The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer

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      “THEY CONSPIRED against us,” Jadzia said again. She dangled her long legs over a parapet of rough dressed stone. Several stories below lay a little shelf of rubble at the base of the citadel wall, and then the water of the Eastern Harbor, slogging and frothing.

      Annja paced the terrace behind the Polish girl. White gravel crunched beneath her soles, and she could practically feel the afternoon sun beating on the wide brim of her hat with angry fists. She tried not to think of the risks Jadzia was subjecting herself to. While signs in various languages placed at intervals warned against precisely what the girl was doing, enforcement of safety rules did not seem to constitute a priority for whatever agency had charge of the big, blocky, fifteenth-century fortress of Qait-Bey. Nobody had yelled at her to get down. As for Annja, she already understood that the only way to get Jadzia to stop doing what she was doing was to try to physically prevent her. And the last thing they needed was to draw attention to themselves by getting into a fight.

      Actually, the very last thing they needed was for them both to get arrested for causing a public disturbance at a national monument. Her estimate of the Alexandrian police was such that she expected it might take them only seconds to sell the young women to whoever it was who wanted them so dead.

      “Why do you blame the oil companies?” Annja asked. She hated to feed Jadzia’s probable paranoia. But she was out of other answers, and a brisk walk through winding streets and out to the tip of the peninsula through growing morning heat hadn’t done a damned thing to replenish her stock. Although Jadzia’s constant whining was at least a bit of a distraction, she had to admit.

      “They have the most to lose from what we might discover,” the young Polish woman said.

      Annja stopped and looked at her. “What did you find in those scrolls, anyway?”

      Jadzia shrugged and kicked the heels of her tennis shoes against the yellow sandstone. They were the only part of her ensemble of the night before Annja had let her keep. “You were there for one of the most tantalizing parts.”

      “That bit about the crystals? That just sounded like New Age craziness warmed over.”

      Jadzia laughed. “Right. Twenty-five hundred years old is very new.”

      “But, I mean, that charging-crystals stuff—”

      “We found more earlier. It spoke of all those things you found so funny—flying chariots, artificial lights, lances of light. The ancient Greek who wrote those scrolls, who somewhere got a much purer version of the story than Solon passed down to Critias, he did not have the language of technology to describe an artificial power source. He probably didn’t understand it. Some kind of divine gift, like Zeus’s lightnings chained, would be the closest he could come to expressing it.”

      “But using gemstones for batteries,” Annja said. “I’m no physicist, but that sounds pretty implausible.”

      An Air France Airbus climbed past them from its takeoff roll, momentarily blanking out the conversation in the scream of its engines. “What?” Annja shouted.

      “I said, how would that airplane strike an ancient Greek? Implausible, yes? Everything is impossible until someone does it.”

      Annja sought an answer to that and could find none that didn’t ring as hollow as a pewter doubloon. Come on , she told herself. Is she really that much smarter than I am? Or am I letting myself get intimidated, just because everyone told me what a supergenius she was?

      Annja had been arguably the brightest girl in the orphanage where she was raised. It had gotten her knuckles rapped by the nuns for being a smart aleck, and had seen her shunned sometimes by girls who thought she was too smart for her own good.

      But she thought she had gotten over the expectation of being the smartest person in the room by about the middle of her first semester as a college freshman. So even if Jadzia was smarter than her by some great yawning gap, it did not follow she had to think herself stupid.

      “How would something like that work?” she asked. “Storing energy that way.”

      Jadzia shrugged. “I am no physicist or engineer, either. But perhaps in some way involving the molecular bonds of the crystalline structure itself?”

      That brought Annja up short. That did sound plausible. At least close enough, given she was so ignorant of what she’d really need to know to evaluate the possibility that she didn’t even feel bad about it. She had her own abstruse specialties, she reminded herself, and if crystallography wasn’t among them, that was just okay.

      “All right,” she said, “I’ll grant the possibility. On a purely hypothetical basis. But so what?”

      “The scrolls could prove alternate energy sources were available,” Jadzia said, “without the inefficiencies of wind or solar power, or the risks of nuclear.”

      Annja shook her head and laughed. “It’s not as if they contain a set of blueprints for harnessing that power.”

      Jadzia’s smile widened until she reminded Annja forcibly of a cat who’d just discovered how to work the catch on the birdcage. “But maybe that’s—” she patted the green-and-purple synthetic bag plumped beside her on the wall “—still in here.”