After the end

Humanity has been held in subjugation for thousands of years, manipulated by a cruel alien race. But what began as a game among self-styled gods evolved into an internecine power play. Divided by ego and greed, the enemy faced resistance—and a reckoning—from an intrepid group of human rebels. But now the Cerberus operation lies in disarray, its members missing or broken, even as the Annunaki threat is reborn in a new and more horrifying form.

The God Machine

Enlil, cruelest of them all, is set to revive the sadistic pantheon that will rule the Earth. Based in his vast Dragon City, Enlil plans to create infinite gods—at the cost of humankind. With the Cerberus team at its lowest ebb, can they possibly stop his twisted plan? Or are they, too, destined to be absorbed by the God Machine?

Hassood simply wasn’t anymore. Where he had been there was only the dark outline of his shape

“What the…?” Grant muttered, staring at the screen as it locked on a fixed image of the wall with the stain that had been Hassood marked on its surface.

Grant turned back to his colleagues, the four of them as transfixed by the screen as he had been.

“What happened?” Domi asked. “It didn’t make sense.”

Grant was about to answer when, in the moonlight that seeped into the roofed passage, he saw silvery lines cutting the air, winking on and off like Christmas lights. From the screen behind him, Grant heard his own voice echoing back with barely restrained urgency. “Hassood?” it said. “Hassood? Come in.”

He watched as another of those silvery lines cut through the air around them, like a knife caught in the moonlight. It was water, pouring from the roof above them, dripping down to the floor where they stood.

“They’re made of water,” he declared, “and they’re here.”

As he said it, Rosalia’s dog began to bark. Something was taking shape behind its mistress.

Dragon City

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

“They’re dragons now, and that’s that. Normality has shifted to accommodate it.”

—Charlie Brooker, The Guardian,

2006

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”

—Adolf Hitler, 1889–1945

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 influ-ences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

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

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

We are water.

The composition of the adult human body is, on average, about sixty percent water. In children the figure is higher, frequently as much as eighty percent. That is to say, up to four-fifths of the human body is water. Which means that every living, breathing person is little more than water sloshing around inside a skin suit like waves against the beach.

Enlil saw this. Enlil, who saw all of eternity laid out in front of him when he closed his eyes. Enlil, overlord of the ancient Annunaki, the superior race who stood as masters of the Earth.

The Annunaki had ruled the planet for millennia and their history had been incorporated into human culture as Sumerian myth. Some would argue that, before the Annunaki, there had been no human culture to speak of, that it was all just cave paintings in blood and clubbing one’s fellow apekin with a blunt rock for the duration of each man’s very short life. The Annunaki, by contrast, were an incredibly long-lived race, whose lifespans had been extended even more so by two developments. The first was that each Annunaki shared a group memory of the past, so things that had happened a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago were as vivid to each individual Annunaki as things that had happened just minutes ago. The second development came in the form of their increased longevity courtesy of an artificial rebirthing process, a memory download into their next body shell. In essence, dead Annunaki were reborn, over and over, in new forms, to pick up where they had left off when their previous body had withered and died, their memories infallibly complete.

In another race, these incredible developments might have led to some form of enlightenment, a mutually agreed upon concept of a higher purpose, a philanthropy even, or perhaps a philosophy that was as far beyond the ability of mortal creatures to comprehend in their own abbreviated lives as the nature of the combustion engine is beyond the ability of a termite to understand. This was not the case in the Annunaki, however. Instead, the near-infinite memory cycles had stultified the whole race, bringing about only a boredom so pervasive, so bone-deep that the whole race seemed destined to die from sheer apathy, the indifference to their own lives consuming them like a flame. That was until Anu, forefather of those who would walk the Earth, had ventured beyond the skies of their home planet of Nibiru, carving a trail through the cosmos in the sacred starship Tiamat and discovering the primitive planet he had named Ki. The planet, known today as the Earth, had been bursting with life, primitive protohumans just dropping out of the trees to make their homes within the warm, dark, womblike embrace of the caves. It must have seemed like a game board to Anu, with pieces beyond number to be placed and tinkered with based on the whims of the bored Annunaki.

Shortly thereafter, the bored Annunaki had followed Anu, traveling through the starscape until they reached this planet, this Earth, to rediscover what it was to be surprised, even if it was just a little, just for one fleeting second of interest in a lifetime that was beyond measure. The Annunaki had landed in the territories known today as Syria and Iraq, where they had settled. Mistaken by the locals for gods, they had built great cities that acted as expressions of themselves, cities that seemed to challenge the very heavens that they had descended from. The first of these cities was called Eridu, and it nuzzled at the banks of the River Euphrates like an embassy, a piece of foreign real estate amid the humans’ otherwise unspoiled world. Eridu belonged to Enki, brother to Enlil and a prince of the Annunaki royal family. Soon Enlil had his own city, Nippur, and the other members of the royal family established similar territories: Babylon, Ngirsu, Kish and more. Housed within those cities, as the Annunaki found new creatures to toy with, new places to acquire, they began to squabble. Boredom had given way to greed and greed led to envy, and if hate was the only thing keeping boredom at bay then the Annunaki hated wholeheartedly and fought as if their very immortal lives depended upon it.

But that had all ended approximately four thousand years ago, when the Annunaki seemed to disappear from planet Earth.

They had not died, these so-called gods. They had merely retreated into the shadows, their squabbles become too overblown. And so their charges—the infant race known as humankind—came to be more prolific and more advanced on the surface of their planet as the Annunaki turned their attentions inward. In a final gesture, Enlil had sought to destroy humankind along with his own slave caste, the Igigi, to wipe this blight from the planet with that weapon of such exquisite irony—the weapon called water. The events that Enlil had set in motion came to be known as the Great Flood, but it had been a simple exercise in pest control, an exercise that had failed thanks to his own brother’s interference.

And so, from the shadows, Enlil and his brethren watched and waited and secretly guided the events on Earth until they were ready to reveal themselves once more. In the first few years of the twenty-third century, two hundred years after nuclear war had ravaged the planet almost beyond repair, the starship Tiamat had reappeared above planet Earth, and the cycle had begun again. The catalyst was set, the Annunaki had been reborn, emerging from the chrysalis shells of the nine hybrid barons who ruled the old territory that had once been known as the United States of America. The Earth, it seemed, was primed and ready for their takeover; humankind would be crushed once and for all beneath their heel. The Annunaki would rule the Earth once again.

Yet within two years, the plot had failed. The Annunaki, an immortal race who had waited almost four thousand years, guiding humankind’s development from the shadows, orchestrating a nuclear war to thin the population, to cull the herd, had turned on one another once more, and so their promised reign as kings of the Earth was aborted before it had even begun.

In a final act of despair, Tiamat herself, the wombship that had orchestrated their rebirth, had died, sacrificing herself rather than allowing her wilful children to continue taking shots at one another.

Or so it had seemed.

Despite being on board when Tiamat had exploded, Enlil had escaped the fiery destruction via lifeboat, plummeting back to Earth’s soil and bringing with him one single seed that formed the essence of Tiamat herself. The Annunaki were masters of organic technology and they had developed devices that seemed both sentient and lifeless, crossing the boundaries of what it means to be living. Tiamat was one such thing, a dragon-shaped spaceship that was semiliving, that watched and emoted, that felt pain and wished for death. If a spaceship can be said to have a soul, then the seed was that soul.

Enlil had planted the seed beside the banks of the timeless Euphrates, that place where the Annunaki had first established themselves with the city of Eridu many millennia ago. And all those millennia, all those changes and acts and ticking seconds on the clock, had seemed as nothing to Enlil, who viewed time in terms of his own immortality, and so understood how dull time really was.

So now he stood on the banks of the rushing Euphrates once more, as he had thousands of years before, his scales glistening in the sunlight like gold washed with blood. A spiny crest probed the air above his head, plucking at the material of the hooded cloak he wore over his majestic form, the golden armor of his own body. The Euphrates rushed on, timeless and ever-mobile, hurtling to its destination as water will, thriving in the journey, not caring about its end.

Enlil, overlord of the Annunaki, master of the Earth, watched as the water played across the reborn figure of Tiamat, lapping at her scaly flanks. Around him, a towering city had grown once more, dominating the lands all around, engulfing them like an infection, for such is what the buildings were.

As he watched the water, Enlil knew what must be done. He would use the water against the humans once again, use it to create his own army with which to enforce his will.

Death by water. The fate of all humans.

Chapter 1

It felt like the head cold from hell.

For the past five months, all Edwards could remember hearing inside his head was that monotonous droning sound, like a choir of tuneless children rehearsing some song they could never get right, never reaching the second note of the refrain. It was a noise, a droning that was so all-pervasive that it had seemed, over time, to obliterate his own considerations, to wipe them from his mind, blocking his ability to form rational thought.

It wasn’t as though Edwards was what you would call an ideas man, of course. Over six feet tall with the broad shoulders of his father, a muscular body from hours in the gym and the military bearing of an ex-Magistrate, Edwards was a member of the Cerberus team of rebels who strove to defend mankind against the insidious threat of the Annunaki. Edwards’s role had been as muscle, acting as security and bodyguard on field expeditions where the scientists of the organization might run into danger.

He had taken a bullet out in the Pacific, the shell clipping his right ear and leaving it a ravaged lump of flesh. While plastic surgery could have fixed that mangled scar, Edwards had instead chosen to keep that bullet-bitten ear, like some trophy to represent what he was: a man of deeds and not of words.

Right now, Edwards lay in a CAT scanner, eyes closed as the radiation mapped his brain, layer by layer. In the control room, five people watched as the real-time results flashed across the control terminal. Four of them were Cerberus personnel like Edwards, while the fifth was a man named Kazuko who was the on-site physician for this facility overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the Cerberus team had been forced to make their temporary headquarters.

For years now Cerberus had operated out of an ancient military redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, from which their sixty-strong team had monitored the world and responded to threats at a moment’s notice. But just seven weeks ago the once-secure redoubt had been infiltrated and turned against its personnel. Their leader Lakesh and his team found themselves imprisoned within a cavernous prison called Life Camp Zero. The infiltration had been performed by the loyal troops of Ullikummis, an Annunaki prince who had recently returned to Earth to exact revenge on his father Enlil. The incursion had been achieved in a manner that bypassed the redoubt’s notorious security—Ullikummis had people on the inside. Ullikummis was a genetic abomination, his body clad in stone, and he had displayed a psionic gift with which he could control the rocks around him. Part of that gift had been to create mind-altering stones, buds from his own body that had planted themselves like seeds within unsuspecting humans. Once planted, these seeds—known as obedience stones—had affected a person’s thought process, acting as an entheogen, filling the subject with a sense of euphoria to feel closer to Ullikummis as their god.

When Ullikummis and his army had neared the Cerberus redoubt, utilizing folded space to evade many of the surveillance systems, his presence had triggered the hidden stones that lurked in several of the personnel within, among them Edwards of the bullet-bitten ear, resulting in the whole team’s incarceration in Life Camp Zero, a claustrophobic prison carved out of rock. While the Cerberus team had ultimately managed to overpower their jailers, one final revelation remained: the warrenlike Life Camp Zero was in fact the Cerberus redoubt, altered almost beyond recognition by the rock-shaping abilities of Ullikummis. The once-proud military base had been rendered unusable by the manipulations of the stone god, and the remaining Cerberus personnel had been forced to flee, dispersing into small groups and hiding themselves across the country as they struggled to survive in a world turned against them. Beyond the walls of the redoubt, the Cerberus warriors found the cult of Ullikummis had grown at an alarming rate, and though they could not possibly know the exact figures, the loyal subjects who would now lay their lives down for their Annunaki master numbered over one million.

It had only been in the past week that Lakesh had begun to establish this new, temporary headquarters for the Cerberus operation. This facility was in actuality an embassy for the Tigers of Heaven, a warrior class operating out of New Edo in the Pacific. The Tigers’ leader, Shizuka, was a longtime ally of the Cerberus team, and she had graciously donated the manse for the duration of the Cerberus team’s exile from their own headquarters, providing what additional equipment she could and granting the team the added security of a squadron of her own fearsome warriors, the samurai-like Tigers of Heaven themselves.

Thus it was that the director of Cerberus, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, now found himself standing in the hastily established monitoring suite of the CAT scanner, watching the multicolored brain maps appear as the scan carved its invisible path through Edwards’s skull. A cyberneticist and physicist by training, Lakesh appeared to be in his mid-fifties, with dusky skin and a well-built body. His high brow and piercing blue eyes gave clear indication of his vast intelligence, while his aquiline nose and small, refined mouth suggested a man of culture, as well as scientific learning. Lakesh’s dark hair was brushed back from his face, streaks of white peppering the wisps that ran at his temples and over his ears. While Lakesh, as he was affectionately known, looked to be about fifty-five, he was in fact closer to five times that age; he had been born in the middle of the twentieth century and had worked as a scientist on various military projects, including the development of the mat-trans system of teleportation. Through cryogenic suspension and a program of organ replacement, Lakesh had survived to his 250th birthday. Most recently, an encounter with a Quad V hybrid called Priscilla had regenerated Lakesh’s ailing body, fixing him at the physical age he now appeared.

Lakesh wore a white jumpsuit, the standard uniform of the Cerberus personnel. With all of the disruption that the team had suffered over the past two months, Lakesh felt that appearances were crucial to restore that sense of teamwork once again among his dispirited personnel.

Lakesh was joined in the small surveillance lab by Reba DeFore, longtime Cerberus physician. DeFore had long, ash-blond hair, which she had arranged in an elaborate French braid atop her head. She had endured psychological trauma during the attack on Cerberus, and Lakesh was pleased to finally see her appear to be acting more herself once again. The last time he had seen her, her eyes had been red-ringed from continuous crying, and her hair had been in a state of disarray that was utterly out of character for a woman who so prided herself on her own appearance. Like Lakesh, DeFore wore one of the simple jumpsuits, its white contributing an almost ghostlike pallor to her already pale skin. After the attack on Cerberus, she had gone into hiding in one of the safehouses provided by another Cerberus ally called Ohio Blue, an independent trader who had gray-market connections across the country. DeFore had had the difficult job of monitoring Edwards who, after his traitorous turn against Cerberus, had been kept chained and imprisoned while they were in hiding. Even now, as he lay on the bed of the CAT scanner, Edwards’s hands were tied with rope, metal manacles being out of the question while in the presence of the powerful equipment that would magnetize them immediately. Like Kazuko, DeFore was here to bring medical expertise.

Though an expert in her own field, the third Cerberus operative in the darkened booth, however, was not there to provide medical insights. A slim, dark-haired woman in her forties, her name was Mariah Falk and she was a geologist, an expert on rock formations and strata. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an engaging manner and an enthusiastic smile that could win the heart of almost anyone she encountered. Even now, she was smiling as she watched the CAT scanner’s report take shape, her narrowed eyes alive with interest. Rocks were at the root of Cerberus’s problems just now, which had elevated Mariah to the level of critical advisor for the duration of the Ullikummis infiltration.

The slim form of Dr. Kazuko pointed to something on the scan, a dark mass appearing like bubbles to the left-hand side of Edwards’s head. “This appears to be a foreign body,” he explained, “possibly cancerous—it’s hard to tell.” Despite this alarming news, Kazuko had a calm, level voice that well suited his low-key manner. He was a short man by Caucasian standards, standing at a little over five feet tall, with the golden skin and almond-shaped eyes of the Orient, and short black hair slicked back from his forehead. Unlike the others, Dr. Kazuko was dressed in layers of leather armor the color of red wine, and he wore a long scabbard—currently empty—at his belt. As well as being a medical doctor Kazuko, like all Tigers of Heaven, was a highly trained warrior. “Whatever it is,” Kazuko continued, “the pattern and spread suggest that it is not static—it’s growing.”

Lakesh nodded, a grave look of concern on his features. “A dreadful thing,” he muttered.

“My guess is it’s the rock,” Mariah confirmed as she watched the scan unfold, “but it’s difficult to get a proper idea of what’s in there.”

The final person within the room spoke up then, his voice deep as faraway thunder. Grant was another Cerberus field operative, and he took particular interest in this case not least because he was also an ex-Magistrate like Edwards. Grant was a huge figure, with dark skin like polished ebony and a body that was all muscle, with not an ounce of fat. Unlike the others, Grant wore a shadow suit, a gossamer-thin armored weave that offered protection from radiation, environmental contamination and extreme climates. He had augmented this with a few simple adornments, dark pants and a pale shirt, which he wore unbuttoned like a jacket. The grimness of his bearing could not be mistaken; his interest in this case was personal. “I remember Edwards having some trouble with his Commtact a while back,” Grant said, referring to the subdermal radio system implanted in the mastoid bone of the user. “Seemed he could hear transmissions but his own reports weren’t coming through.”

Lakesh nodded wistfully as he remembered. “That’s correct, my friend,” he said. “Edwards had been out in Hope at the time, providing medical help to the refugee populace. We’d had trouble contacting him while he was out there, but other events had seemed to overshadow that problem.”

The “other events” in question had included a visit by an alien called Balam, as well as Edwards himself getting knocked unconscious during a religious rally celebrating the coming of Ullikummis.

DeFore spoke up then, her voice sounding rather loud in the confined area. “We need to operate,” she announced. “Whatever this thing in Edwards’s head is, we need to see what it’s doing and how. That could provide a valuable insight into how Ullikummis is spreading his influence.”

Dr. Kazuko nodded in assent. “Loath as I am to open a man up like this, it seems the only option left open to us,” he agreed. “And if, as you say, it’s some kind of stone that’s in there, then not doing anything will be far more dangerous than operating. This man’s brain is calcifying as the growth spreads. Left unchecked, he could lose his power of speech, his rational will—he would be left as a vegetable.”

Lakesh’s brow furrowed as he considered what the two doctors were proposing. “Do we have the facilities here to operate?” he asked Kazuko.

The Tigers of Heaven doctor nodded. “I can call for everything we require,” he said. “We could likely operate as soon as tomorrow, if you’re agreeable, Dr. Singh.”

With weary reluctance, Lakesh slowly nodded. “Whatever it all means, it’s time we got to the root of the problem.”

* * *

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF two Tigers of Heaven guards, Grant escorted Edwards back on a gurney to a windowless room that was located just belowground level in the vast complex of Shizuka’s winter palace. Edwards was strapped down, hand and foot, to the gurney. However, despite being sedated, he still had some fight in him, and he glared at Grant as the larger man escorted him to his cell.

“I don’t like doing this much, either,” Grant assured Edwards as he saw the rage burning in the man’s eyes.

Under Grant’s instruction, the Tigers of Heaven prepared to move Edwards from the gurney to the single futonlike mattress that lay against one wall. The guards untied the straps that held Edwards’s feet down, but his ankles remained bound to one another so that he had no hope of escape. Then they moved up to his wrists, untying the tight straps and freeing his hands, a guard standing on either side of the gurney.

Grant watched warily from the end of the cot, his face emotionless as Edwards was untied from the gurney. Like everything in the winter palace, the room was pleasantly decorated, the peach wallpaper featuring a flock of white doves soaring over its sunset colors. Despite the austerity of the single mattress, featuring as it did four horizontal straps that could buckle the occupant in place, it still looked typically artistic, the dark swirl of pattern there mixed with gold thread that caught the soft side lighting of the room. A low occasional table had been placed against one wall, a vase of dried flowers in its center to add color to the room. This hidden room had likely been used as servants’ quarters once upon a time, and in other circumstances it could seem quite delightful, Grant was sure. As was, however, it had been pressed into service as a jail cell, its lack of windows ideal to prevent any chance of escape. Edwards was sedated and kept restrained, but even so, he was an ex-Magistrate, one of the class of highly trained enforcers in the towering villes that dotted the country. Any enemy underestimated him at their own folly.

But as the Tigers of Heaven guard unstrapped Edwards’s bound right wrist, the ex-Mag moved, lashing out with his fist and knocking the warrior backward. Already unstrapped, Edwards’s left hand snatched at the other guard’s arm, yanking him with such force that the man flipped over the gurney and crashed headfirst to the floor.

“Dammit,” Grant cursed as he came at Edwards from the foot of the gurney.

Although they were still bound together, Edwards kicked out with both feet, striking Grant high in the chest.

Grant staggered backward, his breath bursting out of his mouth with a great “whomph.” He had righted himself in an instant, and he turned once more to Edwards, his hands forming into fists.

Behind the gurney, Grant saw the twin Tigers of Heaven recovering. Both men were well trained in the arts of ninjitsu, and while Edwards’s attack had come as a surprise it had not been enough to render either man inoperative. They circled the gurney, warily approaching Edwards from above and behind his head.

“Kill you!” Edwards spit, mouth foaming, his hate-filled eyes fixed on Grant.

“Not this time, bucko,” Grant assured him as he grabbed Edwards’s kicking legs, fixing them a moment later in a two-handed grip.

“Kill you!” Edwards snarled again as he writhed in place, batting at the Tigers of Heaven as they tried to restrain him.

“Let’s get more sedation,” Grant instructed as he held on to those kicking legs. “Quickly now, I’ve got him.”

One of the warriors reached into the cloth bag he wore at his hip on a crosswise strap, producing a hypodermic syringe. In a half minute he had prepped it with sedative, flicking it to pop any bubbles that remained in the clear mixture. Grant continued to hold Edwards’s legs as the man kicked back and forth, his body tossing on the gurney like a struggling fish on a hook. The remaining guard tried to hold Edwards’s hands above his head and found himself almost knocked aside by several attempts by the ex-Mag.

Then the other guard approached Edwards with the hypo, and Edwards watched it with angry eyes.

“Just be a moment,” the Tigers of Heaven warrior promised, his voice calm despite how fraught the situation was.

“Fuck you,” Edwards growled, pulling both arms across his body and tossing the other guard across his chest as he hung on there. The guard tumbled over the gurney and slammed into his companion, head smashing against head with the brutal thump of bone on bone.

Grant watched as the two guards slumped to the floor, both of them dazed by the impact as the syringe rolled out of reach. Faster than thought, Edwards folded his body at the waist, aiming his forehead at Grant’s. Grant reared back, releasing his grip on Edwards’s legs.

“Utopia is upon you,” Edwards hissed, the madness burning behind his eyes as he flipped himself on the gurney.

“Yeah,” Grant snarled, taking a step toward the rocking gurney, his fist drawn back. “Well, let’s not get too excited about it just yet.”

With those words, Grant snapped out a solid punch at Edwards’s jaw. Grant’s fist connected with a crack, and Edwards shook on the gurney as he struggled to defend himself.

“Hate to do it, man,” Grant explained as he pulled his fist back for a second blow. But as he did so, Edwards’s own struggles proved the man’s downfall. The rocking gurney suddenly upended, and Edwards was thrown to the hard floor in a tumble of limbs. With his ankles still tied, the ex-Mag lay struggling there as the gurney crashed down beside him.

Grant watched as the gurney slammed against Edwards’s side, and the already sedated man slapped against the floor.

“You still got any fight left in you?” Grant asked as he stood over Edwards’s fallen form.

“Kill…” Edwards muttered, blood on his lips.

“Yeah,” Grant said as he picked up the hypodermic syringe, “that’s what I thought.”

A moment later Grant had pressed the needle into Edwards’s vein as the man struggled woozily from the blow he’d taken. Thirty seconds later, Edwards lay restrained on the futon, happily snoring as he drifted off to sleep.

Grant checked on the two guards who had accompanied him to house Edwards. Apart from a little wounded pride, they both seemed pretty much okay. “You need to watch this guy,” Grant reminded them both. “Used to be a Magistrate—he’s trained to turn impossible odds against you.”

The Tigers of Heaven genuflected appreciatively as Grant left the cell.

Chapter 2

For Grant, Edwards’s condition was something personal. He made his way through the Cerberus operations center, a temporary arrangement consisting of four laptop computers attached to a powerful server hub that hummed in one corner of the room. The room itself was originally a simple communal area, a sparsely decorated living room with several low tables and a wide mat covering the floor. The mat had been rolled back to allow for the wiring to trail across the room. Donald Bry, the ginger-haired assistant to Lakesh, was busily linking two of the laptop units together. He lay on his back with a screwdriver in one hand and a pen between his teeth, his mop of copper-colored curls in its usual disarray.

Beside him, Brewster Philboyd, another of the trusted Cerberus team, was running a diagnostics check on the expanding computer system. A tall man with a high forehead, dark hair and black-framed spectacles perched on his nose, Brewster was a trained astrophysicist who could generally turn his hand to most technical problems.

“How’s it going?” Grant asked as Philboyd caught his eye.

Philboyd held up his hands in mock despair. “It’s getting there,” he said begrudgingly. “Satellite feeds are scanning properly, but we’re still amassing the data.”

For years now Cerberus had relied on the data from two satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the equator, the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. The feeds from the two satellites provided empirical data from across the globe and also allowed for real-time communication via the Commtact units that many of the field operatives had had embedded beneath their skin. The task of monitoring these satellite feeds had been interrupted with the recent attack on Cerberus, and it was only now that Lakesh had begun to reassemble his team and initiate the arduous task of checking the information that had been stored in their absence.

Grant continued across the room, walking through the open doorway at its far end and making his way along a wooden-walled corridor that led the way through the building. He passed several doors, each one leading to private bed quarters that had been procured by Cerberus personnel for the duration of their tenancy. Grant arrowed toward one of these, pushing it gently open with a soft touch despite his imposing size.

Within, the drapes of the bedroom were closed, creating a cozy, dark atmosphere. A beautiful dark-haired woman sat in a chair beside the lone bed, her head lolling backward, a mangy-looking dog lying at her feet. As Grant walked in, the dog raised its head, ears pinned back to its head, and let loose a wary growl.

“It’s okay, boy,” Grant said, leaning down for a moment and offering the dog his empty hand to sniff. “Just me.”

The dog was some kind of mongrel, a scraggly-looking beast with more than a hint of coyote. It had the palest eyes that Grant had ever seen in a dog, orbs a white so pure they seemed faintly blue.

The woman in the chair had awoken, too, and she watched Grant through narrowed eyes. Her name was Rosalia, a stunningly attractive woman in her mid-twenties, with long dark hair that fell halfway down her back, olive skin and long, supple limbs. Rosalia wore a long skirt that trailed to her ankles, its flowering pattern scuffed with dirt, her dark top askew on her shoulders where she had slept in the chair. Working both sides of the law, Rosalia had recently found herself siding with the Cerberus team as they escaped the imprisonment of Life Camp Zero.

Grant took no notice of her. His dark eyes were fixed on the still figure lying alone in the bed. Kane had come to be Grant’s brother-in-arms over the years. An ex-Magistrate like Grant, Kane was a few years younger than the other man, and he looked terrible. His dark hair was ruffled, sticking to his forehead in sweaty clumps, and he had the dark shadow of a beard around his jaw now. And there was something else, too—a spiny protrusion growing on his face, circling and encrusting his left eye like bone before arcing over the cheek and pulling the corner of his mouth up into a sneer. Grant looked at Kane as he slept, eyes running across that hideous protrusion and feeling the frustration rising in his gut. Whatever it was, the growth had affected Kane’s vision, not simply blinding him but inexplicably triggering some kind of hallucinatory episodes. As such, it had left Kane grounded while Dr. Kazuko and the other medical staff investigated the nature of the intrusion to his flesh.

When he looked down, Grant saw that he had clenched his own hands into fists. He eased his hands open again, willing the tension from his body. “How is he?” he asked, not bothering to look at the woman he was addressing.

“He’s been asleep mostly,” Rosalia said, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the room’s sleeping occupant. “Probably a relief.”

“I guess,” Grant agreed.

“What about you?” Rosalia asked softly, standing and edging toward Grant. “Any word on Edwards?”

“They’re still trying to figure out what the condition is,” Grant told her, “but they figure it’s stone inside his head. So it’s a safe bet they’re related. Which means the cure to one might just hold the cure to the other.”

Rosalia’s lips pulled back from clenched teeth. “Damn this Ullikummis,” she cursed. “What did Kane ever do to—?”

“Got in his way,” Grant interrupted. “We all did. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for a half-dozen years. Had to take a casualty sometime.”

Grant didn’t tell her the other thing he was thinking. The third member of their cozy partnership—a trained archivist called Brigid Baptiste—had disappeared without trace, only to reappear in time to shoot Kane in the chest as he lay already wounded. That had occurred out in a cavern near the newly rebuilt settlement of Snakefishville, a cavern Kane, Grant and Rosalia had investigated as it housed an Annunaki artifact called the Chalice of Rebirth. While Brigid meant little to a newcomer like Rosalia, the woman had been a crucial member of the Cerberus team since its inception, and she shared a special bond with Kane himself—the two were anam-charas, so-called soul friends linked through eternity.

Rosalia made her way toward the door, encouraging her pale-eyed companion along beside her. “The dog needs some exercise,” she told Grant, knowing the man would want to be left alone with his best friend.

Grant looked at her and nodded sorrowfully.

“You’ll be okay here, right?” Rosalia asked. “I can stay, get one of the big tough samurai men to take care of this nuisance.”

“I’ll be fine,” Grant told her, “but thanks.” As Rosalia pushed through the door, Grant spoke once more, almost to himself. “You know, it’s the strangest feeling—finding out we’re not as immortal as we thought.”

Rosalia silently closed the door and left the ex-Magistrates alone.

Chapter 3

The silent drums were beating and Farrell looked wasted. He was a young man but he was looking old, his sunken skin drawn and pale where he had rapidly lost weight over the past few weeks. His gold hoop earring hung low on his ear, his goatee beard looked a little more ragged than normal and his usually shaved head was growing out in mismatched tufts of ginger and brown. But when Sela Sinclair looked at him across the dilapidated room they found themselves hiding in, the thing she most felt was not sorrow or worry or even desperation—it was hunger. Seeing a man that drawn, that sallow cheeked, made her stomach growl. She wanted so much to feed him, to just see him eat.

That was stress, Sinclair told herself as she looked at him. That was what it had done to him. Was doing to him.

Farrell had been a technician at the Cerberus redoubt, one of those perennial staff members who could turn his hand to any background task to keep things running smoothly. His favorite post had been running the mat-trans and he could often be found checking the diagnostics on the computer terminal linked to the man-made teleportation unit.

When Cerberus had come under attack, Farrell had been among the staff who had been caught with their pants down. Quite how Ullikummis’s forces had penetrated the redoubt remained a mystery to Farrell—hadn’t they had a security perimeter to stop this very type of attack? Somehow, whatever it was that they faced in this Ullikummis creature, it was a threat that could change the rules. And, like the rest of the complement of personnel at Cerberus, Farrell had been overpowered and imprisoned by those invading forces, incarcerated in Life Camp Zero to be indoctrinated into the ways of this new would-be master of the world, this new world order.

Farrell had played only a minor role in the subsequent breakout. Having spent days locked in a single cavernlike room with no amenities and only the most basic foodstuffs, he had been utterly bewildered when the door had pulled back and a beautiful woman and her scruffy mongrel dog had stood framed in the volcanic light, granting his release. Everything since then had been a blur. Kane and the woman—Rosalia was her name, Farrell learned later—had overpowered the troops of Ullikummis but they knew their freedom would be short-lived should reinforcements arrive. It seemed that the cult of Ullikummis was growing into a religious movement that was sweeping the country at an alarming rate, and the Cerberus people were considered a very trivial but very dangerous threat to that movement. Thus the decision had been taken to evacuate the redoubt-cum-prison, to split up the targets and keep the fifty or so Cerberus personnel safe. Farrell had been partnered with Sela Sinclair. Sinclair was a lean-muscled black woman, ex-U.S. Air Force, and had been cryogenically frozen back in the twentieth century to be revived two hundred years later. Thanks to her military background, Sinclair had acted as security detail for Cerberus, and was frequently involved in field missions. If nothing else, Farrell should be safe with her.

Lakesh had made swift contact with a black-market trader called Ohio Blue, an old friend of the Cerberus operation whose underworld contacts gave her ideal access to hiding places for the Cerberus team. Thus, Farrell and Sela Sinclair had engaged in a mat-trans jump that sent them to what had once been the southernmost edge of Arkansas, way out near the border of Louisiana, where Blue’s operation was centered. Ohio Blue was a glamorous figure. Farrell guessed she was in her late thirties, with a cascade of long blond hair that reached halfway down her back and was swept in peek-a-boo style to mask her left eye entirely. Like her name, Ohio always wore blue; the first time she and her security crew had greeted Farrell and Sinclair at the entrance to the old military redoubt, she had been dressed in a floor-length sapphire gown that glistened with sequins and had a hip-high split that left her right leg bare when she walked.

Farrell and Sinclair had traveled with six other Cerberus staff, including Brewster Philboyd and a weeping Reba DeFore. All of them were split into pairs at the destination redoubt, where Ohio’s people led them to various safehouses dotted across the area.

Ohio’s people had escorted Farrell and Sinclair to a dead town that had once been a suburb of Bradley. It looked as if a bomb had hit it, which was very likely what had happened. The asphalt of the streets was churned up into broken chunks, weeds and plants and whole great trees emerging through the wreckage that had sat, unrepaired, for two hundred years. Once upon a time, this had probably been a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb of hell. One half of the street was just gone; it was simply not there, only the occasional markings where houses or apartment blocks had once stood, old pipes overflowing with swarming plant life and buzzing insects.

The other side of the street still looked somewhat like a street. There were houses there, eight or nine of them, but it was hard to be sure given the state of the last two, which looked more like something that had washed ashore from the ocean depths even out here, two hundred miles away from the nearest shore. The other houses stood on ruined foundations. Three of them had sunk into the ground, crumbling so that they sat like the steepled fingers of a pair of hands, propped against one another for support. A conifer grew out of one and into the roof of another, its cone shape striving up through the eaves of the second house and into the sky where birds flocked all around it, cawing and chirruping. The other houses were dirty, weather-beaten and overgrown with moss and mold, but they at least looked durable. If nothing else, the street seemed about right for the state that Farrell found himself in—a blue funk.

The suburb of Bradley was surrounded on all sides by swamp and jungle and forest, much of it impassable even in these days of so-called civilization after the Program of Unification had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction. There were pathways through those jungles, hidden routes that Ohio Blue and her men knew, ways to reach all of these forgotten little corners of middle America that had been largely ignored since the nukecaust.

Sinclair and Farrell had holed up in one of the broken buildings, choosing the place with the strongest walls and traipsing back and forth to furnish it as best they could from the bombed-out remains of the other houses in the street. Ohio’s people visited every three or four days, bringing with them parcels of food, some of it fresh but much of it tinned or dried goods, cured meats that would keep despite the lack of refrigeration or power in the ruined shack. The place itself smelled like the cloying atmosphere of a hothouse, as if they were living in an arboretum. Mold grew a dark greenish-brown up the walls, and some kind of fungus had taken over the bathroom, pretty violet spores popping and bursting from the walls, ceiling and floor the first time Sinclair had pushed open the door. After that, they had left the room shut, and converted what had once been a downstairs home office into a latrine.

In the forty-two days that they had been here, Farrell and Sinclair had barely spoken. They were both in shock, and both were quite unable to comprehend what was going on around them. Days had passed where not more than two words would be grunted between them. Farrell took to staring through the gap in the boarded window at the front of the house, watching the churned-up street as if waiting for a parade to arrive, some kind of parade that only the Devil himself could bring. Ex-military, Sela Sinclair lost herself in a punishing fitness regime, exercising obsessively, well into the night. At least, she thought, if we do get attacked I’ll stand a chance.

She was doing push-ups, listening to the sound of distant drums, when Farrell called her to the window.

“Sela? Come quick, look.”

Sinclair expelled a hard breath as she curtailed her routine, wiping sweat from her neck and underarms on a dirt-stained towel as she made her way across the cramped front room, boards creaking as she walked.

“What is it?” she asked.

Farrell sat motionless at the window, and the sunlight painted a single stripe across the bridge of his nose where it cut through the gap in the boards. “Someone’s coming, I think,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Sinclair looked at him, the way his body had become more like skin wrapping over bones these past few weeks. “Blue’s people?” she asked as she stepped closer to the gap in the window and peered outside.

Farrell shook his head briefly. “I don’t think so. See there? Look.”

Sinclair peered through the gap in the window, feeling the thin draft of air stabbing against her face with the constancy of a knife. It was late morning out there, the bright sun burning against the ruined landscape. Bushes and ferns lined the center strip of the old road, their leaves fluttering in the breeze. One clutch of bushes rustled, and Sinclair watched as a white cat came bounding out of them chasing after some insect or other, its prey’s wings glistening with the rainbow sheen of oil on water as it took flight.

It was quiet after that, quiet and still, but Sinclair could still hear the noise of the drums.

“You hear that?” Sinclair asked, tilting her head unconsciously, the way a dog might. “Music.”

To her it sounded like the drumbeats of a marching band on parade, and it sounded real distant. It was like hearing the ocean before you could see it, that constant batting noise as the waves crashed against the shore, the heartbeat of the world.

Farrell looked at her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t hear anything,” he admitted with confusion. They had been holed up here for more than a month now and he had noticed how sometimes Sinclair would stop and listen to something he couldn’t hear; sometimes he would catch her drumming her fingers against the arm of a worn-through chair as she took a break from her exercises. He watched her now as she continued to listen to the noise, watched as her hand reached up to touch her face, the strawberry-shake-pink insides of her dark fingers playing across that lump she had right in the middle of her forehead. It looked like a blind boil to Farrell, but it had been there a long time, never quite emerging or retreating the way a boil usually will. He hadn’t thought much about it; for the past forty-two days he hadn’t thought about much of anything if he could very much help it, just waited and hoped and prayed for Lakesh or someone else from the Cerberus hierarchy to get back in touch with them and call him and Sinclair home.

“You can’t hear that?” Sinclair asked, her eyes still fixed on the slit in the windows. “It’s getting closer—it’s getting louder.”

Farrell peered again out at the street, watching that point where he had seen movement before, where he thought he had seen a figure disappear into one of the tumbledown houses along the street. “Music?” he clarified. “I don’t—”

Then a figure appeared, pushing its way through the undergrowth that had taken over the road in the past two hundred years. Farrell had fallen silent automatically, watching as the figure pushed through the plants. The figure wore a fustian robe in a dirt-colored brown, the hood over his head, pulled low to hide his features, but Farrell could see the rough salt-and-pepper beard that daubed his chin. He had wide shoulders and he moved with a certain heaviness—a big man, then, powerfully built. A moment later another figure appeared behind the first, this one slimmer but wearing an identical robe, hood low over the face. The robes were largely shapeless, going down past the knees like a monk’s habit, but Farrell could tell that this one was a woman from the way she moved her hips. Something glinted on the breast of the robe, a red shield like the Magistrates used to wear when they had guarded the villes, back before the fall of the baronies.

“They’re Ullikummis’s people,” Farrell identified. “We should probably—”

Before Farrell could finish, Sinclair was on her feet and had scampered over to the door in three quick steps. She moved like a jungle predator, her tread silent and fluid, the movement admirably economical. There was a gun there, a refitted Colt Mark IV. Sinclair checked the little eight-shot pistol swiftly, assuring herself the clip was home, and Farrell watched as she flicked the safety off.

“Sela, I don’t think we should do anything that’s going to attract their attention,” Farrell said, keeping his voice to a low hiss.

Sinclair glanced at him. “Come on.”

Then, before Farrell could voice further complaints, Sela Sinclair was out of the door and creeping out past the broken wall of the lobby toward the main door to the house. Getting up, Farrell followed. Unlike Sinclair, he was not particularly adept in combat situations, and would much rather keep well away from the strangers. Still, if he had to face them with anyone at his side, better Sela Sinclair than being teamed with one of the Cerberus cooks or Mariah the geologist, neither of whom was much use in a firefight.

Slowly Sinclair pulled the front door to the house back on its ancient hinges. Beyond, the once-immaculate front lawn looked more like the bottom of an aquarium, fronds and ferns jutting out of the churned-up earth. Bradley had been a casualty of the nuclear war that had ravaged the United States more than two hundred years before, and it had been long since lost, an untouched artifact from another age. For Sela Sinclair, a woman born in the twentieth century and cryogenically frozen for two centuries before being discovered and revived on the Manitius Moon Base, it was like stepping into the past half-remembered. Things out here were familiar, yet they seemed strange and ghostlike, as if a forgotten world had come back to haunt her.

Pistol raised, Sela Sinclair stepped out onto the porch, its wooden boards groaning in complaint at her weight. She turned to Farrell and gave him a silent look of warning, indicating the creaking boards beneath them. Farrell nodded.

Outside, three house lengths away, the two hooded figures moved through the undergrowth. They were not being especially stealthy from what Farrell could tell, but just hacked their way through it, two Stanleys searching for their Livingston.

Sinclair edged forward, hunkering into herself as she stepped off the porch and out onto the overgrown front lawn. She was wearing dark clothes, a sleeveless vest-top in a black that had washed out to a green-gray, combat pants and sturdy boots. Farrell wore his Cerberus operational uniform, a white one-piece jumpsuit, but he had augmented this with a dark green windbreaker that blended—passably if not well—with the junglelike flora all around. He followed the sec woman as she made her way to the property boundary, passing a rusted pipe that had once formed the exhaust of an automobile, using the plants for cover, her eyes never leaving the hooded figures that approached.

Sinclair stopped behind a clutch of sprouting reeds that had reached over seven feet in height, nosing at them with the muzzle of her gun to see the street. Farrell joined her a moment later, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, pulsing in his ears. The robed figures were moving efficiently along the street, checking left and right without slowing. Their clothes were just like the jailers who had held them captive in Life Camp Zero; there was no question in Farrell’s mind that they worked for the enemy.

“Dammit, Sela,” he whispered, “they’re Ullikummis’s people. We need to get out of here right now.”

A thin smile touched Sinclair’s lips. “We’ll be safe,” she assured Farrell, her voice low.

Farrell watched the street from over Sinclair’s shoulder, glanced at the gun in her hand, back up the street. What the hell was she thinking? That she could shoot them both right here and now? What if she missed? The two recruits for Ullikummis continued making their way along the street toward them, as if sensing their presence. A shaft of sunlight cut through the plants and, just for a moment, Farrell saw the face of the woman of the group. She looked young and pretty, but her blue eyes seemed vacant, as if she was in a trance. He had overheard the Cerberus field personnel who had come into contact with Ullikummis’s troops describe them as “firewalkers,” as if their minds were locked in a hypnotic state, their actions not entirely under their own control. The way these two moved without discussion made him think there was something in that, like watching two puppets being moved across some grand stage, their strings hidden from his sight.

Sinclair narrowed her eyes as she watched them, the Colt pistol held steadily out in front of her in a one-handed grip. Farrell watched as her other hand came up to add support to the grip, planting it firmly beneath the ball of her hand. Wait a minute, he thought. Is she nuts?

“What are you doing?” Farrell whispered. “You can’t shoot them.”

But Sela Sinclair wasn’t listening to Farrell. She was listening to the drumbeats as they pounded louder and louder, like a thunderstorm raging in her skull.

The robed figures were just a house away now, standing there and looking it up and down like a parody of a newlywed couple choosing their first home.

“They’re getting close. We should get out of here,” Farrell insisted, nudging Sinclair gently but urgently on the arm.

Sinclair turned, a sudden movement like a lightning strike, and Farrell found himself falling even before he could acknowledge that she had tripped him.

She jabbed the pistol at his face as he landed.

“He’s here,” Sinclair said, enunciating the words clearly so that they reverberated down the overgrown street. “The nonbeliever.”

Chapter 4

It was like a child’s toy, Mahmett thought, this city so empty and so devoid of life. Squawking birds circled overhead and occasionally the bark of a wandering pye-dog or the meow of a cat might be heard. But the animals kept their distance, avoiding the place the way they might avoid fire, some instinct they chose not to challenge.

Mahmett was here for two reasons: a city that was empty inevitably contained untold riches. Even more inevitably, he wanted to impress a woman. But now, walking through the echoing streets with his brother Yasseft and his cousin Panenk at his side, Mahmett wondered just how far he would need to go to find one and hence achieve the indulgence of the other.

“People have died poking around there. There are easier ways to get a woman to notice you,” Panenk had berated before they had set off for the strange city.

“But this will prove to her that I am brave,” Mahmett insisted.

“And if you die, then what will you have proved?” Panenk asked. “Better just to buy a trinket in the market and then tell Jasmine that you went to the city and got it there.”

“But I will know,” Mahmett had argued with all the naivety and conviction of youth.

“And so will I, and so will Yasseft,” Panenk had said, “but at least we’ll be alive.”

But Mahmett wouldn’t hear of it. So now all three of them wandered through the eerily silent streets that shone a creamy white in the sunlight, feeling cold despite the warmth of the afternoon. The city itself had not been here six months ago. It had appeared, like the ruins of some ancient civilization washed up on the shores of a dream. Mahmett had recalled the stories he had heard of America, where a terrible cataclysm had befallen a great society leaving only the Deathlands, where scattered monuments waited for brave explorers to make their fortunes. That had been more than a century ago, but the myth prevailed, the same myth of lost treasure that had been told over and over since the dawn of language.

The city itself was empty. Everything was made of the same substance, a chalky stonelike stuff that slowly crumbled to dust beneath the sun, the streets and buildings and channeled drains all molded from the same. Bisected by the Euphrates, a confusion of spires and domes climbing toward the sky, interior courtyards and ugly, misshapen towers lunging forth as if vying for space among the narrow, alleylike streets. Those claustrophobic streets wound on themselves like string, doubling back as often as not; narrowing and bloating like a series of valves and pipes. Here and there clear water swished along the sides of the streets in drainage channels, reflecting the sun in bright flashes like lightning under glass.

People had gone missing here, traders and settlers, young and old. No one had explored the place and come back to tell of their findings. Mahmett half expected to find the place full of bones, the remnants of the dead, lost perhaps in the labyrinthine streets and alleyways of the dream. And yet there was nothing, no sign of people, no litter or damage. No footprints or scrapings. No trail of string.

If this was the labyrinth, then no monster came to greet them even as they neared the center; instead it remained obstinately silent, just the cawing of the birds and the raindrop pitter-patter of beating insect wings as they navigated by the sun. The insects didn’t stop—why would they? Nothing lived here, nothing rotted or discarded, so nothing remained to make them stay.

The three young men had trekked for hours, and Yasseft regaled them with stories of his own womanizing. Yasseft was older than Mahmett and Panenk, and his exploits seemed a thing of wonder to the younger men. They egged him on, assuring each other of what they would have done in the same situation, of how they would satisfy flocks of maidens. It was nonsense, of course, but it was only natural that the young men would choose to dream when walking within a place that seemed plucked from one.

They turned a corner, and up ahead they saw a great saurian head looming over them like some dinosaur from another era, its reptilian smile indulgently benign. The thing had narrow eyes that shone with a faint trace of fire red in the blazing afternoon sun as it glared at them from its high arching neck. For a moment all three men took it to be alive, and they reared back in fear, as if the thing might snap down on that thick neck, the flat arrowlike head reaching toward them down the length of bone-white street. But it did not. It merely waited there, serene in its majesty, a lizard sovereign waiting for who knew what.

“Is it a statue?” Mahmett asked, not daring to look away.

Yasseft studied the head where it loomed high above them like a cloud, blotting the sun where it waited. He estimated that the head was at least as large as a toolshed; perhaps even larger, like the house of newlyweds.

“I don’t like it,” Panenk finally said, breaking the silence that Mahmett’s brother had left.

“Who made it?” Yasseft said aloud, knowing neither of his companions could supply the answer.

“Six months ago, this whole region was empty,” Panenk reminded them. “This place came to life…” He stopped, embarrassed and scared by his unfortunate choice of words.

“There’s no life here,” Yasseft stated firmly, as if to reassure himself. “Nothing. Not even death. It’s empty.”

“But people have searched,” Panenk said. “People have looked and they have never come back. There are things, man-made things…”

Yasseft fixed him with his stare. “What things?”

“My grandfather spoke of his time with the army,” Panenk said. “He saw things that had been made. Not just to hurt people, but to change landscapes. Perhaps this is one of those things.”

He turned to Mahmett, asking the lad’s opinion but the boy didn’t answer.

Though silent, Mahmett had doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach.

“Hey, Mahmett,” Panenk urged. “Hey, what’s up with you?”

Mahmett looked up when he heard his name, and Panenk saw the way he ground his teeth, the fearful look in his wide eyes. If he had tried to speak, no words had come out.

“Yasseft,” Panenk hissed. “Your brother…”

Hearing the edge to Panenk’s tone, Yasseft turned his attention reluctantly from the dragon’s head at the end of the street and checked on his younger sibling. Mahmett clutched at his stomach as if trying to hold his intestines in place, and sweat beaded on his forehead like cooking oil. “What is it? Something you ate before?” Yasseft asked.

Mahmett shook his head, the movements jagged and abrupt as if he couldn’t stand to do so for long. “S-something inside…me!”

As he spoke this last, his mouth opened and a torrent of water rushed up his throat and past his teeth, splashing on the ground in a rapidly forming puddle.

Yasseft grabbed him by the elbow, pulling him close and looking at his brother as the younger man remained doubled over. “Look at me, let me see,” Yasseft urged.

Mahmett looked up, his dark brows arching in whatever pain it was that was driving itself through his body like a knife. Yasseft had been there when his brother had been born fifteen years ago, and he saw something in his brother’s eyes that he had not seen for a long time. He saw tears, the type that stream like pouring water with no effort from the one who cries. Water streamed from Mahmett’s tear ducts, thick lines running down the dusky skin of his face almost as if they were placed there by a paintbrush.

“What is it?” Mahmett mumbled, seeing the fear in his brother’s eyes.

“You’re crying,” was all Yasseft could think to say.

From deep inside, Mahmett felt the swirl of liquid charging through his guts, racing and churning with the power of nearby thunder, rocking his frame and shaking his very bones. “I f-f-feel…” he began, but a stream of saliva threatened to choke him, blurting from his mouth in a wave.

Yasseft’s grip slipped but slightly, and Mahmett tumbled to the chalky cobbles of the street. He hit hard but made no cry of pain. It was almost as if he was anesthetized, or more likely that whatever pain was driving through him required more attention than a simple blow to the knees.

Mahmett lay shuddering on the ground, his mouth widening, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“What is it?” Panenk asked frantically. “What is with him?”

“I don’t know,” Yasseft admitted. “It’s like a fever.”

They stood there, aware of how helpless they must appear in the face of this. They were the eldest of their little group, they had played together almost since birth and they had had it drummed into them that they were to keep little Mahmett safe. Suddenly a hundred near-misses were remembered: climbing by the power lines, when Mahmett had fallen from an olive tree, and when they had climbed over the neighbor’s wall for a ball, only to come face-to-face with his mean-tempered mastiff. And now Mahmett was collapsed on the ground in a strange city with not a soul in sight.

“Shit.” Yasseft spit. “We need to get him back. I don’t know what’s got into him but we can’t stay here.”

“I didn’t even want to come here in the first place,” Panenk reminded him, looking at the younger lad with worry. He wanted someone to blame now, and it wasn’t going to be him.

Yasseft crouched and placed his hands beneath Mahmett’s shoulders. The glistening, sunlit water at the side of the street sparked and shone like a polished mirror at the edges of Yasseft’s vision. “Just grab him,” he ordered. “Help me. We’ll carry him.”

Though dissatisfied with the arrangement, Panenk at least had the good grace to raise his complaints while lifting his cousin’s ankles. “It took three hours to get here,” he said. “It’ll take twice that to get back if we have to carry him, and it’ll be nightfall long before that.”

Yasseft didn’t answer. He stood there, his hands clenched beneath his brother’s armpits, wincing as a tremble ran through his own body.

“You okay?” Panenk asked.

Yasseft shook his head wearily. “Just…” He stopped. “Feel like I’m going to…”

He dropped Mahmett, the younger man’s arms slipping from his grip as he staggered backward. Yasseft’s hands reached for his guts. It felt as if he urgently needed the toilet, as if he had diarrhea. He stumbled for a moment, bashing against a wall in the shadow of the looming saurian head and neck.

“What is it?” Panenk asked again.

“Going to…” Yasseft began and then he belched, a watery spume blasting from his mouth.

Panenk let Mahmett’s legs drop to the ground, apologizing automatically as he rushed over to Yasseft’s side. “My grandfather told me about this,” he said fearfully. “Airborne weapons that get inside you, eat you up from within.”

Yasseft was not listening. He stood propped against the bone-white wall of a single-story building, vomiting an odorless mix of saliva and water.

Panenk looked around him, searching for some clue as to where this attack had started. “We’ll leave,” he shouted to the empty buildings. “We’ll go. Just leave us alone, please.”

His voice echoed back to him, its fear magnified.

In the road at his feet, Mahmett shuddered where he lay in a puddle of water he himself had created with tears and vomit, and Panenk watched incredulously as the lad vibrated faster and faster before finally shimmying out of existence.

“Please,” Panenk cried, stumbling away from the pool of water his cousin had been. There was no sign of Mahmett; he had simply ceased to be.

Behind him, Yasseft was clawing at his clothes, pulling his shirt away from his belt as his guts threatened to burst loose. Panenk looked at him, the fear making him shake like a leaf in the wind. As he watched, the older teen began shuddering in place, water streaming from his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils and ears. Water gushed from his hands, spurting from beneath his fingernails and darkening the white walls of the opposite building.

Panenk walked backward, his eyes fixed on what was happening to Yasseft. Yasseft seemed about to scream, but it came out more like a belch, a hacking blurt of noise as if a wind instrument played through water. Then, incredibly, Yasseft seemed to sink to his knees, but his legs had not bent. Instead, he dropped into the ground, his body sinking into the pool of water that had formed around him, sucking him down like quicksand. If he screamed, the scream was lost in the sound of rushing water that washed over his disappearing form. And then, just like Mahmett, Yasseft was gone, and all that was left was a puddle of cool water reflecting the overhead sun.

“Leave us alone,” Panenk cried as he backed away. His voice echoed through the empty white streets. Even as he backed away, he felt the first thrum of water in his stomach like a single drumbeat, and he saw the silvery figures approach.

Chapter 5

Staring into the barrel of the Colt Mark IV in Sela Sinclair’s hands, Farrell took a moment to process what she had just said. She had called him “the nonbeliever” and she looked damn serious about it.

From nearby, Farrell could hear the approaching footsteps of those robed figures, the troops for the stone god Ullikummis, the people who had sacked Cerberus and put him and Sinclair in this impossible position in the first place.

“What are you doing?” Farrell asked, mouthing the words more than saying them as he met Sinclair’s dark eyes.

She fixed him with her stare, and Farrell couldn’t detect so much as a hint of emotion or concern there. If this had been a movie, he knew, she’d smile now or wink or say something coded in such an obvious way that he would know without one iota of doubt that this was a ruse, that any second now she would turn the blaster on their human hunters and they’d get out of here breathless but alive. Come on, Sela, he thought, wishing for that little wink or smile, give me a sign.

Sinclair continued to stare into his eyes, the pistol never wavering as she aimed it at the spot between them.

In a few seconds the twin robed figures had joined them, their hoods still pulled down low over their features.

“Who is he?” the broad-shouldered one said, a man with a basso voice.

“Cerberus,” Sinclair replied, her eyes still watching Farrell like a hawk as he lay sprawled in the grass in front of her.

The hooded figures nodded in unison, and the slender one peered closer at the balding man who lay in the grass. “Is that Kane?” she asked, a Southern drawl to her voice.

“No,” Sinclair said simply. “Guy’s name is Farrell. He’s just a technician.”

“Overlord Ullikummis wants Kane,” the man explained.

Shit, Farrell thought. This should be the point where Sinclair pulled the switch, turned the gun on their enemies, got them the heck out of there. But she wasn’t going to do it, was she? She was following the orders of Ullikummis, whether by choice or design, he couldn’t tell.

Sela Sinclair looked at the pitiful figure of Farrell, with his hollow cheeks and the dark rings around his eyes, and she heard the crescendo of the drums as they beat faster and faster in her head, their rhythm driving to a frenzy.

“Should I kill him?” she asked.

“Ullikummis is love,” the robed woman said. “His will is not to kill.”

As she spoke, the woman pushed down her hood, revealing locks of black hair that reached just past the nape of her neck. Farrell’s eyes were drawn to the woman’s forehead, however, where a bump showed like a spot or a blind boil.

Beside her, the man had pushed back his hood, revealing the graying remains of his hair and the bearded face of a man in his late fifties. Like the woman, he had a protrusion at the center of his forehead, a little ridge the size of a knuckle, resting between and slightly above his eyebrows.

Farrell had made the connection straight away, but still he checked Sinclair’s forehead as he lay in the grass.

“Conversion is preferred,” the man explained in a tone so neutral it was as if he were discussing paint.

“To embrace his love is glory,” the woman added.

“I’ve only met him once,” Sinclair said dispiritedly.

Fuck! Farrell’s heart pounded against his chest, throbbing in his eardrums even as he twisted himself on the scrub and tried to run. Sinclair had it, too, that same telltale lump like a single measle or a boil about to erupt. She had always had it, all the time they had been together. And while he had been worrying himself to an early grave, she had been pumping iron and doing sit-ups, toning her already perfect body into a weapon for her new master. All of this, Farrell thought as he struggled to his feet and began to run back toward the house.

It was a second—less than that—and Farrell was sprinting across the overgrown lawn, Sinclair behind him pulling her gun up to take a shot at him. Farrell ran, the world blurring as the adrenaline blasted through his system like a nuclear explosion. He heard the gunshot, heard the man call out at the same time, ducked his head automatically as he ran.

They had taught lessons in survival technique at Cerberus. Edwards had instructed him in basic hand-to-hand combat on the expanse of dirt outside the rollback door of the redoubt; Sinclair herself had shown him how to load a pistol. A hundred instructions and pieces of advice raced through Farrell’s mind at that moment, as the .38 bullet cut through the air past him and embedded itself in the scarred frontage of the ancient house in a blossoming burst of ruined masonry. What was it Edwards had said?

“If someone pulls a gun on you, get the hell out of there and don’t look back.”

Yeah, something like that, anyway, Farrell thought as he ran in an evasive zigzag pattern toward the house.

Behind him, Sinclair pulled the trigger a second time, aiming her blast at Farrell’s rapidly retreating form. The loud report of the gun echoed in the empty street, and Farrell dropped, crumpling to the ground like a felled oak.

“He’s still alive,” the man in the robes insisted as he scurried toward the fallen figure.

Farrell was more than alive; he wasn’t even wounded. Just as Sinclair’s shot had blasted from her pistol he had caught his foot on something hidden in the long grass and tumbled to the ground, the bullet shrieking its angry trail over his head. Lying there now, Farrell looked all around him as he tried to scramble away. The grass was so long that it hid his prone form. And there, less than a foot from his right leg, he spotted the thing that had tripped him—it was a rusted old exhaust pipe, caught up in a tangle of grass and sod. The pipe was perhaps eighteen inches in length and about an inch and a half across. His mind racing, Farrell grasped for the pipe and yanked it from the earth as he drove his body forward toward the house once again. Rusty pipe in hand, Farrell powered onward to the house, keeping his head ducked and his body bent.

“He’s running,” Farrell heard a woman shout, but he couldn’t discern if that was Sinclair or the woman in the robe. It didn’t matter now, as he was at the door to the house, launching himself at the wooden barricade and powering into the sudden darkness of the hallway beyond.

He had lived in this house for forty-two days, knew every ghastly, rotting inch of it. As footsteps clattered on the porch behind him, Farrell darted left into the living room that ran one half the length of the building.

Something had happened to Sinclair, he realized, something that had maybe been there since before they had gone into hiding. That spot on her head, it was his mark—Ullikummis’s. Farrell had heard rumors about other members of Cerberus turning, siding with Ullikummis and his people. It was like a cult, a growing movement that relied on the belief that Ullikummis himself was a god from the stars. Which was ridiculous, of course—Ullikummis was Annunaki, a cruel and heartless race of aliens who had held humankind in subjugation thousands of years ago. But Sela Sinclair knew this. Everyone at Cerberus knew this; Lakesh himself had held an information session in the canteen just a few months before when they had discovered the first evidence that Ullikummis had returned to Earth. And yet Sinclair was under his sway somehow, something physical inside her twisting her will, instructing her like an entheogen.

Behind him, hideously near, Farrell heard Sinclair and the other two pushing through the house, shouting instructions to split up and find him. The blood was pounding in his ears, and his breath felt warm in his throat, pumping past his gritted teeth like sandblasting. The room was full of old furniture. A settee had collapsed in on itself to become a sculpture of rusted springs and wood that showed the familiar signs of woodworm. A table was splintered against one wall, while another sagged to the floor with two legs bent out of shape. Farrell vaulted it as the figure came through the door after him, the man in the robes. The man was pulling something from an innocuous pouch he wore at his waist, loading the slingshot in his hand even as he leaped the broken settee and rushed through the room. The enforcers of Ullikummis didn’t use guns as a rule, but relied on a more basic weapon, a slingshot-style catapult that launched vicious stones with the force of bullets.

Up ahead, Farrell saw the second door of the room, the one that broke back into the hall opposite the closet, and he drove himself to it as his pursuer launched the first clutch of stones from his catapult rig.

Farrell reached out with his free hand, striking the far door frame with his forearm as he ducked through it. Behind him, a scattershot of rocks struck the frame where Farrell had been, their pitter-patter like hail on a window.

Out in the hallway once more, Farrell found himself face-to-face with Sela Sinclair, the dark metal of the pistol still clutched in her right hand. Farrell caromed into her, slamming both of them against the far wall in a crash of crumbling plasterboard. Sinclair sank back to the floor, spluttering as the plasterboard disintegrated to powder all around her, Farrell landing astride her in a tangle of limbs. Farrell saw the stubby nose of the Colt Mark IV snap up, and he lashed out with the rusty pipe in his hand, knocking the muzzle aside even as it flashed with another ear-splitting shot.

Then Farrell was on his feet again, driving himself along the corridor as Sela Sinclair brought the pistol around for another shot. Beside her, the man in the hooded robes appeared from the main room, the slingshot in his hand spinning over and over, picking up speed before he launched another clutch of pebbles barely bigger than grains of sand toward the retreating figure.

Farrell sidestepped into another room to his right, a chunk of plasterboard turning to dust just three inches from his face where the stones struck. He was in the dining room now, once able to accommodate a six- or maybe eight-seat table. It now housed a pile of broken furniture amid scarred, moss-covered walls. Worse yet, it stank of rainwater, the kind of rainwater that perhaps had been mixed with urine somewhere along the way. Farrell ran through the room, leaping over the shattered remains of a glass-fronted cabinet that had been used as the set for a family of badgers. The robed man hurried through the open doorway behind him, his slingshot whining in his hand as it spun through the air.

Farrell sprinted onward, aiming himself for the twin doors of the serving hatch that stood closed at the far end of the room. The wood was rotten, light cutting through it in bold strips. Farrell heard the robed man unleash another clutch of stones as he leaped, and he used the pipe like a club to smash his way into the serving hatch doors and powered himself through. A smattering of tiny stone flecks peppered the wall around the hatch as Farrell disappeared through it, and his pursuer stopped in his tracks.

Farrell crashed through the serving hatch into the kitchen, tumbling onto the cracked terra-cotta tiles of the floor and rolling forward, bringing himself back to an upright position. He was breathing heavily now, his heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs.

The kitchen was a mess of stained surfaces and mold, the faucets and drains overgrown with plants that had climbed through the pipes once human habitation here had ceased, everything going back to nature in the end. There was another door there that led to the backyard, or whatever had once been the backyard. Now it was just as overgrown as the front, a little jungle in the forgotten strip of land. Sela Sinclair had locked this door when they had arrived here, making sure it was secure to stop anyone sneaking in—or that’s what she had said. Now Farrell wasn’t so sure. He wondered if she had done it to lock him in for the day when her allies in the New Order arrived. Was she even conscious that she was serving them?

Farrell figured he had maybe five seconds to escape. His only advantage was knowing the layout of the building, knowing about the serving hatch to the kitchen. He took the heavy pipe in his hand and smashed it against the ragged boards that Sinclair had placed over the gap of the window. The boards were tough enough, but the nails were brittle and rusted, and the whole door shuddered on old hinges as the makeshift panel crumpled apart.

Farrell was through the window in an instant, wedging his body into the gap before clambering through it with all the grace of a beached fish. Didn’t matter—just had to get out of there, to stay alive.

Outside, the backyard was just as overgrown as the front and the street beyond. Farrell was slowing now, the momentary safety giving him a chance to think. He needed to contact Cerberus, find Ohio Blue or locate the nearest mat-trans.

In a moment he had engaged his Commtact, the subdermal communicator that was located just below his ear. “This is Farrell out in the field. Do you read? Over.”

As he spoke, a figure came hurrying around the edge of the house, chasing after him through the long underbrush. It was the woman in the robe, the one who had accompanied the man to the deserted street. She must have doubled back. Her arms were pumping as she chased Farrell, and he drove himself onward, confident he could outrun her by dint of his longer legs. Her teeth were gritted and her eyes looked fierce as they fixed on his back, while Farrell darted across the jungle of the backyard.

A moment later Farrell saw the boundary fence that had once marked this property, a simple chain-link line running just above waist height. He kicked his left leg out, leaping high and vaulting over the fence in a swish of dirty white clothing. Beyond, he guessed he was in an access road—probably the kind that had once been used by garbage trucks—though it, too, had been given over to the wilderness, with fronds and reeds growing as high as his waist, some up to his chest.

“Farrell, this is Donald Bry.” The voice from the Commtact device reverberated through Farrell’s mastoid bone so that only he could hear it. “What’s the situation, over?”

Farrell looked behind him, saw the woman jump the fence in pursuit, the familiar form of a leather slingshot now grasped in her fist.

“Bit busy,” Farrell explained over the Commtact.

He didn’t wait for Bry’s response, just turned and faced the woman bearing down on him. She plucked a palm-load of stones from the leather pouch at her belt, loading the slingshot in a swift, practiced movement. With a sound like an angered beehive, the slingshot began to whir around and around, picking up speed in preparation of launch. Farrell looked all around him, searching for cover, some way to get out of the line of fire. He could still see the back of the house through the raging underground, saw Sela Sinclair and the robed man come out the back door chasing their prey. There was nowhere to run.

“And when there’s nowhere to run, you stand and fight.”

That’s something else Edwards had drummed into him in those training sessions.

Farrell was upon the woman in a flash, driving the heavy exhaust pipe at her chest where the crimson shield glinted in the sunlight. The pipe hit with a hollow thunk, knocking the breath out of Farrell’s opponent. Surprised, the woman toppled backward, the stones dropping from her slingshot as it momentarily lost all momentum, like a child’s bucket-of-water trick.

Farrell stood over her in the long grass, feeling the ghastly weight of that hunk of metal in his hand. She looked up at him, her dark hair in disarray around her face, blue eyes fixed on his. “I am stone,” she uttered, the words like a mantra.

It would be so easy, Farrell thought, to hit her again, to crush her skull in a single, savage blow. But no, that wasn’t him. That wasn’t how he did things.

So he turned and he ran, the breath heavy against his chest as his booted feet pounded against the compacted earth and leaves.

* * *

THE DARK-HAIRED WOMAN, whose name was Tanya Stone, struggled up from the grass, urging her body to follow Farrell as he sprinted away. She plucked the leather loop that formed her slingshot from the ground, wiping the dirt from it as she stood, began moving after Farrell. She had taken two paces when her partner, Jackson Stone, called for her to halt.

Tanya turned, seeing Jack and the ebony-skinned newcomer, and she gave him a quizzical look. “I can catch him.”

As she spoke, a chill seemed to cut through the air, and Tanya became aware of another presence. She turned around, searching the brush for a moment before she spotted the other figure, the woman with the red-gold hair and eyes the green of the ocean—Brigid Haight. In her late twenties, Haight was poised in the bole of a tree, prowling from its shadow like a stalking cat, her black leather suit covering her entirely, clinging to her limbs like a second skin. It seemed somehow appropriate that Haight had dressed in the dead flesh of animals, surrounding herself with their ghosts.

Haight was the chosen of Ullikummis, his first priest in the New Order, and while Tanya had not met her before she recognized her instantly. And she shivered in the woman’s presence as something seemed to crawl along her spine.

Beside her, Sela Sinclair looked at the slender, red-haired woman stepping from the shadows and she felt a stab of recognition. Inside her head, the drums were beating louder and faster than ever before, louder and faster and far more brutal.

* * *

FARRELL SPRINTED DOWN the overgrown access road, glancing back over his shoulder to see if he was still being followed. The woman was on her feet and she had been joined by Sela Sinclair and the man in the fustian robes. They seemed to be talking, watching as Farrell ran from them. Their confidence irritated him, made him angry.

He turned back to face the path he was running along, with its tangles of briars and reeds, the moisture heavy in the air where the plants breathed. There was a wall ahead, reaching up almost to head height but crumbling in places, a sickly green creeper clinging to its surface. He stopped when he reached it, conscious of the ache in the muscles of his arm where he was hefting the heavy length of exhaust pipe. He glanced fearfully behind him once again, back up along what was left of the old road. Another figure had joined his three pursuers. This one was dressed in black, a bloom of red hair haloing its head. From this distance with the sun in his eyes, Farrell couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. But he knew one thing for certain—it meant they had added another member to their hunting group, another body to chase him and capture him and presumably indoctrinate him into this cult of Ullikummis.

“Cerb-er-us,” Farrell said, the syllables broken by his heavy breathing now. “I need a way out of here, right now.” To his right he saw another low chain-link fence, this one bent out of true and with a gaping hole in its center. Farrell moved toward it, keeping one eye on the gathering group at the far end of the little road.

Donald Bry’s voice came back to Farrell over the Commtact link. “What’s the problem, Farrell?”

“Hostile types just tried to kill me or indoctrinate me, I’m not sure.”

“‘Hostile types’?” Bry repeated, and Farrell suspected that, wherever he was, the man had raised an eyebrow at the phrase.

“The stone nuts,” Farrell grunted, clambering over the sagging fence. “Ullikummis’s people. They tracked me down—I don’t know how.”

“Is Sinclair okay?” Bry asked, the consummate bookkeeper even in times of stress.

“She’s one of ’em, man,” Farrell said. He was running now, arms pumping, the pipe swinging in his hand as he pelted across the overgrown expanse of garden toward another shell of a building.

“What do you—?” Bry asked, mild surprise in his voice.

Farrell sprinted past the side of the house, pushing himself on. “I can’t explain how,” he interrupted. “I think maybe she’s always been one of them, like she was just biding her time waiting for the right moment to strike.”

He hurried on, out past the churned-up tarmac of the drive where an ancient automobile waited, its red paint bleached white by the sun across its roof and hood, rust marring its bodywork like ringworm.

“Am triangulating your position now,” Bry told Farrell, his tone reassuring.

There was a pause, during which Farrell ran down another forgotten Bradley street that now looked like a strip of jungle had been transplanted into the suburbs. Startled birds took flight from a twisting cypress as he hurried past, squawking in ugly caws, their feathers orange and an almost luminescent green.

In a secret location hundreds of miles away, Farrell knew that Donald Bry was even now using his subdermal transponder to track his position, applying it to a map of the local territory and assessing the best escape route.

“Farrell, I have a mat-trans located in a military redoubt about three miles west of your present position,” Bry announced over the Commtact. “Do you think you can make that, or do you want me to scramble a team to come to your aid?”

Farrell glanced self-consciously behind him, searching the wreckage of the nearby houses and the towering ferns for signs of movement. The leaves shimmied in the breeze, making whispering sounds as they swayed. But there was no one around—maybe, just maybe, he had lost them?

“I should be able to make it to the redoubt,” Farrell told Bry reluctantly. He knew how tight the personnel situation was just now, knew that Cerberus could ill afford to scramble a CAT team to protect one lowly tech. “If I go careful, I think I can avoid any more trouble. I’ll let you know when I’m within sight.”

“Excellent,” Bry acknowledged over the Commtact. “We should be able to remote program a jump for you from here. We’ll get you to safety.”

Pipe in hand, Farrell hurried on down the overgrown streets of Bradley, far away from the safehouse he had shared with the traitorous Sela Sinclair.

* * *

BACK IN THE OVERGROWN remains of the service road, Tanya and Jackson Stone and Sinclair stood with Brigid Haight as the trim figure of Farrell disappeared from sight.

“Let him go,” Brigid instructed, watching the retreating figure as he hurried toward the break between the houses where a wall cut across the roadway’s path. “He doesn’t matter.”

“But we’ll lose him,” Tanya insisted, clenching and unclenching her fists where she held the leather band of the slingshot.

“The world belongs to Ullikummis now, and all who share in his love,” Brigid intoned. “Where is there left for him to run?”

Chapter 6

The wind whipped past the retrofitted cargo as it cut through the skies over Syria toward Iraq. Grant sat on one of two long benches that lined the cargo area, head down, his hands held close together so that their steepled fingers formed a rough triangular shape of empty space. Beside him, Domi watched, a confused crease appearing between her white eyebrows.

“What you doing?” Domi asked.

“Concentrating,” Grant replied, his eyes still fixed on the empty space between his touching fingertips.

Domi nodded as if she understood, but she was just as baffled as she had been before. Despite being one of the longest-serving members of the Cerberus organization, Domi was still a child of the Outlands at heart, savage and simpleminded in her comprehension of things. She wasn’t unintelligent; she just had a more direct approach to things than those who had been educated in the nine towering baronies that dotted the landscape of North America. A little over five feet in height, Domi was a svelte, pixielike figure who had wrapped her chalk-white skin beneath a series of light layers for the duration of this field mission. Her hair, a creamy white, like milk, was cut short around her head, framing her sharp-planed face in a ruffled pixie cut. While albinism had left Domi almost entirely white, her eyes were a fearsome red, like bloody wounds in her face, and they had a disarming effect when she fixed her gaze on an opponent. Despite her youth, Domi had formed a close relationship with Lakesh, the two of them becoming lovers over the past couple of years. If Lakesh had ever seemed worried about sending his personnel into the danger zone, that worry had quadrupled with Domi once the two of them had fallen in love. But the worry was reciprocated; Domi could be like a terrier when it came to Lakesh’s safety.

Across the aisle from Domi, sitting between two Tigers of Heaven warriors dressed in armorlike stealth suits, Rosalia smiled contemptuously. “Leave the Magistrate alone,” she said. “He’s focusing his mojo.”

As she spoke, the nameless dog that sat at her feet whined, its expressive, pale eyes wide with worry. The dog disliked the sound of the heavy rotors, and its ears kept twitching so that Rosalia had to keep one hand in the scuff of its neck to keep it settled, rubbing it there now and again. The dog had come with Rosalia here, as it seemed to follow her everywhere. While it might seem a burden at times, the mutt was a fierce fighter when the time came. In fact, there seemed to be something uncanny in its fighting technique, as if more than one creature somehow existed in the same place. Watching it fight was like hallucinating at times, a double or triple image taking up its position.

Rosalia had changed her clothes before leaving the temporary headquarters in the winter palace. Now she wore a dark one-piece outfit that hugged her curvaceous body, her long shapely legs covered by pant legs that tucked into supple leather boots that reached halfway up her calves. Rosalia had tied her hair back in a simple ponytail, which she tucked beneath the black hood of her top to prevent it from flying in her face.

Domi didn’t trust Rosalia. There was something about the mercenary woman and her superior attitude that rubbed Domi the wrong way. Compounding that distrust was the memory that on their first meeting Rosalia had been part of a two-person team that had knocked Domi unconscious from behind. Domi had never forgiven the woman for that, even if Rosalia herself had not struck the actual blow.

“He’s called Grant,” the albino girl said irritably, her red devil’s eyes boring into Rosalia’s.

“Like Seth,” Rosalia said obtusely before turning back to her whining hound to calm it. Despite her brusqueness, it was evident that the mysterious Rosalia was well educated. Her well of knowledge seemed bottomless, yet she frequently saw no reason to explain her comments to those she considered beneath her. Domi very definitely fell into that category.

Grant ignored the two antagonistic females, relaxing his eyes as he meditated on the nonspace created between his touching fingers. It had been fifteen hours since the incident with Edwards, and he had hoped that he might remain while the operation was performed on the man’s brain so that he could witness with the rest of them just what it was that was growing there. However, with the satellite feeds back online, something urgent had come up. Via its network of contacts, Cerberus had amassed several reports of people going missing out near the banks of the river known as the Euphrates. Not just one or two people, but dozens, perhaps more than one hundred. Lakesh had replayed Grant the surveillance footage taken from Iraq, close to the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The overhead footage showed a city structure expanding on the banks of the Euphrates. The settlement that had not been there six months before. Constructed of an off-white stone of unknown origin, the ville was expanding at a rapid rate. That wasn’t unusual in this age of displaced persons and in itself it shouldn’t be cause for alarm. What was alarming was the shape of the burgeoning ville—it quite clearly took the form of a winged creature, drawn across the fertile soil of the riverbank.

“A dragon,” Grant had said as he had stared at the incredible surveillance photos.

“Or perhaps a dragon ship,” Lakesh had said, emphasizing the word ship. His implication was clear. The Cerberus team had become aware of the Annunaki starship Tiamat as it lurked high above the atmosphere, and Grant had been a part of the team on board when the ship had begun its self-destruct sequence, watched from space as its exploding form had filled the heavens with light. To have another of the starships appear like this—on Earth—was without doubt a cause for concern.

Well prepared for the briefing, Lakesh had called up backdated surveillance footage showing the expansion of the settlement from apparent nothingness just six months ago. While it appeared to be a city, there was no mistaking the implication of that swooping, winged shape. Several miles across, it crouched by the banks, head pointing off toward the north while the right-hand flank abutted the river itself, a curving tail winding downward in a southerly direction. The mighty wings were stretched wide in imitation of a crescent, the creature’s right wing crossing the width of the river in a curving bridge. It was unclear from the photographs, but it appeared that buildings were constructed on the wing-bridge as elsewhere, adhering to the dragonlike shape of the vast settlement.

“We need to look into this,” Grant had agreed. “If only we had the Mantas, then me and Kane could…” He stopped, the words turning to ashes on his tongue. He had partnered with Kane for so long that to take on a mission like this without him, even a simple recce, seemed anathema to the way things worked.

“We’re just amassing reports from the local area,” Donald Bry had explained from his position at another computer terminal in the makeshift ops center. “It seems it’s something of a no-fly zone,” he explained. “Reports are hazy but there’s suggestions that some low-flying aircraft have failed to return from the area in the last few weeks.”

“Sounds serious.” Grant nodded. “What about the interphaser—could we access a gateway in there?”

The options that Grant was suggesting covered many of the established forms of long-distance transportation that the Cerberus rebels had come to rely upon. The Mantas were transatmospheric aircraft that were stored at the hangar of the old Cerberus redoubt in Montana. The interphaser, the teleportational device that opened a quantum window through space, relied on established destination markers called parallax points. Unless there was one of these in place, the jump to a specific location could not be completed.

Lakesh had pointed to the surveillance photo on screen, indicating the area where the right shoulder blade of the creature would be. “There’s a parallax point here,” he confirmed, “but I admit a grave reluctance in using it. This specific area was the exact location of the ancient city of Nippur, where Enlil was said to have made his home. It seems too much of a coincidence for this new settlement to have appeared by chance, especially taking the dragon form of the Annunaki mother, Tiamat, as it has. While the interphaser could send you there instantaneously, I’m inclined to think you’d be walking straight into the belly of the beast.”

“Almost literally,” Grant muttered as he eyed the dragon form.

“And if there is any Annunaki connection at all,” Lakesh continued, “the very first thing they would have established is a security detail or automated expulsion system for the parallax point itself. Which is to say, it could well be like walking into a blender. Not clever.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Grant accepted. “So what do we do?”

“We have established some local connections in the area,” Lakesh explained. “We’ll open a gateway into an old military base in Syria, and you’ll take a ride from there.”

“What kind of ride?” Grant had asked warily.

“Helicopter,” Lakesh had explained. “A retrofitted cargo chopper.”

Retrofitted was right. Whatever its original configuration, the craft had been gutted and refitted so drastically over the years that it looked like a flying junkyard. Grant looked around him now, saw the rusting patches that lined the wall behind Rosalia and the two guards, the sloppily painted plastic-and-ceramic bowl that formed the uneven ceiling. From the outside, the whole airframe was a patchwork of pieces, different-colored plates worked one over another to complete its shell. It had no doubt been found in some military redoubt somewhere, tucked out of sight for a century or more before finally being called into action, pieced together as best the local mechanics could based on the design. That the vehicle flew—and flew well—seemed nothing shy of a miracle to Grant, but he had traveled in worse.

Dressed in dark, supple armor, two Tigers of Heaven had agreed to accompany the three Cerberus warriors on this reconnaissance mission to find out what the deserted dragon city was all about. Their names were Kishiro and Kudo and they displayed that studied calmness that all of Shizuka’s warriors seemed to have. Grant admired them for it.

With Cerberus in disarray, field missions like this were proving problematic to staff. Kane and Edwards were out of commission, Brigid was lost and almost two-thirds of the personnel were still in hiding, spread out across North America. If they were going to use subs like this, Grant would rather they include his lover Shizuka, whose ability with a samurai sword was nothing short of artistic. But the world was different now; there were dangers on all sides. This growing cult of Ullikummis seemed to be expanding at a colossal rate, and even threatened the shores of New Edo, the territory Shizuka governed.

Thus, Grant found himself leading an untested pairing of teammates into the unknown. He had come to trust, even respect, Rosalia after their most recent escapade, and he knew he could rely upon both Domi and any member of the Tigers of Heaven. Still, racing across the skies in a rattletrap cargo chopper accompanied by four teammates he only half knew, Grant felt a sense of unease. Reluctantly he turned his attention back to the triangular window created by his touching fingers, willing his worries to slip away. Whatever else happened, he couldn’t change it now.

* * *

“WE ARE ALMOST NEAR,” a voice called over the fuzzy speaker system from the cockpit. It was the pilot, a local man called Mahood, whose English was heavily accented with the emphasis on the wrong syllables, making it hard at times to decipher.

Grant nodded, inhaling deeply and projecting a sense of calm. “How long?” he asked, his finger depressing the radio comm button set in the wall.

Mahood muttered something in the local dialect, then repeated it in English for his passengers. “Two minutes is maximum.”

“Great,” Grant said, wondering if the sarcasm in his tone was lost on the foreigner. He hoped it was; the man was risking his own neck for the Cerberus team, skirting the edges of the dubious no-fly zone.

Swiveling on the bench, Grant turned to look out the window nearest him. It was a horizontal slit of perhaps three inches in height, and Grant had to peer closely to get a decent view of the outside. The others crowded over to their own windows, all except for Rosalia, who stayed with her dog, hushing the animal as it whined in time with the straining engines.

“There it is,” Grant muttered, pushing his face closer to the window without thinking about it.

Down below, off to the port side of the renovated helicopter, the dragon seemed to crouch at the banks of the wide strip of river. Wisps of cloud cut the view for a moment, a V-shaped flock of squawking geese swooping by, and then the dragon reappeared, ill lit in the dwindling light of dusk. It was hard to assess the size of it from so far away, but Grant had seen the aerial photographs from the satellite and he already had a rough idea. That idea hadn’t prepared him for looking at the structure itself, however.

It was not a dragon, even though its shape suggested one. Close up, it was not even a single structure. Rather, a series of buildings were poised along the banks of the Euphrates, with no apparent uniformity to their designs. Here a minaret poked upward to the clouds; there a low, flat rooftop reflected the dwindling rays of the setting sun as it painted the surrounds in orange and vermilion. Yet despite the differences, each building contributed to the whole, each formed a part of the dragon’s body, head and wings. As the satellite image had suggested, one of those wings—the rightmost—sloped out across the river itself, the juddering struts of low buildings ridging across its surface. And everything, everything was creamy white.

“It’s incredible,” Domi whispered, her voice hushed with awe.

“More than that,” Grant said, “it’s like nothing on Earth.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Grant assured her. “Which means we have to get lower.”

With that, the ex-Magistrate flicked the radio transmission button again to speak with the pilot. “Bring us down, Mahood,” he instructed. “Let’s see if we can find us a landing area.”

With a word of acknowledgment from the cockpit, the sturdy chopper banked left, its body rolling closer toward the dragon-shaped settlement. There was something else about it, Grant realized as they got closer. Despite all those buildings, he could see no people out in the streets, no one wandering amid the lifeless structures.

“My cousin Hassood will meet us by the left wing.” Mahood’s voice came over the radio speaker again. “There’s a flat space out there just beyond city limits where we can land. There’ll be a bit of a walk, I’m afraid.”

“Fine by me,” Grant began, but before the last word had left his lips, a bright burst of dazzling scarlet light flashed outside like lightning and the Blackbird shook as though it had struck something. “What th—?”

A moment later the chopper shuddered violently, and Grant, Domi and the others found themselves tossed across the metal decking. They were under attack.

* * *

GRABBING AT WHATEVER PASSED for handholds in the chopper’s interior, Grant hurried forward as the craft continued to shake. Behind him, Rosalia’s dog was barking fearfully.

“What the hell’s going on?” Grant asked as he saw the startled pilot, Mahood, struggling with the controls.

Grant was surprised to see that the piloting system was not the advanced, sleek dash he’d expected. Rather, old-fashioned dials and plates had been wired together and a bucket seat was positioned in front of two stick-style yokes, something like an ancient whirlybird.

Mahood, an olive-skinned Iranian with glistening sweat in the pebbledash stubble atop his head, looked at Grant with wide eyes, shouting something in his own tongue.

“Again,” Grant instructed. “In English.”

“A light ray,” Mahood translated as he fought with the yoke. “Laser. Laser beam.”

Even as he said it, Grant saw another blast zap past the cockpit windows, bloodred and ascending in a thick vertical line that was at least a dozen feet across.

“Shit,” Grant growled. One hit from that thing and they’d lose a wing…or worse. “Can you get us down?” Grant asked urgently, placing a hand on the back of Mahood’s seat to keep himself steady as they rolled and yawed.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Mahood spit as he struggled with the controls, banking the chopper so that Grant had to hang on to stop his head from slamming against the ceiling. Through the cockpit window, Grant could see the narrow crescent of the moon, a thin sliver of white hanging in the darkening blue sky.

Grant was an accomplished pilot himself and he stared at the bucket seat that Mahood sat in, his ample backside resting atop a fluffy pink cushion at odds with the worn brown leather of the ancient seat belt. “Want me to take over?” Grant asked.

Mahood pulled up on the stick as another thick blast of laser light cut through the air ahead of them, its edges crackling like lightning. “We need to land right now,” he explained in his fractured English. “I got her but I don’t think we’re—”

Another blast lit the cockpit, and something on the far right of the dash suddenly burst into flames. Mahood stretched out his sandaled foot and kicked at the flames, stamping them until they went out.

“Must land here, Mr. Grant,” he explained. “But quickly.”

“Yeah,” Grant agreed, “I can see that.”

Mahood banked in on a tight vector as Grant hurried back to the cargo hold, where his four allies were anxiously waiting. Swiftly he explained the situation to them as the ancient chopper rocked in the air, illuminated by another of the all-powerful crimson beams of laser light.

“Be ready, people,” Grant said. “We might have to ditch.”

Rosalia looked up from where she was steadying her dog. “What is that light show, anyway?”

“Looks like a pulse laser,” Grant explained. “Single shot but deadly as hell. I don’t think it’s tracking us. Looks more like it’s automated to react to anything in the sky. But it’s a wide enough beam to cut us if we get unlucky.”

“Local defence, huh?” Rosalia hissed. “Painful.”

Touchdown was as rough as it was unexpected. Grant opened the cargo door and urged his companions out.

“Been a pleasure, man,” Grant said over the radio communicator as he stepped up to the open door. “Clear skies.”

He jumped out into the courtyard where Mahood had landed and sprinted for the cover of the nearby buildings.

As Grant reached the edge of the courtyard the laser blasted again, rushing up into the sky in a column of bloodred lightning. From high above there was an explosion as something went up in flames—the chopper, Grant realized.

He peered up, his eyes aching as they struggled to look into the red beam of the laser. And then it switched off, as suddenly as it had fired, and the sky seemed to be plunged into darkness, the single slit eye of the moon a blurred white streak on his retina.

Grant saw that the chopper had been cut in two by the laser light, an expanding ball of flame bursting from its side as the pieces began to drop. He knew that Mahood was doomed, and threw himself into the mouth of an alley to seek shelter from the flaming wreckage falling from the sky.

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