The hadals set up a piercing wail. Ali was certain they were about to rush after Ike and whatever it was he'd just kidnapped from them. 'Move,' shouted Ike, and she ran
to the soldiers, who opened a way for her and Ike and his catch. She tripped and fell. Ike stumbled across her.
'In the name of the Father,' Walker intoned. 'Light 'em up.'
The soldiers opened fire on the survivors. The noise was deafening in the small chamber, and Ali closed her ears with both palms. The killing lasted less than twelve seconds. There were a few mop-up shots, then the gunfire was over and the room stank with gas vented from their guns. Ali heard a woman still screaming, and thought they'd wounded one or were torturing her.
'This way.' A soldier grabbed her. He was taking care of her. She knew him from his confessions, Calvino, an Italian stallion. His sins had been a pregnant girlfriend, a theft, little more.
'But Ike –'
'The colonel said now,' he said, and Ali saw a brawl in progress against the back wall, with Ike near the bottom of the pile. In the corner lay their little massacre. All for nothing, she thought, and let the soldier lead her away, back to the grotto floor, out through the waterfall.
For the next few hours, Ali waited by the mist. Each time a soldier came out, she questioned him about Ike. They avoided her eyes and gave no answer.
At last Walker emerged. Behind him – guarded by mercenaries – came Ike's save. They had bound the female's arms with rope and taped her mouth shut. Her hands were covered with duct tape, and she had wire wrapped around her neck as a leash. Her legs were shackled with comm-line cable. She'd been cut and was smeared with gore.
For all that, she walked like a queen, as naked as blue sky. She was not a hadal, Ali realized.
Below the neck, most Homos of the last hundred thousand years were virtually the same, Ali knew. She focused on the cranial shape. It was modern and sapiens. Except for that, there was little else to pronounce the girl's humanness.
Every eye watched the girl. She didn't care. They could look. They could touch. They could do anything. Every glance, every insult made her more superior to them. Her tattoos put Ike's to shame. They were blinding, literally. You could barely see her body for the details. The pigment that had been worked into her skin all but obliterated its natural brown color. Her belly was round, and her breasts were fat, and she shook them at one soldier, who pumped his head in and out with a downtown rhythm. There was no indication she spoke English or any other human language. From head to toe, she had been embellished and engraved and bejeweled and painted. Every toe was circled with a thin iron ring. Her feet were flat from a lifetime of walking barefoot. Ali guessed she was no more than fourteen.
'We have been advised by our scout,' Walker said, 'that this child may know what lies ahead. We leave. Immediately.'
Excluding the loss of Walker's three mercenaries, it seemed they had escaped without consequence from Cache III. They had acquired another six weeks of food and batteries, and had made a hasty uplink with the surface to let Helios know they were still in motion.
There was no sign of pursuit, despite which Ike pushed them thirty hours without a camp. He scared them on. 'We're being hunted,' he warned.
Several of the scientists who wanted to resign and return the way they'd come, chief among them Gitner, accused Ike of collaborating with Shoat to force them deeper.
Ike shrugged and told them to do whatever they wanted. No one dared cross that line.
On October 2, a pair of mercenaries bringing up the rear vanished. Their absence was not noticed for twelve hours. Convinced the men had stolen a raft and were
making a renegade bid to return home, Walker ordered five soldiers to track and capture them. Ike argued with him. What caused the colonel to reverse his order was not Ike, but a message over the walkie-talkie. The camp stilled, thinking the missing pair might be reporting in.
'Maybe they just got lost,' one of the scientists suggested.
Layers of rock garbled the transmission, but it was a British voice coming over the radio. 'Someone made a mistake,' he told them. 'You took my daughter.' The wild child made a noise in her throat.
'Who is this?' Walker demanded.
Ali knew. It was Molly's midnight lover.
Ike knew. It was the one who had led him into darkness once upon a time. Isaac had returned.
The radio went silent.
They cast downriver and did not make camp for a week.
Every lion comes from its den, All the serpents bite;
Darkness hovers, earth is silent, As their maker rests in lightland.
– 'The Great Hymn to Aten,' 1350 BC
20
DEAD SOULS
San Francisco, California
Headfirst, the hadal drew himself from the honeycomb of cave mouths. He panted feebly, starved, dizzy, rejecting his weakness. Rime coated the perfect round openings of concrete pipes. The fog was so cold.
He could hear the sick and dying in the pyramided tunnels. The illness was as lethal as a sweep of plague or a poisoned stream or the venting of some rare gas through their arterial habitat.
His eyes streamed pus. This air. This awful light. And the emptiness of these voices. The sounds were too far away and yet too close. There was too much space. Your thoughts had no resonance here. You imagined something and the idea vanished into nothingness.
Like a leper, he draped hides over his head. Hunched inside the tattered skin curtains, he felt better, more able to see. The tribe needed him. The other adult males had been killed off. It was up to him. Weapons. Food. Water. Their search for the messiah would have to wait.
Even given the strength to escape, he would not have tried, not while children and women still remained here alive. All together they would live. Or all together they would die. That was the way. It was up to him. Eighteen years old, and he was now their elder.
Who was left? Only one of his wives was still breathing. Three of his children. An image of his infant son rose up – as cold as a pebble. Aiya. He made the heartbreak into rage.
The bodies of his people lay where they had pitched or reeled or staggered. Their corruption was strange to see. It had to be something in this thin, strangling air. Or the light itself, like an acid. He had seen many corpses in his day, but none so quickly gone to rot this way. A single day had passed here, and not one could be salvaged for meat.