Prologue

Please note that this fanfiction contains spoilers for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Petra
Southern Jordan, 12:05 HRS

Soundwave transmits to all active Decepticons . . .

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Jordan.

Dry, scorching desert environment. The air was thick and dry with the heat; it whipped against her shielded eyes, howled through her hair, billowed out behind her bike as she ploughed through the swirling sands of the Great Rift Valley. The sun beat down on her bronzed skin from above – an overwhelmingly brilliant beacon in endless blue of the African sky.

Forget America; forget Texas; this was home. This was Paradise.

Long, thick strands of hair were wriggling free of the ponytail she had bound them into, and she lifted a hand to brush them aside impatiently. Really, she ought to have cut it all off; her hair was more of an inconvenience than a blessing, though she knew she was lucky to have it. Blue eyes and black hair were a rare combination, and it made her a fascination of sorts to the Egyptian and Israeli people she worked and lived with. They were used to dark hair, but not to the ice blue, thoroughly Western eyes that went with her jet-black tresses.

One such Egyptian was riding to her far right. Ramadan Ahmed – nicknamed ‘Slumdog’ by his merciless friends, seeing that he hailed from the most unpleasant slum in Cairo – had been a friend to Kia since her arrival in the tourist region of Sharm-el-Sheikh three years beforehand. He was witty, energetic and excellent at what he did, and insatiably eager to learn about other cultures. He spoke five different languages fluently, six more in part, and was forever pestering her about America, pleading with her to tell him more about the so-called Land of the Free. If he asked her about what a burrito was one more time, or asked her for a sensory description of one, she was going to slay his ass.

“You doin’ all right there, Slumdog?” she shouted.

Ramadan laughed richly, though his bandanna and the roar of their ATV engines muffled the sound considerably. “You are joking, Kia! Of course I am all right . . . This, compared to a day in August? Nothing.”

Kia snorted. “You’re Egyptian. You’re used to this.”

“But you are Egyptian,” he called back, thumping his fist on his chest. “Here, Kia! Your soul lives here, in the desert. You are born in Texas, yes, but your spirit – one with the pharaohs, I think.”

“You’re nuts.”

“I am crazy?” He twisted the handlebars, and his bike bounced closer to hers. She rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses, wondering whether she could kick a customised Yamaha Raptor away without breaking her foot. “Why are you not wanting to be a part of this place, huh? You belong in Egypt, yet you are always insistent you belong nowhere. You are . . . how you say in English . . . a rebel, no?”

She smirked, though she hid the gesture behind her scarf, which was wound around her head and covered most of her face. Her leather-clad palm twisted the handle, revving the engine, and she stood up to hoist the vehicle’s weight upwards.

“You got it.”

No further answers were needed.

Ramadan bayed for joy as they took on another shallow sand dune; not much compared to others they had encountered en route, but a dune was a dune. Kia hitched the ATV up and took her hands off the bars, grinning as she flung her arms high into the air. With expert skill, she kept the bike between her thighs as she soared through the air unaided, her shadow cast on the infinite white of the sand seas. A riotous sense of freedom burst inside her, and she whooped as her scarf flew away from her mouth. Ramadan crashed down on her right and promptly rounded towards Mount Hor, which loomed over the desert like some almighty guardian. Kia pouted as her bike made hard contact with the sand, revving the engine resentfully.

“You dirty cheater!”

“At least I am not a loser,” he carolled back, his voice barely reaching her on the wind. “Looks like I will be first to Petra!”

She glared after him sulkily.

They had set off several days ago on a quest to the infamous Petra, an ancient archaeological site – of World Heritage standard, apparently – that Kia had never laid eyes on before. Ramadan had always raved about it, calling it ‘the rose-red city’. It had been named one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, and for that reason alone, Kia had agreed to travel from Egypt to Jordan and see it with him. He had seen it once before, as a kid, but was eager to explore it again, preferably without a lousy tour guide sticking to his ass.

Kia had never really been into old buildings, but she liked a new experience – hence her transition from the States to Africa. It could be interesting, she supposed, to have one of the world’s most cherished locations all to themselves.

After what seemed like hours of riding through the desert, they came to an extremely narrow, shaded gorge, which Ramadan informed her was about a kilometre long. They rode between soaring cliffs, some of up to three hundred feet in height (why doesn’t he just swallow the damn textbook?), and she couldn’t help but admire the rock formations and their fantastic colours. Ramadan was way ahead of her, but she took her time in following. Speed demon though she was, there were times where the desert relaxed her irresistibly.

Ramadan stopped his bike at the end of the path, and she watched him dismount from a distance. Behind him, she could see a massive façade that seemed to dwarf the ATV and its rider.

“Hurry it up, Kia!”

“You said it’s been there since 100 B.C.,” she hollered. “It can wait a little longer!”

The strapping man wandered towards the building behind him, one hand raised to shield his eyes. The midday sun was almost unbearable, so intense that it was blinding, but her skin had long since grown used to the desert conditions. Nonetheless, she was grateful for her sunglasses – Ramadan, being Ramadan, had left his back at the Sharm-el-Sheikh airport.

Goofball . . .

She brought the ATV to a grinding halt and switched the engine off, grimacing at the dust on the burgundy paintwork. One of the others would sluice it down when they returned to Sharm, she supposed. Achmed was the one who did the cleaning, simply because he was a born grease monkey and adored vehicles, particularly motorcycles and Jeeps. Nobody else wanted to stand around with a hose and get the mud and dust off their ATV collection, but none of the tourists wanted to ride dirty bikes, and Achmed was pleased to do it.

When she turned her head, she had to take in a quick breath.

Petra lay silent and modest beneath the sunshine – a rose city in the desert, just as Ramadan had told her. It was whittled of rock, built right into Mount Hor, and made of something that looked to Kia like stained sandstone. Its entrance was a massive breach between six colossal columns, and Ramadan was just about managing to hoist himself onto the ledge.

“Anyone in there?” she asked him, dismounting as she spoke.

“I do not think so.” He stood up and looked around. “It is even larger than I remember.”

She moved towards him with raised eyebrows, ignoring her smarting shoulders. Too much sun in too little time. “Go on in, then. I’m comin’.” He offered her a brown, weathered hand, but she shook her head and pulled herself up on leather-shielded palms. Her bare fingers flexed on the dusty pink rock, enjoying the gritty feel of it against her fingertips.

Ramadan rolled his dark eyes. “Why you never let me be a gentleman, huh?”

“Because you ain’t a gentleman, goober.”

He scowled. “I am! You are never fair to me . . . Achmed is the one that gets all your attention.”

Kia thought it best to ignore this little gem of a remark. Ramadan was more than aware that she hadn’t come to Africa looking for a boyfriend, or – God forbid – a husband; she had come to Africa looking for herself, and for the fun of being wild. She brushed past him, jostling him with her elbow as she went, and he grumbled something in Arabic under his breath. From what she had picked up of the language, she could detect a couple of mild insults amongst his muttering, but paid it no heed. He never meant it.

To their mutual relief, the room that had entered was dark and relatively cool, out of the way of the sun’s prying rays. What Kia noticed first, aside from the emptiness of it, was how . . . enormous it was.

“Dang,” she muttered, reaching for her water bottle. “They build this place for a dinosaur, Slumdog?”

Ramadan folded his burly arms, one dark eyebrow tilted almost pityingly. “No, my friend. Petra was carved right into this rock by the Nabataeans. They were a very productive Arab people who settled here more than two thousand years ago.” He cast his hand around the room, leaving her rather indifferent to the tirade of useless information. “They turned it into a very important intersection for trade routes that linked much of Asia and Europe. This place is called the Treasury, or Al Kazneh, in my language.”

“That’s real exciting.”

“I am glad you feel the same. What we just came through for the last kilometre was the Siq. This is the only way to gain access to the city,” he explained, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “It used to be very fiercely guarded.”

Though she bit her tongue, she couldn’t really see why an old, empty room like this would need guarding.

“Where are the guards now, then?”

He frowned at that. “That is what I am puzzled about. I thought that motorised vehicles were not allowed on the site . . . but we have not been stopped or challenged anywhere, and I have seen no tourists, no guides . . . no salespeople.” She knew why he lingered on this; no salespeople was a virtual impossibility in day-tripper regions. “That is very confusing to me.”

“You let me ride an ATV down there when we weren’t allowed any damn vehicles?” Kia demanded.

Ramadan gave her a sly grin. “I thought you were a rebel?”

“You’re an idiot. This whole journey would’ve been for nothing.”

“Well, we are here now, are we not? Let us not dwell on the past.” She clenched her fist, annoyed. “Never mind the strange absence of human life, Kia. Come, explore this place with me. There is so much to see that we shall have to stay for a few days, I think. We cannot make a truly good discovery of this city in one day. You have camping equipment, yes?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, but Aabid don’t know I’ve got it.”

“Aabid will be okay. We will stay for the night, and hope this emptiness remains, too. Good?”

“Fine. Your ass is the one that’s gonna be flayed when the boss finds out.”

The woman’s booted feet echoed through the room as she moved towards something that had drawn her wandering eye. At the back of the enormous chamber, a small flight of steps led to what looked like . . . a picture on the wall, if a bizarre one. She knew they were just a collection of fantastic rock striations, but they looked as if they were supposed to make a tribal mural of some sort. The flat rock upon which it had formed also looked as if it had once been an entranceway . . . then filled in with cement, perhaps. Blocked to keep something out . . . or in.

“What’s that?”

Ramadan glanced up from his flick knife. “What?”

“That.” She pointed up at the wall. “Looks as if someone filled that baby up.”

A look of intense concentration knitted his dark face into a frown. “Huh. You are right. That looks as if it might have been a doorway to another room . . . Perhaps a room in which valuables were kept.”

“An antechamber?”

“Yes; that is the word I am looking for in English. An antechamber.”

The two of them approached the vast wall, their eyes fixed on the centre of it. The strange patterning seemed to culminate in the centre, spiralling out from one particular point, dead centre of the flat plane of stone. Ramadan grabbed a flashlight from his belt and swung the beam over the fissures and undulations, his lower lip caught between his slightly crooked teeth.

“Look,” he murmured. “An opening.”

Kia squinted. Sure enough, there was a relatively wide crack at her knee level – big enough to take a peek through. “Give me that flashlight, Slumdog . . . I wanna take a look in there. Could be our first line of exploration, right?”

“Absolutely.”

He slapped the flashlight into her hand. She dropped to one knee and angled the shaft of light as best she could, directing it straight into the fracture. “I’m gonna be so beyond irritated if this is just another wall behind here,” she muttered. “Hell, I feel like some sorta archaeologist here, looking into the tiny little details. I ain’t got the patience to sit around on my ass, following trails that end up bein’ cold.”

Ramadan laid a hand on her shoulder reassuringly. “Patience, Kia.”

“You know I ain’t got none o’ that, hon’.”

The flashlight suddenly caught a sliver of something metallic, or at least silver. Kia narrowed her eyes again, and she thought – though it could have been her imagination – that she spied some sort of insignia there. An old carving, perhaps.

“See anything?” her companion asked keenly.

“Mm. Think we might just be on to somethin’ here.”

She peered deeper into the gloom, and the beam danced on what little she could see. There was definitely something metal there . . . something metallic and curved, hidden behind the wall. The markings became clear as her eyes grew used to the shadows: they were weird, squiggly little symbols; something like Japanese, but not quite. With determination, she tried to stick her hand through the gap, but it was too small at its furthest point to even hook a finger into.

“You got a crowbar?” she joked.

“I have a tool kit,” he offered.

Kia looked over her shoulder. “Are you serious, ya lunatic? I was kiddin’. We can’t wreck a World Heritage Site with your crappy tools. We ain’t archaeologists, and I got a feeling we might end up in confinement.”

He looked hurt and disappointed. “You are no rebel! Where is the sense of adventure in you? We have two bikes waiting for us outside, Kia. If anyone comes, we get on them and drive for our lives! They cannot outrun us with camels and horse-drawn carriages, my friend. If you are going to prove yourself as a real rebel, then you will follow this clue and find out what is behind that wall.”

“Or else . . . ?”

“Or else I will tell Aabid all about the tourist you punched after our last race through Sinai.”

She snapped her fingers, defeated. Aabid would fire her for sure if he heard about that, and she needed that job. “Damn it all to Hell, you little sneak! You win, but you’re the one who’ll end up in jail for this. Don’t think I’m comin’ to save you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Here, take these.”

Kia took the implements that he handed her, though her heart sunk when she thought of what she was about to do. With a steel chisel in one hand, and a small hammer in the other, she hacked into the pink-hued rock, tongue in the corner of her mouth as she worked. Tiny chips of it fell away at a time. Her patience was short, as was her infamous fuse, but she was genuinely curious to see what was beyond this wall. It looked . . . alien, almost. Like the metal claw of some incarcerated machine, curled into a loose, deadly fist.

After almost ten minutes of work, the sweat on her brow became too uncomfortable, and she let Ramadan take over for a while. He got a little further, and was able to remove a chunk of the reddish stone after bashing it away with the hammer.

“This is weird,” he remarked softly. “Very, very strange."

She watched in silence as he put the chisel to the fissure again, and her eyes followed the hammer’s arc as he plunged it into the rock. However, even that could not prepare her for what happened next.

The crack suddenly split into a spider’s web of fractures, which had engulfed the entire wall before Kia could realise what was happening. Dust trickled down the striations, hissing as it went, and Ramadan looked up in horror as chunks of rock began to fall away. They smashed down to the ground with crashes that shook the entire room. Regaining some control of her shock, Kia lunged forward and seized the stunned Egyptian by the shoulder, hauling him away from the avalanche of falling stone. Without speaking a word, they threw themselves backwards, and Kia grunted as her elbow hit the floor. Rocks rolled past harmlessly, some tumbling outside into the sunshine.

Silence fell. Dust streamed through the shadowy room, glittering coral pink from the light outside. Kia and Ramadan looked up in unison, clutching each other, and the former felt her heart rocket to her mouth when she saw what they had just uncovered.

“Well, I’ll be God damned.”

Author’s Note:

Welcome to Renewal of the Lotus, everyone! This is my brand-new fanfiction, based on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), which I had the very great pleasure of watching yesterday due to an early UK release date. As expected, I loved it . . . and, as you can see, I’ve already got a plotline for a nice little story. ;) Whilst Deux Claret will still be my main project, aside from my novel, I couldn’t resist writing this. I estimate it will be around twenty-five chapters long. Enjoy, and please leave a review!

Kia Hawkins belongs to weapon13WhiteFang, who has kindly given me permission to use her again for this story. Ramadan belongs to me and requires permission to use elsewhere.