The Four Corners Cycle
Book Four  - Yekaterina's Kiss
Chapter Four
Spookey247 

Feedback- Cherished and answered: Spookey247@msn.com

Summary - Truths lurk in a dark place. Our friends descend and delve.

Summary - Truths lurk in a dark place. Our friends descend and delve. Notes and Acknowledgments at the beginning of 1/9

More notes and thank-yous at the end of 9/9.

Mulder sticks like a fly to the rocky face of the bluff. He digs in with the toes of his boots and stretches toward yet another craggy handhold. For the last several minutes he's been moving laterally across the rock toward an area of deep fissures and sharp outcroppings that lies no more than ten feet beneath the bottom of the ancient stone stairway.

Dana and Ben stand side by side at the foot of the wall.

Having latched on with his fingers to a rugged protrusion, Mulder reaches out with his foot. Dirt and gravel plummet downward as his boot digs into the rock, searching for purchase. He hesitates, working up the nerve to trust his weight to the foothold. Dana presses her hand to her mouth. She inhales sharply as he shifts himself up and sideways.

"This is easy for him, Dana," Ben says calmly. "I've seen him go up higher walls than this one."

"Really," Dana says, eyes locked to the face of the bluff. "When?"

"Years ago. Before Maia...before the twins were born. We used to all climb for fun. I'm too damn old to do it anymore, but nothing ever changes for Will. He's spry. He sticks to rock like a lizard."

True to Ben's word, Mulder finds a series of solid outcroppings and begins climbing straight up the wall at an astonishing rate of speed.

"You've known him a long time," Dana says, lowering her voice.

"Will? Yeah. Forever. Since I was a kid. I grew up in Tuba."

With a sinking feeling, Dana realizes that Ben has probably known Will over twice as long as she knew Mulder.

Her voice drops even lower. "And you knew Maia, obviously."

Ben stares up for a few minutes without speaking. Then he nods, slowly, his gaze steady on Mulder's form as it travels up the side of the bluff.

"What was she like, Ben?"

He shrugs. "Hard to sum up a person like Maia. She was a good woman. She loved her kids."

Dana watches as Mulder reaches the spot towards which he's been working. He anchors himself to a ledge and begins hauling himself up over its edge.

"Did she love her husband?"

Ben doesn't answer. He watches Mulder ascending, jaw working hard. "Far as I know," he answers, finally. "I mean, they were always really good friends. The match made sense. It meant a lot to Verbena. Gave her a lot of prestige within the movement."

Mulder stands up on the ledge, reaching toward the overhang above it. He jumps, grabs hold, begins pulling himself up by brute force.

"You're saying the marriage was arranged?"

"Not exactly." Ben looks down abruptly, dragging his fingers across his forehead and back through his long gray hair. "Not so much arranged, as...expected."

Mulder pulls himself up onto the bottom of the stairway and slumps across the steps, breathing hard. "Hey," he calls down. "I'm going to go check it out. I'll be right back." He disappears triumphantly up the stairs.

Dana turns toward Ben. "What do you mean, 'expected'?" she asks.

His dark face has gone pale. He studies his boots. "You asked me what Maia was like," he says softly. "I'll tell you what she was like. She and I were both raised in the Resistance, hearing every day about what a noble thing it was to make sacrifices for the cause. When it came right down to it, though, most of us learned fast that it doesn't do any good to be noble if you're dead. We tended to put a high priority on looking out for our own asses. Maia was different. She took all that crap about duty to heart. She lived it. She was the most selfless person I ever knew."

"So she married him because her mother wanted her to?"

"People in Tuba treated the survivors from the Labs like they were holy, so Verbena already considered Will to be a good match for Maia. When he was called, you know, when he started seeing spirits..." He raises his gaze to meet Dana's. His eyes swim with bitterness. "At that point there was no arguing with her. She expected Maia to do her duty and give up everything else."

He looks up at the stairway, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. "So she did. She gave it up," he mutters.

There is a long silence.

"She gave *you* up, didn't she, Ben?"

His eyes close briefly. He does not answer. A hawk screams, far above their heads.

Afternoon Beamer Trail Northeast of the Tanner Delta Colorado River, Grand Canyon 

Sam walks.

One footfall after another in the soft, rocky soil. He travels up, then down, left, then right, first west, then east, back and forth, lower and higher, ascending cliffs, dropping into creek beds, climbing over boulders and jumping sharp gashes in the dry, red earth.

Sam remembers.

A night in the springtime when he was eleven. Visiting Grandmother's family in Moenkopi. Sitting cross-legged on the ground late at night with his left knee brushing Will's and his right knee brushing Dru's, looking around at a gathering of relatives, dark brown eyes glowing in the firelight, dark faces upturned in wonder as his father's teacher, Uncle Edward, told the story of the First World and how it ended with a journey.

Sam walks.

The first world was called Tokpela, Endless Space. Its people were happy. Like all living things, they had been created by Spider Woman to make the earth vital, to fill it with color and movement. They understood that this was their true purpose. They revered and loved Taiowa, the Creator, who showed his face in the sun each day.

But gradually there came a time when some of the people forgot to respect their Creator. Instead of following their own inner vision, which told them right from wrong, they let themselves be corrupted by Lavaihoya, The Talker, and Kato'ya, The Handsome One, who led them away from peace and unity and into duality and suspicion.

After a time Sotuknang, the nephew of Taiowa, came to those people who still revered the Creator and told them Taiowa had decided to destroy the first world and replace it with a new one. Sotuknang told these people how to escape the destruction, and because they had not forgotten how to use their inner vision these people were able to see the signs he left for them, following clouds by day and stars by night. They walked to a certain place where Sotuknang met them and led them to the kiva of the Ant People. Sotuknang stamped on the roof of the kiva, and the Ant People took the people down under the ground, where they took care of them for many, many years, while the Creator destroyed the old world and made a new one.

Sam remembers.

The night Uncle Edward told that story, Sam laid awake for hours. He stared into the darkness, listening to Dru breathing in the bed beside him, listening to the murmur of voices in the kitchen: Uncle Edward's voice, dry and crackling, always joking under his breath; Maia's voice, higher, laughing at the jokes; Grandmother's voice, scolding them for their lack of respect. Now and then he would hear Will's voice, always low, no word uttered without prompting.

He couldn't quit thinking that night. How would it be, he wondered, to live away from the sun, shut up under the ground, never to study pictures in the clouds or see the three colors of the dawn? What would it be like to live, all mother and no father, all earth and no sky, without being able to tell east from west or night from day or summer from winter?

Sam walks.

The night Uncle Edward told that story, Sam had a terrible dream. He was standing in the desert in total darkness with a sickening crawling feeling in his feet and ankles. Even though he couldn't see, he knew his feet were buried in an enormous ant hill and that he was sinking into that ant hill, disappearing, the sand underneath him cascading downward in a strange, slow-motion crumble. As the ants pulled him deeper into their home, his body melted, became soft and elastic; filled the dark passages like a long stream of honey poured from a ladle to fill the depths of the earth.

Then he was standing at the bottom. He didn't know what bottom, only that it *was* the bottom, and that there was no place lower, no place darker, no place more airless or further from the sun than the place where he stood in that moment.

The Kachina came out of nowhere, looming toward him with a huge black face that blended with the dark, defined the dark, *was* the dark. Its eyes blazed white. Hot stars shone forth from its massive head. It held a helpless woman in its wildcat claws. Flinging the woman to the ground, it fell upon her, pushing her legs apart and penetrating her cruelly.

Sam wanted desperately to cover his eyes but found his hands glued to his sides and his feet frozen to the ground. The woman looked up into his eyes as the Kachina violated her body. She begged him to forgive her. She begged him to be silent. Her voice was high and musical, "I'm right here, son. Mama's right here..."

Sam stops walking and drops to his knees. Suddenly, he can't stop remembering.

Soyal, the Winter Solstice, a time of long, solemn ceremonies. Will was in the kiva praying with Uncle Edward and the other men from the village. Sam was supposed to be in bed, but he had slipped away from Uncle Edward's house that night. He was waiting by the entrance to the kiva, listening to the prayers below, waiting and listening and dreaming of the next winter, when he would be a man.

From his hiding place near the kiva, Sam noticed a figure in the shadows, walking quietly and carefully near the edge of the main road of the village. It moved hesitantly and appeared to stop now and then to give a backward glance.

Curious, Sam stole away from the kiva and followed the figure, silent as a ghost through miles of high desert. He thought maybe it was a spirit. Maybe it was leading him somewhere special. Maybe it wanted to tell him something.

But as the first full moon of winter rose high in the sky, he realized the figure he was following was a woman.

The figure he was following was his mother.

When the car picked Maia up near the main road, Sam was left behind, hiding behind a rock in the moonlit darkness, wondering why his mother had left them behind, without any explanation, without saying good- bye. He didn't expect her to return, but later she did, dropped off by the very same car in the exact same spot. Sam had been waiting for the sunrise so he could find his way back to the village, and as the sky began to glow with the purple light of early dawn, he followed his mother again.

Maia made guttural moaning noises as she walked. She paused now and then to double over in pain. Near the village she knelt by the side of the road for a few moments. Sam could hear how desperately she wept. He could see how hard her shoulders were shaking.

Sam wanted to go to his mother, but he was too afraid.

When she returned to the village, the men were still in the kiva. Will never knew that she had gone.

But Sam knew.

Sam gets up off the ground, dragging a sunburned arm across the tears streaming down his face.

Sam keeps walking.

All through that winter, through that spring and that summer, the nightmares would come before he knew he was asleep. He would wake in the dead of night, screaming and crying. At first, Maia would come to him with her ever-growing belly, the product, he knew, of that horrible night. She would try to comfort him by stroking his forehead, but he always shrank from her touch. After a while, she just quit coming. Sam knows his mother must have wondered why he wouldn't let her touch him.

She died late that summer, still wondering.

Late afternoon 

Yekaterina kicks the grate off the ventilation shaft and climbs through the wide opening into the medical bay. She sets her light down and takes a moment to replace the grate. Someone should do me a favor, she thinks, and just install a door here. Everyone knows how many times a day I come and go through this stinking hole.

She's been in the depths all night, sitting by a clear subterranean stream, numbing her feet in the ice cold water and pelting the blind, pasty fish with pebbles. She's been trying to find a way to forget about Stephen, trying not to think about how sad his pale blue eyes always were, trying not to remember how the sadness melted away when she touched him. She's been telling herself she shouldn't have let herself get so attached. Everyone dies, she thinks. Especially around here.

She douses her lantern and stalks up the passageway with its dim, artificial lighting. Steel doors have been affixed to the ancient living spaces that line each side of the narrow stone hallway. Yekaterina wonders what the natives who lived here eons ago would have thought of the pointless partitioning of this venerable hiding place.

Most of the doors are locked, for reasons Yekaterina has never been able to fathom. Where the hell does her father think the women are going to go? They're wired to the beds like summer squash in the hydroponics bay, all tough and yellow with big, swollen bellies. She can't see why anyone would waste energy keeping track of a key.

Why, indeed. Her face melts into a twisted, wistful smile.

Looking around to make sure she's alone, Yekaterina sits down on the floor and takes her boot off. Hidden underneath its insole is the key to the compound. Ages ago, when she was just seven, she stole it from one of her father's employees, figuring he'd be too afraid of the consequences to admit to anyone that it was missing.

She was right, as always.

Yekaterina unlocks the door to room two and slips inside. Three beds line the walls of the chamber, surrounded by equipment: heart monitors, brain monitors, stands with plastic bags and feeding tubes swinging from them. There are other kinds of machines, as well, but Yekaterina's never understood what those are used for.

She approaches the beds as she has since childhood, slowly, with a feeling of reverence and awe.

Mothers of Humanity. That's what Papa has always called them.

Yekaterina reaches underneath the first bed. The brush is right where she left it; its handle tucked neatly into the bedsprings. She pauses for a moment, smoothing the fine chestnut hair of the woman lying in the first bed.

Her name is Teresa. She lies on her side. Over the years her body has toughened and twisted, but she still has beautiful skin.

Teresa's babies always have blue eyes.

It's been about three weeks since Yekaterina has visited room two. They've been keeping her very busy in room three, the room where they keep the newer mothers, on the other side of the hall. There was a woman who joined the Project just last year, Emma, who bore a baby girl that lived two entire weeks.

Everyone was excited. When Yekaterina went to work in the lab the night it was born, she couldn't believe how sweet the baby was. Such a tiny little thing, so soft and needy. Spending her shift bathing it and holding it was a nice change. Normally after a birth she just mops up lots of blood.

But that's how it's been the last few years. The mothers get so big with those green-eyed boys. More often than not, it ends badly.

Emma got lucky, though. They gave her a girl. These days, that's like getting a reprieve, Yekaterina thinks. A chance to live, to give birth again.

It was a shame about that baby. Yekaterina's never seen one like that: perfectly formed, and so, so small. Failure to thrive is what they said, when it died.

Still, the fact that it lived at all was an encouraging sign. Papa says the Project has never been this close to success.

Yekaterina begins singing, a soft, tuneless murmur: "The night keeps all her light inside, to fill her empty womb..."

It's an old song. Her father taught it to her when she was a child. She's always loved the way it made her feel.

Yekaterina moves on, pausing at the second bed. The sheet has slipped off of Colleen's shoulders.

The Project doesn't ask much of the first mothers anymore. They've been asleep here in room two for months and months. The doctors say their bodies are exhausted. They've given so much. Yekaterina still comes to see them, though. It's habit. She's taken care of them since childhoood. It's not fair, she thinks, to shut them away like this, just because they're not bearing.

Yekaterina tucks the motionless form securely under the covers and leans down to give it a quick kiss on the cheek. She continues singing softly as she turns toward the third bed.

"...her breath comes quick and shallow, like a dying bird..."

Yekaterina catches her breath.

Dana's bed is empty.

~~~~

Yekaterina drops the key as she tries to lock room two, cursing softly as it bounces across the floor. She bends down, peering in the gloom to see where it ended up.

She can hear someone pacing, further down the passage.

The key is lying a few feet away. Yekaterina locks the door with trembling fingers and stuffs it quickly into her boot. She heads for the lab. She's got to find Dana.

Where could they have taken her, she wonders, desperately. She's been in stasis for years. Why would they move her?

Yekaterina knows that her father has no plans for Dana. He's never had any luck with her. It's always been hard to get Dana pregnant, and when they do, her babies always come too early. They've tried taking them out and incubating them, but they never make it, not even for a few days. When she asks her father about it he shakes his head in frustration and says that Dana just wasn't meant to give birth. Not like Teresa. Not like Colleen. Certainly not like the younger women, in room three.

Yekaterina has always wondered why her father is so insistent that Dana should remain with the Project. She's tried reaching into his mind while they're fucking, rummaging around for information about Dana; digging through his memory like it's a dusty supply trunk. All she receives, though, are the same hazy images, the same useless parade of dark emotions. She knows he loves Dana, in his own twisted way. She knows Dana's given him something. Something he treasures.

Somehow, Dana is Papa's favorite. She's Yekaterina's favorite, too. Unlike the other women in the Project, Dana remains fresh and beautiful, no matter what they do to her.

"Yekaterina."

She starts, hand flying up to her throat. "God, don't do that to me."

Wallace leans against a door, arms folded, staring down at her over the fat, hand-rolled cigarette that dangles from his lower lip. His round cheeks redden almost imperceptibly. "Where've *you* been?"

"You know where."

He clips his cigarette between his index and middle finger and spits a fragment of tobacco on the floor. "You're worse than a fucking rat, Yekaterina. Everyone else is dying to get out of this place and you just dig down deeper."

"I love you, too, dickhead." Yekaterina shifts on the balls of her feet. The key is digging into the side of her foot. "Hey, um...have you seen anyone...have they got anything going on in the lab?"

"How should I know? Go down and look yourself."

"Okay, fine. What are you doing hanging around down here, anyway?"

"Guarding," he sneers. "Guarding a prisoner." He hooks one enormous thumb toward the partially closed door behind his back.

"A what?" Yekaterina cranes her neck and tries to see around him.

"A prisoner. You know, another lucky fuck from the surface who's just dying to get buried alive."

"Really? Where'd they get her?"

"Not 'her'." Wallace takes a deep drag of his cigarette and blows smoke, contentedly.

"I guess this is the part where I freak out and beg you to tell me more."

He smiles. "Yup."

"Oh, Wallace. I can't stand the suspense," she intones. "Please, please tell me what's going on."

"It's a guy. A kid. We brought him all the way from Tuba City."

"No way. Really? Why?"

"You really want to know?"

"No, I'm hanging around this door because you're so goddamn sexy."

"It's because he did something. Something really bad. Mr. Birch was bringing him here to punish him, but then something happened."

Yekaterina suddenly feels incredibly nauseous. "And what was that?"

"We got to the trading post at Desert View, and of course we told Bitty his big brother was dead. When Bitty found out that this kid was the one who killed Stephen, he freaked out and stole my gun. He shot the kid in the back."

~~~~

"Scully, watch it. Push off from the rocks as you come up by the steps. There are some sharp edges there."

"Got it." Dana kicks a foot out as she rises, pushing her body away from the rock wall with its many protrusions. She grips the rope tightly, casting a glance down at the canyon floor, where Kaya and Matthew stand looking up, their worried faces slowly receding.

She cranes her neck and looks up, toward the aged pulley mechanism that was Mulder's first discovery when he reached the top of the archaic stairway. She gazes with apprehension at the rusted apparatus. It squeaks and strains each time Mulder pulls her higher. The fact that the rope itself is obviously far newer than either the stairway or the pulley affixed to it is of little comfort. It is hard to trust her safety to this conspiracy of corroded metal and lurking dry-rot, despite having watched both Ben and a load of equipment make the journey without mishap before her.

After an eternity of alternating gasps of alarm with a complete inability to breathe, Dana arrives at the top.

"Welcome to the Penthouse," Mulder quips, reeling her in.

"Hope the view is worth the trouble," Ben adds, offering a hand to steady her as she steps onto the landing.

Still holding onto Ben's hand, Dana extricates herself from the cracked leather sling she rode up in and turns to look out at the canyon. Huge white clouds dot the indigo sky. The sun is dipping lower, casting odd shadows as it streams past jagged formations and slips in and out of the fitful rock walls. Nameless terror raises the hairs on her arms and sucks all the moisture out of her mouth. Suddenly she feels lost, engulfed and immobilized, no more than a collection of frail organic cells waiting to be buried alive and petrified by increments.

She turns to speak to Mulder and Ben, but instead her mouth drops open. "Oh my god..."

"Yeah," Mulder murmurs. "That's what *I* said."

The archway towers above their heads, its ancient hand-hewn stones set around a massive portal that still bears the coarse marks of antediluvian chisels. A pathway is marked in crumbling tile on the floor of the passageway, giving way to packed dirt as the pathway becomes a tunnel and winds off into the gloom.

A faint, familiar odor wafts up from the interior of the cavernous dwelling, a whiff of something foreign, not of rock or earth, animal or bird.

Dana's breath comes quick and shallow...

All at once she's lying on her back in the darkness, paralyzed by tubes and wires and a host of powerful drugs. Gentle hands stroke her hair. A smooth, soft voice sings, tunelessly.

"The night keeps all her light inside..."

A horrifying chill runs through her body.

Mulder's hand is on her shoulder.

"Mulder, this place..." she begins, turning toward him.

"This is the place," he answers, softly. He runs a finger over her collarbone, searching for words. "If it's too much for you, Scully, to come back here..."

"Mulder, no." Dana grasps his hand and squeezes it. "I need to do this."

"Hey, look at this," Ben calls. He is staring at images carved in the rock near the foundation of the stone archway. A large figure with a square, mask- like head is carved above a smaller human figure. A long line is drawn below the figures, crossed with many smaller lines and ending in an arrow that points away from the cave.

"What's that?" Dana asks.

Ben scratches his head. "I'm not sure."

"From the placement..." Mulder muses, tracing the carvings, "might be a wu'ya."

"Yeah," Ben agrees.

"And that is...?" Dana asks.

"Sign left behind to show how long people were here. Left to welcome anyone from the clan who returns." Mulder points to the large figure, then to the small one. "This is the god. This is the people. The marks might represent years, or tens of years, or hundreds of years."

He shrugs. "Who knows? Probably carved by the people who built this, but not necessarily."

"Hey, Will. Give me your lantern." Ben squats down and opens his pack. He fills Mulder's lantern with kerosene. Mulder fixes a coil of rope to his belt while Ben works. He goes to the edge and calls down to Kaya and Matthew. "We're set. We're going in."

Matthew's voice rises from the canyon floor, fluttering in the wind like a loose piece of paper caught in an updraft. "When do we start worrying?"

"First light tomorrow. But don't worry."

"Will!" Kaya's voice sounds childlike after being carried so far up the rocky wall.

"Yeah!"

"Be careful!"

"We will. Kaya!"

"Yeah!"

"Remember, Sam's coming. Send him in."

There is a pause.

"I will!"

"We'll see you both soon!" Mulder turns away from the edge and takes a few steps back toward the entryway. He shakes his head with a wry smile. "I bet they'll find something to do while we're gone."

"Do you think we'll have enough light?" Dana asks in a dry, husky voice. She remembers how vast the darkness can be. How light only makes it seem bigger.

Mulder stares at her intensely for a long, long moment. Dana can feel how badly he wants to take her in his arms. "Is everybody ready?"

Ben pulls his pack on his back and nods. Dana takes a deep breath. She's not sure if her feet are going to move when she tells them to carry her toward that blackness. She reaches for Mulder. He takes her outstretched hand, then turns toward the dark and raises his lantern.

"Okay, then," he says. "Let's do it."

End 4 of 9