and he nodded, his head feeling suddenly sore as he moved it. “Jump dream,” he explained.
The human body had not been designed for the instantaneous transportation of the teleport, and one side effect was the so-called jump dream that threatened a user’s sanity. Mostly associated with the mat trans, a man-made teleportation system that the Cerberus team had employed on numerous occasions, jump dreams were accompanied by nausea and a sense of disturbed reality. However, the interphaser units had rarely generated such jump dreams, and Grant was surprised to hear his friend refer to such a thing after so long.
“You need some time?” he asked, concerned.
Kane brushed at his face, swiping at the tears. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.” His face looked red and his left eyelid was puffy, the eye itself bloodshot. “I’ll be fine,” he repeated as Grant looked at him.
Turning then, Kane led the way up a subtle incline that led to a one-story building set amid the quiet grounds. His companions followed, Rosalia’s dog scurrying ahead excitedly to scope out this new place. Off to their left was a simple wooden fence, a long strip of two horizontal boards attached to wide-spaced posts like a farmyard gate. Behind the fence, a sheer drop fell away, ending in the pebble-dappled shore of a tiny beach.
“Looks like a nice spot,” Rosalia observed as she peered over the cliff side. “Quiet.”
“Work on your tan later,” Kane growled as he marched onward. “We have us a meeting to attend.”
He was angry, he knew—not with Rosalia but with himself. Whatever that vision had been, that “jump dream,” as he had called it, it had left some mark inside him, an indelible burning behind his eye. He blinked, forcing back the salty tears that welled there once again at the memory.
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES after dawn in Tibet and the watery yellow-white orb of the sun was just starting to nudge itself over the towering mountains that dominated the landscape. The woman with the fire-red hair pulled her cloak around her as she ascended the rise that led to the cave opening, striding the final few miles of the snow-dusted mountain path, her horse abandoned with exhaustion. It was cold out here in this mountainous range where Tibet bordered China, bitingly so. In fact it was cold enough to freeze the flesh of the woman’s steed almost three hours before. She hadn’t cared—the armor-like properties of her shadow suit kept her warm, regulating her body temperature beneath the scarred black leather of the supple armor she wore like a second skin. The cloak that she wore was made of animal fur, a dead thing cinched around her throat, encasing her with its ghosts. Hung inside the cloak, a bag slapped against her hip, a large leather satchel containing something heavy. It had been better when the satchel had been contained in her horse’s saddlebag where it couldn’t irritate her, but it mattered little.
The wind blew around the woman as she clambered along the rough path, her booted heels breaking the night frost that covered it before sinking into the layer of snow that dwelled beneath like a bloated egg white. Her name was Brigid Haight and she had made this approach before, several years ago when she had been a member of the Cerberus team. That had been before Ullikummis had remade her, showing her the true path and filling her head with a secret knowledge that had always seemed just out of reach before.
Back then she had been known as Brigid Baptiste, an archivist from Cobaltville who had formed one-third of the seemingly inseparable trinity that lay at the heart of Cerberus. Where Kane had brought his integrity and Grant his strength, Brigid had brought knowledge. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Brigid had the ability to recall information to the smallest detail with photographic accuracy. She had traveled the globe under the aegis of Cerberus, expanding her experiences and her knowledge and challenging her archivist’s mind with the most complex of conundrums. Alongside Kane and Grant, Brigid Baptiste had learned of the secret history of the Earth, uncovered a conspiracy that stretched back millennia and placed the star-born Annunaki at the top of the evolutionary tree. In those days Brigid had thought that humankind should rebel against this notion, that Cerberus was engaged in a noble fight to turn these alien usurpers away and free humanity from the shackles of their subjugation. She had been naive.
Ullikummis had changed all that, his words bending her prodigious mind, letting it achieve its full potential for the first time. Now she stood reborn, and had chosen the new name of Haight. The role of the Annunaki was deeper than she had ever suspected, their tentacles reaching out beyond this simple plane of existence. The things she had seen as Brigid Baptiste had been nothing more than performances on a stage, but Brigid had been too ignorant to think to look past the curtain, beguiled to think that the play was real without ever considering the activity backstage that created the illusion in front of her eyes. Ullikummis had changed that.
Brigid Haight took a deep breath of the icy air as if challenging it to harm her, to make itself felt. Ignorantly, the air remained cold, caring nothing for the affairs of man or Annunaki.
She had come here before in search of a mythical city called Agartha. Buddhist and Taoist legends had spoken of this city, a secret enclave beneath a mountain range on the China-Tibet border from which strange gray people emerged to influence human affairs. In actuality, the city had once housed a race of aliens called the First Folk, among whom a long-lived creature called Balam had been witness to many of the most pivotal points of human history. Balam had befriended the Cerberus team, welcoming them into his underground city that stood all but deserted hundreds of years on from the days when those initial legends had first sprung up. Balam remained in the city even now, living there with his foster daughter, the hybrid spawn known as Little Quav.
It was Little Quav that brought Brigid to Agartha on this occasion under the instructions of her master, the fallen god Ullikummis. The half-human girl child was actually an Annunaki in chrysalis state. The members of the Annunaki royal family had been reborn in hybrid form on Earth, their tweaked DNA hiding their true nature until a catalyst download was applied by their mother ship, Tiamat. The two-and-a-half-year-old child known as Little Quav housed inside her the genetic sequence of the goddess Ninlil, child bride of Enlil and mother to Ullikummis. When the Annunaki, those terrible children of the serpent, had re-emerged on planet Earth, Lord Enlil, the most fearsome of their number, had sought out Little Quav to complete their ghastly pantheon. The Cerberus warriors had protected the child until an agreement could be reached that placed her in the custody of Balam until such time as she came of age. It had been a tentative solution at best, and Balam had been forced to return to hiding with the child so that she would come under no further scrutiny. Ullikummis was determined to bring his mother back to his side in his war against his father—the full nature of his scheme, however, remained unknown. While Ullikummis could not enter the secret city of Agartha without alerting the child’s watchdog, Balam’s longtime ally Brigid should be able to without raising any undue curiosity.
For a moment Brigid stopped, searching the shadow-painted mountains as they towered above her. There was an access point near here, she recalled, a physical entryway that led into the ground itself. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she peered into the darkness, scouring the base of the mountains until she found the place she sought. It was lodged within her eidetic memory, the location still vibrant despite the rudimentary change in the mountains’ snowy covering.
There was something else in her memory, too, appearing for just a fraction of a second as she delved for the hidden location in her mind’s eye—a series of golden circles disappearing into the blue, regular highlights of red and green dotted all around the pattern like a Julia set.
Then, her red-gold hair billowing around her like a lion’s mane, Brigid made her way to a familiar indentation in the snow-covered foothills, her emerald eyes seeking the opening that was hidden in the shade. Her boots slipped for a moment on the shifting snow, and then Brigid had located the path, clambering down to a clump of rocks that waited like sentries, timeless and eternal.
