“Maybe they hacked our phones? Cintia was worried that there might be a mole in Fallon’s inner circle.”
As much as he didn’t want it to be true, he knew she was right. As usual. The timing of the assault, and the fact that the attackers were moving up the hill, was all the proof he needed.
Worst of all, the sun chariot wasn’t even there, or if it was, it was hidden so well that Fiona could not sense its presence.
“It doesn’t change what we have to do,” Pierce said. “We just need to stay alive—”
The ground heaved beneath him, knocking him flat. He slipped a few feet down the slope before catching himself, but even before he stopped sliding, he knew the sudden disturbance wasn’t another explosion. The ground was still moving under him.
“Earthquake!” Fiona shouted.
Pierce stayed down in a prone position, hugging the ground to avoid being launched into an uncontrollable downhill slide, but as the frightful shaking went on, the seconds stretching into minutes, he could not help but wonder if this was the beginning of the solar event Dourado had warned about.
If it was… If the Black Knight satellite had been activated again, redirecting the sun’s light and gravity, the tremor would only be the beginning.
A noise, loud like a thunderclap, split the air, and a wave of heat flashed over Pierce. His nostrils filled with a strange smell, a mixture of burning dust and freshly turned soil. There was a second report, more distant, but still very loud, and then another, the two overlapping. Pierce couldn’t tell if the noises were from bombs or maybe rocket-propelled grenades exploding on the slopes around them, or something related to the quake. Regardless, there was nothing he could do to protect himself. His life or death was in the hands of fate.
Then the shaking stopped.
“George!” Gallo’s cry was choked by a mouthful of dust, but at least she was alive.
“I’m okay. Are you? Fiona, are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Fiona replied, then added. “The Black Knight just woke up again.”
Pierce pushed himself up to a crouch and, despite the unresolved threat from the monastery attackers, flipped his headlamp on.
The dust motes caught in the beam of light made it look like a solid thing, but amid the haze, he spotted Gallo and Fiona, both huddled just a few feet away. He crawled over to them, hugged them for a moment, and then shone his light on the mountain, scouting a route to freedom.
Below them, a hundred yards away, the line of glowing artificial lights advanced up the slope — the monastery attackers, homing in on Pierce’s headlamp. As he stared down at them, Pierce saw a tiny flash, barely bigger than a spark, followed half-a-second later by the report of a rifle shot.
“Down,” he called out, flipping off his light and pressing himself flat. “We can’t stay here.”
“We can’t very well move either,” Gallo said. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “I saw.”
As if being hunted by killers armed with guns and rocket launchers wasn’t going to be challenging enough, fate had decided to increase the difficulty setting. Pierce’s brief glimpse of the mountainside had revealed the quake’s aftermath. The ground had split apart all around them. Long fissures, bleeding acrid smoke into the chilly night air, now crisscrossed the slope. Without the aid of artificial light, Pierce could just barely make out the ground in front of him. The jagged cracks in the terrain were a shade darker than the brown soil.
“Slow and steady,” he said. “We’ll crawl out on hands and knees if we have to.”
“Uncle George!” Fiona’s voice rose with increasing urgency, as she called out. Pierce couldn’t see her face, but he could make out her silhouette. She was pointing into the nearest crack.
The fissure was glowing a dim red, but getting brighter by the second, like the coils of an electric heater warming up. Pierce’s first thought was that they were witnessing volcanic activity, but as the light grew, rising through the spectrum — orange, yellow, and then bright white — he realized the cause was nothing as ordinary as a rising magma plume.
Something was alive down there, moving in the depths of the Earth, like an embryonic dragon squirming through the cracks in its eggshell, struggling to be born.
TWENTY-FOUR
Felice Carter felt like throwing up. How had she not seen this coming?
Smoke and mirrors.
Deception.
Fallon had invited her into his inner circle and then distracted her with the imaginary external threat of the hacker.
Even now, confronted with the reality, she couldn’t quite reconcile it with what she had experienced. Why had Fallon gone to such extremes to deceive her, particularly at the beginning, when he had complete control over the Black Knight satellite and the Roswell meta-material fragment? It made no sense.
She placed her hands flat against the concrete walls and took a deep breath. She didn’t need to see them, and the wall itself posed no obstacle. All she needed to know was that there were two men inside the structure, and one or both of them were going to unleash an apocalypse if she didn’t act.
A hand touched her arm, distracting her. She looked up and saw Lazarus. His face was impassive, but she could see the question in his eyes.
Are you sure you want to do that?
“I have to stop them,” she said.
“Wait.”
That was all he said.
She knew the reason for his apprehension. It had not been concern for the men inside the transmitter building that prompted him to intervene, but rather concern for her. If she did this, if she touched their minds and permanently stripped away their free will, it would be the same as killing them. Two more souls added to her tally.
The first few times her… ability…had become manifest, it had been something out of her control, an autonomic response to a threatening situation. Yet, knowing that did not assuage her feelings of guilt. Those incidents had prompted her subsequent quest to develop a mental discipline regime to keep the power in check, and had motivated her to spend years of her life helping fight disease in developing nations.
If she unleashed the ability now, it would be deliberate, intentional.
But no less necessary.
Behind Lazarus, one of the large construction robots trundled down the drive. She couldn’t tell if there were more behind it, but this time, she didn’t have a souped-up spy car in which to escape. Not that she had any intention of running.
Dourado’s fingers flew over her laptop’s keyboard. She muttered as she worked, letting Carter and Lazarus know that she wasn’t ignorant of the threat. “I see it. It’s not recognizing the admin account I set up, but I created a backdoor that he doesn’t know about. If I can… I’m in.”
Lazarus half-turned to look at her. “Can you shut the transmitter down?”
“I don’t know that part of the system.”
“The robots then?”
“Working on it.”
Lazarus turned back to Carter. “Let’s try it this way first.”
She nodded. “Hurry.”
Lazarus pulled away from her and ran back to the front of the building, where the two electric carts blocked access to the door. She followed, but only as far as the corner, observing from a discreet distance.