by David Klass
She reaches out to me.
I hold out my hands to her.
“Jack?” she calls.
“I’m here, P.J.!” I shout back, and reach toward the blue eye, trying to poke through it to another world.
My fingers touch it and break some kind of barrier. It feels like reaching beneath the surface of a freezing lake. Then there’s a thunderous roar that nearly knocks me off my feet. I duck down and cover my ears. It must be a cave-in! I’ll be buried alive in seconds.
But no rocks fall on me.
“Jair?” It’s my mother’s voice.
I look up at her. She’s standing, and so are the ninja priests. They’re staring at my right hand, which is in a fist, still clamped tight to my ear. I lower it and slowly open my fingers. In the center of my palm is what looks like a pulsing blue teardrop.
The ninja priests drop to their knees, while my mother steps forward. “Well done, Eko,” she whispers.
31
My mother and I stand together, waiting for a miracle. The Star of Dann is now resting in an ornate little chalice that sits between us on the cave floor. It’s projecting a dark blue luminescence that covers the two of us like a sorcerer’s cloak.
The ninja priests who accompanied us on our mission stand a little way off, watching and also waiting for something amazing to occur.
The dark blue light makes my arms and neck tingle, but that hardly qualifies as a miracle. Ten minutes pass and the suspense starts to wear off. Finally I walk outside the sheet of blue radiance, head over to a nearby rock, and sit down. “Are you sure this is going to work?” I ask. “Whatever that blue thingamajig is supposed to do, it’s sure taking a long time to get going.”
An odd thing happens. The ninja priests don’t seem to hear my question. None of them even throw me a glance. Their eyes remain riveted on the Star of Dann.
A few seconds later, my mom also steps outside the mantle of blue light, and I notice that they don’t react to her movement, either. “They can’t see us,” she answers my questioning gaze. “And they can’t hear us or smell us.”
“Why not?” I ask. “I can see you clearly.”
“And I can see you and hear you, Jair.” She nods.
“Jack,” I remind her.
“But to everyone outside the protection of the Star of Dann, we have become ghosts,” she tells me.
That’s a little hard to swallow. I don’t feel like a phantom. I’m still one hundred and seventy-five pounds of Jack Danielson, unshaven, hungry, and slightly frostbitten from my long night in the cave. I walk over to the ninja priests and wave my arms at them. They don’t even give me a glance.
One of them has been a hard-ass toward me the whole trip. He’s a sour-faced little man who was always telling me what to do or ordering me to keep quiet. I throw a punch at him, and stop my fist an inch before his nose. He looks at me and right through me. I step right in front of him and jab my finger at his eyeball. He doesn’t even blink.
“Are you done yet?” my mother asks.
“Not quite yet,” I tell her. I crouch down in front of the curmudgeonly ninja and say, “Yo, lemon-face. I think you’ve got cave lice. And you need a bath.”
He scratches his nose and goes on staring at the Star of Dann in the silver cup.
“We don’t have time to joke around,” my mother reminds me. “We’ve got to get your father out of the fortress.”
“That should be a lot easier to do now that we’re invisible,” I point out. “Are our weapons invisible, too?”
“Clothes, weapons, and whatever you were carrying when the Blue Star touched you.”
“Then let’s go get Dad,” I say, gripping the handle of my scimitar. “But are you sure this cloak of invisibility will work at long range?”
“I don’t know,” she confesses. “That’s why you’re going to bring the Blue Star with us.” She walks over to the chalice.
“Don’t you mean we’re bringing it with us?”
“You must carry it. You are the Prince of Dann.”
“You’re the Queen of Dann,” I point out. To be honest, I’m a little afraid that the Star of Dann may be pissed off at me for dumping it in an Amazon backwater.
“I married into the royal family, but you are your father’s son, of the direct blood lineage of Dann himself. He found the Star and you must carry it with you to light our way.”
She picks up the chalice and tips the Star of Dann out into a tiny silver locket that dangles on a thin chain. “Wear it around your neck.”
As she pours the star from chalice to locket, the ninja priests look startled.
I try to imagine it from their point of view. If my mom’s right, and they can’t see us, then it must look to them like the Blue Star just floated up from the silver cup, and is levitating three feet above the cave floor.
I reach out and take the chain from her, and gently snap the locket shut. The Blue Star dwindles to a spark, as if settling comfortably into its new home.
The ninja priests freak out. “It’s gone!” one of them shouts, jumping up and grasping his sword.
“They’re gone, too!” a second one observes. “The Queen and the beacon of hope! They must have taken it!”
“Or it’s taken them! What do we do now, Donnerell?” they ask their leader.
“Stay and wait,” he answers softly. “It’s all up to them now.”
32
We emerge from black cave into dark night. Clouds blot out the moon and stars so thoroughly that it’s easy to imagine we’re still deep inside the cavern. But a numbing night wind blasts my face, so we must indeed be aboveground, out in the open, heading for the dreaded Fortress of Aighar.
Eko taught me to pick my footing through blackness, but traversing what feels like the Himalayas without a flashlight is tricky. A single misstep on one of the ice patches and I’ll plummet down a fissure, taking the Star of Dann and all hope for the future with me.
My mom walks ahead of me, picking the best path, and I’m pretty sure that a mountain goat couldn’t do a better job. We don’t exchange a word, even telepathically. She’s completely focused on the mission ahead, and I guess that’s understandable. She’s not only trying to save her husband, but she’s also attempting to turn the tide of a centuries-old war that is all but lost.
I remind myself that she’s been fighting since she was a little girl. If we don’t succeed today, everything she’s loved and striven for will be lost. In the darkness, I listen to her footsteps, steady, confident, and determined.
We’re wearing goggles to ward off the glare, which even in darkness radiates up from the mountainside. The hoods of our coats have bands that stretch over our mouths like scarves and act as air enhancers. We’re at a pretty high altitude, in a world with a damaged atmosphere, and even with help it’s hard to get a good breath.
The first light of dawn glazes the high peaks, and I glimpse a bleak and lifeless landscape. It’s a mountain wasteland, an alpine desert, with not a tree or a hut or even a stray wildflower to soften the desolation.
Drones buzz overhead, but they don’t slow down to give us so much as a look or a sniff. They can scan for shapes and movement, for body heat, and even for telepathic thought, but they can’t spot ghosts.
I walk next to my mother and match her silence and moodiness. My own emotions are strong and complicated. I’m about to try to save the man who abandoned me as a child. I don’t want him to die, but I also don’t know how I’ll react when I see him.
The sun is higher now—its unfiltered radiation does a slow burn through the layers of my protective coat.
We round a craggy precipice and I see a thin ribbon up ahead, snaking through the peaks and valleys. It’s a road, but it’s not yellow brick and filled with dancing Munchkins. It’s as black as pitch, and I’m pretty sure that instead of leading us to the Emerald City of Oz it will take us straight to hell.
Still, a road is a road, and my mother heads right for it. Soon we’re jogging side by sid
e on a six-foot-wide pathway of crushed black stones. It’s hard to run this way in high altitude, but we have no choice. My father is set to die at noon, and the sun has already separated from the jagged horizon.
My mother runs in a steady rhythm, barely breathing harder as we climb steep slopes or changing her running motion as we speed down into cleft valleys. She would have definitely challenged the leaders in the New York Marathon.
For a moment I flash back to Central Park, and my run around the reservoir on the night that launched me on this adventure. It’s a good thing I was in training. I’m more than twenty years younger than my mom, and I can barely keep up with her.
Our narrow pathway joins another thoroughfare, and then merges with a third one. We are soon on a wider roadway, and we spot other travelers.
They’re wrapped up to protect themselves from the extremes of temperature and the radiation. Even so, I can see that none of them are fully human. It’s a Via Appia full of Frankensteins of nature—chimeras and cyborgs with jumbled DNA and skulls full of microcircuits.
I glimpse hideous features beneath hoods and fur hats—viperlike fangs flash behind red lips, and machine-cold eyes gleam from otherwise human faces. They’re all either traveling on foot or riding nematodes—none are flying with antigravity jackets or zipping around on levitation sleds. I guess the Dark Army likes to control its airspace, and the drones will shoot down anything airborne.
A forbidding mountain looms in the distance. As we jog closer I recognize it, though it’s hard to believe that such a thing could be man-made, or rather Dark Army–made. This was the terrifying image the computer wiz showed us in the Dannites’ subterranean desert hideout. In real life it’s even more menacing—the biggest, baddest castle of the Dark Ages, rendered creepier by futuristic science.
At its base, licking up with a thousand poisonous tongues, is the river of acid. The metal walls rise above it to such heights that they dwarf the surrounding mountains. At the top I glimpse the battlements that can slide to chomp on unwanted airborne visitors.
The road we’re following is the only way in. “Let’s join these cyborgs,” my mother says to me, and falls in behind three tall, black-cloaked figures. “When the gate opens for them, we’ll slip in.”
“Sounds good,” I tell her. “What do we do when we get inside? Do you think there’s an escalator to the roof?”
She doesn’t look amused. I guess using humor to take the edge off a scary situation isn’t appreciated by the royal family of Dann. “Careful,” she warns. “Here come the guards. They can’t see you, hear you, or smell you, but their senses are acute. If you so much as kick a tiny pebble, they’ll devour us.”
33
Two large shapes bound toward us on four legs. As they draw closer, I shiver. They’re beautiful and horrible at the same time. Powerful legs drive their large, low-slung torsos forward, tufted tails lash the air, and their ferocious yet noble faces are framed by flowing red-brown manes. Lions!
The three cyborgs stop walking, and don’t move so much as a biomechanical finger. My mother also stands stock-still, and I freeze-tag myself.
“Are they real?” I ask her, watching their flowing manes and flashing teeth as they gallop toward us and growl deep-throated warnings.
“Of course not,” she answers. “The last real lions went extinct in the middle of the twenty-first century, with all the other big cats. These are clones made from stored DNA, engineered to follow commands and report back to overseers inside the fortress.”
Her answer saddens me, and also makes me feel personally responsible. So the King of the Beasts died out in my own century. Some of the cubs I saw in zoos on family trips must have ended up among the last members of their species.
I read somewhere that 10,000 years ago the two large land mammals most widely spread on earth were lions and humans. Lions were in Africa, Asia, India, and all through the Middle East. How strange that man should have taken over and destroyed the earth, while the lions—far stronger in every way—were hunted down, herded onto game reserves and into zoos, and driven out of existence.
The lion guards reach us. They have handsome, leonine faces with red eyes that glow unnaturally, lit from inside. As they stand sniffing and growling, their bloodred eyes flash over the cyborg travelers, scanning them.
My mother and I wait motionless a few paces back. The lions are enormous—they must each weigh five hundred pounds. But they’re also keenly sensitive—I can see their noses and ears twitching. Something tells me that they would not hesitate to charge an invisible foe, and that being pinned down by those enormous paws and torn apart by those jaws would not be a pleasant way to die.
I guess the three travelers check out okay, because the lion sentries bound away as quickly as they came, and we all proceed down the road toward the castle.
As we draw close to it, I inhale an acrid smell that creeps inside my throat and nostrils and makes me cough and gag.
“That’s the acid in the moat,” my mother cautions me, hearing me struggle for breath. “Be very careful.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?” I try to ask, but I can’t get the words out. The acid is setting fire to my lungs! The air enhancers we’re using don’t seem able to filter out the noxious stench. Mom, help! I shout out to her telepathically. I can’t breathe!
Try to hold your breath! she suggests. We just have to make it across the bridge.
It’s hard to hold your breath when you don’t have much breath to hold. I lock my lips together, clamp my nostrils shut with my fingers, and follow the three cyborgs out onto the bridge. They don’t seem affected by the fumes—I guess their lungs are more robotic than human.
The bridge is wide and dark—a great iron plank. As we start across, I have the strange feeling that the river of acid beneath is alive and aware of us. It bubbles up higher and hisses suspiciously.
The moat can’t be more than fifty feet wide, but the trek across the bridge seems endless. I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer, so I rip a bead off the necklace that Eko gave me long ago when we went diving on the Outer Banks, and open my mouth to swallow it. As soon as my lips part, the acid fumes force their way in.
One whiff of the bubbling brew nearly knocks me off my feet. I cough and feel faint but just before I topple over, the condensed oxygen from Eko’s bead kicks in and I’m suddenly okay again.
I glance at my mother. The Queen of Dann is too proud to complain, but she looks like she’s about to asphyxiate. I offer her a bead. Mom, this will help you breathe.
She swallows the bead and nods gratefully. And then she sends me an urgent message: Don’t let the vapors touch you!
Up ahead, I see that the crimson and black tongues licking upward from the acid river have geysered high above the bridge and completely encircled the cyborgs. It looks like they’re captive inside a living, probing mist. The miasma shifts and billows, and its grasping tentacle-like edges come within inches of me. I jerk away, but there’s not much room to dodge.
What’s happening? I ask my mother.
They’re being checked one last time before being granted admission to the fortress.
Checked how?
Validated as Dark Army down to the cellular level. When they were created, I.D. markers were planted in their DNA. If the vapors brush you, all is lost.
Easy advice to give, but nearly impossible to follow, as bright tongues from the river flick around us.
My mother and I bob and weave, duck and jump, like two shadowboxers in the fight of our lives. Somehow we keep from being touched.
The vapors finally recede back into the moat, and the cyborgs walk forward again. The bridge appears to lead smack into the metal wall of the castle, but as we get close a spider crack appears on the metallic facade. I see that it’s the outline of a semicircular door.
The cyborgs are now five feet from the metal wall, and we’re right behind them. The spider crack thickens and darkens, and suddenly the portal slides open. The cybo
rgs hurry inside, and my mother and I dash forward and just make it in before the doorway seals back up.
We’re in a small, dark transitional space—not inside the fortress yet but no longer outside. A strong wind blows so hard that it almost knocks me over. Then I realize it’s not blowing but rather air is being sucked out with such force that I feel my skin stretching off my face and my hair is yanked straight up. What’s going on? I ask my mom as an orange light flashes across the tiny chamber.
Re-oxygenation and sterilization. They’re just making sure no unwanted pathogens get in.
The wind blows again, more gently, as new air is pumped in, and then the other side of the air lock opens and we step out into the Fortress of Aighar.
34
It’s a crowded, cavernous space that reminds me of an Escher drawing with stairways leading to other stairways and hallways that seem to bend in upon themselves. The three cyborgs hurriedly walk off and my mother and I stay by the door, taking it in.
If there’s safety in being lost in a throng then we should be more secure in this bustling chaos, but to me it feels more threatening. For the first time I see the population that intends to take over what’s left of the earth, and I start to understand what fate my parents spent all these years fighting against.
Dark Army life-forms are all around us, designed for survival under the increasingly harsh conditions of a deteriorating world. They’ve shed their coats and hats because the temperature inside the fortress is regulated, and I see them clearly as they pass.
Some of them might almost be human if one or two features hadn’t been augmented with the DNA of another species. They are the saddest to me, because something inside me wants to reach out to them and call them brother. Then I see their mechanical eyes or taloned hands and know that there’s no kinship possible.
Others appear to have crawled straight out of a medieval bestiary—nightmarish creatures that are too freakish to be characterized as human, animal, or cyborg, let alone mammal, reptile, or amphibian. Their genetic reshufflings may have given them a better chance in the survival of the fittest, but a steep price was paid for that. I peer into their eyes as they pass and it’s very clear they are not of nature—they all appear soulless. Their creators, in appropriating God’s power to fashion new life-forms, seem to have lost the spark of the divine.