to escape. Father has done everything in his power to limit its existence, yet...”
“Yet he still makes us toil, unraveling the secrets built into it on an atomic scale,” Negari responded. He rose, then gently lowered himself between her open thighs. His hands cupped her face tenderly, his emerald eyes meeting her crimson gaze. “I can advance us without letting the totality loose on the world, without having it infect us. We would be ourselves, mightier than anything this world could hope to contain.”
Neekra reveled as Negari put his words aside and utilized his tongue and lips for other, much more pleasurable things. His kisses, his nibbling of her newly revived flesh provided an escape from the agonies inflicted upon her, at that time from the rage of Enlil, and outside of the memory, from the assault of Kane.
The time of needles came up next, after years of Negari’s experimentation. He’d isolated the particular protein chain that could be turned into the base root of a world-encompassing hive mind. The first experiment was on himself, and slowly the natural telepathy of the Igigi race became stronger. Within him, the proteins reproduced, growing, laying the groundwork of sheathing along his nervous system, which acted as the conducting antenna coil for his thoughts. As soon as that happened, he reached out to Neekra.
He spoke to her, mentally, without outside Annunaki technology, reaching blindly around the globe, over a mile of ocean water or, even more impressively, through the crust of a planet.
That night, Neekra’s body came alive with the touch of a lover who no longer needed to be in the same room. Neekra cried out, thrashing at his ministrations, biting down hard on her lip to prevent her uttering his name.
Still, she was found out. She was cornered, quizzed, whipped and battered by an enraged Enlil.
Negari had gone too far, committed himself to an experiment, become something that was greater than Enlil, and this was a world where none could be greater than he. He had not crossed a universe to become the second-best in his own Olympus. He was to be Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, yet Negari dared to slap their leader in the face.
Igigi had been meant to be the servant class—never mind that Neekra was the result of Enlil’s night with one of those serfs.
“What is good for you, Father, is forbidden for me?” Neekra gasped, stretched against the wall, naked and helpless. She wouldn’t shrink, not even as vulnerable as she was now.
Enlil pressed against her. “You act as if I care what happens to you.”
Then Enlil showed Neekra exactly how much he “cared” about her, brutally, slowly grinding her cheek against the wall with his forearm as he drove into her again and again. All he was doing was stoking the fires of hatred, the hunger for revenge that would cross centuries unabated, growing only in depth of spite and disgust.
Soon, Neekra whispered into the ear of her younger self, something that did as little for the remembered image as if she’d given promises to a baby photo of herself.
The dream broke. A little bit of vision was still left in the dead eyes of Gamal, and she saw collapsed figures all about her. She’d gone to full armor in an effort to protect herself, her “piggyback brains” from being assaulted by the humans who caught on to how she’d reconfigured the man’s body to accommodate the telepathic organs, the biological computer that granted her the seemingly impossible powers necessary to shake the world.
No one around her was conscious. She tried to move, but all around her was crust; her flesh turned to ash with black, ugly sap crawling from cracks in her surface.
Don’t have long, she thought. Nehushtan will awaken the least injured with the least energy first, then tap into him.
Neekra stretched to reach for one of her spawn. Some must have been left alive.
And there were. She could feel two of them, staying deep in the rubble of crypts that had been struck by grenades and bullets. Those two hid, knowing that there would be others to come to her aid immediately. Neekra had programmed them that way, making certain she had a backup plan in case things went to crap.
They had gone beyond crap. The spark of life in the carcass she inhabited was fading fast, and as she did a mental inventory of herself, she saw the deterioration of the protein strings that made up her “telepathic antennae”—the webbing of natural materials that turned her into a living psychic transmitter, able to manipulate thought as well as cellular structure. The protein “biocomputers” also could create the telekinetic fields that gave her superhuman strength and durability far beyond even her father’s brute force at his prime.
She pushed out a blackened polyp of tar, separating cracked chunks of Gamal’s ashen corpse. Gamal had been one of the people she had been drawn to, three charismatic figures who would be attuned to her, to be her pawns. Neekra’s body was somewhere, operating on autopilot, chosen by Enlil to be the guardian of the tomb of Negari, her lover. Neekra was an excised intelligence, her lobotomized body an engine of destruction whose sole purpose was the death of anyone foolish enough to attempt a rescue of the Igigi who dared to ascend to unearned godhood.
Whether Neekra’s wandering ghost was an afterthought, or a callously calculated punishment, she knew she was a nomad. She was an infection, capable of only infesting one host at a time. To find that host, she was limited to a psyche that could handle the power of her mind and spirit; otherwise she would burn him out, but it still needed to be a mind that she could overpower.
Now, all she had for a body, for a means of travel, was the combination of two blobs of semisentient snot that she’d birthed from Gamal’s body. She could last in them for a while, but it was nothing like she could do with a host such as her last one.
She injected what little of herself was left into their cytoplasm, mixing with them, letting the two amorphous entities unite. They each had undamaged protein string centers—four, in fact—which she laced together into a matrix that could sustain her until she could recover.
With that, the blob carrying her consciousness stretched out pseudopods, latching on to imperfections on the ground, swinging itself along, making for the corkscrew that would lead her to the surface.
The light-sensitive sensory organs in the membranes of her host body cringed at the overabundance of sunlight, even though dawn wouldn’t break for another five minutes.
All she needed was to scurry to a thicket of thorns, burrow under the sand and wait.
Hiding was her only solace, at least until she could find someone, something.
And then it would be a game of catch-up.
Kane and Durga had been put on a trail now. They had been after her hiding place. There, they would subdue her body and then attempt to destroy it. But by battling her, they would loosen what bonds held Negari in place.
Doing that would free him, and if Neekra had caught up by then, she’d retrieve herself and awaken as she was meant to be.
She crawled under the graying, ever-lightening sky across the arid dirt toward the dry grasses of the tree line.
A scaled foot set down in her path.
It was Durga. He’d vowed to destroy her, and now she was vulnerable to him. The mega-cellular form she was trapped in couldn’t withstand the deadly venom he stored in his fangs. He had used enough to blind her previous avatar, but...
“Don’t cringe from me,”
