The Old Mine

29: Building a Stronger Base

                       Recke walked around the bishops wing, trying to figure out their thought process. Usually things like this came easy to him but this time he was distracted by something Cal had said last night. She had suggested that maybe the things Ocea found in the vitamins were to help the bishops clone the jumpers. Actually she had made a joke that if this was a movie, they would be trying to clone him; but she might not have been too far off from the truth. First thing he did this morning was contact Ocea and tell her Cals joke, he suggested that she eliminates the outrageous as possible motives to their actions. Ocea had agreed that figuring out their motive might help solve this. Recke sighed and looked around him, the extinct species of conifer known as rainbow wood and the safe it hid was a clue to him. Recke knew it meant that there were a lot more hidden places around this wing. The elaborate decor was hiding the triggers to the other vaults. Triggers that would be obvious to those that were in on the secret. That meant that these triggers were overall topics in the purpose behind their betrayal. "I wondered if I would find you here," Cal came in slowly "This place creeps me out. I feel like there are people hiding everywhere."

                         Recke turned and looked at her quizzically "Can you describe the sensation a little differently than that?" A thought was striking him, some timekeepers sense breaks in the moral code of jumping as a nagging feeling and others feel it as people hiding where the evidence has been hidden.

                         "I guess it feels a lot like jumpers." Cal shuddered and looked around nervously. "Like people are hiding around here waiting to leap out and scare me."

                         "Point out where you feel this." Recke suspected that Cal's instincts were pointing to the hidden vaults. "If I am correct your instincts have done it again. You aren't feeling people hidden you are either feeling the jump energy remnants to whatever process they used to get secured files... or you are feeling what timekeepers call the alarm. It is this nagging feeling and it shows you who has broken the moral code."

                           "Okay, let's do it this way." Cal pulled out her cube and opened up a map of the space. She walked the space with the map out, tagging the locations that she felt any unusual sensations from. "Here" she handed the cube to Recke who compared the locations to the decor and found a few anomalies in each location she had tagged. "Why do they do this, what is the point. What is their motivation?" Cal paced angrily "Aren't we supposed to be after the same thing, I thought they were on our side."

                         "Preston Rivers is but the bishops under him aren't all loyal. It's their endgame that we need to understand to know where all the pieces fit." He glanced at Cal who was now seated and deep in thought "Did I stir something in that beautiful head of yours?"

                        Cal nodded, "Something I found in my secret searches" She laughed I need to do more looking, but I don't want to do it alone." She looked at Recke, "When you finish here, will you help me?" Recke nodded and sent a message to Brick and the Winthrop's then opened the vaults one by one. Just like the first one the others were filled with paper copies of files the bishops had no right to access.

                         With Recke in charge Cal sat and looked at the files by Zachary that's when she saw it "Wait, some of this is similar to some files I found hidden in an abandoned wing that I cleaned up." All eyes turned to look at her She glanced at Recke first "The secret search." He nodded in understanding "I guess it's a timekeeper thing, but when I had that dream that said Recke was going to be replaced with a clone a few things stood out. One was that he always hung out in this abandoned space, he would sit on file cabinets that had been turned on their side and turned into... at least in part to planters. The plants in them were weird, different colors... abnormal colors some larger than normal."