His dark hair was ruffled, sticking to his forehead in sweaty clumps, and he had the dark shadow of a beard around his jaw now. And there was something else, too—a spiny protrusion growing on his face, circling and encrusting his left eye like bone before arcing over the cheek and pulling the corner of his mouth up into a sneer. Grant looked at Kane as he slept, eyes running across that hideous protrusion and feeling the frustration rising in his gut. Whatever it was, the growth had affected Kane’s vision, not simply blinding him but inexplicably triggering some kind of hallucinatory episodes. As such, it had left Kane grounded while Dr. Kazuko and the other medical staff investigated the nature of the intrusion to his flesh.
When he looked down, Grant saw that he had clenched his own hands into fists. He eased his hands open again, willing the tension from his body. “How is he?” he asked, not bothering to look at the woman he was addressing.
“He’s been asleep mostly,” Rosalia said, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the room’s sleeping occupant. “Probably a relief.”
“I guess,” Grant agreed.
“What about you?” Rosalia asked softly, standing and edging toward Grant. “Any word on Edwards?”
“They’re still trying to figure out what the condition is,” Grant told her, “but they figure it’s stone inside his head. So it’s a safe bet they’re related. Which means the cure to one might just hold the cure to the other.”
Rosalia’s lips pulled back from clenched teeth. “Damn this Ullikummis,” she cursed. “What did Kane ever do to—?”
“Got in his way,” Grant interrupted. “We all did. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for a half-dozen years. Had to take a casualty sometime.”
Grant didn’t tell her the other thing he was thinking. The third member of their cozy partnership—a trained archivist called Brigid Baptiste—had disappeared without trace, only to reappear in time to shoot Kane in the chest as he lay already wounded. That had occurred out in a cavern near the newly rebuilt settlement of Snakefishville, a cavern Kane, Grant and Rosalia had investigated as it housed an Annunaki artifact called the Chalice of Rebirth. While Brigid meant little to a newcomer like Rosalia, the woman had been a crucial member of the Cerberus team since its inception, and she shared a special bond with Kane himself—the two were anam-charas, so-called soul friends linked through eternity.
Rosalia made her way toward the door, encouraging her pale-eyed companion along beside her. “The dog needs some exercise,” she told Grant, knowing the man would want to be left alone with his best friend.
Grant looked at her and nodded sorrowfully.
“You’ll be okay here, right?” Rosalia asked. “I can stay, get one of the big tough samurai men to take care of this nuisance.”
“I’ll be fine,” Grant told her, “but thanks.” As Rosalia pushed through the door, Grant spoke once more, almost to himself. “You know, it’s the strangest feeling—finding out we’re not as immortal as we thought.”
Rosalia silently closed the door and left the ex-Magistrates alone.
Chapter 3
The silent drums were beating and Farrell looked wasted. He was a young man but he was looking old, his sunken skin drawn and pale where he had rapidly lost weight over the past few weeks. His gold hoop earring hung low on his ear, his goatee beard looked a little more ragged than normal and his usually shaved head was growing out in mismatched tufts of ginger and brown. But when Sela Sinclair looked at him across the dilapidated room they found themselves hiding in, the thing she most felt was not sorrow or worry or even desperation—it was hunger. Seeing a man that drawn, that sallow cheeked, made her stomach growl. She wanted so much to feed him, to just see him eat.
That was stress, Sinclair told herself as she looked at him. That was what it had done to him. Was doing to him.
Farrell had been a technician at the Cerberus redoubt, one of those perennial staff members who could turn his hand to any background task to keep things running smoothly. His favorite post had been running the mat-trans and he could often be found checking the diagnostics on the computer terminal linked to the man-made teleportation unit.
When Cerberus had come under attack, Farrell had been among the staff who had been caught with their pants down. Quite how Ullikummis’s forces had penetrated the redoubt remained a mystery to Farrell—hadn’t they had a security perimeter to stop this very type of attack? Somehow, whatever it was that they faced in this Ullikummis creature, it was a threat that could change the rules. And, like the rest of the complement of personnel at Cerberus, Farrell had been overpowered and imprisoned by those invading forces, incarcerated in Life Camp Zero to be indoctrinated into the ways of this new would-be master of the world, this new world order.
Farrell had played only a minor role in the subsequent breakout. Having spent days locked in a single cavernlike room with no amenities and only the most basic foodstuffs, he had been utterly bewildered when the door had pulled back and a beautiful woman and her scruffy mongrel dog had stood framed in the volcanic light, granting his release. Everything since then had been a blur. Kane and the woman—Rosalia was her name, Farrell learned later—had overpowered the troops of Ullikummis but they knew their freedom would be short-lived should reinforcements arrive. It seemed that the cult of Ullikummis was growing into a religious movement that was sweeping the country at an alarming rate, and the Cerberus people were considered a very trivial but very dangerous threat to that movement. Thus the decision had been taken to evacuate the redoubt-cum-prison, to split up the targets and keep the fifty or so Cerberus personnel safe. Farrell had been partnered with Sela Sinclair. Sinclair was a lean-muscled black woman, ex-U.S. Air Force, and had been cryogenically frozen back in the twentieth century to be revived two hundred years later. Thanks to her military background, Sinclair had acted as security detail for Cerberus, and was frequently involved in field missions. If nothing else, Farrell should be safe with her.
Lakesh had made swift contact with a black-market trader called Ohio Blue, an old friend of the Cerberus operation whose underworld contacts gave her ideal access to hiding places for the Cerberus team. Thus, Farrell and Sela Sinclair had engaged in a mat-trans jump that sent them to what had once been the southernmost edge of Arkansas, way out near the border of Louisiana, where Blue’s operation was centered. Ohio Blue was a glamorous figure. Farrell guessed she was in her late thirties, with a cascade of long blond hair that reached halfway down her back and was swept in peek-a-boo style to mask her left eye entirely. Like her name, Ohio always wore blue; the first time she and her security crew had greeted Farrell and Sinclair at the entrance to the old military redoubt, she had been dressed in a floor-length sapphire gown that glistened with sequins and had a hip-high split that left her right leg bare when she walked.
Farrell and Sinclair had traveled with six other Cerberus staff, including Brewster Philboyd and a weeping Reba DeFore. All of them were split into pairs at the destination redoubt, where Ohio’s people led them to various safehouses dotted across the area.
Ohio’s people had escorted Farrell and Sinclair to a dead town that had once been a suburb of Bradley. It looked as if a bomb had hit it, which was very likely what had happened. The asphalt of the streets was churned up into broken chunks, weeds and plants and whole great trees emerging through the wreckage that had sat, unrepaired, for two hundred years. Once upon a time, this had probably been a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb
