The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) Read Online Free

next to a cot.
    “Please,” said Hillary. “Take a seat. Anywhere you wish.”
    John and Alyssa each grabbed a folding chair and positioned them beside the table.
    “Good to see you again, Alyssa. And this would be Mr. Savage?” He offered John his hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you, sir.”
    Savage took the man’s hand and gave it a solid shake, finding a non-calloused feel to the professor’s hand. He found it soft and moist, even fragile. It was more like the feel of a man who appointed others to do his labors for him. “My pleasure,” he said.
    When Hillary took the chair by his desk, he turned to Alyssa and smiled. “You’ve grown since I last saw you.”
    “People do that, Hillary. They grow up.”
    He immediately recognized the edge, since she did little to hide it. “Alyssa, I can understand your animosity towards me since I did everything in my power to get out of your father’s shadow by making claims and admissions that I’m not proud of. I even went as far as to file false claims to discredit him so that I could rise above and beyond his level. And I was wrong. Your father was a great man and I could never hold a torch to him. It was my insecurities that marked me as a failure. I should have been above that.”
    “You’re not a failure, Hillary. You’re renowned in the field.”
    “I’m renowned because I chased down every lead your father offered. I followed the scraps he left behind. And I’m here, at this place, at Eden, because of your father and because of you.” 
    She sighed. Forgiving an adversary of her father was difficult to do. So this was not going to be easy by any means.
    “I’m offering you an olive branch,” he told her. “I want you to understand that your father has been credited as the discoverer of Eden . . . And that your credibility has been restored to you.”
    “This is all very nice of you, Hillary,” the tightness was still there, in her voice. “But why offer me a partnership?”
    “Ah.” He lifted papers from his desktop and revealed the triangular piece of black silica, then offered it to Alyssa, passing it off as if it was the most precious item he ever laid hands on. “Does this look familiar to you?”
    Her eyes widened, but slowly, the shine of the glass, the expert engraving, the archaic symbols, all brought back emotions good and bad, but more openly, an unbridled excitement. “Yes,” she whispered, turning the relic over.
    “Do you know what it says?” he asked.
    “No. I can decipher a few symbols. But it’s not enough to string together a cognizant thought. There’s not enough here.” She looked at him and raised the item. “This is the reason why you want a joint expedition?”
    “I need a cryptanalyst. But it has to be someone with your keen ability to interpret.” He took the relic back and held it up. “Someone with your skills can expedite matters greatly. And there’s something else.”
    “And what’s that?”
    He placed the relic onto his desktop. “As I expressed earlier to you, we found this relic at the mouth of an opening, a tunnel, which took a better part of a day to excavate. We found more pieces of black silica, obviously remnants of manufactured pieces that were skillfully crafted, but held no script to them. By this time the sun had set. So we cordoned off the entrance to begin anew as soon as the day begun.”
    “But?”
    “This morning we discovered that the barrier had been breached.”
    Alyssa pointed to an unseen area beyond the walls of his tent. “You have tent city out there,” she said. “So what did you expect? That there wasn’t going to be a single soul out there who wanted to go on a treasure hunt?”
    “I can assure you that this is not the case.”
    “How do you know that?”
    He leaned back against his chair. “Because the breach did not come from our side of the dig,” he told her. “The breach came from something that forced its way out of the tunnel.”
     
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    Savage leaned