A fire flickered to life, casting light and shadows outside the cave, and I sucked in a sharp breath. My intuition was urging me to flee. The map brought me here for a reason, though. I needed to find this cave or maybe, the person inside it.
Be like Amy Pond, I told myself again. She had never backed down from an adventure on Doctor Who. Carter was sort of like the Doctor. At least, I didn't think he sent me here for me to die before I had a chance to change history the way he wanted. I purposely didn't think about what I had learned, that there might've been other girls sent back before me.
I drew a deep breath and moved towards the cave, pausing in the open entrance.
It was larger than I expected, extending a good thirty feet into the canyon wall, and stocked with barrels and crates along the back wall.
A Native American man sat on a wooden box towards the back, staring at me with a mix of puzzlement and intensity. A glow flared around him briefly, the way it had at the market.
"Running Bear?" I called uncertainly.
He rose, tense, with one hand clenching a bloody knife and another a rabbit he was skinning.
The flickers of memories were faint, jumbled with the insistent whisperings and dream-like images emanating from everywhere in the cave. The chips were confused again, unable to read him clearly but reading the cave itself.
Not Running Bear. The man was an identical twin. The scar running down one side of his face marked the difference between the two men, along with the odd intensity and cold eyes. Running Bear hadn't been happy to see me at any time our paths crossed, but this man was … hostile.
The historical chip was telling me about the massacre that he would commit, the same tale it told me about Running Bear. I realized with some dread that it wasn't able to tell the difference between the two men. In fact, there was nothing anywhere in my mind that mentioned there being twins, as if the knowledge was either never recorded or lost somewhere in history.
But the visions of blood and shadows, of anger and hatred, belonged to this man. This was the man I could see starting a massacre.
There's something very wrong with him. My empathic memories were scrambled and overwhelmed by the cave, for there was more than one source to the whispers, and they were spread around the cave, as if …
Dead. There were people buried in this cave, people whose lives had ended violently, right here, by the man whose mind was too tangled for me to read. Why hadn't Carter told me I could read objects and places in addition to people?