The Enclave

by Karen Hancock

A familiar voice speaking his name called him back from it, and he awoke to find an old friend bending over him. “Parthos?”

  “Are you all right? You fell an entire story. Can you move?”

  Zowan sat up, thinking he felt pretty good for having fallen that far. Was that I Am’s doing, as well? His eyes fell upon a dark pile of robes not far off, surrounded by a pool of blood: an Enforcer impaled by a three-foot sliver of glass. He knew the moment he saw him that the man was Gaias.

  “Almost all the Enforcers are dead,” Parthos told him. “And most of the High Elders. A lot of other people, too . . . What did you do in there?!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Zowan said, getting shakily to his feet and staring up into the ruined Justorium. “God did it.”

  “God,” Parthos said doubtfully. “You mean that I Am person you were talking about earlier?”

  “Yes.” Zowan looked at his blood-spattered friend more closely. “You seem to have come through pretty much unscathed yourself.”

  “Maybe, but the Elder next to me was decapitated.” He shuddered.

  “Come on.” Zowan pulled his friend’s arm as he stepped across the glass-littered floor toward the spiraling staircase. “Let’s go get Terra.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  New Eden

  Lacey found the trial in the Justorium to be one of the most repugnant spectacles she’ d ever witnessed. The only thing good about it was Zowan’s defiant, unwavering stand for the truth. But when that huge black Cube had risen into view and the lines of electricity snaked about it making the young man inside it writhe and scream, she was appalled. When it suddenly blasted itself to pieces in a flash of light and a boom both heard and felt, she wanted to cheer its destruction—even as she lamented the loss of the courageous young man it had taken with it.

  The other women, however, were primarily distressed by the sudden loss of the video signal. Like clucking hens, they pecked about at what might have happened. Was it the camera? The feed? Had the Cube really exploded? No doubt it had been overloaded, what with everyone pushing their lever as far as it would go, but still . . .

  It was Terra’s wailed “Noooooo!” and her subsequent collapse into inconsolable sobbing that brought them all to silence. Lacey alone moved to comfort her, wrapping her arms around the girl, as Andrea-Isis had done for Lacey not so long ago. It was some time before poor Terra regained her composure, and Lacey could only imagine how she herself would have felt had it been Cam in that Cube.

  By then the other girls had worked themselves into a tizzy over what had happened in the Justorium, and why had no one come to tell them about it?

  They were all chattering at once when loud clacking sounds erupted from the rear of the residence to silence them. A moment later, two young men burst into the main room, one a dead ringer for Swain— except for his buzzed-off hair—the other a tall black youth who was the clone of Mr. Abuku from the Ivory Coast. They were definitely the men Cam had photographed with his cell phone.

  Theia leaned forward imperiously on her pillow. “What is this?! You boys have no right to intrude upon the sacred residence—”

  Whatever else she said was lost in Terra’s shriek as the girl leapt free of Lacey’s embrace and threw herself into the Swain clone’s arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re alive!” she said, over and over. Eventually she stopped to ask how. “We all saw the Cube explode.”

  And to Lacey’s astonishment, he credited his miraculous deliverance to God.

  She was further astonished—chilled, in fact—to learn of the large death count that had resulted from the explosion. Zowan said most of the Enclave’s leadership had been killed, and many of the Enforcers.

  “I have never seen anything like it,” Parthos said. “Destruction, blood, glass, bodies. People screaming. We stayed to help for a bit, but there were too many Enforcers.”

  “And I wouldn’t risk my chance to get you out of here,” Zowan said to Terra.

  “Was Father there?” she asked almost eagerly. “Was he among the dead?”

  “How dare you ask that question in that tone, young lady!” Theia interjected. “As if you would be happy to hear of his death.”

  “I would be happy,” Terra retorted.

  “I don’t think he was there,” said Zowan. “At least I never saw him, and I had a pretty good view.”

  Lacey took that moment to intrude with her own urgent questions about Cam.

  Zowan looked at her in surprise, then must have reached the obvious conclusion, for he said only, “I haven’t seen him since they took him off to Father.”

  She was drawing breath to ask where that might be when a second boom shook the floor, and this time the lights went out.

  As Lacey’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, the dim light that still filtered through the wall of wooden screens drew her into the walking gallery. Despite the power loss, the mall remained partially illuminated by shafts of light spearing down from piercings in its vaulted ceiling. The rooms lining it and the corridors leading off of it, however, had turned into black holes.

  Since most everyone had been at the Justorium when the Cube blew and were still involved with the disaster there when the power went off, no one was surprised to find the mall deserted. It wasn’t long before the other women busied themselves with moving the screens to let more light into the main room.

  As they did, Lacey overheard Zowan speaking to Terra: “We have to leave the Enclave now, while everyone is distracted with the Justorium.”

  Lacey purposed at once to go with them. Trapped in the residence, she was completely helpless to do anything to help Cam, and wandering about with no idea where he was, or even where she was, hardly seemed better. At least up top she might be able to contact his friend Mallory and tell him what had happened.

  Suddenly light flickered at the mouth of the corridor feeding into the mall. It quickly resolved into separate narrow beams, and moments later a dozen soldiers in full battle dress burst from its mouth.

  “Whoa!” she cried, drawing the others’ attention to the newcomers. The soldiers carried automatic weapons mounted with spotlights, which they flashed down the mall and up. Bringing up the rear was a man carrying a handheld tracking device, its green light reflecting off his camo-painted face. Now, at his direction, they all made straight across the mall’s island, clambering right over bush and stream to enter the library underneath the residence.

  “We need to leave,” Zowan said.

  But as he spoke, Lacey recalled the RFID chip lodged beneath her shoulder blade, placed there so she could be tracked if Swain took her. Might these men be coming for her?

  She’ d barely had the thought when the back door of the residence blew open with a bang, and in moments half a dozen soldiers crowded into the main room. The wives screamed and huddled, terrified, into the farthest corner, but the soldiers ignored them, making straight for Lacey. Someone flashed his light into her face, and another said, “That’s not Reinhardt. What are you doing, Rudy?”

  “That’s the girl Swain was after, Lieutenant,” said the man with the reader, and she immediately recognized Mallory’s voice. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and helmet, with bandoliers of ammunition strapped to his body, he did not look anything like Cam’s pseudo-insurance man, Mallory. Nor the trim, tidy servant with the dessert tray. In fact, between the darkness, the face paint, and the helmet, she couldn’t make out his features at all.

  He continued to squint at the reader, then stepped away from her to squat over the black duffle bag Zowan had brought with him a few minutes earlier. Setting aside the reader, he was rifling through the bag’s contents when the lieutenant said, “I thought you were going to chip Reinhardt.”

  “I was. With everything happening so fast, we never got around to it. So I put it in his duffle.” Rudy pulled out a small computer with attached keyboard and switched it on. “Ah, good boy, Cameron. You downloaded the floor plans!”

  He stood and turned to Lacey
. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Some secret lab, we think,” she answered.

  “In the orange sector,” Zowan added.

  Rudy tapped the keys on his little computer and images flipped by on the screen.

  “What’s he got all this C-4 in here for?” the lieutenant asked, now examining the duffle’s contents himself.

  “To blow out doors if he needed,” Rudy said.

  “There’s enough explosive in here to bring down the whole place.

  What kind of op are you running here, Rudy?”

  “The same one you are. Look here.” He shoved the computer before the man’s face as he tapped the keys. “See . . . here’s the orange sector—obviously some sort of lab. And now the red sector . . . ” Screens flipped by, then froze. “Look at the size of this space. That’s gotta be where they are.”

  The lieutenant stepped to the window to eye the mall while Rudy pointed to the lower corridor off the front court and said, “That’s the one we’ll take.”

  “Yeah, but where is everyone? It’s midday. Shouldn’t we be seeing people?”

  Lacey told them about the situation with the Justorium, though she didn’t know where exactly the Justorium was.

  “It’s along the upper corridor,” Zowan informed them, “the one opposite the lower corridor you are planning to take.”

  “So we’re clear?” the lieutenant said. “Then let’s move.”

  As his team exited the way they’d come in, Rudy hung back to speak to Lacey and the clones. “You all need to get out of here, ASAP. Use the route through the physical plant. We left it open.”

  The lieutenant’s voice squawked out of Rudy’s earpiece: “Aguilar, you comin’ or not?”

  “On my way, Lieutenant.”

  “What about Cam?” Lacey asked as he turned to go.

  “You can’t help him now,” Rudy said, slinging the duffle over his shoulder. “Besides, he’s a big boy. Just get yourselves out—along with as many of these others as you can.” With that, he followed his team members down the rear stair, the small computer with its glowing screen of floor plans still in his hand.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  New Eden

  Cam and Swain, surrounded by the four security guards, were on their way down to the red sector when they heard a distant boom. The floor shook and the lights flickered. Cam sensed the Nephilim become suddenly energized by the explosion, as if something dreadfully important had seized their attention, then dealt them a near-fatal blow. He sensed shock, disbelief, and finally despair, the latter quickly swallowed up by a rage that dwarfed all previous manifestations of their frustration.

  Swain stopped in the corridor, waiting, perhaps, for an alarm to sound or a call to come in via the land-line phones mounted to the corridor wall nearby. When neither happened, he moved on.

  The Nephilim, however, pelted Cam with demands to stop wasting time and let them out, their voices increasingly clear and compelling the closer he got to them. That proximity also seemed to be sparking unwelcome memories—striding out of a crisp fall morning into the Tirich Pazu facility’s upper service entrance with the rest of his transport team, while Rudy closed his deal with Dr. Garzi somewhere inside; washing his hands in the sink outside the pod-lab as he eavesdropped on the archaeologist Khalili arguing with someone about Canaanite religious rites; noting uneasily the six pods laid out on the tables inside the lab and wondering who else was purchasing a sarcophagus. . . . He kept shaking the memories off, but they kept returning.

  Finally, he, Swain, and the guards passed through the double set of locking doors that separated the orange sector from the red, then followed a short hall into a long, narrow prep room lined with rows of changing lockers and wooden benches. As the guards waited, Swain directed Cam to pull a white Tyvek coverall over his clothing and did the same himself. A second, lesser boom rattled the lockers and shook the floor. But when, as before, no alarms went off or calls came in, they proceeded from the prep room into a spacious meeting area with couches, chairs, and low tables arranged before a large video screen.

  As they entered, the people waiting stood to greet them: Gen,Slattery, a half dozen scientists, one of the Saudi guests Cam had observed at the party last night, and most surprising of all, the general he had met at Swain’s reception—General Lader, if he remembered correctly—now in uniform and looking quite unhappy.

  Swain left Cam by the door as he went around to greet each guest, so, of course, Gen had to come over and taunt him. “Well, if it isn’t our great hiring coup, our rising star geneticist. Spy and liar extraordinaire.” She shook her head. “I have to say, Reinhardt, the Christian act was a great cover. You almost had me believing you were for real.”

  He stared at her, deeply dismayed by her words but having no idea how to counter them. Before he could even begin, Swain called for everyone’s attention. “You all know why we’re here,” he said, “and again I apologize for the blindfolds. I assure you, that minor indignity will be more than made up for by what you are about to see.”

  “Your confidence is awfully high, Director Swain,” said General Lader, “for someone who has freely admitted he doesn’t know how to open those pods yet.”

  “Ah, but that’s all changed today, General,” Swain informed him. “I neglected to mention last night that Dr. Reinhardt here was present during the opening of the pods in Afghanistan eleven years ago.

  Obviously he escaped that incident. As far as I know, he is the only man who did.”

  Lader turned narrowed eyes upon Cam. “Reinhardt may have survived, but he remembers nothing. The experience addled his mind.”

  Cam frowned at him. Lader knew about Tirich Pazu? Knew about his past?

  “Only temporarily.” Swain turned to Cam. “He’s been having a lot of flashbacks lately.”

  “But not about that,” Cam said. “I was there, yes. But General Lader’s right: I don’t know how to open them.”

  “I believe you do,” Swain countered confidently. “I believe we have only to jog your memory to get the information we want.”

  “Even if I did remember,” Cam said flatly, “I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “No?”

  Suddenly the image of the bearded Garzi standing by the giant pod in the oversized cleanroom flashed into his mind. “They were bloody, gruesome rites,” Khalili said in his heavily accented English, still occupied with the Canaanites, “but that was not uncommon in ancient times. Man has believed for millennia in the power of blood to restore life, acquire strength, form unbreakable bonds. . . . ”

  An angry, fearful voice intruded upon Garzi’s musings, as memory again gave way to present reality: “You mean you intend to open those pods today?!” one of the scientists demanded.

  “Only one of them,” Swain assured him. He went on to detail the precautions that had been taken to ensure their safety. The observation booth was well above the reach of anything that might come out of the pod and was reinforced with steel and concrete, its windows made of impact-resistant glass. If at any time they felt uncomfortable, they could easily move back into the prep room, or leave the laboratory entirely, though he didn’t anticipate any problems that would require taking such drastic measures.

  When he’ d finally persuaded everyone that the small risk was manageable, he took them into the spacious observation booth that lay beyond the meeting room’s reinforced far door. The observation window encircled the booth on three sides, overlooking a cavernous chamber of cement block walls more than thirty feet high. On the floor stood five massive steel tables, each supporting a monstrous dark green pod, wrinkled and tipped with the black points of the preemergent cubes. For Cam the sight of them was chillingly familiar.

  A crane loomed off to the left beside a twenty-foot-wide metal plate set into the cement block wall. Beside it stood the massive cylindrical tank Cam recognized from the videos as the home of the dead Ecuadoran Nephilim, frozen in liquid nitrogen. All around, heavy chains dangled from reinforced
ceiling tracks, used no doubt for moving the heavy pods. A line of steel drums stood against the base of the observation booth’s front wall, their top edges some fifteen feet below the booth’s window.

  The pod Cam assumed would be opened today was surrounded by a cage of stout steel bars. Inside, hanging from a track that ran the length of the cage’s ceiling, was a fanlike device with four nozzled flanges, all aimed toward the pod. Outside, a large housing stood beside a cylindrical tank of web-spinning material, hoses connecting it to the nozzle apparatus inside the cage. This, apparently, was Swain’s promised method of restraining the awakened Nephilim.

  A side gate provided access into the cage, beside which stood an IV stand of heavy-duty stainless steel, several oversized bags of liquid nutrients and attendant tubing hanging from its hooks.

  Cam observed all the aspects of the lab while deliberately keeping his eyes off the pods, fearing they’d trigger another flashback. He was certain that was precisely what Swain intended. Indeed the director’s eyes darted to him frequently, watching for sign of one. When nothing happened, he took Cam’s elbow and urged him toward the booth’s side door. “Let’s get a little closer,” he said, guiding Cam out and down two flights of metal stairs to the lab’s floor, his cadre of guards following.

  The place smelled of acetone and an unpleasant musk that raised the hairs on the back of Cam’s neck. As Swain walked him toward the caged pod, which was the nearest of the five, Cam began to tremble. Tension squeezed his gut and clenched his teeth. The Nephilim calls grew increasingly frenetic.

  His sovereignty rules over all, Cam told himself. He will never leave me nor forsake me. And He brought me here for a reason.

  To open the pods. You are the only one who can.

  No, he argued with the Nephilim. I don’t remember how.

  Yes, you do.

  He frowned then, noting uneasily that the one who argued with him didn’t sound like a Nephilim. . . . For one thing the Nephilim had never argued with him.

  Suddenly he was back in Tirich Pazu, in the facility’s cavernous lab, where six pods now lay on their respective steel tables, awaiting preparation for transport. Rudy had rejoined the team by then, but Khalili had pulled Garzi aside for a private conversation in Farsi, earnestly seeking to change the latter’s mind about selling the pods to outsiders, particularly American infidels. Garzi argued that they needed the money and the Americans might figure out how to open them.