the double-paneled steel doors, a modest entrance to what many considered a Doomsday Vault, a place that may one day save humanity. A fitting home for the Seed.
As Morgan pulled up on the snowmobile, one door opened and a huge man peered out. “Welcome, Dr Sierra. Come on in.”
The head scientist, Kristofer Rubeck, was not quite what Morgan had expected. He towered over her, his frame dwarfing hers. With his thick ginger hair and bushy beard, Kristofer was the very image of a Norse explorer from ancient times. Yet his long fingers were slender and delicate, necessary for his precise work with fragile ecology.
Morgan followed him inside and Kristofer closed the enormous steel door behind them, the clang echoing through the corridor that led into the heart of the ice mountain.
“There are many millions of seeds here,” Kristofer explained. “From almost a million different varieties of food crops. Thirteen thousand years of agricultural history that perhaps, one day, will save the whole of humanity.” He gave a cheeky grin. “Or at least some of its eco-systems.”
“What do you mean?” Morgan asked.
Kristofer shrugged. “To be honest, an apocalyptic event will kill us all and no one is going to care about this seed bank at the end of the world. But localized catastrophes happen all the time, miniature Doomsdays that end natural environments — war, floods, fire, mining, even human choice over some strains rather than others. One of our goals is to protect genetic material from all areas of the world. You never know, one of these seeds may be the answer to a question we don’t even know how to ask yet.”
As Kristofer led the way down the long metal tunnel, one hundred and fifty meters into the mountain, Morgan reflected on his words. Did the Seed from the Tree of Life contain genetic data that could help people right now? Was she doing the right thing by hiding it here? Perhaps she should take it to a lab and have it tested for anything that might be useful to humanity?
But then she remembered her vision in the cavern, the wild women who tore a man apart, and the tree that feasted on blood and thrived on sacrifice. Humanity was cast out of Eden for their own protection, and even now, the world wasn’t ready for the knowledge of what the Tree of Life could do. Perhaps one day, but for now, the Seed must rest here, far from those who would turn Her loose to destroy or try to tame Her for their own purposes.
They emerged from the tunnel into a long main chamber with three doors. A thin layer of ice lay on the outside of the middle entrance, hinting at the temperature inside.
“Only one of the vaults is used right now,” Kristofer explained. “But hopefully, we’ll fill them all over time.”
He indicated a metal table in the middle of the room with a neat pile of silver packets, test tubes and a vacuum packing machine. “It’s not too complicated. We pack the seeds carefully and then store them at sub-zero temperatures.” He smiled, brimming over with enthusiasm for his chosen field of expertise. “But think about it. Seeds are the basis for everything. What we eat, what we wear, the very fabric of life. We have to protect them, for our own sakes.”
Morgan exhaled slowly as tension seeped from her body. Kristofer’s words made her confident that this was the right place to leave the Seed. She opened her backpack, pulled out a clear plastic bag and placed it on the metal table.
The Seed was small enough to cup in her palm and shaped like the curve of a kidney bean or the spine of an embryo. Its surface was silvery grey and slightly pitted, a hard shell that protected the genetic riches within. This tiny package was Nature’s perfect way to preserve and pass itself down to the next generation.
Kristofer bent over the bag, a crease forming between his eyebrows as he considered the Seed. “It’s a tree of some kind, but this pitting has some similarities to poppy, even some fruits. It’s also akin to some resurrection plants.” He looked up at Morgan. “They feign death for years but can rehydrate to full function. Do you know what it is?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know exactly, but it was given to me in the mountains of north-western Iran before a volcanic eruption destroyed the area. The eco-system is gone, and this is all that remains.”
“It’s the only one?”
Morgan nodded. “As far as I know.”
“Then it will be safe here until it’s needed once more.” Kristofer pulled on a pair of gloves and carefully opened the bag. He lifted out the Seed and placed it on a sterile surface, took several photos and then packed it inside one of the silver bags.
As he sealed it with a delicate finger, Morgan’s heart beat faster. Part of her wanted to reach out and snatch it back, keep it close to her. The Seed still wanted to be free.
She clenched her fists, restrained her urge and watched as Kristofer noted the number on the silver packet and typed a description into the computer log.
“That’s it,” he said. “Now I just need to put it in the vault. I’ll catalogue it alongside other Iranian material.”
He pulled on a heavier jacket and thicker gloves and carried the silver packet to the door of the vault. “You’ll have to stay out here, but you can catch a glimpse inside as I open the door.”
Morgan stood with her back against the wall of the main chamber, her breath frosting in the air. As the cold seeped through her padded jacket, she became aware of the thousands of tons of rock and ice above her and the millions of precious seeds in the vault beyond. She was truly insignificant against the vast timescale of the Earth, and that thought was strangely comforting.
Kristofer opened the vault door. Tall metal shelves laden with boxes stretched toward an ice-covered ceiling, each labeled with letters and numbers with no sign of the true nature of what lay inside.
As the door slammed shut and Kristofer disappeared from sight, Morgan smiled. Humanity protected a future Eden here in the ice, and now the Seed lay within its safe haven at last. It instinctively knew how to wait. The life inside would lie dormant until conditions allowed it to grow once more in a perfect alignment of light, temperature and moisture. It waited in the dark to live, while humanity existed in the light, waiting to die.
Morgan walked away, down the long corridor and back out into the Arctic sun, ready for a new day.
<< THE END >>