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cold but she didn’t think it was cold enough for that. Regardless, immersion was not doing their health any favors. There was a tingling in her scalp and pressure building behind her eye sockets like the beginning of a sinus headache. The sensation had been there all along, probably the result of the impact with Rafi, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. “There’s nothing there, Rafi,” she insisted. “Come on. Let’s try to get out of the water.”
    He returned a tentative nod and then began dog-paddling toward her. She rolled over was about to head out in a random direction when she caught a glimpse of someone floating beside her. She snapped her head sideways but there was nobody there.
    “You saw it, didn’t you?” Rafi said, his tone verging toward hysteria. “There’s something here. We’re not alone.”
    “There’s nothing there, Rafi. We’re jumping at shadows.” Even as she said it, Jade glimpsed movement again. Damn. Now he’s got me doing it.
    “They aren’t shadows,” Rafi insisted. “Think about where we are. This was their burial place.”
    “Ghosts, Rafi? Seriously?” She tried to inject an appropriate level of disdain into her voice but the chilly water and the throbbing behind her eyeballs was taking its toll. The best she could manage was a nervous quaver. “You don’t believe in that stuff anymore than I do. You’re just psyching yourself out.”
    She actually did not know what his personal beliefs on the subject of the afterlife were. Religion was a topic they had never discussed. He was an Arab-American, which meant there was a better than average chance that he was Muslim—his cultural heritage had in fact recommended him for the job, since it was extremely unlikely that he would be a sleeper agent for the religious extremists with whom Jade had tangled in the past—but up to this point, Rafi had been very private about the practice of his faith.
    “I don’t know what to believe. What if he’s right? Stillman, I mean. What if the Paracas were part alien or something?”
    Jade’s first impulse was to scoff, but two things stopped her: the terror in the young man’s voice, and the presence of a very human-looking shape in the periphery of her vision. She resisted the urge to look directly at it, and to her astonishment, it remained there, hovering at the edge of her perceptions.
    She didn’t know if it was a ghost, or an alien, or the ghost of an alien, but something was definitely there.
    No , she told herself. There’s nothing there. You know better.
    “Ignore them,” she told Rafi. “They haven’t done anything to hurt us. Maybe they don’t even know that we’re here. Maybe they’re just an echo of something that happened in the past.”
    She felt foolish talking about the hallucinations—that was what they were, she decided, what they had to be—as if they were something real, but her subconscious mind refused to accept that they were not.
    “Yes.” Rafi grasped at the explanation eagerly. “That makes sense.”
    Jade did not think it made a lick of sense, but if it was enough to get her young companion moving, that was good enough. She began swimming again, paddling away from the scant light filtering down into the cave, and into its dark unknown depths. Despite the fact that everything else was shrouded in impenetrable murk, the shapes floating at the corner of her eye remained every bit as vivid, which meant that they were almost certainly some kind of optical illusion—not a true hallucination, but something else, like the visual aura from a migraine or phosphenes, the phenomenon more commonly known as “seeing stars.” The fact that both she and Rafi were seeing them, not to mention the sudden onset of her increasingly intense headache, might indicate an environmental factor—toxic gas or fungal spores in the air—which meant it was imperative that they find a way out as soon as possible.
    “Ignore them,” she said again. “Swim.”
    She