Commtact came to life and Grant advised that he had found the local doctor and would be along shortly.
A couple of minutes later, having quizzed the teenagers some more and assured themselves that the two were all right—physically, at least—Kane took Brigid to one side and asked what she made of them.
“They’re whacked out on something,” Brigid concluded. “The girl’s seeing visions wherever she looks. She told me the sea was being dragged to and fro by the moon.”
Kane grimaced. “That’s kind of true, I guess. You know, with tides and so on.”
To Brigid, it sounded as if Kane was trying to convince himself. “Teenage girls don’t say things like that, Kane,” she told him. “She was talking about a tesseract being hidden within the angles of my hair. A place where I kept my memories.”
“They’ve been smoking something, all right,” Kane growled, looking around the campfire for evidence of cigarette butts or drug-taking equipment. There was nothing there; all he could see were the shells of smoke-damaged shellfish, cracked and empty.
“Or perhaps eating it,” Brigid realized as she crouched by the empty mollusk shells to put her boots back on. “I think they had a little snack out here, Kane—look.”
Kane cocked an eyebrow as he picked up and examined one of the empty shells between thumb and forefinger. “Breakfast?” he suggested.
“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.
“What are they?” Kane asked.
Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.
“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.
“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.
When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.
“No ideas?” he asked.
“It’s from the same genetic strain as mollusks and crustaceans,” Brigid assured him, “but I can’t place the type. Not off the top of my head, anyway.”
“And that’s a lot of head,” Kane mumbled.
As they spoke, Grant returned, accompanied by the church warden and a local medical practitioner called Mallory Price. Price was a tall, gangly woman with a gaunt face and thin blond hair, and she looked very much as if she had just been woken up.
“What do we have?” Mallory asked as she approached the two teenagers, glancing over at Kane and Brigid. Her voice was husky, as if she had spent a lifetime shouting or smoking. Kane couldn’t tell which.
“I found them in a trancelike state under the pier,” Kane explained as he joined the medical woman. “They just didn’t seem to want to wake up.”
“The girl said some stuff,” Brigid added as she walked over to join them, her boots back on her feet once more. “Unusual things, not what you’d expect from a teen.”
Price checked the two teenagers briefly, but other than their general disorientation, she could find nothing ostensibly wrong with them. “They’re both suffering a little bit from exposure,” she told Kane and the others, “but they’re young. They’ll be fine.”
“What about their altered state of mind when he found them?” Kane asked.
The woman shrugged. “Teenagers being teenagers,” she said. “Who knows what they’re getting hooped up on. You probably did the same when you were their age.”
Overhearing this, Grant laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Kane,” he muttered.
Kane opened his fist and showed the mollusk shell to Mallory. “Have you seen one of these before, Doc?” he asked, letting her handle the little shell.
The medical woman turned it over in her hands. “What is that?” she queried. “Some kind of snail?”
The church warden, an older man called Vernor, with thinning hair that was turning gray at the temples, had made his way over by then, and he sucked at his teeth as he peered at the shell in Mallory’s hands. “Could be a crab, maybe?” he suggested.
“Could be a lot of things, Vern,” Kane agreed.
The old church warden looked up at Kane with an expression of concern. “Seen a few of these things wash up just lately. You think this has something to do with how these kids are acting, Kane?”
“Let’s get these kids inside and see whether we can make any sense out of all of this,” Kane suggested noncommittally.
“I KNOW.”
The words came as a whisper from the thin gray lips of a creature called Balam. He was fifteen hundred years old and he had been born as the last of the Archons, a race that confirmed a pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan millennia before.
He was a small figure, humanoid in appearance but with long, thin arms and a wide, bulbous head that narrowed to a pointed chin. Entirely hairless, Balam’s skin was a pink so washed out as to appear gray. Within his strangely expressive face, Balam had two wide, upslanting eyes, as black as bottomless pools, their edges tapering to points. His tiny mouth resided below two small, flat nostrils that served as his nose.
He reached out before him, spreading the six fingers of each hand as if to stave off something that was attacking, and a gasp of breath came from his open mouth.
There was a child playing in the underground garden that spread before him. She was human in appearance and perhaps three years old, wearing a one-piece suit in a dark indigo blue that seemed to match the simple garment that Balam himself wore. The child turned at Balam’s words, her pretty, snow-blond hair swishing behind her in simple ponytail, her large, blue eyes wide with curiosity.
“Wha’ is it?” the child asked, peering up from the daisy chain she had been making on the little expanse of lawn before Balam’s dwelling.
Balam looked at the child with those strange, fathomless eyes and wondered if she might recognize the fear on his face, the fear that had threatened for just a moment to overwhelm him.
The child smiled at him, chuckling a little in that strange, deep way that human children will. “Uncle Bal-bal?” she asked. “Wha’ is it?”
“The Ontic Library has been breached,” Balam said, his words heavy with meaning, fully aware that the child could never comprehend the gravity of them. “Pack some toys, Quav. We’re going to visit some old friends.”
With that, Balam ushered the child—known as Little Quav
