by James Axler
Balam continued to look at Kane, waiting for the man to meet his eyes once more.
Kane stepped away, admiring his work. “Field dressing ain’t my speciality, but it’ll hold for now.” Then he looked Balam in the eye. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
“We have something to talk about, friend Kane,” Balam said. “I have told you my story, but that is only half of the tale, is it not? You of all people would know what Brigid Baptiste was doing, would you not?”
Reluctantly, Kane nodded. “You can see that things have got kind of messed up around here,” he said with typical understatement. “Baptiste, too. She’s not with Cerberus right now, and I really don’t know if what you saw—the person who shot you—was her.”
“She was different but she was still Brigid,” Balam said with arch simplicity.
“Yeah,” Kane agreed, tugging at his shirt and revealing the shadow suit he wore beneath. Its black skin was torn and frayed in places and the area that should cover his heart was missing, the dark hairs of his chest visible through the two-inch-wide tear that lay there. “Baptiste shooting you only makes you a part of an exclusive club,” he said.
Balam could barely believe what he was hearing. “S-s-she shot you, too?” he spluttered.
Kane nodded. “Something shot me,” he said. “Something with Brigid’s face.”
Kane paused, and Balam waited as the man struggled with what he had to say.
“She had Quav with her at the time,” Kane stated. “I couldn’t do anything. It was so fast. It was all so—” he stopped, trying to find the right word but failing “—so fast.”
“You and Brigid were friends, close friends,” Balam said.
“More than that,” Kane acknowledged, recalling their anam-chara bond, which linked them through eternity. “But something’s gone wrong with her, something inside. And it’s Ullikummis’s fault, just like this whole base is Ullikummis’s fault, this whole damn world and the mess it’s now in.”
“Kane,” Balam said slowly, his voice firm, “I am sorry. I know how much Brigid means to you. I see how you look at each other.”
Kane shrugged with impatience. “Well…”
The strange infirmary with its dark tendrils of stone across once immaculate surfaces, grasping like the tentacles of an octopus, was silent for almost a minute as the two figures remained in silence, each pondering his own concerns, his own losses.
“And what of you?” Balam asked finally. “The wound on your chest isn’t the only one, I can see.” Delicately, Balam brought his six-fingered hand up to his own face, brushing his long fingers along his cheek by his left eye in indication. “You have taken…a blow of some sort?”
In unconscious imitation, Kane touched at the callused area beside his blind eye. “Something hit me,” he explained. “Something alive, I think. My vision comes and goes.”
“You’re blind?” Balam asked for clarification.
“No,” Kane said. “It’s hard to see, and sometimes I don’t. But I’m seeing something else. His memories, those of Ullikummis. I can’t explain.”
“Kane, you are going into battle with your vision seriously impaired,” Balam stated, clearly horrified. “A human would need to harbor a death wish to do that. I understand that you have lost Brigid—”
“No, I haven’t,” Kane interrupted, anger firing his voice. “She’s out there and I’ll bring her back.”
Balam looked at the muscular figure of the ex-Mag for a long moment, studying for the first time how much Kane had changed physically. He held himself slightly stooped now, as if weary with fatigue, and his hair was ragged, unwashed and caught in tangles that reached past his collar. His chin was dark with a semigrown beard, tufts of ginger in its muddy brown.
“You are facing an enemy who has destroyed your base,” Balam realized, “and taken your friend, perverting her into something that neither of us truly recognize. But, take solace in this fact—you are not alone in your struggle.” As he spoke Balam reached up, his long arms shifting across the gulf between himself and Kane, his snakelike fingers grasping Kane’s. “I am pledged with the guardianship of Little Quav, a pledge I take seriously. We stand now together.”
Kane held Balam’s hands in his, feeling how cold the creature of the First Folk’s skin seemed compared to his own. “Two wounded soldiers, huh?” he muttered.
“I believe, as you might say, that we still have some tricks left in us,” Balam said, smiling in that slight, knowing way that only he could manage.
* * *
USING HIS COMMTACT, Kane reported to Lakesh and the others at Cerberus’s temporary base, briefly reciting how Balam was present and had set off the redoubt’s distress alarm upon finding the base abandoned.
“Do you require any assistance?” Lakesh asked, surprise mixing with concern in his agitated voice.
“Not just yet,” Kane reasoned. “Balam might need a medical consort later, but the tough little bastard says he’s fine right now. Best not to press it.”
After he had reported in, Kane led Balam up to the cafeteria area of the redoubt via elevator. The elevators still worked, despite being recast in ugly stone cladding, their interior lights replaced with a dull orange glow from wall-mounted magma pods, the same magma pods that were used in so much of the refashioned redoubt.
The canteen, too, was a mess of jutting stone and wreckage, one whole section covered over with a wave of rough-hewn stonework, the walls and floor scored with more of the haphazard rock. Blisters ran along the walls as if the room was alive.
“See if you can find us a seat,” Kane said, “and I’ll grab us a bite to eat.”
With that, Kane disappeared into the familiar kitchen area, its doors heavy with dark stone plating, its once-tiled walls lumpy as a rock face. Balam watched him depart, making his slow way over to one of the rock benches that rested in front of a flat stone table where once metal and Formica had ruled.
Despite the changes, much of the canteen remained pretty well intact and Kane soon located the larder area of the kitchen, its cool walls rough now with jagged spikes of gray-black stone like a porcupine’s back. Shortly, he returned to the seating area carrying two plastic trays featuring molded compartments in which he’d placed a few items from the canned supplies: cold beans and some brittle flatbreads.
“I couldn’t get the stoves working,” Kane explained briefly as he took a seat opposite Balam, laying the trays out between them. “But the way you look just now, I figure you won’t mind so much.”
Balam nodded gratefully, plucking at the beans with a metal spoon. Tiny veins of stone arced across the spoon’s handle and bowl, making it rough on the tongue as Balam scooped up the cold beans and ate them.
“When was the last time you ate?” Kane asked as he worked his spoon into his own plate of beans.
“Six days,” Balam said through a mouthful of food, tearing at the flatbread with his incisors. Kane had never seen Balam like this; there was something almost undignified in his manner, no longer the archly refined figure he had always seemed before. Balam saw Kane watching him and he smiled. “I can manage without sustenance for a while, but not indefinitely. Your food, however, is good.”
“Thanks.” Kane nodded, tearing off a piece of his own flatbread. There was a dusting of mold on the flatbread, and Kane tore around it, casting that part aside.
Balam looked around the cafeteria area, transformed as it was, the magma pods glowing redly along the walls to cast a gloomy light on the proceedings. “Something bad happened here,” he stated. “Death.”
“A lot of things went down when Ullikummis attacked,” Kane agreed. “I wasn’t here for most of it, had to play catch-up when me and Grant and…well, when we came off mission. We literally walked into all this.”
“A lot of things have ch
anged,” Balam said with deliberation. “Perhaps if you had warned me, I could have been better prepared to protect Quav.”
Kane shook his head. “We didn’t realize anyone would come for her. Or for you. How could we guess that?”
“Little Quav is the genetic template of an Annunaki goddess called Ninlil,” Balam mused, “as you well know. The reason she was placed in my safekeeping was to shield her from the Annunaki’s machinations.”
“Enlil’s machinations,” Kane corrected. “This wasn’t Enlil.”
Balam looked at the nightmarish devastation that had consumed the cafeteria, feeling the emanations of death all around him. “Things changed when the Ontic Library was breached. Perhaps we have both been naive,” he concluded.
“So, you think Baptiste’s planning to employ Quav in her aspect as the goddess Ninlil?” Kane proposed.
Balam nodded. “That is distinctly possible. You said that Brigid disappeared during the attack on Cerberus, that she cannot be tracked in your usual manner.”
“That’s right,” Kane acknowledged. “Her transponder isn’t broadcasting. It’s like she’s disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
“The transponder could be blocked, of course,” Balam suggested through a mouthful of flatbread and beans.
“Theoretically,” Kane agreed.
“But Ninlil would be of no concern to Brigid Baptiste,” Balam resumed. “She was sent to take the child while my guard was down. Specifically, someone sent Brigid because I would trust her, even though I saw through the ruse swiftly. Another person—Enlil, say, or one of his Nephilim warriors—would be unable to perform the same feat, for I would have removed Little Quav to safety at the first sign of them. As was, Quav recognized Brigid and placed herself in jeopardy almost immediately on your colleague’s arrival.”
“So, she’s working with Ullikummis? How would that make sense?”
“Many are the ways of the Annunaki,” Balam told Kane. “Surely I don’t need to remind you of that.”
Using the flatbread to mop up the last of the bean juice, Kane reached unconsciously for his face, probing at his left cheek with his fingertips.
“How is your vision now?” Balam asked.
“The light in here isn’t good,” Kane replied sourly.
Balam watched as Kane chewed on the last of the flatbread, leaving nothing but an oily residue on his plastic tray where the beans had once sat, a torn hunk of the flatbread with mold patterning its edge. “Kane, there is a way around all of this,” he said slowly. “Little Quav is still a child, not yet three years old. She is not a goddess yet—to achieve that will require a full body download from the genetic hub of Tiamat.”
“Which we destroyed,” Kane growled.
“Without those codes, without that genetic key to trigger her metamorphosis, Quav will stay Quav,” Balam explained. “If we track her down, we would likely track Brigid down, and also Ullikummis.”
Kane looked impatient. “And how do you propose we do that? We’ve already established that Baptiste’s transponder is nixed.”
Balam smiled enigmatically. “You have your ways of tracing people, friend Kane, and I have mine.”
Kane shoved the tray away with irritation, causing it to clatter across the table. “You are not a soldier, Balam. You wouldn’t stand a chance against Ullikummis. And you know it.”
“Yes, I do,” Balam agreed. “But perhaps together…?”
“No.” Kane shook his head. “I faced this monster three times, and two of those times I got my ass handed to me. Look around you—all this destruction, that’s Ullikummis, that’s his legacy.”
Balam waited as Kane seethed with annoyance and frustration, watching the broad-shouldered man tensing with the menace of a caged tiger.
“What if I told you I could restore your sight?” Balam said.
“Cerberus is working on that,” Kane responded dourly.
With an abruptness that surprised Kane, Balam reached across the table and grasped Kane’s hand, placing his long fingers over Kane’s own. Before the startled Kane could respond, he saw something change in his vision, as though a light had been switched on in the room, the dimensions and depths once hidden by shadows clear once more, colors flooding and overwhelming his senses in a blur.
“Balam, what did you do?” Kane said, the words coming as a frantic shout. “What did you do to me?”
“Stay calm, friend Kane,” Balam replied. “You have nothing to fear here.”
Chapter 14
She had stepped into the water and she had died. Or at least, that’s how Domi thought of it as she fought to open her eyes.
While Rosalia and her dog were trying desperately to save Grant from an unimaginable fate at the hands of the sentient water pool, Domi had found herself partnered with Kudo out in the moonlit courtyard. Standing back-to-back with the modern-day samurai, Domi had walked around, footstep over footstep, as four of the watery beings washed toward them on all sides, like menacing, roiling waves crashing toward some eerie moonlit beach. Behind her, having already seen his partner disappear beneath the dark surface of one of the impossible pools, Kudo readied his katana sword, grim determination showing in every muscle of his tautened body.
Domi took another pace to her right, the weight of the Detonics Combat Master glinting as it caught the silvery moonlight. The transparent human forms cut from water flowed closer, ebbed back, flowed closer still. Then, suddenly, Domi moved, kicking off the cobblestone roadway and blasting a shot from the pistol as she hurled herself at the nearest of the sinister forms.
Whatever it was she had shouted, it was unintelligible, just a frustrated shrill of anger as the first of her bullets cut through the surface of the creature and continued on, through its body and out the other side without having an effect.
The thing swung one of its arms at Domi, like a whirlpool spinning through empty space at her head, and she ducked it, feeling the coolness of the water as it speckled her chalk-white skin and dampened her bone-white hair. Domi’s pistol blasted again, kicking in her hand as she drilled another bullet into the creature’s flank. It had no internal organs—heck, its whole substance seemed malleable, so what was she hoping to hit?
Fuck it!
With another savage scream, Domi kicked forward and drove herself at the swirling pillar of water shaped like a man. Head down, shoulders driving onward, she splashed into the creature as, somewhere behind her, Kudo tried to cut the arm of another of the creatures with his sword. Then, with a splash that seemed to echo through every bone of her body, Domi hit her foe.
It felt like hitting the surface of a freezing cold lake, cracking through a layer of ice so thin it barely registered. The water seemed to swirl around her, clinging to her as she drove through the creature’s liquid body, clasping her flesh. Domi felt her feet go out from under her, felt herself trip and drop, the water still holding her, clinging to her face like some terrible mask. She could feel it filling her mouth, nostrils and ears, pressing against her wide-open eyes with the pressure and coldness of the deep. She should have walked through it, shattered it, ruined it, but instead she was still inside the thing, trapped as she toppled toward the hard cobblestones of the path. Sound was different here, too; she felt her finger pull at the trigger of her gun but the spitting bullet sounded deeper and louder, as if the sound had been artificially slowed down.
Then Domi slammed against the cobbles, knees first, connecting with a brutal impact. And still the water swished around her face and body, clinging to her with the consistency of tar. She couldn’t breathe. It had been just two seconds, but she was desperately conscious of the fact that she could no longer breathe.
The world swam around Domi’s eyes as she rolled against the ground, feeling the coldness and the wetness of the slick cobblestones. Behind h
er, seen as if through a stained-glass window, Kudo was using his two-foot-long sword to keep the other water beings at bay, hacking left and right, carving splattering lines through transparent limbs that reconstituted in the blink of an eye.
Bubbles rushed past Domi’s eyes, her own breath passing her, hurtling for freedom from this terrible prison. Mindlessly, pointlessly, Domi squeezed the Combat Master’s trigger again, feeling the mighty handblaster buck in her hand.
Then her head struck against the cobblestones, cushioned by the water that had enveloped her, the impact still hard enough to shake thoughts from her skull. There was redness in the water now. Blood. Her own?
Redness and encroaching blackness, swirling in from the edges of her vision.
Red and black—cards on a table.
* * *
PAINTED SILVER IN THE moonlight, the courtyard was eerily quiet now, just the faint sounds of dripping from somewhere off in the distance. Three figures stood in the empty courtyard—Grant, Kudo and Rosalia with her dog—the hound’s breathing and the occasional sound of their shoes scuffing against the cobblestones made artificially loud by the silence.
Grant looked all around him as he stood in the courtyard’s center, pacing a few steps back and forth in irritation. “Where is she? Where did Domi go?” he snapped.
“I didn’t see,” Kudo admitted, his head bowed in supplication. “After we lost Kishiro, things started to move awfully fast.”
“Lost Kishiro?” Grant mused. “Let’s start with what happened to him.”
“He was drowned in a pool of water, pulled under,” Kudo explained. “I saw him struggling, heard him screaming, but I couldn’t reach him in time.”
Grant took in the empty courtyard in a glance, searching the gaps between the cobblestones for signs of water. There was nothing; it was dry as a bone now. The color of bone, too, as it happened. “Where did the water go?”
Rosalia was crouching, running her fingers along the cobbles, the dog sniffing at the air over her shoulder. “There’s no drainage system,” Rosalia said. “Not even any gaps within the grouting that I can see. This may look like stone, Grant, but I don’t think it is. It’s something more than that.”