Free Birth of the Alliance by Alex Albrinck Page A

submarine back again to mine all of this.
    Will moved deeper into the cave. While this cave wasn’t quite so burdened by the yellowish metal as the others, it would probably be the easiest to mine.
    He paused. Hope?
    Still no response.
    He started moving to the entry of the cave, then saved time and teleported to the river. Hope?
    There was still no response, and Will began to panic. Had something happened to her? She couldn’t be more than a mile away; their effective telepathic range was probably somewhere in the vicinity of the moon. Where could she be? With no better approach available, he started teleporting to each cave in turn, looking inside for her and shouting her name until his voice echoed, and then moving to the next when he failed to locate her.
    “Will!”
    He spun around quickly, spotting her on his side of the stream. There was a faint hint of Energy and a burst of the flute-like sound that her Energy produced in his mental ears. Had she teleported there in search of him? If so, where had she been?
    He teleported to her side in an instant, and embraced her as if she’d survived a horrible trauma. “I tried to contact you and you didn’t respond. Are you okay? Were you hurt?”
    Hope shook her head. “I’m fine. I tried to contact you as well, but nothing happened. That’s when I ran out of the cave I was in and teleported back to the river to look for you. Are you okay?”
    Will nodded. “I’m fine, but this is puzzling. How in the world can we both have failed to successfully communicate with telepathy? That’s been automatic for at least seven centuries now.”
    She put her hands to her temples and massaged them with her fingers; a mannerism she’d developed during their long separation, one which he knew meant she was in deep thought. “We were both in caves. Neither of us could hear the other’s telepathic messages.” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “What did you find in the caves you explored?”
    “Huge amounts of gold available for mining the walls. What about yours?”
    She shook her head. “Then there’s nothing there worth checking. I think the cave I was in must have some kind of material in it that… I don’t know, absorbs Energy or something. But there’s far more there. Come on!” She set off at a jog to the left of the river.
    Will glanced back at the caves that would fund most nations for centuries, and then jogged after her.
    He followed Hope into the third cave. It wasn’t as large as the first cave he’d entered, but was larger than the others he’d been in. The rocky hill sloped down from the left to the right, meaning that the caves Will had visited would be “shorter” than those Hope had chosen to explore.
    It wasn’t the size of the cave that caught his attention, though.
    The first thing he noticed was the strange, blue-tinted rock that lined the entirety of the inside, much as the gold had plated the walls of the caves he’d seen. It gave the cave walls an almost watery appearance, and he had the strange feeling that he was inside the cabin of the submarine. The crystal-like stone and its bluish tint made him feel like he was under water.
    Could this blue rock be the secret to the shielding effect he and Hope had experienced?
    He turned his attention away from the walls and toward Hope, and momentarily forgot about the rock.
    The inside of the cavern was littered with skeletons, most of which were seated at wooden tables spread throughout the interior of the cave. An interior section of the cave included a small graveyard, and when Will moved in that direction, he found tombstones engraved with words written in a language he didn't recognize.
    Eden had been inhabited long before he'd arrived.
    Or, as Hope had suggested, had the people in this cave been living here for at least part of the time he’d been on the island?
    “This whole scene doesn't suggest a peaceful end. They wouldn't have sat down at tables to die like that, would