Heroes fic: Mohinder Suresh and the Quest for the Cure (4/8)
Title: Mohinder Suresh and the Quest for the Cure (4/8)
Characters: Mohinder/Peter, Noah, Nathan, Sylar, the Haitian; cameos by most of the (surviving) Season 1 cast
Word Count: 28,000ish
Rating: PG-13 for mild language, violence, some non-explicit romance-y stuff -- nothing worse than what you'd find in Raiders. Also, character death -- if you've seen Raiders, you'll have an inkling as to who might not make it to the end.
Spoilers: through all of Season 1
Summary: When the FBI approaches the Helix Foundation with a request, Mohinder finds himself thrown into another adventure--one that brings up a past he thought he’d left far behind.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the words.
A/N: An AU, set in the 1930s but after the events of Season 1. Written for reel_heroes as an adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. An unending amount of thanks, gratitude, and hugs to imamandajulius for cheerleading, offering criticism, and holding my hand through these past few months. You are the best of the best of the best. <3
Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight
IV.
“This is not good,” said Nathan Petrelli curtly.
He walked briskly through the excavation site, the Haitian at his side. Around them the clink of shovels and the whirr of drills clashed in the dust-ridden air as hundreds of Arabs and Americans alike labored over holes and dunes and pushed wheelbarrows of sand across the dirt. Nathan ducked under a rig of long wooden beams that was hauling buckets out of a deep gouge in the ground; a truck rumbled by, and he shaded his eyes against the swirl of dust that puffed up in its wake.
“I told Sylar not to be premature in his communication to New York,” Nathan continued, taking out a handkerchief that once was white and dabbing it beneath the brim of his panama. “Finding this tomb is not an exact science; it doesn’t deal in time schedules.”
“Your mother is not a patient woman,” the Haitian countered, hands in his pockets. “She wants constant reports, and she expects progress. You know this well.”
Nathan sighed. “Well, we’ll find the girl soon. And then this will all be over.”
The Haitian noticed that Nathan’s hands quaked as he put away his handkerchief, but said nothing. They brushed past two men in turbans, cloth draped across their faces so that only their eyes were visible. Nathan walked on without hesitation, but the Haitian’s eyes lingered on the turbaned men for a split second before he continued onward, one step behind Nathan.
Mohinder adjusted the cloth over his face and eyed the man next to him. “Your glasses give you away,” he uttered, voice muffled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Haitian recognized you.”
Noah slipped off his spectacles and tucked them into the folds of his cotton robes. “I’m not worried about the Haitian,” he said. “Come on, let’s find Asanet’s tomb.”
They kept their heads down as they walked deeper into the excavation site, passing by a long table of Company workers eating breakfast outside of their tents. Mounted on a ridge a few yards away was a surveyor’s instrument, its lens swiveled toward the site’s center of activity. Mohinder and Noah approached the ridge and climbed upwards over the heavy sand; when they reached the top, Mohinder peered through the instrument, maneuvering it eastward.
“The main excavations are taking place right where we expected,” Noah said, looking over the operations. “Seventy cubits south of Psusennes’ tomb. One hundred cubits east of that is, what, about fifty yards?”
“That’s how I calculated it,” Mohinder said, looking up from the instrument. “And if I’m reading this correctly…” He pointed to a dune just beyond the digs, smooth and untouched. “Asanet’s tomb should be buried there, under that sand. Here, check me, make sure I’ve got it right.”
He moved to the side and let Noah look through. “Yes,” Noah said, lifting his head, “that’s it. That’s the place.”
They stared at the virgin dune for a moment, letting everything sink in.
“We should get off this ridge,” Noah said. “People are starting to stare. And we’ve got to tell Fahim the location so he can bring the truck around.” Mohinder nodded, and they found their way down the slope, passing back behind the table of Company men.
“Hey, you there!”
Mohinder and Noah stiffened as one of the men twisted around in his seat, pointing at them. “We’re running out of water,” the man continued, holding an empty pitcher. “Wa-ter.” He moved his mouth in exaggerated gestures, as though speaking to a child. “What’s a guy have to do around here to get service from you people?”
“Go,” Noah hissed, and he stopped to take the pitcher from the table. After a moment of hesitation, Mohinder darted onward past the table, holding the cloth over his face and entering a stretch of sand dotted with dozens of tents.
He ducked between two tents and flinched-three American men stood at the other end of the tents, talking amongst themselves and blocking Mohinder’s escape route. Hastily Mohinder moved along the side of one tent, and when his hands found a flap in the canvas he slipped inside.
He looked around. The interior was furnished more comfortably than he expected, dark weaves draped over a round table in one corner and an ornate lantern flickering in the other.
And kneeling by the pole supporting the tent, bound and gagged yet very much alive, was Peter.
Peter snapped to attention as Mohinder entered the tent and stared at Mohinder’s veiled face. Beneath disheveled hair his eyes flashed, first with fear, then confusion, then joy as Mohinder ripped away the cloth over his face and knelt at Peter’s side. Peter laughed Mohinder’s name through the gag, his face beaming.
Mohinder yanked the gag down out of Peter’s mouth with shaking hands. Heart thumping madly in his chest, he looked into Peter’s glowing eyes and kissed him fervently, pressing his fingers into Peter’s cheeks until they left white marks on the other man’s face. When they parted, both were panting hard.
“I thought you were dead,” Mohinder choked. “They must have switched baskets and I didn’t see. Oh, thank God! Are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Peter said breathlessly, “but they’re giving me injections of curare every twenty minutes or so. I couldn’t use my powers even if I had any. You’ve got to get me out of here, quick-they’ll be back any minute.”
Mohinder hunched over and examined the knots around Peter’s hands, which were tied behind his back and around the tent pole. Swiftly Mohinder rummaged for the switchblade in a pocket underneath his robes.
“They keep asking about you, what you know,” Peter continued. “Cut me loose, quick, before they come back-what’s wrong?”
Mohinder had paused in his descent toward the knots, brows furrowed in thought. He slowly flipped the switchblade shut.
“What are you doing?”
Mohinder took Peter by the shoulders. “I know where the tomb is, Peter.”
“And it’s here?” Mohinder nodded. “Well, cut me loose, I’m coming with you!”
“If I take you out of here now, they’ll start combing the place for us.” He started pulling the gag back over Peter’s mouth, and Peter wriggled in his binds, eyes wide in disbelief.
“Are you crazy? Get me out of here!” Peter slurred through the gag, but Mohinder cupped his hand over Peter’s lips.
“I hate to do this,” Mohinder said, “but if you don’t sit still and keep quiet, this whole thing’s going to be shot. I’ll be back to get you,” he added, and kissed Peter on the forehead before pulling the cloth over his own face and slipping out of the tent, Peter’s garbled shouts ringing in his ears.
He turned left out of the tent, then swerved to the right at the sight of Nathan, the Haitian, and Sylar talking heatedly beyond the open flap of another tent nearby. Mohinder paused, leaning forward to listen, but his eavesdropping was interrupted as a pair of hands grabbed him from behind.
He spun around, swinging a fist, but it was caught by his attacker. Their eyes met, and Mohinder sighed in relief.
“Relax, it’s just me,” Noah whispered, releasing Mohinder’s hand. “Where have you been?”
“I found Peter,” Mohinder said. “He’s alive, tied up in that tent. But they’re looking for us, Noah, and if we rescue him now it’ll only alert the Company to our presence.”
Noah nodded in agreement. “We get the sarcophagus first. Fahim is on the way to the dune. Let’s go.”
They weaved through the tents, skirted past a train of mules hauling wheelbarrows of sand, and hiked toward the untouched dune beyond the Company’s digs.
“Who knows,” Nathan was saying to the other men within the tent, “perhaps the sarcophagus is still waiting in some antechamber for us to discover. Perhaps there’s some vital bit of evidence that eludes us. Perhaps-”
“Perhaps your brother can help us,” Sylar said in a low voice.
Nathan’s mouth vanished into a thin line. “The original piece was sent to him, after all,” Sylar continued. “He may know much … if properly motivated.”
“He doesn’t know anything more than we do,” Nathan muttered through gritted teeth.
“Nathan, Nathan,” Sylar chuckled, circling the table they were standing around until his face was inches apart from Nathan’s. “I can only imagine how epic the betrayal of a brother must be. I pity you, really I do. But you needn’t worry-I know the perfect man for this kind of work.” He flashed his teeth, eyes wild.
Nathan’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “You will leave him alone,” he hissed.
Sylar laughed, striding out of the tent. Nathan and the Haitian exchanged glances, Nathan’s face stretched thin.
On the far side of a barren sand dune, hidden from the scattered digs of the Company, Mohinder tread through the thick sands followed by a trail of turbaned men. The dune loomed above, dry sands giving way to caked dirt and cracked mud that lurched skyward into a steep hill several feet above Mohinder’s head. Using his shovel as a walking stick, he hoisted himself upward, scraping past the dirt clumps until he reached the top, where the hill flattened into a dusty plateau overlooking the digs. He whistled, and soon Noah and the men were climbing up the hill, breaking into the dirt with their own shovels and picks.
Mohinder looked out over the digs for a moment, catching sight of the tent where Peter lay, waiting. Then he turned, breathed in deeply, and shoveled through the broken tiles of mud and dust.
---
Against a cinnamon-red sky, amidst a rising shower of fizzled heat, before a sun blazing white-hot in its final descent beneath the desert, a blackened silhouette stripped away the last of his robes. Dry gusts breaking against his blouse, he paced before a rhythm of figures chanting to the steady beat of their shovels.
The silhouette reached down and plucked a fedora from the darkness, placing it snugly atop his curls.
---
Only after the sky fell cold and Mohinder shrugged on his leather jacket did someone hit stone. “Find the edges!” he shouted over the gasping wind. Thunderclouds roiled above them and spat out lightning across the dark horizon, but rain still eluded them. Mohinder shivered.
He grabbed a pry-bar and joined Noah and the others in lifting up the flat block of stone they had uncovered. With a final collective grunt, the block broke away from the sand, expelling dank, ancient air into the wind. They heaved the block to the side, pushing it away until the rectangular void in the dune was bare and vulnerable.
Noah took a torch from one of the Arabs, and he and Mohinder lay prostrate at the edge of the darkness to peer inside. Firelight somewhere below sputtered and flickered and cast a murky glow over the space, but not enough for either of them to see by. A flashbulb of lightning screamed through the darkness, illuminating the head of a giant statue glaring into the churning heavens. And for one fleeting, terrible moment, Mohinder glimpsed the stone floor down below.
Noah squinted in the dim powder of light, frowning. “Why is the floor moving?”
Mohinder swallowed. “Give me your torch,” he said. He took the light from Noah with numb fingers and dropped it into the darkness.
Coating the floor, seething and writhing like the black thunderheads outside, were thousands of hissing snakes. They slithered and twisted amid one another, bellies sliding across bellies, damp sand sticking to slick scales, weaving a wet and living carpet. Bodies black and tenuous, the serpents recoiled from the torch Mohinder had thrown and twined themselves around each other in a squelching mass of tails and tongues.
Mohinder choked back the bile that had surged into his throat. He rolled to one side, blood draining from his face.
“Snakes,” he croaked. “Why’d it have to be snakes?”
“Asps,” Noah added. “Very dangerous.” He patted Mohinder on the arm. “You go first.”
---
Peter opened his eyes, blinking away drowsiness. For a moment he was disoriented, trying to remember why he was kneeling in the dirt and why his mouth tasted like cotton. In a rush his mind caught up with his senses, and for the first time since he had drifted out of sleep he realized someone was untying his hands.
He struggled to turn around, hoping for dark skin and a tattered fedora, but instead found himself staring into the grim eyes of his brother.
Nathan came around and gently loosened the knot in the gag, slipping it off over Peter’s head. He kept his eyes downcast, but felt Peter’s gaze project a dozen emotions onto his forehead. Nathan stood, moving away toward the table on the other side of the tent. Peter hesitated for a split second before dashing toward the open tent flap-but the Haitian loomed in the entrance, a sudden strike of lightning outlining his rigid silhouette.
“If you’re trying to escape on foot,” Nathan said, his back turned, “the desert is three weeks in every direction.”
“I wasn’t planning on walking,” Peter snapped.
Nathan moved aside, revealing a tray of bread, cheese, and water on the table. “C’mon, Pete. I know there’s something up with your abilities, or else the Company would never have been able to capture you like this. You can’t fly out of here any more than I can walk through walls.”
Peter wasn’t sure what to say to this.
“Have something to eat, Peter,” he continued, gesturing to the tray of food. “You must be hungry.”
Peter was in fact a lot thirstier than he was hungry, and he couldn’t see why Nathan would untie him just to poison him with a late-night dinner; so he approached the table and emptied the glass of water in one long draught. Then he ripped into the loaf of bread, sliding into a seat across from Nathan, who once again was avoiding Peter’s eyes.
“I’m sorry they’ve been treating you like this,” Nathan said quietly. Peter glared at him between bites.
“I think you mean we, not they. Last I checked, these people were friends of yours.”
“They’re not my friends. Necessary allies, perhaps, but not friends. They have the resources I need right now.”
“The Helix Foundation has resources,” Peter countered. “Why not go to them?”
“Because you and Mohinder-” He stopped himself, but Peter knew what came next.
“Ah, I see. Because you couldn’t ever admit to yourself that your little brother had fallen in love with a man. And that justifies ignoring the Foundation and going to the dark side?”
“Not everything is as black and white as you think it is, Peter.”
Peter finished eating the rest of the bread in silence before speaking again, his voice quiet but emphatic. “Nathan, you’ve been sleeping with the enemy for two years-you go around capturing innocent people so that the Company can experiment on them-you represent everything Mohinder and I have been fighting against.”
Nathan narrowed his eyes. “What you and Mohinder do is pointless. Hiding people from the Company? The Company might do some questionable things, but in the end, we-”
“Ha!” Peter barked, rising to his feet. “We! You admit it, then, you’re one of them. And don’t tell me the Company does good things, Nathan, anything our mother is involved with these days is poisonous.”
“Mom’s changed,” Nathan said.
“Mom manipulated you into thinking she was reformed. Hell, she has Sylar doing her bidding. I’ll never understand how you can sleep at night. And this Asanet business? The only reason you’re looking for her is to control who has abilities and who doesn’t. Can you imagine what kind of power the Company would wield if they got their hands on-”
“Dammit, Peter,” Nathan shouted, jumping to his feet, “Asanet isn’t for the Company, she’s for me!”
Peter stared at Nathan, who now met his eyes with desperate determination.
Nathan circled the table and stood face-to-face with Peter, putting a hand on the younger brother’s shoulder. “Listen,” he hissed, “I joined the Company for a lot of reasons that you’ll never understand, but in the last few months I started questioning some things.” Peter opened his mouth to speak, but Nathan censored him with a dangerous look. “Don’t interrupt me. I was questioning some of my decisions, but then that Mendez painting showed up in my mailbox. And for a couple of days, I did some of my own research and learned what Asanet could do. I’m smiling in that painting, Pete. Smiling at the thought of losing my ability. And everything I’d been thinking about all clicked into place-I didn’t just want out of the Company; I wanted out of this entire life.”
He broke away from Peter and paced restlessly about the room. “Everything wrong with my life stems back to this ability. Heidi’s accident. Dad’s death, he and Ma being linked to all of this. You thinking you could fly and trying to get yourself killed-repeatedly. Not to mention that four years ago, I was willing to sacrifice half of New York for the power that Linderman promised me. None of it would have happened if I didn’t know how to fly, if Dad and Mom and Linderman and the others hadn’t singled me out to be the politician who could change everything. Heidi and I would still be together, and I’d still see my sons. And you wouldn’t hate me so much for what I’ve become.”
He sighed heavily. “I want out, Peter. I took the painting to the Company because I knew they could find this girl faster than I could alone. And once I’m cured, I’m leaving that place for good. Starting fresh, off to lead a normal life.”
Peter watched Nathan drag a hand through his hair. “You can’t just give up, Nathan,” Peter said softly. “Being cured isn’t going to solve everything.”
“But it’ll be a start, Pete.”
Peter closed the distance between the two of them. “Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway. You can’t wake Asanet. She isn’t going to cure you; she’s going to kill you.”
Nathan’s head snapped up. “What?”
“My sketch. It shows you dead, at the foot of the sarcophagus.”
Nathan stared at him, face thin. Peter took Nathan by the shoulders and watched the war rage behind his brother’s eyes for a long moment.
“You’re lying,” Nathan muttered, jerking out of Peter’s hold. “Sylar saw the sketch, and I wasn’t in it. You just don’t want me to go after this girl.”
Peter stepped back, feeling as though he had been slapped in the face. “I’m not lying. Another image was drawn on the back of the sketch that Sylar didn’t see. You’re my brother, Nathan, no matter what, and I’m not about to let you go get yourself killed!”
Lightning flashed, and a new silhouette flickered in the open tent flap. Argument forgotten, Peter rushed to Nathan’s side as Sylar stepped lightly into the tent.
“We meet again, Peter,” Sylar sneered, wrapped in his black trench coat. “I see you and your brother have caught up; how touching. Unfortunately, you and I have far more important matters to discuss. Please, take a seat.”
Peter glanced at Nathan before sitting hesitantly at the table; Nathan remained at his side. Sylar slid into a chair across from them and folded his hands on the table.
“Now,” he said, smirking, “what shall we talk about?”
---
Mohinder dangled from a rope halfway between the snakes and the open sky. Looking up, he glimpsed Noah’s head peering into the tomb; and with a quick glance down over his shoulder, he saw the landing they had created, a bare patch of dust circled haphazardly by torches. The snakes watched him, as though waiting for him to descend. He loosened his grip on the rope and slid down, jolting to a halt as he squeezed his gloved fingers over the twine again. The rope swung him like a pendulum; the slithers and hisses only grew louder and more nauseating.
Suddenly the rope slackened. For a split second he felt weightless, hovering above the torches as the twine crumpled toward his fingers; and then gravity heaved itself upon him, thrusting him down into the dirt with a heavy thud.
He jerked up his head to look around, and his stomach dropped into the floor.
Staring at him with acidic green eyes was a cobra, thick body reared and bruise-black hood opened wide. Their faces hovered inches apart; Mohinder saw every scale, every fang, every shuddering muscle in heightened detail, felt the snake’s breath flick against his cheek, heard its hiss buzz in his ears until nothing else existed. He kneeled, frozen-fingers clutching dirt, legs seizing yet unmoving, jaw clamped shut so tightly that his temples throbbed-and didn’t dare breathe or think or allow his heart to beat. For a full minute he remained motionless, except for his eyes, which quivered like jelly under the cobra’s unflinching scrutiny.
Slowly, laboriously, with muscles moaning and protesting, Mohinder backed away from the serpent. The cobra slithered down to the floor, and Mohinder finally exhaled, dizzy and drenched in cold sweat. Earlier he and Noah had lowered a gas can into the circle of torches; Mohinder reached for it now, pumping gasoline over anything that moved, and tossed a torch into the mass of bodies. Flames leapt up from the floor in a rush of heat and sizzling snake flesh. Mohinder watched them burn with grim satisfaction.
As the fire began to die out, he peered up into the opening he had come through. “Noah, get down here!” he called, voice cracking. The rope still hung down from the opening; the Arabs must have lost their grip only for a moment, he thought to himself, and hadn’t dropped the rope altogether. In a few minutes Noah was lowering himself down through the hole, and soon he dropped safely at Mohinder’s side.
“You okay?” Noah asked, picking up a torch.
“Been better,” Mohinder muttered, waving his torch at the worming carpet. “I can see part of the sarcophagus from here; we need to get to the other side of the tomb.”
Their torches had nearly burned out by the time the two of them forged a path through the writhing serpents and managed to step gingerly around them; but soon they stood upon a stone platform extending out of a wall and witnessed the physical embodiment of Peter Petrelli’s first sketch.
The sarcophagus rested atop three steps, and on either side of the wall two torches flickered and stained the coffin’s curves cinnamon-gold. Snake-forms were etched into the wall’s ancient blocks above the sarcophagus, and in the sputtering torchlight they seemed to writhe upon the stone. Columns of shadowy hieroglyphics ornamented the side of the coffin. The lid was shaped into that same form of a sleeping woman, her hands folded peacefully atop her breast, her heels perched delicately on the edge of the sarcophagus.
Noah and Mohinder stood in the presence of the sarcophagus for a long moment, neither man approaching it. Mohinder’s scalp tingled, and the hair on his arms stood up. The air felt different here, electric, snapping with restless anticipation.
Mohinder swallowed and slowly ascended the steps. Reaching the top, he placed a hand upon the stone woman’s head, tracing a finger over the faded kohl around her eyes. The woman’s body was dotted with hieroglyphs, too, and he noticed again the half-helix wedged among the other symbols.
As he leaned in closer, his side brushed against something jutting out of the sarcophagus. Looking down, he noticed a circular band of stone attached where the lid met the side of the coffin. The band was large enough to fit his fist through, and after further inspection he saw an identical loophole at the other end, by the woman’s feet.
“Look,” Noah said; he had followed Mohinder up the steps and was now standing by the rightmost torch. He crouched down and picked up two long poles that had been lying on the floor; both were just wide enough to fit snugly through the stone circles.
Wordlessly, Mohinder took a pole and slid it through the two loopholes on one side of the coffin as Noah did the same on the other. They looked up at one another in silence. Neither noted out loud how eerie it was that the sarcophagus had been built for easy travel, or that the coffin seemed to be waiting for someone to take it out of this darkness. And neither made mention of the two torches that still burned steadily through the thick, old air after all these centuries.
With Mohinder at the head and Noah at the foot, the two of them gripped the poles and hoisted the sarcophagus into the air. The stone vessel was lighter than Mohinder had expected; with some effort they carried it down the steps and off the platform, walking cautiously across the path they had made in the sand. Soon they reached the dangling rope, a rectangle of early light spilling in from the surface onto a wooden crate the Arabs had lowered down a few moments before. Mohinder and Noah settled the sarcophagus in the crate and boarded up the sides, fitting the top piece of the crate into place. They tied the slack rope securely around the crate and motioned for the Arabs to take it up out of the tomb.
---
“Next time, your sidekick is not allowed during an interrogation, Nathan,” Sylar snapped, gesturing to the Haitian as the three of them burst out of the tent and walked across the sands. Dawn had settled over the excavation site, decorating the sky with clouds of color.
“As I told you before,” Nathan said bitterly, “Peter knows nothing more than we do. Your entire charade in there was a complete waste of-”
He stopped in his tracks, staring at the horizon. In the distance, atop a sand dune untouched by the Company, half a dozen men scurried about a large crate just big enough to hold a coffin. Nathan rushed forward to get a better look, the sport coat in his grasp flapping in the breeze.
“Sylar, wake your men!”
-chapter five-
Characters: Mohinder/Peter, Noah, Nathan, Sylar, the Haitian; cameos by most of the (surviving) Season 1 cast
Word Count: 28,000ish
Rating: PG-13 for mild language, violence, some non-explicit romance-y stuff -- nothing worse than what you'd find in Raiders. Also, character death -- if you've seen Raiders, you'll have an inkling as to who might not make it to the end.
Spoilers: through all of Season 1
Summary: When the FBI approaches the Helix Foundation with a request, Mohinder finds himself thrown into another adventure--one that brings up a past he thought he’d left far behind.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the words.
A/N: An AU, set in the 1930s but after the events of Season 1. Written for reel_heroes as an adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. An unending amount of thanks, gratitude, and hugs to imamandajulius for cheerleading, offering criticism, and holding my hand through these past few months. You are the best of the best of the best. <3
Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight
IV.
“This is not good,” said Nathan Petrelli curtly.
He walked briskly through the excavation site, the Haitian at his side. Around them the clink of shovels and the whirr of drills clashed in the dust-ridden air as hundreds of Arabs and Americans alike labored over holes and dunes and pushed wheelbarrows of sand across the dirt. Nathan ducked under a rig of long wooden beams that was hauling buckets out of a deep gouge in the ground; a truck rumbled by, and he shaded his eyes against the swirl of dust that puffed up in its wake.
“I told Sylar not to be premature in his communication to New York,” Nathan continued, taking out a handkerchief that once was white and dabbing it beneath the brim of his panama. “Finding this tomb is not an exact science; it doesn’t deal in time schedules.”
“Your mother is not a patient woman,” the Haitian countered, hands in his pockets. “She wants constant reports, and she expects progress. You know this well.”
Nathan sighed. “Well, we’ll find the girl soon. And then this will all be over.”
The Haitian noticed that Nathan’s hands quaked as he put away his handkerchief, but said nothing. They brushed past two men in turbans, cloth draped across their faces so that only their eyes were visible. Nathan walked on without hesitation, but the Haitian’s eyes lingered on the turbaned men for a split second before he continued onward, one step behind Nathan.
Mohinder adjusted the cloth over his face and eyed the man next to him. “Your glasses give you away,” he uttered, voice muffled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Haitian recognized you.”
Noah slipped off his spectacles and tucked them into the folds of his cotton robes. “I’m not worried about the Haitian,” he said. “Come on, let’s find Asanet’s tomb.”
They kept their heads down as they walked deeper into the excavation site, passing by a long table of Company workers eating breakfast outside of their tents. Mounted on a ridge a few yards away was a surveyor’s instrument, its lens swiveled toward the site’s center of activity. Mohinder and Noah approached the ridge and climbed upwards over the heavy sand; when they reached the top, Mohinder peered through the instrument, maneuvering it eastward.
“The main excavations are taking place right where we expected,” Noah said, looking over the operations. “Seventy cubits south of Psusennes’ tomb. One hundred cubits east of that is, what, about fifty yards?”
“That’s how I calculated it,” Mohinder said, looking up from the instrument. “And if I’m reading this correctly…” He pointed to a dune just beyond the digs, smooth and untouched. “Asanet’s tomb should be buried there, under that sand. Here, check me, make sure I’ve got it right.”
He moved to the side and let Noah look through. “Yes,” Noah said, lifting his head, “that’s it. That’s the place.”
They stared at the virgin dune for a moment, letting everything sink in.
“We should get off this ridge,” Noah said. “People are starting to stare. And we’ve got to tell Fahim the location so he can bring the truck around.” Mohinder nodded, and they found their way down the slope, passing back behind the table of Company men.
“Hey, you there!”
Mohinder and Noah stiffened as one of the men twisted around in his seat, pointing at them. “We’re running out of water,” the man continued, holding an empty pitcher. “Wa-ter.” He moved his mouth in exaggerated gestures, as though speaking to a child. “What’s a guy have to do around here to get service from you people?”
“Go,” Noah hissed, and he stopped to take the pitcher from the table. After a moment of hesitation, Mohinder darted onward past the table, holding the cloth over his face and entering a stretch of sand dotted with dozens of tents.
He ducked between two tents and flinched-three American men stood at the other end of the tents, talking amongst themselves and blocking Mohinder’s escape route. Hastily Mohinder moved along the side of one tent, and when his hands found a flap in the canvas he slipped inside.
He looked around. The interior was furnished more comfortably than he expected, dark weaves draped over a round table in one corner and an ornate lantern flickering in the other.
And kneeling by the pole supporting the tent, bound and gagged yet very much alive, was Peter.
Peter snapped to attention as Mohinder entered the tent and stared at Mohinder’s veiled face. Beneath disheveled hair his eyes flashed, first with fear, then confusion, then joy as Mohinder ripped away the cloth over his face and knelt at Peter’s side. Peter laughed Mohinder’s name through the gag, his face beaming.
Mohinder yanked the gag down out of Peter’s mouth with shaking hands. Heart thumping madly in his chest, he looked into Peter’s glowing eyes and kissed him fervently, pressing his fingers into Peter’s cheeks until they left white marks on the other man’s face. When they parted, both were panting hard.
“I thought you were dead,” Mohinder choked. “They must have switched baskets and I didn’t see. Oh, thank God! Are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Peter said breathlessly, “but they’re giving me injections of curare every twenty minutes or so. I couldn’t use my powers even if I had any. You’ve got to get me out of here, quick-they’ll be back any minute.”
Mohinder hunched over and examined the knots around Peter’s hands, which were tied behind his back and around the tent pole. Swiftly Mohinder rummaged for the switchblade in a pocket underneath his robes.
“They keep asking about you, what you know,” Peter continued. “Cut me loose, quick, before they come back-what’s wrong?”
Mohinder had paused in his descent toward the knots, brows furrowed in thought. He slowly flipped the switchblade shut.
“What are you doing?”
Mohinder took Peter by the shoulders. “I know where the tomb is, Peter.”
“And it’s here?” Mohinder nodded. “Well, cut me loose, I’m coming with you!”
“If I take you out of here now, they’ll start combing the place for us.” He started pulling the gag back over Peter’s mouth, and Peter wriggled in his binds, eyes wide in disbelief.
“Are you crazy? Get me out of here!” Peter slurred through the gag, but Mohinder cupped his hand over Peter’s lips.
“I hate to do this,” Mohinder said, “but if you don’t sit still and keep quiet, this whole thing’s going to be shot. I’ll be back to get you,” he added, and kissed Peter on the forehead before pulling the cloth over his own face and slipping out of the tent, Peter’s garbled shouts ringing in his ears.
He turned left out of the tent, then swerved to the right at the sight of Nathan, the Haitian, and Sylar talking heatedly beyond the open flap of another tent nearby. Mohinder paused, leaning forward to listen, but his eavesdropping was interrupted as a pair of hands grabbed him from behind.
He spun around, swinging a fist, but it was caught by his attacker. Their eyes met, and Mohinder sighed in relief.
“Relax, it’s just me,” Noah whispered, releasing Mohinder’s hand. “Where have you been?”
“I found Peter,” Mohinder said. “He’s alive, tied up in that tent. But they’re looking for us, Noah, and if we rescue him now it’ll only alert the Company to our presence.”
Noah nodded in agreement. “We get the sarcophagus first. Fahim is on the way to the dune. Let’s go.”
They weaved through the tents, skirted past a train of mules hauling wheelbarrows of sand, and hiked toward the untouched dune beyond the Company’s digs.
“Who knows,” Nathan was saying to the other men within the tent, “perhaps the sarcophagus is still waiting in some antechamber for us to discover. Perhaps there’s some vital bit of evidence that eludes us. Perhaps-”
“Perhaps your brother can help us,” Sylar said in a low voice.
Nathan’s mouth vanished into a thin line. “The original piece was sent to him, after all,” Sylar continued. “He may know much … if properly motivated.”
“He doesn’t know anything more than we do,” Nathan muttered through gritted teeth.
“Nathan, Nathan,” Sylar chuckled, circling the table they were standing around until his face was inches apart from Nathan’s. “I can only imagine how epic the betrayal of a brother must be. I pity you, really I do. But you needn’t worry-I know the perfect man for this kind of work.” He flashed his teeth, eyes wild.
Nathan’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “You will leave him alone,” he hissed.
Sylar laughed, striding out of the tent. Nathan and the Haitian exchanged glances, Nathan’s face stretched thin.
On the far side of a barren sand dune, hidden from the scattered digs of the Company, Mohinder tread through the thick sands followed by a trail of turbaned men. The dune loomed above, dry sands giving way to caked dirt and cracked mud that lurched skyward into a steep hill several feet above Mohinder’s head. Using his shovel as a walking stick, he hoisted himself upward, scraping past the dirt clumps until he reached the top, where the hill flattened into a dusty plateau overlooking the digs. He whistled, and soon Noah and the men were climbing up the hill, breaking into the dirt with their own shovels and picks.
Mohinder looked out over the digs for a moment, catching sight of the tent where Peter lay, waiting. Then he turned, breathed in deeply, and shoveled through the broken tiles of mud and dust.
---
Against a cinnamon-red sky, amidst a rising shower of fizzled heat, before a sun blazing white-hot in its final descent beneath the desert, a blackened silhouette stripped away the last of his robes. Dry gusts breaking against his blouse, he paced before a rhythm of figures chanting to the steady beat of their shovels.
The silhouette reached down and plucked a fedora from the darkness, placing it snugly atop his curls.
---
Only after the sky fell cold and Mohinder shrugged on his leather jacket did someone hit stone. “Find the edges!” he shouted over the gasping wind. Thunderclouds roiled above them and spat out lightning across the dark horizon, but rain still eluded them. Mohinder shivered.
He grabbed a pry-bar and joined Noah and the others in lifting up the flat block of stone they had uncovered. With a final collective grunt, the block broke away from the sand, expelling dank, ancient air into the wind. They heaved the block to the side, pushing it away until the rectangular void in the dune was bare and vulnerable.
Noah took a torch from one of the Arabs, and he and Mohinder lay prostrate at the edge of the darkness to peer inside. Firelight somewhere below sputtered and flickered and cast a murky glow over the space, but not enough for either of them to see by. A flashbulb of lightning screamed through the darkness, illuminating the head of a giant statue glaring into the churning heavens. And for one fleeting, terrible moment, Mohinder glimpsed the stone floor down below.
Noah squinted in the dim powder of light, frowning. “Why is the floor moving?”
Mohinder swallowed. “Give me your torch,” he said. He took the light from Noah with numb fingers and dropped it into the darkness.
Coating the floor, seething and writhing like the black thunderheads outside, were thousands of hissing snakes. They slithered and twisted amid one another, bellies sliding across bellies, damp sand sticking to slick scales, weaving a wet and living carpet. Bodies black and tenuous, the serpents recoiled from the torch Mohinder had thrown and twined themselves around each other in a squelching mass of tails and tongues.
Mohinder choked back the bile that had surged into his throat. He rolled to one side, blood draining from his face.
“Snakes,” he croaked. “Why’d it have to be snakes?”
“Asps,” Noah added. “Very dangerous.” He patted Mohinder on the arm. “You go first.”
---
Peter opened his eyes, blinking away drowsiness. For a moment he was disoriented, trying to remember why he was kneeling in the dirt and why his mouth tasted like cotton. In a rush his mind caught up with his senses, and for the first time since he had drifted out of sleep he realized someone was untying his hands.
He struggled to turn around, hoping for dark skin and a tattered fedora, but instead found himself staring into the grim eyes of his brother.
Nathan came around and gently loosened the knot in the gag, slipping it off over Peter’s head. He kept his eyes downcast, but felt Peter’s gaze project a dozen emotions onto his forehead. Nathan stood, moving away toward the table on the other side of the tent. Peter hesitated for a split second before dashing toward the open tent flap-but the Haitian loomed in the entrance, a sudden strike of lightning outlining his rigid silhouette.
“If you’re trying to escape on foot,” Nathan said, his back turned, “the desert is three weeks in every direction.”
“I wasn’t planning on walking,” Peter snapped.
Nathan moved aside, revealing a tray of bread, cheese, and water on the table. “C’mon, Pete. I know there’s something up with your abilities, or else the Company would never have been able to capture you like this. You can’t fly out of here any more than I can walk through walls.”
Peter wasn’t sure what to say to this.
“Have something to eat, Peter,” he continued, gesturing to the tray of food. “You must be hungry.”
Peter was in fact a lot thirstier than he was hungry, and he couldn’t see why Nathan would untie him just to poison him with a late-night dinner; so he approached the table and emptied the glass of water in one long draught. Then he ripped into the loaf of bread, sliding into a seat across from Nathan, who once again was avoiding Peter’s eyes.
“I’m sorry they’ve been treating you like this,” Nathan said quietly. Peter glared at him between bites.
“I think you mean we, not they. Last I checked, these people were friends of yours.”
“They’re not my friends. Necessary allies, perhaps, but not friends. They have the resources I need right now.”
“The Helix Foundation has resources,” Peter countered. “Why not go to them?”
“Because you and Mohinder-” He stopped himself, but Peter knew what came next.
“Ah, I see. Because you couldn’t ever admit to yourself that your little brother had fallen in love with a man. And that justifies ignoring the Foundation and going to the dark side?”
“Not everything is as black and white as you think it is, Peter.”
Peter finished eating the rest of the bread in silence before speaking again, his voice quiet but emphatic. “Nathan, you’ve been sleeping with the enemy for two years-you go around capturing innocent people so that the Company can experiment on them-you represent everything Mohinder and I have been fighting against.”
Nathan narrowed his eyes. “What you and Mohinder do is pointless. Hiding people from the Company? The Company might do some questionable things, but in the end, we-”
“Ha!” Peter barked, rising to his feet. “We! You admit it, then, you’re one of them. And don’t tell me the Company does good things, Nathan, anything our mother is involved with these days is poisonous.”
“Mom’s changed,” Nathan said.
“Mom manipulated you into thinking she was reformed. Hell, she has Sylar doing her bidding. I’ll never understand how you can sleep at night. And this Asanet business? The only reason you’re looking for her is to control who has abilities and who doesn’t. Can you imagine what kind of power the Company would wield if they got their hands on-”
“Dammit, Peter,” Nathan shouted, jumping to his feet, “Asanet isn’t for the Company, she’s for me!”
Peter stared at Nathan, who now met his eyes with desperate determination.
Nathan circled the table and stood face-to-face with Peter, putting a hand on the younger brother’s shoulder. “Listen,” he hissed, “I joined the Company for a lot of reasons that you’ll never understand, but in the last few months I started questioning some things.” Peter opened his mouth to speak, but Nathan censored him with a dangerous look. “Don’t interrupt me. I was questioning some of my decisions, but then that Mendez painting showed up in my mailbox. And for a couple of days, I did some of my own research and learned what Asanet could do. I’m smiling in that painting, Pete. Smiling at the thought of losing my ability. And everything I’d been thinking about all clicked into place-I didn’t just want out of the Company; I wanted out of this entire life.”
He broke away from Peter and paced restlessly about the room. “Everything wrong with my life stems back to this ability. Heidi’s accident. Dad’s death, he and Ma being linked to all of this. You thinking you could fly and trying to get yourself killed-repeatedly. Not to mention that four years ago, I was willing to sacrifice half of New York for the power that Linderman promised me. None of it would have happened if I didn’t know how to fly, if Dad and Mom and Linderman and the others hadn’t singled me out to be the politician who could change everything. Heidi and I would still be together, and I’d still see my sons. And you wouldn’t hate me so much for what I’ve become.”
He sighed heavily. “I want out, Peter. I took the painting to the Company because I knew they could find this girl faster than I could alone. And once I’m cured, I’m leaving that place for good. Starting fresh, off to lead a normal life.”
Peter watched Nathan drag a hand through his hair. “You can’t just give up, Nathan,” Peter said softly. “Being cured isn’t going to solve everything.”
“But it’ll be a start, Pete.”
Peter closed the distance between the two of them. “Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway. You can’t wake Asanet. She isn’t going to cure you; she’s going to kill you.”
Nathan’s head snapped up. “What?”
“My sketch. It shows you dead, at the foot of the sarcophagus.”
Nathan stared at him, face thin. Peter took Nathan by the shoulders and watched the war rage behind his brother’s eyes for a long moment.
“You’re lying,” Nathan muttered, jerking out of Peter’s hold. “Sylar saw the sketch, and I wasn’t in it. You just don’t want me to go after this girl.”
Peter stepped back, feeling as though he had been slapped in the face. “I’m not lying. Another image was drawn on the back of the sketch that Sylar didn’t see. You’re my brother, Nathan, no matter what, and I’m not about to let you go get yourself killed!”
Lightning flashed, and a new silhouette flickered in the open tent flap. Argument forgotten, Peter rushed to Nathan’s side as Sylar stepped lightly into the tent.
“We meet again, Peter,” Sylar sneered, wrapped in his black trench coat. “I see you and your brother have caught up; how touching. Unfortunately, you and I have far more important matters to discuss. Please, take a seat.”
Peter glanced at Nathan before sitting hesitantly at the table; Nathan remained at his side. Sylar slid into a chair across from them and folded his hands on the table.
“Now,” he said, smirking, “what shall we talk about?”
---
Mohinder dangled from a rope halfway between the snakes and the open sky. Looking up, he glimpsed Noah’s head peering into the tomb; and with a quick glance down over his shoulder, he saw the landing they had created, a bare patch of dust circled haphazardly by torches. The snakes watched him, as though waiting for him to descend. He loosened his grip on the rope and slid down, jolting to a halt as he squeezed his gloved fingers over the twine again. The rope swung him like a pendulum; the slithers and hisses only grew louder and more nauseating.
Suddenly the rope slackened. For a split second he felt weightless, hovering above the torches as the twine crumpled toward his fingers; and then gravity heaved itself upon him, thrusting him down into the dirt with a heavy thud.
He jerked up his head to look around, and his stomach dropped into the floor.
Staring at him with acidic green eyes was a cobra, thick body reared and bruise-black hood opened wide. Their faces hovered inches apart; Mohinder saw every scale, every fang, every shuddering muscle in heightened detail, felt the snake’s breath flick against his cheek, heard its hiss buzz in his ears until nothing else existed. He kneeled, frozen-fingers clutching dirt, legs seizing yet unmoving, jaw clamped shut so tightly that his temples throbbed-and didn’t dare breathe or think or allow his heart to beat. For a full minute he remained motionless, except for his eyes, which quivered like jelly under the cobra’s unflinching scrutiny.
Slowly, laboriously, with muscles moaning and protesting, Mohinder backed away from the serpent. The cobra slithered down to the floor, and Mohinder finally exhaled, dizzy and drenched in cold sweat. Earlier he and Noah had lowered a gas can into the circle of torches; Mohinder reached for it now, pumping gasoline over anything that moved, and tossed a torch into the mass of bodies. Flames leapt up from the floor in a rush of heat and sizzling snake flesh. Mohinder watched them burn with grim satisfaction.
As the fire began to die out, he peered up into the opening he had come through. “Noah, get down here!” he called, voice cracking. The rope still hung down from the opening; the Arabs must have lost their grip only for a moment, he thought to himself, and hadn’t dropped the rope altogether. In a few minutes Noah was lowering himself down through the hole, and soon he dropped safely at Mohinder’s side.
“You okay?” Noah asked, picking up a torch.
“Been better,” Mohinder muttered, waving his torch at the worming carpet. “I can see part of the sarcophagus from here; we need to get to the other side of the tomb.”
Their torches had nearly burned out by the time the two of them forged a path through the writhing serpents and managed to step gingerly around them; but soon they stood upon a stone platform extending out of a wall and witnessed the physical embodiment of Peter Petrelli’s first sketch.
The sarcophagus rested atop three steps, and on either side of the wall two torches flickered and stained the coffin’s curves cinnamon-gold. Snake-forms were etched into the wall’s ancient blocks above the sarcophagus, and in the sputtering torchlight they seemed to writhe upon the stone. Columns of shadowy hieroglyphics ornamented the side of the coffin. The lid was shaped into that same form of a sleeping woman, her hands folded peacefully atop her breast, her heels perched delicately on the edge of the sarcophagus.
Noah and Mohinder stood in the presence of the sarcophagus for a long moment, neither man approaching it. Mohinder’s scalp tingled, and the hair on his arms stood up. The air felt different here, electric, snapping with restless anticipation.
Mohinder swallowed and slowly ascended the steps. Reaching the top, he placed a hand upon the stone woman’s head, tracing a finger over the faded kohl around her eyes. The woman’s body was dotted with hieroglyphs, too, and he noticed again the half-helix wedged among the other symbols.
As he leaned in closer, his side brushed against something jutting out of the sarcophagus. Looking down, he noticed a circular band of stone attached where the lid met the side of the coffin. The band was large enough to fit his fist through, and after further inspection he saw an identical loophole at the other end, by the woman’s feet.
“Look,” Noah said; he had followed Mohinder up the steps and was now standing by the rightmost torch. He crouched down and picked up two long poles that had been lying on the floor; both were just wide enough to fit snugly through the stone circles.
Wordlessly, Mohinder took a pole and slid it through the two loopholes on one side of the coffin as Noah did the same on the other. They looked up at one another in silence. Neither noted out loud how eerie it was that the sarcophagus had been built for easy travel, or that the coffin seemed to be waiting for someone to take it out of this darkness. And neither made mention of the two torches that still burned steadily through the thick, old air after all these centuries.
With Mohinder at the head and Noah at the foot, the two of them gripped the poles and hoisted the sarcophagus into the air. The stone vessel was lighter than Mohinder had expected; with some effort they carried it down the steps and off the platform, walking cautiously across the path they had made in the sand. Soon they reached the dangling rope, a rectangle of early light spilling in from the surface onto a wooden crate the Arabs had lowered down a few moments before. Mohinder and Noah settled the sarcophagus in the crate and boarded up the sides, fitting the top piece of the crate into place. They tied the slack rope securely around the crate and motioned for the Arabs to take it up out of the tomb.
---
“Next time, your sidekick is not allowed during an interrogation, Nathan,” Sylar snapped, gesturing to the Haitian as the three of them burst out of the tent and walked across the sands. Dawn had settled over the excavation site, decorating the sky with clouds of color.
“As I told you before,” Nathan said bitterly, “Peter knows nothing more than we do. Your entire charade in there was a complete waste of-”
He stopped in his tracks, staring at the horizon. In the distance, atop a sand dune untouched by the Company, half a dozen men scurried about a large crate just big enough to hold a coffin. Nathan rushed forward to get a better look, the sport coat in his grasp flapping in the breeze.
“Sylar, wake your men!”
-chapter five-