ever so slightly, and his lips mouthed the word no so quietly that Kane wasn’t sure that the visitor had actually spoken at all. “It saddens me to have to come to you at this time, but I have been made aware of a situation that requires urgent attention.”
Brigid Baptiste pulled up a free chair to join Balam at the desk, while Kane took several steps closer until he loomed over them all, his shadow dark on the alien’s domelike pate.
“What sort of a situation?” Brigid probed gently.
Balam raised his head slightly, and Brigid could not be sure if his fathomless eyes were staring at her or through her. “Many millennia ago, the Annunaki established a store that would house all of their knowledge,” he explained. “This storehouse was called the Ontic Library, for it contained all of the caveats that defined the real from the imagined or the spiritually malleable.”
Brigid nodded, aware of the philosophical resonance of the term ontic.
“Over the past few days I have felt things in my head,” Balam continued, clearly referring to his telepathic nature, “that make me suspect that the library has been breached and may, in fact, be being broken apart.”
Kane shrugged, clearly unimpressed. “So it’s a library,” he said. “Big deal.”
Balam turned to face Kane, staring at him with those strangely expressive black eyes, but he took a long, calming breath before he actually spoke. “This is not a library as you understand the term,” he explained. “This is a storehouse for the very rules governing this reality. Should it be broken apart, destroyed, there is a significant risk that ‘the real’—that is, your world—will cease to hold integrity.”
“So, the world is under threat?” Kane asked, incredulous.
“More,” Balam stated, “the very rules that underpin the world are threatened. The Ontic Library is a store of knowledge so powerful that it holds the structure of ‘the real’ in place. Without it, your world, your universe may very well cease to hold together.”
Kane looked uncomfortable at the thought, and his brow furrowed with irritation. “Why would they do that? Why create something that could destroy everything around you?”
“Is your knowledge of human history so poor?” Balam challenged in his soft-spoken manner. “Or have you conveniently forgotten the bloodshed caused by humankind barely two centuries ago at the push of a single button?”
“But a library,” Kane said, still trying to comprehend the concept. “Why would they—?”
“The Annunaki are multidimensional beings, Kane,” Balam stated. “Do you concern yourself that food may spoil in your larder, or that a pot might overboil while inside your oven? Everything has a risk, even the retention of knowledge.”
Kane nodded, still feeling uncomfortable at the notion he had just been presented with.
Sitting at the desk, Brigid leaned forward to regain Balam’s attention. “So, where is this Ontic Library located?”
“Beneath the ocean you call the Pacific,” Balam stated emotionlessly, “off the coast of the barony of Snakefishville.”
“Hope,” Brigid breathed, a horrible realization knotting the pit of her stomach.
“Had to fucking be,” Kane growled, clearly irritated that he hadn’t realized it before now.
BACK IN THE FISHING VILLE of Hope, a separate Cerberus field team agents had been operating out of the shantytown area that surrounded the main ville. Like Kane’s group, this team was also a three-person operation, but they had journeyed to the overwhelmed ville using an interphaser unit and had traveled the remaining distance on foot, carrying much-needed medical supplies to the area. Right now, the three operatives were handing out antibiotics to a youthful family that was suffering a bout of skin rashes due to the poor sanitation of the area.
Domi looked at the eldest of the six children in the covered shack where her team had set up base. The child was a dark-haired boy of perhaps four years old, and Domi recognized the fear in the child’s eyes. He was afraid of her because she looked different, Domi knew, but she wasn’t here to make friends. Instead, she ignored him, turning her attention to the busy dirt street that ran between the slanting temporary dwellings while her colleagues, Edwards and Johnson, doled out the relevant medical supplies.
Domi was a small-framed woman, standing barely five feet tall, with the slender build of an adolescent girl. Her skin was a vivid white the color of chalk, and was complemented by similarly colored hair, cut short in a pixie style. She wore a simple outfit that left much of her unusual skin on display, cutoff denim shorts that sat low to her belly and finished high on the hip, and an abbreviated crop top in a dull tan color that clung tightly to her small, pert breasts. Contrary to her usual style, she had elected to wear shoes while round the refugee camp, a pair of muddy pumps with a gripping, cushioned sole; she would prefer to go barefoot given the choice.
Domi was a child of the Outlands, having grown up far from the protective walls of Cobaltville, where she had ended up prior to joining the Cerberus team. As such, her outlook was quite different—and often less diplomatic—than that held by her colleagues. A fearsome six-inch knife was strapped to her ankle, and she wore a Detonics Combat Master handgun in a leather holster slung low on her bare, chalk-white hip. Overall, Domi looked like a human figure that had been carved from bone. But it was her fiercely darting eyes that added to the feeling of otherness in the people who saw her. In stark contrast to her pure white flesh, Domi’s eyes were a deep scarlet color, like two glistening pools of blood.
Right now, Domi’s bloodred eyes were scanning the street, watching the many figures trotting along it with their meager belongings, their buckets and bowls of water, moth-eaten blankets and clothes. Mangy dogs and flea-bitten cats stepped out of the way to avoid the humans as they went about their business, and the street itself stank of human waste. Domi wrinkled her nose at the stench, all the more repulsed for her senses were unusually perceptive. Where Edwards and Johnson had become used to the unpleasant reek of Hope, Domi remained disgusted and a little nauseous despite being there for over a day.
A group of people was making its way down the street, six in all. Dressed in rags like the others around them, they seemed somehow different to Domi, giving her the impression that they were much more organized. She watched them for a moment, realizing that despite their ragged appearances, they were walking in perfect time, like soldiers at a parade. Not soldiers, she realized—birds. They moved like flocks of birds on the wing, turning as one.
Domi watched as the six people strode past, their faces masked behind the hoods of their dirt-caked cloaks. Weird, she thought.
From behind her, back in the shack where her colleagues were distributing medicines, Domi heard Edwards growl. She turned just in time to see the tall, muscular man lunge up from where he sat, knocking a vial of medicine from the table in his haste. An ex-Magistrate, Edwards was a powerfully built man, dressed in his preferred garb of combat fatigues with shirt open to show the drab-olive undershirt that clung to his chiseled pectorals. Edwards’s hair was shaved very close to his scalp, and the start of a beard was forming on his chin now in what seemed an almost comical imitation. His right ear was misshapen where it had been clipped by a bullet during an escapade on Thunder Isle.
Sitting beside Edwards, Henny Johnson gazed up at him with openmouthed surprise as he lunged up from the table. A little taller with a little more flesh on her bones than Domi, Henrietta Johnson wore her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below the lobes of her ears. She was a
