FOUNDATION STONES

The epic battle between two would-be gods to rule earth may have ended, but the struggle to survive aliens of near-immortal powers—aliens determined to cage humankind—continues. As the freedom fighters of the Cerberus organization regroup and press on, a shattering storm heads toward the planet…the blood tide of a new apocalypse.

EARTH REPURPOSED

They’re tiny stones that wield shattering power, remnants of the war between the godlike aliens Ullikummis and Enlil, and they lie scattered throughout the Gulf of Mexico. In the wrong hands, these stones could easily be used as biological weapons. That’s why Kane and Grant are dispatched to track a notorious pirate—it’s believed he has an entire collection in his possession. But in the Bay of Campeche, they realize something much bigger is happening. Something unthinkable: the genesis of a new age. And that means only one thing for mankind. Annihilation.

Domi lay writhing on the floor

The albino girl was hissing like a cat as the living stones ran across the flesh of her arm and up toward her shoulder, affixing themselves quicker than she could remove them. Domi snatched for another as it clambered toward her throat, wrenching it away with a tearing of her skin.

“Okay, Domi,” Kane said calmly, “I’m right here.”

Domi’s scarlet eyes glared into his. “Kane, get them off me,” she begged through gritted teeth.

His hands just a couple of inches away from her body, he stopped, staring nervously at the stones. Like a swarm of tiny-shelled insects, the hard backs of the stones had massed against Domi’s arm, creating solid bands that wrapped around her like bangles.

He had had a similar stone embedded in him just a few months ago, and he could still recall the pain.

“Kane?” Domi squealed. “They’re pushing into me. I can feel them!”

Genesis Sinister

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

“The clock strikes one that just struck two—Some schism in the sum—A Vagabond for Genesis Has wrecked the Pendulum.”

—Emily Dickinson

1830–1886

The Road to Outlands—

From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 1

The Gulf of Mexico

Screams rolled across the waves.

On the deck of a fishing scow, a blond-haired woman was being dragged backward by her hair. She was shrieking and struggling as a pale-skinned man with tattoos down his exposed right arm yanked her across the decking against her will. A snatch of blond curls tore from her scalp as she tripped, and she slammed against the wooden deck with an agonized moan, tears streaming down her flushed face. Another man stepped before her as the one with the tattooed arm cursed. This one had dark eyes the color of midnight, a mop of black hair on his head and dark stubble along his jaw.

“Hold ’er down!” he snarled at his partner.

The man wore leather trousers and an open shirt, and where his chest was exposed the blonde woman could see dark chest hair tufting from his weather-tanned skin alongside a puckering of scars where he had been burned many years before. At his belt, the man had a holster in which he had jammed a long-barreled Colt revolver, its chrome finish marred from overpolishing. His name was “Black” John Jefferson and he was a pirate.

Fern Salt, his colleague with the tattooed arm, obeyed with a nod, grasping the blonde by her wrists and slapping at her breasts to hold her down, stretching her taut as she tried to kick away. Salt pawed roughly at her left breast for a moment, laughing cruelly as he squeezed it. The woman was twenty-two, with apple-red cheeks and a belly already round with child. She screamed again, tears washing down her face.

All around them aboard the listing scow, the sounds of violence played out in a cacophonous symphony, gunshots and screams rolling over the waves. The sea was calm, and it seemed to urge the violence to hush with the sound of every softly lapping wave against the side of the boat.

One of the crew, a cousin to the blonde woman, scrambled across the deck to help her, alerted by her screams and followed by another of the pirates. Glancing over his shoulder, Black John snatched the Colt from its holster and squeezed the trigger, holding it upside down and blasting a single 9 mm bullet behind him. With the boom of discharge, the bullet cut into the sailor’s right leg just below the knee, and he let loose a bloodcurdling scream as his leg exploded in a burst of blood and splintered bone. Another of Black John’s crew, the man following the sailor across the deck, finished the job swiftly with a single bullet to the man’s head.

Black John turned back to his task at hand. Unbuckling his belt and loosening his pants, he reached out for the screaming blonde. His fingernails had been painted as black as his nickname, and they glistened in the sunlight like the shells of insects.

“Quit shoutin’, girl,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed with fury. “Makes no diff’rence to me if you’re alive or dead, just so long as you’re still warm.”

With that, Black John grasped the woman’s skirts with one of his beautifully manicured hands, ripping away the bottom half of her dress to expose her crotch. Then, he got about his business as Fern Salt held her down with one tattooed arm. Salt’s other arm was scrubbed clean and hairless, unnaturally pale where another tat had been removed. All around them, Black John’s shipmates were rushing through the scow, sacking her and dispatching the last of her crew with cold professionalism as the ruined engine spit black smoke into the morning sky.

Beside the scow was a larger boat, and from a distance the pair seemed restful as they floated on the clear waters of the Bay of Campeche, far enough out from the coast that they couldn’t be seen from the shore by the naked eye. The larger of the boats was a sleek sixty-foot cutter, its sides painted the same blue-green as the waves. The cutter was shaped like a dart in the water, flared at the aft with a long body that tapered to a brutal point like a stiletto blade at the front. The cutter’s name was La Discordia, although papers filed in El Cuyo still had her listed by her original name, La Vara de la Esperanza, or The Wand of Hope. La Discordia loomed beside the smaller vessel like an older sibling, her dark shadow cast over the other’s slanted deck.

La Segunda Montaña, the smaller vessel, was listing to one side where it had been wounded. The screams and shouts that had emanated from the scow as the crew of the larger vessel boarded her were dwindling now, the sounds as brief and sudden as bird calls, and, like those bird calls, they were ignored or unheard by anyone who might have intervened.

Aboard La Segunda Montaña all was pandemonium. Harpoons had been used to attach the two boats, trapping the smaller vessel as her captain tried to get out of the larger one’s path. The scow had come all the way from the north, seeking freedom and a new life. Instead, one of those hooks had gone straight through the first mate’s torso, gouging a hole through his chest even before the ships locked together. Now he was wedged upright, his body splayed against the safety rails that lined the scow’s deck, screaming as the harpoon point held him in place, his ruined guts spilling down his legs.

Belowdecks, two pirates called Six and Xia were standing in the fishing scow’s tiny hold. Xia held the sharp edge of his blade across a girl’s throat while Six looked around the shabby little room. The girl had dark hair and pleading eyes, and Xia had already had his way with her.

“What is that?” Six asked, jabbing his outstretched finger at a box in the corner of the living quarters. The box had wooden sides and was open at the top, its lid propped against the wall. The box was half-full of stones, not one of which was more than an inch across; they looked like shale that had washed up on the beach.

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the glistening tears still drying on her pretty face. “It was here when we boarded. Belongs to the captain, I think.”

“Belongs to us now, hermanita,” Xia growled, and he drew the blade closer to the girl’s throat, six inches of knife glistening in the light cast by the round portholes. Xia was a large man, broad-shouldered and with a suggestion of Malaysian or Polynesian to his appearance, especially around the eyes and the golden tint of his skin. He wore an undershirt and cutoffs, and a long white scar ran almost the entire length of his left leg, from groin to well past the knee. He had gotten the scar in a knife fight on a plantation that had almost ended with the authorities hanging him. But only almost.

The girl struggled in his grip, trembling with fear.

“Floater this size don’t need ballast,” Six said as he nudged at the stones with the tip of his blaster. Six was broad-shouldered, too, with a gold hoop depending from his left earlobe. He wore his hair in a topknot on his otherwise shaved head, a gunslinger’s mustache drooping down over his top lip. He licked the bristles absentmindedly as he spoke, eyes narrowing as he looked at the strange contents of the crate.

“Something in it, mebbe?” Xia suggested, gripping the girl tighter as she struggled. “You, keep fucking still.”

Six rummaged through the stones with his free hand, turning them over as he plunged deeper into the crate. It was just a little deeper than a foot, and the broad-shouldered pirate reached down until he could distinctly feel the crate’s bottom. “Nothing in there,” he said. “Nothing but stones.”

“Worth something, you think?” Xia asked.

As he spoke, the girl finally pulled herself free, wrenching out of his grip before Xia knew what was happening. Still pressed against her throat, Xia’s blade cut through her flesh as she yanked herself away, and blood began to spurt as her carotid artery was compromised by its touch.

“Shit me, Xia,” Six spit as the girl lumbered toward him, blood shooting from her nicked artery.

The blood seemed to blast out of her neck with the power of a jet, spraying the walls of the cabin and turning the lone porthole red in just three seconds as the girl screamed in agony.

Six leaped out of the way as the screaming girl barreled toward him, sidestepping as she fell toward the crate. The force of the rushing blood was lessening now, the furious jet turning into a steady stream of red that washed down the girl’s tattered clothes. She slumped against the crate, blood flowing across its contents, and Six and Xia listened as her scream turned into a whimper and then to nothing.

“Damn, I liked her,” Xia said. Then he shrugged as Six glared at him. “What? She got free,” he added.

Six nodded. Then, after a moment’s consideration, he reached down and pulled the girl off the crate by her long hair, tossing her to one side. She slumped against the wall of the hold, blood still running down her neck and turning her dress crimson.

Within the crate, the bloodied stones seemed to pulse and move where the blood seeped through them. Six watched for a moment before dismissing the thought as nothing more than an optical illusion. Then he grabbed the box and hefted it from the deck. “Shit like this gotta be worth something,” he decided. “Only thing on this death trap that is.”

Xia glanced at the dying girl before he followed Six up the little flight of wooden stairs and into the main cabin. She stared back, eyes wide with shock, the red pulse at her neck now turned to nothing more than a drizzle. In six minutes she would be dead from blood loss, and already her body was turning cold.

* * *

THE CAPTAIN OF LA SEGUNDA Montaña was a portly Latino called Alfredo. A man of indeterminate age with the leathery tanned skin and cropped hair that could place him anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five, Alfredo struggled with the wheel as the boat listed farther to starboard. He was trying to bring the little scow back to true as his crew fended with their unwanted boarders. Alfredo had traveled a long way with his cargo; he still believed in a higher purpose.

He watched as one of the marauders leaped down from the cutter, brandishing a sword with a wickedly curved blade in one hand. The man had olive skin and brown dreadlocks that clattered with beads as he moved, and he smiled as he spotted the captain standing in his little box of a cabin, wrestling with the wheel.

“Please, señor,” Alfredo called as the pirate approached him. “Don’t hurt me. My ship, she will sink if I don’t—”

The dreadlocked pirate drove the tip of his sword into Alfredo’s chest, wrenching it down through his body from sternum to crotch as the man howled in agony. “What makes you think I’d give a shit about your boat?” he hissed, wrenching the blade free. The captain’s guts came with the blade, spilling over the bloodied deck as he sank to his knees. And he screamed long and loud.

“For goodness’ sake, shut him up!” Black John Jefferson commanded as he tightened his grip in the blonde woman’s hair. “I can’t concentrate on the task at hand with all that screaming.”

The “task at hand,” as Black John had described it, left the blonde sobbing, and the pirate cursed her even as he spilled his seed inside her. He pulled away from her and stood as his companion, Fern Salt of the tattooed sleeve, took his turn on the girl. All around them, mayhem reigned, and Black John smiled as he saw the bloody hell he had encouraged. The last of the ship’s crew was being hoisted high in the air by four of Black John’s crew as another used his bobbing form for target practice, shots clipping chunks from the helpless sailor’s ear and cutting two of his fingers off his hand as they hit. Finally a bullet pierced the man’s larynx as he screamed, and his scream turned to a gurgle as his ruined body was tossed overboard, the blood pouring down his flailing limbs.

Black John hurried over to the side of the ship as the man was thrown, wrenching his Colt Anaconda from its holster even as he ran. Steadying himself against the rail, Black John took aim at the bobbing figure before blasting a single bullet through the man’s forehead, ripping his skull apart in an ugly red blotch. The sailor continued to bob in the ocean, eyes wide but their spark gone.

Black John turned back to his crew, eyeing them with his ferocious glare. “For goodness’ sake, ex him when you’re done,” he berated. “No witnesses. Not ever. That’s the code, lads.”

Chastised, the pirate crew muttered their apologies as they checked the old scow’s cabin for anything of value. Black John smiled grimly as he marched across the deck to where Fern Salt was having his way with the pregnant blonde. Gun still in hand, he shot the woman in the face, killing her instantly.

Delirious with passion, Fern Salt shook for a moment before realizing what had happened. “What did you do that for?” he shouted, his ardor disappearing like a snuffed flame. “I wasn’t done pricking her, man!”

“No witnesses, Mr. Salt,” Black John said in reply, an ugly sneer marring his dark features. “No witnesses.”

Still staring at the bloody body of the woman, Black John aimed his pistol at her swollen belly and stroked the trigger once more. Salt was splattered with blood, and he growled as he turned and glared at Black John as the sadistic pirate walked away, fury raging through him. With a guttural shout, Fern Salt began to charge across the sloping deck at his colleague.

Black John was a survivor who had relied on his quick wits to keep him alive up to now. He heard Salt charging at him and he stepped aside automatically, his long coats swishing about him as he brought his pistol around. Salt slammed into him still, knocking Black John with his shoulder and shoving him a half-dozen steps onward with a roar. Off balance, Black John went down, tumbling to the deck with his first mate atop him.

“What do you think you’re doin’, Mr. Salt?” Black John bellowed.

Salt was too angry to respond. He scampered back, reaching for the long-barreled Llama Comanche revolver he wore in an open shoulder rig. The Comanche had a six-inch barrel and, at some point in its history, someone had painted a naked, openmouthed woman reclining along that length.

“You’re a maniac,” Salt snarled as he freed the Comanche from its holster.

Black John smiled as he brought his own pistol to bear on the mutinous pirate. “Mr. Salt, surely you cannot be serious—”

Salt pulled the trigger, blasting a volley of .357 bullets into Black John’s chest. Several missed, cutting splinters from the deck in furious bursts of wood, but three bullets hit, striking the captain with force enough to shake his whole body. Black John’s pistol blasted, too, but he was a fraction of a second slower in getting that first shot in. His shots went wild, clipping Salt only once in the hard muscle of his upper left arm.

Salt bellowed in pain as the bullet winged him, jabbing with his Comanche and blasting another burst of fire at his captain. Black John lay writhing on the deck, blossoms of blood appearing on his clothes like opening poppies, a dark wound in each one’s center.

“Bastard,” Salt spit as his weapon finally clicked on Empty.

Standing there, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathed heavily, Salt became aware of his seven colleagues around him. They had boarded with him and Black John to take whatever cargo the ship might have.

“What happened, Fern?” Six asked, still hefting the crate of stones.

Salt became suddenly very aware that Six had a gun trained on him under the base of the box he held, a little snub-nosed thing, its finish the color of storm clouds.

“Cap’n’s out of control,” Salt muttered, shaking his head. “You seen it. You all seen it.”

For a moment, Six and his companions stood in silence, each man poised with his own blaster. Then Six nodded and clicked the safety back on his pistol, the others following suit a moment later.

“Killed the girl an’ the baby, just to make sure,” Salt continued. “The unborn fucking baby. No witnesses, my eye, he just went kill crazy. It’s sick, man.”

Six took a step away, motioning for the others to follow with a tilt of his head. “Let’s get back to La Discordia and get out of here. Time’s ticking and the clock’s never kind.”

Xia looked Captain Black John Jefferson up and down for a moment, the man’s blood pooling around him where he lay sprawled on the deck. “You want we should take him with us, Six?”

Six shook his head without looking back. “Screw him,” he said. “Salt’s right—he always was a sick bastard.”

“Yeah,” Xia agreed, plucking the Colt Anaconda from the dying man’s grip. “An’ he cheated at cards.” With that, he blasted off a single shot into Black John’s skull, finishing the job that Fern Salt had started.

Two minutes later, the graceful dartlike form of La Discordia was sailing away, cutting through the sea at some speed. Behind it, the little fishing vessel known as La Segunda Montaña lurched toward the water, its prow sinking beneath the waves. The pirate crew whooped as they departed the scene of the crime. They had gained only a few trinkets, a box of stones that had been washed in blood, but there had been women on the ship, and the men had been satisfied. Piracy was not always about goods; frequently it was simply an exercise in staving off boredom. The ability to live free, away from the baronies and their oppressive rules in the north, was something every crewman treasured.

Which was ironic, in that the passengers aboard La Segunda Montaña had also come in search of freedom. They were refugees, escaping a madness that seemed to engulf the northern territory of America. The villes had fallen but something had risen briefly in its place, a religion based on stone. Alfredo, the late captain of La Segunda Montaña, had lived the past few months of his life under the name of Alfredo Stone, in acknowledgment of his new faith. The people aboard his boat had come south in search of freedom, trying to escape the insanity that swept across the north after the fall of the baronies, trying to find somewhere to live. Instead they had merely found somewhere new to die.

Chapter 2

Brigid Baptiste was sick of the questions. A member of the resistance group known as the Cerberus organization, Brigid had been deeply involved in a war between two would-be gods, Ullikummis and Enlil, who were in fact part of an ancient race of aliens called the Annunaki. With her Cerberus colleagues, Brigid had been battling the Annunaki for several years, striving to prevent their takeover of planet Earth and the absolute subjugation of the human spirit. But during the most recent skirmish with the insidious aliens, Brigid had been taken prisoner by Ullikummis, rogue upstart of the Annunaki. The stone god had turned her mind against her, brainwashed her into servitude. For a time she had taken the name of Brigid Haight and acted as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness, helping to manipulate events so that Ullikummis could breathe new life into the reincarnated form of his mother and seize control of Earth and her peoples.

Gifted with an eidetic memory that granted her perfect recall, Brigid had used a mind trick to hide her own personality in a meditative trance, leaving her body to function solely as a shell controlled by the wicked purpose of Ullikummis. But she had become lost in the trance, and when her mind had finally been reawakened, Brigid found that her body had wrought terrible atrocities, killing innocents and betraying her closest friends.

The war itself was over. Less than a week earlier, Ullikummis had led his million-strong army in a final push on Enlil’s stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates. Ultimately, the attack had failed, with enormous casualties on both sides. Cerberus had been in the thick of things, striving to the very limits of their abilities to halt the incredible God War that had erupted, twisting it from within. And for a while, almost to the very end of that final, cataclysmic battle, Brigid had stood with Ullikummis, opposed to the forces of man. She had a woman to thank for her final change of heart, a Cerberus fighter called Rosalia who had managed to break the meditative spell and free Brigid’s mind from its hiding place beyond time.

Ever since then, Brigid had been plagued by questions. Her colleagues had been concerned for her, which was not only natural but touching—something so very human that it encompassed everything that the Cerberus organization represented. But Brigid didn’t have any answers; she was still trying to put the pieces together herself. It was like waking from some horrible nightmare, only to be told that the nightmare had been real after all.

Now Brigid stood on the wide stone steps that led down to the River Ganges in India, the morning sun beating on her back. She was a tall and slender woman in her late twenties, with emerald eyes and flame-red hair that cascaded down her back in an elegant sweep of curls. Her skin was pale and she showed a wide expanse of forehead that suggested intelligence, along with full lips that suggested passion. In truth, Brigid could be defined by both of those aspects, and many more besides. She wore a white one-piece suit, the standard uniform of the Cerberus organization, and she had augmented this with a light jacket that was already making her feel too warm even before the sun had properly reached its full intensity.

Beside Brigid stood another woman dressed in similar clothes, enthusiastically gazing out at the rushing waters of the Ganges. This was Mariah Falk, a thin woman in her early forties, with short dark hair that showed flecks of white running through it. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an engaging smile and a genial nature that put most people at ease. A geologist, Mariah had been with Cerberus a long time, ever since being awakened from a cryogenic suspension facility she had been placed in back in the twenty-first century. It had been her idea to travel to India, using the teleportation system that the Cerberus team relied on.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Mariah said, staring across the wide expanse of river where locals were washing clothes, hefting buckets of water for private use, and where the local holy men had come to wash the soles of their feet.

Brigid watched, too, as a clutch of children ran past them on the stone steps and leaped into the water, giggling as they splashed one another. All human life was here, she realized, going about its business, oblivious to the great war that had been fought just a few days before, a war that had been for their very souls.

The water itself was brown with silt where movements churned up the riverbed, and it had that smell to it, Brigid recognized, the smell of muddy puddles after a hard rainfall.

“Clem brought me here once,” Mariah continued enthusiastically. “He said that the Hindus believe the Ganges is the source of all life and that bathing in it will wash away a person’s sins.” She turned to Brigid then, smiling her bright, hopeful smile.

Brigid just stared, watching the water the way one might watch an insect bat against the outside of a windowpane, with distracted disinterest.

“Brigid, I don’t know what happened to you,” Mariah said gently, “but I like to think that Clem would have said to bring you here, if he’d still been alive.”

Mariah had lost Clem Bryant in the God War, never having had the chance to tell him that she was in love with him.

Slowly Brigid dipped her head in the faintest of nods. “Clem was a good man,” she said quietly.

“He was,” Mariah agreed. “I really miss him. We all lost something in the war, Brigid. I lost...hope for a while.”

Brigid looked at the geologist, saw the worry lines on her face and around her eyes. She looked older than Brigid remembered. The war had placed a strain on everyone.

“Do you want a dip?” Mariah asked, inclining her head encouragingly toward the river. “Wash away your sins, once-in-a-lifetime offer.”

Brigid shook her head. “You go,” she said. “I’ll wait right here.”

There, on the sandy stone steps that lined the riverbank, Mariah stripped off the white jumpsuit, revealing a modest swimsuit underneath. “Whether the river really does wash away people’s sins or not, you can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened,” she told Brigid.

Brigid just looked at the rushing water, leaning down until she was sitting on one of the wide steps, her legs stretched out before her.

Mariah didn’t bother saying anything else. She had thought a trip to India might pull Brigid out of her blue funk. The Cerberus team was still engaged with the massive cleanup of their redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana. The redoubt had been infiltrated and overwhelmed by Ullikummis and his army, but Brigid had seemed distant, emotionally disengaged, unable to be of any help. Yet the trip hadn’t seemed to do anything for her mood. She remained withdrawn, as if in mourning.

Brigid watched as Mariah waded into the river, waters lapping at her ankles and then her knees, then higher until she was in it past her hips. The geologist crouched, letting the cool waters lap against her skin, smiling as it tickled.

It would take more than water to wash away her sins, Brigid knew. In her guise as Brigid Haight, she had been a part of the campaign to betray and cage humankind. To cleanse her of her sins would take a miracle, something with the power of a nuke. She watched in silence as Mariah ducked under the water, letting it run through her hair as all around her the locals continued going about their business seemingly without a care in the world. It was as if nothing had happened at all.

* * *

CERBERUS WAS A MESS. The familiar operations room that sat at the hub of the redoubt complex looked as if a bomb had hit it. No, not a bomb, Lakesh corrected himself—an avalanche.

Lakesh was in his mid-fifties, with dusky skin, clear blue eyes and an aquiline nose over his refined mouth. His black hair was swept back in a tidy design, hints of gray showing at the temples. His full name was Mohandas Lakesh Singh and he had run the Cerberus operation since its inception. In fact, he had been at this redoubt, off and on, for the best part of 250 years, dating back to before the nuclear holocaust that had so dramatically changed the world at the end of the twentieth century. A physicist and cyberneticist of some renown in his day, Lakesh had worked on the original mat-trans system at this very redoubt. Cryogenic freezing and a program of organ replacement had kept Lakesh alive far longer than his natural years. In short, Lakesh had seen a lot in his life, and a lot of it had been in this very room in the heart of a mountain.

The room featured two aisles of computer desks, and one wall was dominated by a Mercator relief map showing Earth covered in lighted pathways that traced the routes available to the matter-transfer system at any given time. The mat-trans units were designed for military use back in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cerberus mat-trans unit was located in its own chamber in the far corner of the room. Tinted brown armaglass walls encompassed its powerful machinery. With just the flick of a switch, the mat-trans could hurl a person across the quantum ether to a similar unit many miles away. Though primarily concentrated in mainland America, the mat-trans units stretched across all continents and even as far as the moon.

The operations room was staffed around the clock, with people checking the live feeds and liaising with field agents in their self-appointed role of protecting humankind. Right now, however, the room was mostly populated by a cleanup crew that was using a combination of ultrasonic generators and good old-fashioned brute force to remove the strange infestation that had threatened to consume the redoubt.

The Cerberus redoubt was initially a military facility located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, where it had remained largely forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt had required few active measures to discourage visitors, so when it had been attacked by Ullikummis and his forces the personnel had been both surprised and dumbfounded. With a force of just fifty troops, Ullikummis had taken control of the redoubt, altering its interior dimensions and changing the very shape of the rooms themselves as he transformed it into a brutal Life Camp.

Ullikummis himself was the shamed scion of the Annunaki bloodline, and had been medically altered to look like a monster carved from stone. Among other genetic enhancements, Ullikummis exhibited a psionic control over rock, and had employed this to radically alter the whole of the redoubt, covering everything in a fresh skin of stone. Ullikummis had other powers, too, including his so-called obedience stones, semisentient shards of rock that could influence and control a person’s thoughts. Ullikummis and his agents had secretly placed these obedience stones in several of the Cerberus personnel prior to the attack on the redoubt, and it had been these hidden allies within who had allowed the great stone Annunaki to take over the complex with such ease.

When the redoubt had come back under Cerberus’s control, the personnel had begun the slow process of cleaning away the stone and replacing the damaged stock beneath. It had been four days now, and Lakesh wondered if he could see any progress at all. The ops room was still covered in a spiderweb of rock, thick stone fingers clawing across every surface and every wall, obliterating the old familiar sights he had been used to for so long.

Outside was little different. Just beyond the rollback door where the garish three-headed hellhound had been painted many years earlier, lending the Cerberus facility its name, thick posts of rock lined the plateau, barring the entryway to the redoubt for anything wider than a human. Even now, workers were chipping away at those pillars of stone, breaking them down into gravel and dust.

“I’m sorry it’s such a mess in here,” Lakesh said as he offered a seat to the beautiful woman who had come to speak with him. “You haven’t caught us at our best.”

Rosalia shrugged indifferently. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not staying.” Rosalia was long of limb with thick, dark hair that reached past her shoulders to halfway down her back. In her early twenties, Rosalia wore loose clothes, a pale skirt that brushed her ankles and a white cotton blouse that she had left half unbuttoned. Where her olive skin could be seen it was tanned a beautiful golden. Rosalia had first met one of the Cerberus field teams as an adversary, but she had joined their ranks during their campaign against Ullikummis and had proved her worth many times over.

“You’ve been a real asset to us, Rosalia,” Lakesh told her. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to stay?”

Rosalia looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. “This? It’s not my scene,” she said. “You’ll be fine without me.”

And there it was, Lakesh thought. That remarkable arrogance that had typified Rosalia and her behavior within the Cerberus organization. The woman was competent—there was no question about it—but she was very aware of that fact. Whatever she had done, she made it clear that she had done it as a favor to Cerberus, not the other way around.

Kane, an incredibly gifted field agent and a lynchpin of the Cerberus team, had brought her on board. He had been trapped in the Life Camp at the time, and he had needed Rosalia’s help to escape and thus free the other Cerberus captives. But he had seen something in her and had asked her to help them for the duration. With Ullikummis now destroyed, Rosalia felt that her time with Cerberus had reached its natural end.

“Where will you go?” Lakesh asked, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of chiseling going on just behind his shoulder.

“Somewhere,” Rosalia told him, as ever giving almost nothing away about herself.

“Cerberus owes you,” Lakesh said, “and I would like to see us pay our debts. If there’s anything I can do, or anything you need from the people of this facility, you need only ask.”

Rosalia stifled a laugh. “The first time I met your people—” she began.

“The slate is clean,” Lakesh cut in. “Whatever you did before you came here is forgotten. I promise.”

Rosalia nodded with gratitude. “You know, there is one thing,” she said. “I was planning to go see some people I... Some acquaintances. They’re down south. It’s quite a journey or I would have gone there sooner. You have your tech, the interphaser and the mat-trans. Think you can maybe give me a little push in the right direction?”

A broad smile appeared on Lakesh’s features. He was glad to be able to help the normally cagey young woman. “Where is it you need to go?” he asked.

“There’s a town close to the border, Mexico,” Rosalia said. “That side, not this.”

Lakesh was already tapping at the computer terminal that dominated his desk. The screen still had tendrils of stone across it like a cracked windshield, but he could see enough to get what he needed. “Whereabouts, exactly?”

“The place has gone by many names,” Rosalia said, “and it never once appeared on any map. I was told it was set up by a bandit who made himself its uncrowned king way back before the nukecaust. He meant it as a place where other outlaws could retreat and maybe retire. These days it’s a place of tranquillity and learning, high in the mountains, away from the villes.”

“Do you have coordinates?” Lakesh asked.

Rosalia nodded, tapping on the illuminated map on his computer screen. “Get me close enough, I’ll hoof it from there.”

“I’ll have to track down the nearest entry point,” Lakesh said, “which may take a while with the—”

“Everything?” Rosalia said brightly, gesturing around the ruined room.

Lakesh nodded. “Yes, with the ‘everything’ right now. Leave it with me—you’ll ship out before the day’s over.”

Rosalia nodded, pushing herself up from the swivel chair and making her way to the doors of the ops room. Rough stone ran along the edges of the doors, and they still wouldn’t close properly. A worker called Farrell, with goatee beard and hoop earring, was using a hammer and chisel to slowly chip away the offending rock, piece by piece.

Looking up from his computer, Lakesh eyed Rosalia wonderingly. “What’s there?” he asked, unable to contain himself.

“My old school,” Rosalia said in response before leaving the room.

* * *

BLACK JOHN JEFFERSON drifted back to swirling consciousness, a burning pain urgent in his gut. His eyes flickered open, gazing straight up and into the glare of the sun overhead. He saw it but could not feel it; instead his skin felt cold.

All around he could hear the sounds of rushing water, as if someone had opened a plug and let the whole damn ocean in.

Beneath him the deck of the ship lurched, and Black John was sent sliding across it. He had to dig his heels in to stop himself going any farther. He felt as if he would be sick, and he tilted his aching head to one side, spitting out the warm mouthful of blood that threatened to fill it.

Suddenly the deck of La Segunda Montaña rocked violently to one side once again, and Black John struggled to pull himself up to a sitting position. The deck was wet beneath him, water mixing with his own blood and the blood of others as he tried to make sense of it. He stared at it, trying to remember what had happened, the blood swilling and churning in the clear water, eddying in little whirls of red.

He had shot him. That was what had happened, wasn’t it? He had shot Fern Salt, turning on him after he had snuffed the straw-haired harlot before her screaming gave him any more of a headache. Hadn’t worked. He had one hell of a headache now, so much so he reached up to his forehead with a curse. When he did so, he found the slick wound there, cried out in surprise and at the furious twinge of pain.

“Fuck!”

The boat lurched again, its prow disappearing beneath the waves once more, bobbing up for a moment before disappearing one final time. He was on a sinking ship, scuttled by his own men—shot and left for dead.

“Those mutinous bastards,” he muttered, pulling himself up until he was standing, feeling queasy.

The wound in his skull was making him light-headed, so much so he couldn’t tell if it was the boat that was lurching or himself. Then another wave hit the sinking scow, and Black John stumbled as he tried to retain his balance.

The sound of rushing water was becoming more restrained, and Black John realized what that meant. The ship had all but sunk; there wasn’t much left for the ocean to fill before she took her.

Beside him, a body floated past, a tanned man with a gaping wound across his belly, guts spewing forth like the writhing tentacles of an octopus.

“Better you than me,” Black John muttered as the body floated away, even as the deck disappeared beneath his feet, covered by a carpet of ocean.

Beneath his feet, La Segunda Montaña finally sank from view, leaving Black John floating alongside six dead bodies on the ocean waves.

Black John was a pirate and sadist, but most of all he was a survivor. He would survive this. Somehow he would survive and bring bloody revenge on the crew that had betrayed him.

Chapter 3

The God War was over.

The mop-up, however—now, that would take a little longer.

Kane, Grant and Edwards stepped out of the rain and made their way past the open double doors of the old aircraft hangar and into the grumbling crowd that waited beyond. Within, close to forty or fifty people were waiting, the muttering sounds of their voices echoing from the high ceiling.

“Just like old times, isn’t it?” Kane said under his breath as the three men entered the huge room.

Edwards nodded. “Yeah, it’s a regular triple-P, all right.”

“Triple-P” was slang for a Pedestrian Pit Patrol, a task all three men had had to perform in their past lives as Magistrates for ville authorities, lives all three had put behind them.

At some point in time, the building they entered had been used to store aircraft and automobiles, playthings of the very rich. That was before the nukecaust had changed the rules of the world, and civilization had been dealt such a blow that it had seemed for a while as if it might never recover. Even now, two hundred years later, these places still existed, abandoned and almost forgotten, relics of a bygone age just waiting to be put to use once more.

The ceiling dripped rainwater through gaping holes, and what glass remained in the windows was white with birds’ droppings. Right now, even as the orderly crowd gathered, the sound of pigeons cooing trilled through the building, a sonic bed that was almost subliminal in its constancy.

Kane glanced up at the ceiling, watching for a moment as two pigeons took flight one after the other, a third joining them a moment later, weaving through the high girders that held the roof in place in a fluttering of gray feathers. The crowd ignored them.

In his early thirties, Kane was a tall man with a strong build that even his loose denim jacket could not disguise. With wide shoulders and rangy limbs, his physique resembled that of a wolf. He had the nature of a wolf, too, both a loner and pack leader depending on what the fates threw at him. His dark hair was cropped short and he was clean shaved for the first time in more than a month. As an ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the enforcers of the now-fallen baronies that had dominated the former United States. He had been exiled from the barony of Cobaltville after stumbling upon a conspiracy that had threatened the very integrity of the system he was pledged to protect. Exiled along with his Magistrate partner Grant and archivist Brigid Baptiste, Kane had been recruited into the Cerberus operation in its infancy. Ever since, he had been battling against the Annunaki threat to Earth in all its myriad forms, and most recently he had taken down Ullikummis in a battle that raged not simply across Earth but through multiple planes of reality. Standing in a decrepit aircraft hangar amid a gaggle of other humans, Kane was glad to get back to something approaching normality once more.

The two men walking at Kane’s side were similarly intimidating men. The first of these was Grant, Kane’s longtime brother-in-arms whose relationship with Kane dated from way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate. Tall and broad-shouldered, Grant was an imposing figure with ebony skin and not so much as an ounce of fat on his body. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and he had sported his trademark gunslinger’s mustache. In his mid-thirties, Grant wore a long black duster made from Kevlar weave. The coat skimmed the tops of his boots, giving him a funereal look.

The other man was called Edwards, who was similarly well built. He had chosen to forgo a jacket, leaving his rippling arm muscles cinched beneath the tight sleeves of his dark cotton shirt. He was closer in age to Kane. Like Grant, his hair was shaved close to his skull, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. During the war with Ullikummis, Edwards had been duped into acting in the interests of the enemy through a hidden implant in his skull. That implant had been removed via ultrasonic surgery just four days earlier, but Edwards was in the field already—determined, as he put it, to make up for lost time. Kane and Grant kept an eye on him, neither of them sure that he could be fully trusted yet.

There was a fourth Cerberus agent in the room, an albino woman called Domi who had been tracking down information about this meeting for several days. She had patched through to Cerberus just a few hours before, confirming the time and location and giving the go-ahead for the others to move in.

The meeting itself was in the West Coast territory of the old United States of America, just forty miles from the majestic settlement of Luikkerville. Built on the ruins of Snakefishville, Luikkerville was a city constructed from faith, its populace enthralled by the preachings of Ullikummis and his followers. News of Ullikummis’s passing had done little to temper that burgeoning faith in the region, and Domi was there to ensure it remained at a manageable level. Where the Annunaki were involved, that was often easier said than done.

The crowd numbered close to fifty, and they came from all walks of life, all ages and ethnicities. But there was a definite atmosphere in the room. Kane could sense an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and mistrust, the belief that some great betrayal had occurred. Their god was dead.

Kane and his team continued moving through the crowd, splitting up with assured casualness as they lost themselves amid the ragtag congregation.

“...brother died,” Kane heard one of the crowd complain as he walked past. “Disappeared in a warp and never came back.”

“Yeah,” his companion agreed. “Same thing happened to my cousin. Ain’t seen him since Sunday.”

Kane moved on, gently pushing the occasional crowd member aside as he found a good vantage point to view the raised stage that dominated one end of the room.

Elsewhere within the crowd, Grant and Edwards made similar progress, making their way through the throng without drawing attention to themselves. All three men were trained Magistrates and they knew how to work through a crowd, walking with that inherent authority and challenge to their step that made others move aside.

A simple podium had been erected at one end of the hangar, just boards raised on piled blocks, and Kane, Grant and Edwards took their places as a woman stepped up onto it with the help of a man in a hooded robe. The robe was made of rough hessian material, and it featured a red shield insignia over the left breast. Kane winced as he recognized the design. Just a few years before, he and his colleagues had worn something similar in their roles as Magistrates; this new religion had appropriated much of the iconography of the dying villes in its manipulation of the populace. The woman looked to be in her late twenties, with mouse-brown hair to which she had added streaks of purple like an anarchic road map. She walked with a shuffle to her step, and Kane saw she carried a little extra weight around her middle beneath the loose, floaty dress she wore. The dress was white, and it billowed around her as it caught the drafts from the broken windows, clinging to her legs as she took each step.

To the side of the podium, two more of the robed Magistrate stand-ins waited, their hoods down revealing their emotionless expressions. They were watching the crowd warily.

The crowd came to a hush as the woman stood astride the podium, casting her eyes slowly over them, an appreciative smile forming on her lips. The woman raised her arms and, once the crowd was silent, she spoke.

“I was made a promise by Lord Ullikummis,” she announced in a clear voice, “that stone would be the future. That stone would be our future.”

A little rumble went through the crowd, and voices were raised in dissent.

“I heard it was over.”

“Yeah, Lord Ullikummis abandoned us.”

“He died.”

The woman raised her hands for silence. “Please, people. Please.”

Gradually, with a palpable sense of reluctance, the crowd quietened.

“Ullikummis is dead,” the woman on the podium announced. “The rumors are true.”

Someone in the crowd cried out, and others raised their voices in shock once again, taking a minute to finally quieten once more.

“Ullikummis ascended,” the woman continued, “to watch over all of us, to better guarantee his utopia would come to pass. And he left us a gift.”

The woman pulled at her waist then, and Kane saw that what she wore was not a dress after all but a skirt and top of the same shimmering material. She raised the top, lifting it up and over her belly until it cinched just below her breasts. Her pink belly was swollen, a little bump showing in line with her hips. At first, Kane had taken the bump for fat, but now he realized his mistake.

“He planted his seed in me before he ascended,” the woman announced to the stunned crowd. “I am the Stone Widow, and Ullikummis’s child grows within me. Our lord has departed, but his flesh shall live on.”

Once again, the crowd began to talk, raising questions and surging forward to see and to touch the swollen belly of the pregnant woman who called herself the Stone Widow.

Careful not to draw attention to himself, Kane engaged the hidden receiver of his Commtact and subvocalized, “Edwards, what are you making of this?”

A moment later, Edwards responded, his voice crystal clear in Kane’s head. “I need to be closer to be sure, Kane.”

Commtacts were communications devices that were hidden beneath the skin of the Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit whose designs had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

Kane bit back a curse as he saw Edwards’s tall form pushing farther toward the very front of the crowd. The man’s height made him conspicuous and, unlike himself and Grant, Edwards had never had much experience working in low-key ops like this one. Instead, he just barreled on, eyes on the prize.

“Cool off, Edwards,” Kane subvocalized. “You’re drawing too much attention.”

“Well, shit, Kane,” Edwards’s voice came back. “Whatever’s left inside me from that monster needs to get close to sense things. So, I’m getting close. You got a better idea, I’m all ears.” As he spoke, Edwards peered across the heads of the crowd, fixing Kane with a challenging stare.

Kane looked away, his eyes automatically playing over the rest of the crowd. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it should play out. Edwards had been turned into a traitor against his will, and now that he was back on side he felt like he had something to prove. If they weren’t careful, that desire to prove himself was going to land them all in very hot water.

* * *

MEANWHILE, CLOSE TO the rear wall of the hangar, the fourth agent of the Cerberus team had slipped past the celebrants and was making her way along the length of the room behind the stage. Domi was an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair that was cut into a short, pixie-style bob. Barely five feet in height with eyes a fearsome red, Domi had the figure of a teenage girl, with tiny, bird-thin limbs and small, high breasts. Right now, she was wearing a simple, airy ensemble, a light dress that left much of her pale skin uncovered. Given her choice, Domi would prefer to wear less and perhaps nothing at all. A child of the Outlands, Domi found the feel of clothing on her skin restrictive.

She had been tracking this group for several days, and had already witnessed two of their “performances,” for want of a better word. She balked at calling them sermons; there was nothing holy or reverent here that she could see. The group had come to recognize her, not in the least since her appearance was so distinctive, and she had told them her name was Mitra, a preferred alias she had used a few times while infiltrating similar pseudo religious groups. As “Mitra” she was trusted, a gentle-hearted innocent with a sickly parent who was looking for a new family in the form of this congregation. The story gave her enough credibility to pass herself off unnoticed as the false sermon continued.

While the crowd’s attention was on the preaching Stone Widow, Domi ducked under the stage and peered at what lay beneath. The stage had been constructed of several sheets of wood, placed end to end and held aloft by piled cinder blocks at regular intervals. Visibility was poor underneath, but Domi could see that the area was being used for storage. She wanted to know what was being stored.

The woman speaker’s coat was under there, neatly folded and placed by the open end of the stage. Other than that, the usual kind of things one would expect from travelers—several canteens filled with water along with some travel bags. Domi crouch-walked toward the bags—one of which was unbuckled at the top—and peered inside, spying a change of underwear along with some dried strips of cured meat in a separate bag with a clasp tie at its top. She sniffed the latter bag for a moment before moving on, head ducked beneath the stage. The height of the stage was about three feet, and Domi had to move slowly to find her way around.

Above her, the woman continued her proclamations about being the mother of the god’s child, and the crowd oohed and aahed as prompted. Through the medium of the low stage, the voices sounded hollow and eerie, as if coming from a great length of tunnel.

Up ahead, Domi spotted a wooden box that had been pushed a little more than arm’s length from the stage’s edge and against the side wall, just enough to keep it safe. The box was about fourteen inches in height and roughly square.

Checking the edges of the stage for movement and confirming there was none, Domi made her way slowly toward the crate on silent tread.

* * *

UP AT THE FRONT OF THE crowd, the Stone Widow was continuing to explain her role in the New Order. Words like messiah were being bandied about, child of god, saviour. The audience was lapping it up. The sense of relief was palpable; these people craved something to believe in now that their god was gone.

“When this child is born,” the woman continued, “he will be the first step in the evolution of our new world. A child born of god and woman. A force to lead us all.”

Edwards had reached the front of the group now, and he stared at the woman, eyeing her belly. Edwards had been seeded with one of the semisentient stones that came from Ullikummis to fulfill his will. While most of the stone growth had now been removed from his skull, parts of it tenaciously remained—not enough to do any damage to Edwards, but enough that he could sense other obedience stones and their ilk. He sure as hell could detect something here, but it was dull, like a niggling itch.

“Well?” Kane asked over the Commtact. “Anything?”

“Definitely something here,” Edwards replied. “Gonna have to pinpoint the source.”

As he spoke, Edwards reached forward, hand outstretched, and slapped his palm against the speaker’s ankle, the way others of the congregation had.

The woman was surprised by the hard grip, and she stopped midspeech to stare at the shaved-headed man who had grabbed her. “Let go, you’re hurting,” she said.

“Just wanted to touch the sainted lady,” Edwards explained as the robed figures came hurrying toward him from the back of the podium.

“Get away from the glorious widow,” one of the robed goons ordered.

The woman on stage kicked out and stepped back from Edwards, leaving him stumbling forward into the stage. The buzz in his head was there, but it was slight, and touching the so-called Stone Widow didn’t seem to make any appreciable difference.

“I just wanted to,” Edwards said, “to be close to the new life that’s coming.”

“So do I,” another member of the crowd called. “Let me feel the new life.”

“Let me be close,” another shouted.

“And me!”

Suddenly, Kane and Grant found themselves being pushed forward in a human wave as the crowd surged to get closer to the Stone Widow, even as Edwards was shoved violently against the edge of the stage itself.

“Fuck, Edwards, what have you started?” Kane muttered into his Commtact link.

* * *

BENEATH THE STAGE, Domi’s crimson eyes widened as the wooden box began to throb, its contents rattling within.

* * *

CONFUSED, BLACK JOHN Jefferson peered around him, trying to figure out where he was. He was surrounded by jungle, dense foliage thick with sap and the buzzing of insects like a wall of sound on the air. Tiny black flies swarmed about his wounds, feeding on his blood.

There was no real path to speak of, and Jefferson looked behind him, trying to recall if that was the direction he had come from. He had been on board the sinking fishing scow, had dipped under the waves when it had finally disappeared. The wound on his head had felt bastard hot where the sun struck it, but the salty water of the sea had made it sting even worse, doing nothing to cool either his skin or his temperament.

He had floated there awhile, the waves rolling about him, sending him on an undulating journey to wherever they chose. He remembered a beach, golden sand, a jungle running along its edge, palm trees and rubber plants. He had to have blacked out somewhere and had since been running on instinct.

He could recall nights like that when he’d been drunk, and his body had continued functioning anyway, whether his mind was really awake or not. Instinct could do that to a person—the deep-rooted instinct to survive.

Black John pushed the stem of a plant away as it tickled at his nose, shoving it aside with a groan of pain. His body ached and the wounds on his chest were still weeping, a clear pus coming from the broken skin where the bullets had struck, along with tiny slivers of congealing blood like red splinters. He’d kill them; that’s what he’d do. Salt, Six, all of them. They should have followed his number-one creed—to leave no witnesses. Leaving him alive would be the last mistake those ungrateful sea dogs would make.

He battled on, fighting with the foliage, seeking something to vent his anger upon. Then, as he shoved the low branches of a towering palm out of the way, he saw the building. It sat there, nestled in the jungle’s green embrace, as big as a cathedral. Constructed of stone the color of sand, the building had grand, sloping sides and a wide expanse of steps running up its center to a smaller structure that rested at its apex. The walls were notched with carvings, shadowed crevices in some script that the pirate couldn’t recognize but assumed to be written words.

Black John eyed the building, estimating it to be more than three stories in height, but still shorter than the tallest of the palm trees surrounding it.

With nowhere left to turn, Black John trudged toward the structure, wondering if anyone was inside. He was in need of medical attention, he knew, and the blood-spot trail he left on the jungle floor informed him he likely didn’t have that much time left. He reached down for the gun in his holster only to find it was gone. It didn’t matter—whoever lived there would either help him or he’d execute them and then he’d help himself with whatever he could find. In the end, it was always that simple.

Chapter 4

Lakesh stared at the Mercator relief map that stretched across one wall of the operations room, narrowing his eyes to pick out the trails of lights that were currently dark. Like everything else in the ops room, the map had been covered by tendrils of stone during Ullikummis’s violent assault on the redoubt. A tech on a stepladder was working at one side of the map, to the east, chipping away at the stone that had once overwhelmed it, removing its crust sliver by sliver. According to the map, there were plenty of pathways into the old states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, but there were no mat-trans-ready redoubts in the particular area that Rosalia had indicated. Lakesh shook his head with incredulity; it was almost as though military operations had been warned away from the region, deliberately kept at arm’s length.

Swiveling his chair, Lakesh turned back to his computer, tapping at a key to reengage the darkened screen. While the Cerberus redoubt had been designed to manage the mat-trans system, it was not the only mode of transportation that Lakesh and his people had access to. The interphaser could also tap the quantum pathways and move people through space to specific locations.

While more amenable than the stationary mat-trans, the technology of the interphaser was limited by certain esoteric factors. The full gamut of those limitations had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful, hidden lines stretching across the globe and beyond. This network of geomantic energy followed old ley lines and supported a powerful technology so far beyond human comprehension as to appear magical. Though fixed, the interphaser’s destination points often corresponded with the locations of temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious value. Clearly, ancient man had recognized the incredible power that was concentrated at such vortex points, which had been cataloged in the Parallax Points Program. These coordinates had been input into the interphaser.

Lakesh brought up a computer database of the known interphaser destinations; like most of the Cerberus endeavors, one of the IT experts had come up with a computer program that explored its properties.

Lakesh was still working at the problem when Brigid Baptiste and Mariah Falk returned, materializing in the mat-trans chamber like participants in a magic trick. Deep in his calculations, Lakesh had not heard the unit power up in the corner of the room, but when its door opened he looked up from his desk and watched Mariah and Brigid exit the chamber, returning home from their brief excursion to India. Mariah looked buoyant, smiling radiantly and—Lakesh fancied—walking with a skip in her step. A pace behind her, Brigid was solemn, her dour expression fixed. Lakesh had been Brigid’s supervisor back when they had both been archivists in Cobaltville, and they had been colleagues—and friends—for a very long time. Right now, Lakesh was worried about her. What had happened with Ullikummis had put all of them through metaphorical hell, but Brigid had taken it worse than anyone, being turned so absolutely against her own will.

“Brigid, a word?” Lakesh called, raising his hand as the two women paced through the room.

Brigid turned to him, fixing Lakesh with dead eyes. “Yes?”

“I have spoken to Reba,” Lakesh explained soberly once Mariah had left and Brigid had sat beside his desk. “She has agreed to speak with you about what you went through. She’s been doing this with a number of our people. A lot of them are still quite understandably traumatized. We feel it might be of some help to you, as well. Do you understand?”

Reba DeFore was the facility’s physician. Brigid had known her a long time, too.

“You mean a psych evaluation?” Brigid challenged.

Lakesh nodded. “You have been through a terrible ordeal,” he said, “one we fear you are perhaps struggling to cope with. The sessions would be open-ended—and voluntary of course. I feel it would be for your own good.”

Brigid glared at him, her brilliant emerald eyes piercing his. “No,” she said.

Lakesh watched openmouthed as she rose to leave. Finally, he recovered his composure before she reached the doors. “Please, Brigid, there are so many questions that need to be addr—”

“No,” she shrieked, turning on him. “I’m sick of questions. Sick, sick, sick. Do you hear me?”

Lakesh balked at the outburst, apologizing and defusing the situation by backtracking as quickly as he had suggested it. He watched as Brigid left the room, still mad.

Lakesh regretted that, but he was worried about her. They all were. He had known Brigid for a long time, and in all that time he had never known her like this. Her biolink transponder, the device that was injected into all Cerberus personnel so they could be monitored and tracked, had been shut off by Ullikummis, and without it she had been lost to them for almost two months. She had come back broken, no longer herself. And there didn’t seem to be anything that Lakesh or anyone else could do about it.

* * *

BRIGID STORMED DOWN the main corridor that ran the length of the redoubt, the heels of her boots clumping against the hard stone floor. Wide enough to fit two ground vehicles side by side with ease, the corridor featured a high arched ceiling. It was always cold, like a cave at night, and always busy, running as it did the length of the redoubt mountain complex.

There was something about the feel of the corridor that was reassuring to Brigid right then, and she slowed her pace as she weaved over to the right-hand wall before pressing her hand against the rock. The wall was cold, the kind of cold that emanated just a little way beyond a thing’s surface, that one could feel before touching. It felt real to her.

When Ullikummis had attacked her, overwhelmed her, destroyed her, Brigid had hidden her true mind away in a secret place that he couldn’t reach. It was a higher plane of consciousness, accessible only via meditation. Its walls had been as white as lightning, and it had a sterile quality, with not so much as the hint of a breeze anywhere within it no matter how far she traveled.

Here, back in the redoubt with its rocky ceiling and cold walls, Brigid couldn’t help but notice the difference. It was real here. Everything was real. Wasn’t it?

* * *

BLACK JOHN JEFFERSON had reached the top of the stone steps that ran up the outside of the building, and spatters of his blood now daubed each stair. It was a rectangular construction, the sloping sides reminiscent of a pyramid, although they failed to meet at the apex. Instead, there was a small covered area, fourteen feet by twelve, its flat stone roof marked with carvings. Black John examined those carvings for a moment, trying to make sense of them. The elements had not been kind to them, and much of the definition had worn away over time. Still, he saw geometric shapes and something that looked like a bird carved into the stone, but he didn’t know what any of it meant.

Beneath the stone roof, there was another staircase, this one leading down into the building itself. The steps were dark and grimy, the detritus of dead leaves and dried insect shells lying amid swollen lines of moss.

Black John poked his head closer to the staircase and called out, “Hello? Anybody there?”

His own words echoed back to him after a moment, sounding hollow as they reverberated from the walls.

Jefferson clutched at his belly as another spark of searing pain ran through his guts where the bullets had struck, and when he brought his hand away it was slick with blood. The blood was thick, congealed with rough flecks in it from the edges of a forming scab.

Behind him, the jungle waited, bird caws and animal cries sounding distant and lonesome. Black John looked around him, searching the area. The tree cover was high, and the jungle was so overgrown that he could barely see ten feet beyond the edge of the stone structure. It would not surprise him to learn that this temple had stood here, unnoticed, for thousands of years, utterly lost to the eyes of man.

Warily, the blood dripping from his stomach wound with each step, Black John followed the stone steps into the darkness of the forgotten temple.

* * *

STILL CONCERNED ABOUT Brigid’s reaction, Lakesh threw himself back into his work, unable to put the incident out of his mind. The map of the Mexico border glowed on the flickering computer screen, with several destination points highlighted that the interphaser would be able to access. That posed a problem, too. While Lakesh was willing to help Rosalia, the interphaser would need to travel to the destination point, too, and it was simply too valuable a unit for Lakesh to rely on the feature that would return the device to the Cerberus redoubt. Lakesh took a pen from his rock-scarred desk and began to tap it against his teeth absently, wondering what his best course of action was. Brigid could only be helped if she would let them. And Rosalia needed to go home.

Lakesh was still pondering those problems when Donald Bry came over to speak with him. With an unruly mop of copper curls and an expression of permanent worry, Bry was second in command at the Cerberus ops center, and was also Lakesh’s closest confidant. Many hours of experience had taught him to pick up on the signs when Lakesh was worrying, and seeing the man absentmindedly tapping at his teeth with a pen was one sure giveaway.

“Something I can help you with, Lakesh?” he asked cheerily.

Lakesh looked up from his calculations and smiled. Bry had been overseeing much of the reconstruction work for the redoubt over the past four days, which meant that the two of them had spent little time in each other’s company. “Donald, how are things progressing?”

“Slowly. Ever so slowly. But we’re getting there.”

Lakesh nodded. “I’ll be glad when I can see my old map properly again.”

“Ullikummis did a real number on this place,” Bry said. “We’ve found things that look like carcasses up in the canteen area, round and as big as a dog but all withered up and dead now. The disturbing part is, they’re made of rock.”

“That sounds hideous,” Lakesh said solemnly. “I fear what other surprises we might yet find.”

Bry took a steadying breath, placing his hands on Lakesh’s desk. “We made it back here, and that monster won’t be coming again,” he said. “We survived everything he did, and we’ll make it through this, too. Whatever we find.”

“I know,” Lakesh agreed. “I’ll just be glad when things are finally back to normal. I’ve spent too much of the past few months living out of a suitcase, not knowing what new horror the next day will bring.”

“Life goes on,” Bry conceded, as he glanced at Lakesh’s screen. “But you look like you’re puzzling over something there.”

“Brigid,” Lakesh said, ignoring the screen. “I fear that something has broken inside her, her spirit, if you will. What Ullikummis did took so much from her, and one can ill imagine what the effects of that are with her incredible memory. If she won’t let us help her, I fear we could lose her forever.

“Am I an old fool to worry so, Donald?”

Bry chuckled. “If you are, then I am, too,” he said. “Brigid’s not herself....”

“She’s more herself than she’s been in months,” Lakesh corrected. “That’s the problem. She’s grown—experience has shaped her. She almost bit my head off when I proposed she talk things over with Reba.”

“Maybe therapy isn’t the answer,” Donald said after a moment’s consideration. “One time when I was eight, my cat—Tiger—died. I really loved that cat, and my mom fussed and worried herself silly at what his passing would do to me. She asked if I would like a new cat, but I didn’t want one. Eventually, she tried to get me to see a child psychiatrist.”

“For a cat?” Lakesh asked.

“For a cat,” Bry confirmed. “So, I saw her—a nice enough woman, though I’ll be damned if I can recall her name after all these years. And we talked some, life and sorrow and all that. And it just made me realize that—you know, all I wanted was for people to stop asking me how I felt, to stop going on about it. I knew Tiger wasn’t coming back, and it wasn’t that I wanted a new cat. I just wanted to put that behind me and do new stuff.”

“What happened?” Lakesh asked.

“Eventually the therapy sessions stopped,” Bry said. “I probably only went for about four weeks, but that’s a long time when you’re eight. I think the shrink gave up when all I would talk about was some movie that I’d seen a trailer for. I can’t remember what the movie was now, either. Go figure.”

Lakesh laughed. “It was always something when you were a child, wasn’t it?”

Bry nodded. “You’ve tried to help, Lakesh, but maybe Brigid can just figure this out in her own way. No matter how much people care, probably all the questions aren’t helping her right now. Nor is being here, with reminders of what Ullikummis did to us there to see on every surface.”

“Perhaps not,” Lakesh said, his eyes flicking back to the image on his computer terminal.

Bry watched as a smile crept across Lakesh’s face. “I know that look,” he said. “What is it?”

“You may have provided the solution to two problems,” Lakesh said. “Rosalia requires the interphaser to travel to her next destination, but I am reluctant to leave it with her. However, if I were to send Brigid along for the trip, she could retrieve the interphaser and take a little time away from everything that’s happening here.”

Bry smiled. “Happy to help. Shall we say ‘eureka’?” he asked.

“Oh, why not?” Lakesh laughed, and the two men punched their fists in the air.

“Eureka!”

Chapter 5

Those old stones were a-rattling.

In the darkened area beneath the stage in the old aircraft hangar, Domi pulled her hand back from the box. Her eyes widened as a sound came from it like the clip-clopping of hoofbeats. But already she was too late. A rush of stones came with her, racing over her hand and up her arm like insects, moving under their own power.

“No!” Domi cried out, scampering backward with her eyes fixed on the dark shapes running up her flesh. Before her, the box continued to tremble just slightly, as though it had been knocked, its contents rattling like cooking kernels of popcorn.

* * *

ON THE STAGE ABOVE, the Stone Widow was speaking of salvation. “The future will need strength,” she proclaimed.

From his position in the jostling crowd, Kane watched as one of the three robed figures who were acting as the woman’s assistants brought a wooden box over to her from its place at the edge of the stage. The box was roughly one foot square, and though Kane couldn’t know it, it was an identical match to the one that Domi had just discovered beneath the raised stage.

“You all shall be that strength,” the woman on stage continued joyously.

The crowd cheered in agreement, pushing ever closer to the orator. On stage, the robed man nudged the lid of the box aside, opening it so that the Stone Widow could reach within. From where he stood, Kane could not see what was in the box but he could tell it was heavy.

* * *

JUST FEET BELOW, Domi gasped as the strange stones ran across her skin. She brushed at them as their dark shapes moved along her right arm, watching in horror as they clung to her hand, ringing her wrist with a caking of stones. She grunted as she tried once again to pluck them from her flesh.

Several of the stones were sinking into the flesh of her right arm where they had first touched her, digging in with their sharp edges, forming the beginnings of a shell across Domi’s skin. And all Domi could do was grit her teeth against the pain.

* * *

CLOSE TO THE FRONT of the stage, Edwards felt the pull of the box as the Stone Widow reached within. It seemed to be tugging at his mind, magnet to magnet.

“We are all grieving,” the woman on stage proclaimed. “Ullikummis ascended, and we are left to grieve the passing. But the future is right here, within me. Within us all.”

With the crowd transfixed, the Stone Widow plucked a handful of stones from the box, each one no bigger than her thumb joint. Kane balked as he realized that they were shards of Ullikummis. He searched the crowd for Edwards, saw the man reach a hand to his forehead and wince as if in pain.

The Stone Widow held her arm outstretched and, before Kane could do anything, opened her hand, palm down, above Edwards’s head. A single stone—just a pebble really—dropped from her hand, falling onto Edwards’s shoulders and the back of his neck. Edwards fell back, sweeping at the stone and brushing it away over the heads of the crowd. Beside him, another crowd member was receiving one of the living stones, arms outstretched to accept this precious gift from a god. But as the Stone Widow handed over the stone, there came a crash from below the stage and she turned.

One of the robed security men turned also, his brow furrowed beneath his hood. “What the heck—?”

Then there came more bumping from the underside of the stage as Domi bashed her head against it in her haste to get out, the living stones pouring across her skin, all the way up her right arm.

In front of the stage, Edwards shook his head to clear it of the buzzing before searching the crowd to locate his colleagues. “Kane—? Grant—?”

From his right, Kane came hurtling forward, swept along by the surging crowd eager to accept the eerie, living gifts. “Edwards, what’s happ—?”

He stopped, spying the commotion at the far end of the stage where Domi had come barreling out from her hiding place. She had chosen to wear a light summery dress that left her chalk arms bare, and Kane could see immediately the dark spots rising along the right arm, rolling up it in some weird perversion of raindrops. Two of the robed acolytes were moving toward her, each of them reaching inside his billowing robes and pulling something free. Kane already knew that each of those figures would be packing heat.

“Domi, look out,” Kane called, placing his left hand on Edwards’s shoulder and using it to propel himself over the crowd and onto the stage. With his other hand, Kane gestured forward, and the specific flinch movement of his wrist tendons activated the hidden holster he wore under his right sleeve, powering a weapon into his hand. The Sin Eater was a compact handblaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden sleeve holster. Once the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater fired 9 mm rounds. The trigger had no guard, as the necessity had never been foreseen for any kind of safety features. The absolute nature of that means of potential execution reflected the high regard with which Magistrates like Kane were viewed in the villes; their judgment could never be wrong. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a Magistrate, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service at Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand.

Ahead of Kane, the two robed figures had brought what appeared to be slingshots into their hands, just simple coils of leather. Despite their primitive appearance, the slingshots could launch rock missiles at speeds that rivaled a bullet from a gun. These were the default weapon of the troops for Ullikummis, and Kane had been on the receiving end of their lethal projectiles on more than one occasion in the past three months.

“Kane, they’ve got stones,” Edwards warned, recovering from his momentary loss of concentration.

“I see them,” Kane muttered under his breath.

In unison, the two hooded forms spun the slingshots in their hands, gathering speed in a fraction of a second before unleashing the first of their stone ammunition. No larger than a knuckle each, two stones fired from the whirling slingshots like bullets, cutting through the air toward Domi’s writhing form. At the same instant, Kane drew a bead on the hooded figure to the left and stroked the trigger of his Sin Eater, sending a single 9 mm bullet into the back of the man’s leg. The man went down in a flutter of robes, crying out in pain as his leg gave way in a burst of blood.

Concentrating on protecting Domi, Kane was dimly aware that chaos was erupting in the main room behind him, the crowd startled by the gunshots in the enclosed space. But there was not time to worry about that now—Grant and Edwards could take care of it.

Kane charged across the stage as the figure to his left fell, bringing the Sin Eater around to take out the second. The figure in the robe surprised Kane with the swiftness of his response, spinning and bringing his arm up, batting away the muzzle of the Sin Eater even before Kane could pull the trigger a second time.

“Put the sling down,” Kane demanded as he was knocked two paces to his left by the savage blow.

In response, the hooded figure simply smiled, reloading his simple but effective weapon in a blur of movement.

Down on the floor behind the stage, Domi was writhing in pain as two dozen stones rushed over her body, rolling like snail shells and leaving bloody welts in their wake. A complete line of the tiny stones had encircled her arm just below the elbow, forming a second skin there. “H-hurts,” Domi hissed as she tried to pull one of the shell-like rocks from her limb. It pulled away with an audible popping sound, releasing her flesh with a spit of blood. Around it, the other stones shimmered and throbbed, shuffling to take its place.

Among the crowd, Grant and Edwards were calling for everyone to calm down.

“Just a little mix-up,” Grant said, forcing that old Magistrate authority into his tone. “Everyone keep calm and no one’s going to get hurt.”

“Screw you!” yelled a man from just behind him, and Grant automatically ducked as his peripheral vision caught something being thrown at his head.

The powerfully built ex-Mag turned then, commanding his own Sin Eater into his hand from its hidden wrist holster. “We’re busting this scam open, people,” he shouted, targeting the man who had thrown his shoe. “You need to calm the hell down—right now.”

Grant swept the blaster over the crowd at head level, warning them back as he backed toward the stage. Edwards was beside him, a smaller-caliber pistol now in his hands from its hiding place at the small of his back. As the two of them reached the stage, the Stone Widow and her remaining acolyte leaped over them, launching into the crowd and hurrying for the doors.

Dammit, Grant thought. Why was it that wherever he went with Kane he always ended up in situations like this? It was Kane, he was a magnet for trouble.

“Edwards, grab the box,” Grant commanded as he chased after the woman.

Edwards charged after the retreating robed figure who was hefting the box of stones, shoving members of the crowd aside in his urgency to reach the man. Sensing the danger, the figure turned, his face a patchwork of wrinkled lines and puckered skin.

“You’re one of us,” the robed man hissed as he saw Edwards barrel toward him.

“Used to be,” Edwards spit, pistol-whipping the man behind his ear.

The robed figure lurched forward, dropping the box at the strike, and its contents spilled across the room.

“Everyone back,” Edwards ordered, skipping away from the strewed rocks. “Get back!”

Behind him, the crowd raised their voices in confusion.

* * *

AT THE REAR OF THE STAGE, Kane ducked as a volley of stones hurtled toward him from the shooter. As the rocks zipped over his head, Kane powered himself forward, charging at the man.

As he saw Kane charge toward him, the robed figure said one ominous sentence that Kane had heard time and time and again in the past few months: “I am stone.”

Kane plowed into the man, knocking both of them back and off the stage. Although only a small drop, the robed man slammed against the floor with a loud crack of bone. Kane landed on top of him, and he brought the clenched fist of his left hand down in a swift, sharp jab. The punch struck the man full in the face, and Kane watched with satisfaction as his eyes flickered and he fell unconscious.

“No, you ain’t,” Kane muttered as he pulled himself off the fallen figure, moving to help Domi.

Back on the stage, the robed man’s colleague was just recovering from the gunshot. An expert marksman, Kane had targeted him perfectly, clipping the top of his leg and hobbling him just long enough that he could not reload his sling.

Kane scurried across the stage to where Domi lay writhing on the floor. The albino woman was rolling back and forth, hissing like a cat as the living stones ran across the flesh of her arm and up toward her shoulder, affixing themselves quicker than she could remove them. Domi snatched for another as it clambered toward her throat, wrenching it away with a tear of her skin.

“Okay, Domi,” Kane said calmly, “I’m right here.”

Domi’s scarlet eyes glared into his. “Kane, get them off me,” she begged through gritted teeth.

Commanding his blaster back into its hidden holster, Kane kneeled next to Domi and reached for the shifting stones. Hands just a couple of inches away from her body, he stopped himself, staring nervously at the semi-living things. Like a swarm of tiny-shelled insects, the hard backs of the stones had massed against Domi’s arm, creating solid bands there that wrapped over her skin like bangles.

“Kane?” Domi squealed. “They’re pushing into me. I can feel them.”

Kane had had a similar stone embedded in him just a few months earlier, and he could still recall the pain it had caused. Like leeches, Kane knew that the insidious things needed to be wrenched from the body before they gained any greater hold.

“Okay,” Kane said, “let me work.”

* * *

ON THE STAGE BEHIND KANE, the robed figure was pushing himself up, careful not to put pressure on his wounded leg. As soon as he was standing, the slingshot began to revolve again in his hand, cutting through the air with an audible whoosh as he targeted the man who had shot him.

Still standing over the spilled stones like a barricade, Edwards saw the hooded figure rise, saw the slingshot picking up speed in his grip. Edwards assessed the situation in an instant and concluded that taking a potshot at the man was too dangerous in this crowd. So he ran, knocking aside several of the congregation as he rushed for the stage and leaped. Before the robed man could launch the stone projectile, Edwards threw himself at him.

“No way, buddy,” Edwards growled as he slammed full force into Kane’s would-be attacker. “Fight’s over for you.”

The hooded man dropped to the stage with a crash under the weight of Edwards’s attack, crying in agony as his wounded leg was wrenched painfully to the side.

Edwards turned to the crowd that was warily approaching the spilled stones he had been guarding. “Nobody touch anything,” he warned, “for your own safety.”

The Stone Widow weaved through the crowd, hurrying toward the main exit of the hangar with the last of the robed guards stumbling after her, recovering from Edwards’s attack. “What happened?” she asked. “The stones...”

“We’ll come back for them,” the robed man said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

They both looked up as Grant stepped from the shadows to block the door. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he warned.

Beside the Stone Widow, the robed figure turned on Grant, throwing a handful of stones in the ex-Magistrate’s face. Grant lifted his arm to protect himself, batting the stones aside as they slapped uselessly against the Kevlar of his coat sleeve.

Before the robed figure could follow through, Grant had his Sin Eater pressed against the man’s forehead, whip fast. “You try that again, you’ll be doing it without a head on those shoulders,” Grant warned ominously.

Seeing the futility of arguing, the robed man slowly raised his hands in surrender.

* * *

OVER THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes, Kane used a knife to pluck the stones from Domi’s arm while she lay there, biting her lip. “Evil things,” she hissed, and Kane was inclined to agree.

Removed, the stones moved only for a few moments before lying still on the floor. It seemed that contact with flesh triggered them, and separated from the warmth of Domi’s body they ceased functioning, returning to their dormant state.

Once he was done, Kane produced a little medical kit from a pouch in his belt. The kit included several antiseptic wipes, and he used these to clean the grazed sections of Domi’s arm where the stones had tried to bond.

“Does this mean Ullikummis isn’t dead?” Domi asked.

“He’s dead, all right,” Kane assured her as he wiped at one of the grazes. “Saw it with my own eyes. Just a few last bits of his crap to clean up.”

Domi watched the unmoving stones for a few seconds. “They tried to—” she began and Kane nodded.

“I know.”

While Kane nursed Domi’s wounds, Edwards guided the confused congregation to the doors, assuring them they had been duped and that this was just another old-time scam, the kind of thing their grandfathers were either pulling or falling for in the Deathlands.

“Go home and find a better life for yourselves,” Edwards told them. “’Cause you won’t find it here in a bunch of empty promises.”

Whether the congregation took his warning to heart, no one could say, but the sight of a man with a bullet-bitten ear brandishing a blaster and ordering them from the hangar was enough to dissuade them from asking too many questions. Once they had left, Edwards carefully retrieved the spilled contents of the other box of stones, piling them together with his booted feet, careful not to let them touch his skin. They seemed dormant now, dead things, but he had felt them call to him earlier, deep in his skull where Ullikummis had touched him.

While his companions were clearing up the mess, Grant brought the Stone Widow to the rear of the stage along with one of her robed assistants. The other sec men had been disarmed by Edwards, and both were still unconscious. Edwards proceeded to tie them up with strips of their own robes while Grant interrogated the two who remained awake.

“Where did these stones come from?” Grant asked, fixing the Stone Widow and her guardian with a no-nonsense stare.

“What’s it to you?” the robed figure challenged.

Beneath his hood, he looked tired and drawn, a man of twenty-five with the skin of a man of sixty or seventy. It was as if something was eating him up from inside. Grant had seen this before when he was a Magistrate, drug users hopped up on jolt or some other stimulant, burning through their own bodies in just a few years. In the case of the robed man, Grant suspected he knew what it was. His robe indicated that he had been one of Ullikummis’s elite guards, the people whom Cerberus had dubbed “firewalkers.” Each firewalker had a sentient stone embedded within his or her skull that could simulate the physical properties of Ullikummis, turning flesh to stone during bouts of incredible concentration. The stones had been linked to Ullikummis himself, and with him destroyed they were withering and dying, eating away at their hosts like parasites.

“Come here,” Grant said, grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck and marching him over to a window of the hangar.

Edwards remained with the Stone Widow, sitting on the edge of the stage and holding his blaster ready in case she tried anything. She looked defeated, biting her lip in futility.

“See this?” Grant said, shoving the robed man facefirst toward the window. “Your face, you see that?”

The man looked at his reflection in the glass. “What of it, man?” he replied contemptuously.

“You’ve got a stone inside you, right?” Grant said. “Just like the ones that attacked the white girl over there.”

“Mitra?” the man said. “She shouldn’t have been—”

“Never mind what she should and shouldn’t have been doing,” Grant cut in. “How old are you?”

“What? Twenty-three. What’s it matter to you?”

“You’re even younger than I’d guessed,” Grant said sorrowfully. “Take another look at your face.”

The twenty-three-year-old man looked at his reflection in the dropping-spattered glass of the window.

“You’re looking old,” Grant told him. “No escaping it.”

The robed man look irritated, but he seemed unsure of where to direct his anger. “Is there a point to all this?”

“You have a stone inside you,” Grant told him. “Just like the ones that tried to attach themselves to Mitra there. They’ve burned out, my friend. They’re past their due date. Whatever that stone used to do for you, now all it does is eat you up. You need to get it removed. Your god is gone and he ain’t coming back.”

“You have no idea of the power—” the man began.

“Yes, I do,” Grant said solemnly. “Try it. Go ahead, tap the stone field and show me what you can do.”

The man glared at him, suspecting a trick. Grant encouraged him with an incline of his head. “Go on.”

Standing there by the wall, the man clenched his fists and spoke three words: “I am stone.”

Grant drew back his fist and, without warning, smacked the man in the jaw. The man was knocked back by the force of that blow, staggering backward until, three steps later, he slammed against the wall behind him.

“Stone, huh?” Grant taunted.

The robed man wiped at his chin, swiping blood away from a loosened tooth. “What...?” he asked, confused. “You... What happened?”

“Stones don’t work anymore,” Grant told him. “Trust my people, and we’ll get it out of you and anyone else that needs it. Leave them in there, and they’ll burn through your body in next to no time. That’s your choice. Are we clear?”

The man nodded, still rubbing at his sore jaw. “So what do you want me to do?”

Grant pointed at the second box of stones that Kane had now carefully retrieved from under the stage per Domi’s instruction. He had sealed the box to ensure nothing could touch his skin.

“The stones,” Grant said. “I want to know where they came from.”

The man looked at Grant with resignation, a shining droplet of blood budding at his split lip. “Okay, man, I’ll tell you what I know. But you said you’d help me, right?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Grant assured him.

Chapter 6

The graveyard was silent, its stone slabs overgrown, the ancient gravestones broken and ruined. A mausoleum stood in the center of the small plot, its faux-Roman columns subsumed by creepers, their leaves as red as sunset. Overhead, the sun itself was still bright as afternoon prophesized evening, a place marker burning whitely in the blue sky. For a moment, the leaves of the creepers bent in a breeze that could not be felt, and the chipped and broken gravestones seemed to shake and bulge in their spots. Then a burst of light appeared from nowhere, all the colors of the spectrum swirling in its impossible depths.

Brigid and Rosalia materialized in that lotus-blossom swirl of color as the twin cones of light shimmered. The beautiful light burst cut more than a dozen feet into the sky and, impossibly, the same distance down into the earth, creating an hourglass shape in the once-still graveyard. This was an optical illusion generated by the opening of a window through the cosmos, and it had been created by the ignition of the interphaser.

The interphaser was a simple metal unit, one foot tall and the same on each side of its square base. Its sides reached up to form a pyramid shape, and the light burst seemed to emanate from somewhere within it before disappearing a moment later with the speed of a popped balloon.

“Nice place,” Rosalia observed as she lifted her foot from the tangled vines that crisscrossed the ground. “Cerberus would feel right at home, huh?”

Working the controls of the interphaser, Brigid looked up to see what Rosalia was indicating. It was a statue of a dog on a stone plinth. The dog was a pointer, sitting obediently, its head cocked as if waiting for instruction. Vines had grown over the plinth and wrapped most of the hound’s body.

Brigid looked around as she packed the interphaser in its carrying case, seeing similar statues of dogs and cats poised amid the thick undergrowth. A pet cemetery, then.

“Do you know where we are?” Brigid asked her dark-haired companion.

Rosalia was pacing around the little graveyard, peering over its low walls. “I think so,” she said. “House over that way, I’ve seen it from the road a few times.”

Brigid looked where Rosalia indicated, spotted the house between the trees. It was a big mansion-type place, and the pet cemetery lay on its grounds. Presumably its one-time owners had thought a lot of their animals, Brigid guessed.

Standing, Brigid made her way across the overgrown graveyard and joined Rosalia at the gates. The gates themselves were missing, probably stolen and melted down sometime after the place had been abandoned. The nukecaust had dramatically culled Earth’s population at the start of the twenty-first century. A lot of things had been taken and applied to new uses by the struggling survivors.

“How far away are we,” Brigid asked, “from this village of yours?”

Rosalia smiled enigmatically. “Not far.”

With that, Rosalia stepped over the single fallen gatepost and tromped off toward the house. Back in the graveyard, Brigid watched for a moment, wondering about the logic of what she was doing. Kane trusted this woman, despite their previous run-ins, she knew that much, and his word had always carried weight for Brigid. She and Kane were anam-charas, soul friends linked throughout eternity, bonded at some spiritual level to always find and watch over each other. As such, their relationship ran to a far deeper level of trust than most people would ever know.

And what about their anam-chara bond, anyway? It wasn’t as if Kane was the center of Brigid’s world; they weren’t lovers in any traditional sense, even though they felt love for each other. Ullikummis had forced them apart, turning Brigid into something she could barely recognize. While under Ullikummis’s influence, Brigid had actually shot Kane, blasting him in the chest. With her photographic memory, she could replay that moment over and over if she chose to, and it haunted her every time she looked at Kane. Their anam-chara bond had meant so much, yet now she wondered if she could even bear to be near him after what she had done. Of course, Kane had said nothing of the incident, had only joked nonchalantly, making light of the whole wretched escapade. But it festered in Brigid’s mind, lurking in the shadows like a sinister face from a child’s nightmare.

To Brigid, it felt as if they were losing the anam-chara bond that had held them together for so long. No matter how much she wanted to reach out, something stopped her, emotionally stunting her.

“Are you coming, Red?” Rosalia called from across the mansion’s abandoned grounds, intruding on Brigid’s melancholy.

Brigid nodded firmly before tromping from the cemetery and trudging across the long grass, the carrying case holding the interphaser swinging at her side. Maybe Lakesh had been right. Maybe she needed to get away.

* * *

THEY TREKKED FOR TWENTY minutes, the evening sun warm against Brigid’s back even through the weave of the shadow suit she wore. The shadow suit acted as an independent, temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, but Brigid chose to ignore that, preferring instead to feel everything that the real world had to throw at her. She had been away from that for too long.

Rosalia set a fast pace, keeping to a comfortable jog as she led the way out of the overgrown grounds of the dilapidated mansion and onto the dusty road beyond. Rosalia kept herself in the prime of physical fitness, and Brigid noted how little the exertion seemed to affect her.

There was a paved road a little way beyond the forgotten mansion, and carts and scratch-built automobiles rolled down the street now and then, passing the two women as they made their way to their destination. Beside the road it was mostly open ground, sandy red earth giving the whole area a blushlike tint. Now and then the two travelers would pass a shack that had been constructed at the side of the road, and Brigid might spot a woman there by the porch, sitting down to darn the holes in a pair of man’s socks or leaning over to water the potted plants proudly arrayed by the front door.

“Who lives here?” Brigid asked as they passed one of the shacks.

Rosalia looked around her. “People. Just people. Why, what did you expect? Caballeros and banditos, swashbuckling their way down the streets?”

Brigid shook her head. “It’s just you forget sometimes what the world really is, all the people who make up its diversity and color.”

Marching onward down the road, Rosalia turned back and smiled. “I thought you never forgot anything,” she teased.

“I don’t know,” Brigid mused. “The world we inhabit—Cerberus—it’s all so frenetic. I guess I do forget sometimes that a normal world is out here.”

“Life’s not just memory, is it?” Rosalia observed. “It’s for living.”

Together, the two women continued along the road until Rosalia found the junction she had been searching for. The road itself continued on, but a rough dirt track had begun to run parallel to it at about fifteen feet away, rutted wheel marks crisscrossing between the two.

“Come on,” Rosalia instructed, stepping off the paved road.

Brigid followed, joining her companion on the other track.

Before long, the track veered away from the paved road once more, following a gentle incline that ultimately led into the mountains.

They walked for another quarter hour, following the path through the foothills and around the mountains themselves.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Brigid asked once, gazing around the desolate, uninhabited path.

Rosalia simply turned to her and smiled, offering nothing more than the incline of her head.

Eventually the narrow path dropped again, and Brigid saw buildings waiting in the distance, hidden within the recess of the valleys. The buildings were white-painted stucco, no doubt to reflect the sun’s heat during the daytime, now turned pink by its setting glare. Most of the buildings were just one-story, sprawling structures that accommodated perhaps five or more rooms, but there were a few two-story buildings, one with a high steeple dominating its western side. A few people could be seen milling between the buildings, and the occasional sound of voices and laughter came from below.

“Does this place have a name?” Brigid asked as she trekked with Rosalia along the pathway.

“Not anymore,” Rosalia told her with a shrug.

Brigid knew better than to probe her reticent companion too deeply, and together she and Rosalia marched past a sprawling graveyard that sat about a mile from the town itself. The graves were indicated by simple gravestones, each one marked not by a name but merely a number. Some of them looked more than a hundred years old, and not a single one had flowers.

All around, fields of crops were waiting to be harvested, a herd of cows and a sheep flock grazing in other fields patterned with long grass. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that this hidden community could feed itself. Brigid guessed it had perhaps sprung from some old survivalist troop dating back to the nukecaust that had reshaped the world.

“Do you come from around here?” Brigid asked as they walked toward the town’s outskirts.

“No,” Rosalia said. “I was schooled here. In the nunnery, over there.”

Brigid looked, saw the little chapel with its bell tower. It was just two stories high and built of stucco like the rest of the town, and it was probably the largest single building here.

The sun setting to their left, the two women walked past the simple stone marker that indicated the town limits, with Rosalia leading the way toward the nunnery. “You’ll like it here,” she promised. “It’s quiet.”

Brigid thanked her. She had agreed to come here when Lakesh had proposed it because it meant relief from the incessant questions from her colleagues. Rosalia was different. She didn’t ask questions; she just seemed to listen and to observe. Before they had left Cerberus, she had assured Brigid that she would take her to a place of tranquillity and meditation. It sounded preferable to therapy from Reba DeFore and, away from Cerberus and still carrying the interphaser, Brigid knew she could just run and keep running if she chose to, until she finally disappeared.

They walked through the open gates to the nunnery, an arch that was high enough to accommodate a horse and cart, and stepped into the courtyard within. Whatever Brigid had expected, she was left dumbfounded by what she saw. Women, all of them young and many of them still just girls, were involved in various forms of combat, throwing one another on straw mats, engaged in swordplay, shooting arrows at targets and working nunchakus in a furious display of fighting prowess.

“What kind of place is this?” Brigid said, taking everything in.

“I told you already,” Rosalia explained. “It’s a school.”

* * *

HOW LONG HAD IT BEEN? Black John Jefferson’s eyesight was dimming as he trudged heavily along the stone corridor. The walls to either side of him sloped subtly inward, narrowing the tunnel at its roof, fourteen feet above his dipped head. The walls themselves were solid, and the whole tunnel echoed with each heavy footstep.

“Where is this place?” Black John muttered, his words echoing.

He had climbed down the stone steps, slowly and heavily, his blood spilling onto each one as he passed. In his weak and wounded state, the stairs seemed to go on for a long time, and the light from the sky above had narrowed to just a single foot-wide shaft by the time he found the bottom stair.

Down there, Black John had trudged on, step by laborious step, following the only path he could see in the dim light from the stairs. There should be sconces here, or some other way to light the area, he felt sure, but he could find none. His head was reeling too much to care.

It took twenty minutes to walk the corridor, each footstep like running a marathon now, blood filling his blouse and streaming down his legs. His wounds just wouldn’t scab over anymore; they had been pulled about too much.

Ahead of him a doorway led into an open room. He stopped on its threshold and leaned heavily against the wall, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps that echoed through the underground maze. In the darkness, he could only see hints of the room beyond. It was wide, roughly circular, and it seemed to take up the whole expanse of the building. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be any furniture in the room, only a broad floor covered in dust.

Well, he had come this far, hadn’t he?

Black John removed his hand from the wall, and when he did so a bloody handprint remained there, clinging to the stone like some awful, red arachnid. He walked into the room, bent almost double, the pain in his ruined guts like a burning blade.

Maybe there is treasure in here, he thought. He was delirious now from the loss of blood, and he had all but forgotten what had brought him here in the first place, forgotten that he was dying.

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