Descendant: A Mira Raiden Adventure (Dark Trinity Book 2)

by Sean Ellis

It took her only a moment to process this. Of course he was alive. She had survived the collapse of Shambala, so there was no reason to believe that he could not. Her surprise and joy quickly soured into self-recrimination—

  I didn’t even look for him. I just gave him up for dead.

  —and then acceptance.

  How could I? I barely made it out myself.

  Then she realized that Booker was not alone. Eric Collier stood beside him, the Trinity Xu had just created now gripped in his right hand. “Hello, Mira.”

  His tone was sardonic, menacing, and Mira realized that he was the source of the premonition she had been feeling. Something fundamental had changed in her relationship with him—perhaps with both men—and she was the only person who didn’t know about it. She glanced past them and saw the scattered bodies of the marines, and Atlas and Kiong surrounded by a knot of men in camouflaged wetsuits.

  Xu stiffened in alarm and outrage. “How dare you attack us? I am a Minister of the Chinese government.”

  Collier turned his gaze from Mira and appraised Xu disdainfully. “Deputy Minister Xu. The man responsible for the current international crisis. What a pleasure to meet you at last.” There was no mistaking the contempt in Collier’s tone. “I shouldn’t be surprised though. You are one of them.” He nodded at Mira. “One of the offspring of the Ascendant Ones.”

  When Xu did not reply, Collier turned to Mira again. “Such an amusing name, don’t you think? ‘Ascendant Ones.’ It hardly sounds like evil incarnate, but that’s what they were, and it is what you are. The Bible had another name for you: Nephilim. The mighty ones. The offspring of the sons of God—Fallen Ones is a better name for them—and the daughters of men.”

  Mira gaped at him. “How can you say that after what you’ve seen?”

  “What I’ve seen?” He chuckled mirthlessly. “You mean that business about man evolving from the lower beasts, developing mental abilities? It’s nonsense. An imperfect attempt to reconcile the myth of Darwinism and the truth of God. I saw through it immediately, just as I saw what my own role would be, here at the End of Days.

  “I had hoped that you could be redeemed, Mira, but it seems you cannot escape who are: the bastard offspring of the Wise Father’s children, who visited our world long ago and mated with primitive humans. The seed of that union dominated the earth, driving the untainted to the brink of extinction. God sent the Flood to wipe out your kind.

  “Oh, don’t mistake my meaning. I understand now that the Flood was not literal. It was this.” He shook the Trinity emphatically. “The silencing of your unnatural powers, which left you exposed and vulnerable, while the true humans sheltered in the ‘ark’ of ancient cities like this. But, the taint of the Fallen Ones endured. I can smell it on you.”

  He glanced back at Kiong, including her in his denouncement. “And so wickedness has once more filled the earth, and now we stand at the End of Days. This time, the stain of the Fallen Ones’ sin will be wiped away completely. I will be the Lord’s instrument of cleansing.”

  Booker stepped forward. Uncertainty and trepidation hung about him like a fog, but he spoke nevertheless. “Sir…uh, Eric, let’s just dial it back, okay? You’ve got what you came for. Let’s just go.”

  “This is insanity,” raged Xu. “You have no authority here.”

  “‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’”

  Mira recognized the quote, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. My God, she thought. He really believes that he’s—

  Collier thrust the Trinity segment at Xu.

  Look away!

  The warning roared through Mira’s nervous system and she turned away reflexively, a fraction of a second before a blinding discharge of light filled the cavern. Even though she wasn’t looking directly at it, the flare was so intense, she could feel the photons passing into her, illuminating her flesh in an orange glow, revealing the outlines of the bones underneath.

  The burst of radiance lasted only an instant, like a camera flash amplified to the magnitude of a supernova, then total darkness descended.

  Flash blind, Mira thought. And I wasn’t even looking at it.

  The sense of impending danger was undiminished, a siren screaming in her head. Collier had killed Xu, she was sure of it, and she would be next. She stumbled away, groping for something to orient herself. If she could just reach the water, dive under, get away from Collier and the talisman he wielded—

  She felt a hand grasp her arm…Del? Then, she was being pulled in a different direction. She tried to wrestle free, but the grip was fierce.

  Suddenly, she could see again, except, she wasn’t seeing. Her vision remained shrouded in darkness, yet she beheld the pyramid clearly in her mind’s eye like a scene displayed on a television screen. She saw Booker, hands out, searching blindly for something to hold onto. She saw Kiong, no longer surrounded by the assault team but moving away from the apex of the pyramid, pulling someone along behind her….

  It’s me.

  In a rush of understanding, Mira knew that Kiong was sharing her gift. She was seeing the world through Collier’s eyes. She saw herself moving on the steps of the pyramid, still struggling against Kiong and trying to find her own way. She fought back the primal instinct to flee, stopped resisting and allowed Kiong to take the lead. The blind woman was in her element, not merely surviving in a permanently benighted landscape, but coordinating her movements to the external stimulus of someone else’s perspective.

  She saw them approaching the edge of a step and flexed her knees in preparation for the step down. It was awkward, but she managed to keep up with the far more nimble Kiong. Only her head and shoulders were visible now, the rest eclipsed by the angle of Collier’s horizon. Kiong did not slow.

  Abruptly, the perspective changed. Mira felt a wave of vertigo as the third-party point of view began moving, reorienting to bring her back into view.

  Collier was chasing them.

  Does he know that we’re in his head?

  It didn’t matter. He would need only a moment to acquire them and then it would all be over.

  Kiong dodged to the left, angling toward the clustered members of Collier’s assault force. The men—she assumed they were SEALs—were not moving and she could only assume that the flash had likewise compromised their vision. Then she saw one of them turn toward them, brandishing his weapon.

  Kiong did not slow, but Mira’s vision of the two of them abruptly vanished in a haze of shadows. Something moved in the darkness, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  That’s what we look like to the SEALs, Mira realized. They can barely see us. Kiong showed me this so I would know to trust her.

  The view flickered back to Collier’s perspective and she saw them moving quickly through the midst of the SEALs. Now she understood why Kiong had chosen to brave the gauntlet of guns; if Collier wanted to vaporize them, he’d have to kill his own men to do it.

  Given his delusions of godhood, she doubted he would let something like that stand in his way, but the attack did not come. Kiong kept the SEALs between them and Collier and headed down the slope of the pyramid.

  Mira felt she was getting the hang of seeing the world the way Kiong did, and her own precognitive abilities boosted the process, helping her time her downward steps and avoid injury. She bounded forward, taking the two-foot high steps as quickly as she would regular stairs and then, at the first splash of water beneath her feet, she dove out, plunging headlong into the frigid water.

  As she and Kiong disappeared beneath the shimmering surface, she caught a glimpse of ripples on the water before the world returned to absolute darkness.

  57.

  Booker squinted, his eyes refusing to open wider than narrow slits. They itched ferociously, oozing moisture, but he screwed up his face and forced them to open wider. It didn’t help. Even though the flash had come from behind him, his eyes turned toward Mira in the moment of discharge, the sudden brilliance had scorched his night
vision, constricting his pupils to pinpoints in a painful reflex of self-preservation. The last thing he had seen before the darkness however, remained burned into his consciousness: Xu, the Chinese minister, evaporating into nothingness.

  Shit!

  Xu had been a senior Chinese political leader, and an unarmed prisoner to boot, and Collier had just executed him. It hadn’t been a tactical or strategic decision. Collier had no orders, he wasn’t even military any more. He had killed Xu, murdered him, because of some religious delusion that the Chinese minister was the spawn of Satan.

  Mira was right.

  Mira!

  Collier would kill her next.

  “Booker!” Collier’s voice hit him like a sledge hammer.

  He wondered if the man knew what he was thinking, if he sensed Booker’s outrage at the brutal assassination and his growing fear for Mira’s safety.

  Stay cool. You can’t do anything if you get yourself killed.

  “Yeah?” he croaked, his throat constricted with emotion. “I can’t see. Give me a minute.”

  Collier didn’t seem to care. “We need to go. We have the Trinity. It’s imperative that we get back to Washington as soon as possible.”

  Shapes started to emerge from the green blob that filled his vision. The pyramid, the SEALs, Collier, but there was no sign of Mira. He spotted Atlas, still surrounded by the strike team, but the Chinese woman was gone as well. Had Collier killed both of them?

  He had to know. “Where’s Mira?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Collier replied. “We need to return to the helicopter. As soon as we’re clear, I will have the destroyers sanitize this island with Tomahawk missiles. We won’t need to worry about her.”

  Worry about her? Booker barely kept the thought inside his head. Then the significance of the declaration sank in. Mira’s still alive. She got away.

  A strange sound, mocking laughter, filled Booker’s ears, and he wondered if perhaps Collier really was reading his mind, but then the laughter became words. Not Collier, but Atlas.

  “You’re being used.”

  The Wise Father’s latest puppet.

  “Be silent!” Collier retorted, the stentorian command echoing back from the walls of the cavern.

  “Why? Will you kill me next? Go on, give it your best shot. Better people than you have tried.” When Collier did not respond, Atlas continued. “That was an impressive speech. Dare I say it? Inspired. But you’re wrong. About everything. You’re being lied to, manipulated, and if there was an ounce of humanity left in you, you would see it. But there isn’t, is there? You’re not human any more. You’re like me, a dead man, brought back to life by that thing, and now you’re helpless to act against it.”

  The words stung Booker like a bucket of ice water. How had Atlas known that? He got the sense that Atlas wasn’t really speaking to Collier; his words were meant for the rest of them, but only Booker knew the significance of what Atlas had said. Collier had died. He had been stone dead when Booker and Mira had left him, and now he was alive again. Or was he? Maybe Atlas was right; maybe he was a puppet—a meat puppet, reanimated by the Trinity and reprogrammed for some diabolical purpose.

  Collier made no further attempt to silence Atlas, but simply turned to the SEAL squad leader. “I want him zip-tied and gagged. We’ll be taking him with us.”

  Booker thought he heard uncertainty in Collier’s voice. “Why?” he asked, overpowered by curiosity. “Why not just…?” He made a little explosion with his fingers.

  Collier shook his head with the same air of consternation. “No. He has a role yet to play.” His expression hardened. “Don’t question me again. Do as you were instructed. We have to go. Now.”

  Booker raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and moved down the steps to join the SEALs, but his compliance was solely for the purpose of not arousing Collier’s suspicions.

  Something was rotten. Collier, the Wise Father, the Trinity…all of it. He felt certain that Atlas was right, they were all being used. But recognizing it and knowing what to do about it were two different things. He needed to talk to Atlas. Alone. Soon.

  58.

  Even underwater, Kiong continued to take the lead. Mira didn’t know how she was navigating, but the blind woman seemed to be moving toward a definite goal, and Mira’s intuition gave her no reason to question their course.

  They broke the surface just as Mira was beginning to feel the need to take a breath. Her vision was starting to return and in the glow of her headlamp, which thankfully had not gotten lost in the fumbling escape from the pyramid, she saw that they were floating just a few feet below a curving rocky ceiling that extended away in either direction—it was a tunnel of some kind, or perhaps a very large pipe.

  She turned to Kiong, shining her light into the woman’s face. Kiong had lost her sunglasses, revealing eyes that were open ever so slightly, as if she were drowsing. “Are you all right?”

  Kiong tilted her head toward the sound of Mira’s voice and said something in her native tongue.

  Mira searched her memory for a familiar phrase. Language training had been a part of her upbringing at the Farm, but much of her instruction had been focused on preparation for the Middle East threat sector. She knew how to say ‘hello’ in Mandarin, and that was about it. “Ni hao?”

  An awkward smile crossed Kiong’s face. “Not to speak English,” she said, her accent so thick that Mira could only guess at what she had said.

  “This should be fun,” Mira muttered. She wondered how Kiong had discovered the tunnel passage, but then she realized that she had seen this place before. It was one of the main passages that had led from the tower to the rest of the city. She knew this because she had glimpsed it in a Trinity vision, but how had Kiong known about it? Perhaps the blind woman could do more than simply see through other people’s eyes.

  “I don’t suppose you know where we should go next,”

  Kiong said something, this time in her own language, and pointed down.

  “We need to swim?” Mira tried to pantomime swimming, but the realized the futility of doing so. The only way Kiong was going to see anything was by looking through Mira’s eyes. “Great. I can’t show and I can’t tell.”

  But there was might be another way.

  Kiong must have come to the same conclusion, for she put one hand over her dead eyes and then gripped Mira’s hand with her other.

  “Close my eyes?” Mira did, and was immediately somewhere else.

  She saw a smooth rock wall, wet and glistening, with a taut rope stretched vertically between the wall and her…or more precisely, the person through whose eyes she was now looking.

  “The SEALs are bugging out,” she said.

  Now she understood what Kiong was trying to tell her. “We need to stay here until they leave.”

  Kiong answered with another indecipherable utterance, but then she added one more word in broken English. “Sisters.”

  Mira squeezed her hand. “Sisters.”

  She continued watching for several minutes as the unknown climber made his way up the wall, occasionally glancing this way and that. At the top of the ascent, the man clambered up onto the ledge and then turned back to help his comrades. She saw the SEALs hauling Atlas up like so much dead weight at the end of a rope. The ageless immortal was now bound and gagged, and completely helpless. At the top, the man through whose eyes she looked, grabbed hold of Atlas and leaned so close that Mira reflexively drew back, an action which did not change the view one bit. Atlas’ eyes widened a little then he gave a terse nod.

  Mira felt her curiosity grow hot; what had just been said to Atlas, and who had said it? She got no answer. The man grabbed Atlas’ arm and then started pulling him along, up the cramped passage toward the surface. A few seconds later, both emerged into late afternoon daylight and fell in with the line of SEALs making their way to a waiting helicopter.

  Kiong gave her hand another squeeze. Time to go.

  59.

&nbs
p; Booker took one last look back in the direction of the cave entrance, hoping against hope that he would catch a glimpse of Mira, but there was no sign of her. Once again, he found himself with no choice but to leave her behind, but this time felt much worse because he knew that she was almost certainly still alive.

  Not for much longer, though.

  He considered turning back. The fissure was only about a hundred yards away, he could sprint that in a few seconds, but what then? Collier probably wouldn’t try to stop him, and why should he? Once the helo took off, there would be no escape from the island. Even if he found Mira, they would be stranded, at least until the Tomahawks arrived.

  If he died here, there would be no one left to oppose Collier, ergo he had to survive.

  Ergo, he had to let Mira die.

  Shit.

  He bit the inside of his lip until it bled and somehow managed to keep his face a dispassionate mask as he climbed into the helicopter and found a seat. Atlas sat across from him, eyes closed, head tilted back as if meditating. Here in the light, Booker could see traces of the man he remembered from the vision the Trinity had given him, Atlas the rebel who tried to capture the Trinity for himself and almost destroyed the world in the process. He knew very little about the man beyond that, aside from the fact that he had imprisoned Mira in Libya, stolen the Trinity from Los Alamos, and evidently partnered up with the Chinese.

  Can I trust him?

  Mira evidently had, even at the risk of being labeled a traitor. But Mira was.…

  Mira had her own reasons for wanting to stop Collier, reasons that had nothing to do with the best interests of the United States of America, or even the human race…the normal, ordinary human race.

  The same could probably be said of the Wise Father’s prophet.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  The helicopter shuddered and lifted off the ground, nose slightly forward, and took off, skimming just a few feet above the verdant island until, after only a few seconds, the land fell away beneath them and they were heading out to sea.