He paused, his eyes shining with that distant, silver light.
“I ask you again, what does it matter what the degenerate masses do, trying to save their pathetic skins? Kill those we can, as a final act of mercy… but if they really must go, let them go. Let them reap the evil they prefer to death. We will end these days as the last line against the dark. If we cannot stop them, we at least can be martyrs for God.”
His voice grew harder, sounding almost like his old voice.
“If my God stays, I stay. I would not think of going to a place where they are not. I am surprised you would not feel the same.”
Gregorio nodded, some of the heat leaching from his eyes.
“I do feel the same, brother,” he assured him, his hand still heavy on his shoulder. “It never occurred to me to lament my own death, not in this. Serving God is what I have lived for. To die for the same has always been my inevitable honor… and my privilege.”
Deifilius looked at him.
That time, relaxing slightly, he nodded in approval.
“Good, my loyal, wise brother Gregorio,” he said, patting his hand. “Good. I am glad you are with me for this. I am glad we will witness this end together.”
“In the meantime, I will kill a few more demons first,” Gregorio grunted.
Taking his hand off Deifilius, he smiled, raising a cup of water in a toast.
Half of it had already evaporated, Deifilius noticed, since the other man poured it only a few minutes earlier.
Gregorio’s smile widened as he raised the cup towards the sun. “I will die with God’s sword in my hand… as I always envisioned, even in my youth. May it be covered in unclean blood before I take my last breath.”
Deifilius nodded, gazing up at the blood-red sun.
“Yes, brother,” he said distantly. “May it be so.”
“We will kill like avenging angels. Then we die like saints.”
Tilting his head, he knocked back the last of the water.
He gave Deifilius a final bow, sweeping a thick arm as he bent at the waist before he made the sign of the cross. Then, unsheathing the electric, serrated sword he wore across his back, he stalked out from under the sun protection and into the desert, heading for the hole they’d blown in the ground above the now-unholy door.
Deifilius watched him go, the silver angels swimming above his head.
The sickness in his chest returned as he saw Gregorio motioning to others, mustering them to follow him inside that broken hole in the ground.
They had failed.
Whatever Gregorio did now, that did not matter either.
Deifilius would have killed himself if the point wasn’t moot already.
It does not matter, the silver angels whispered. It does not matter, my son.
Deifilius frowned, tilting his head up to listen.
Turning over their words, he frowned harder.
Then he let out a grunt.
What does not matter? he could not stop himself asking bitterly. Losing our future world to liars, deceivers, and jackals? Handing the virgin planets, the waters promised us teaming with fish, lands teeming with game and grain, to a group of ungrateful, disgusting animals?
The silver strands flickered and spun, indifferent to his pain.
It does not matter, the angels repeated. It will all happen again. That which happens once has happened a thousand times, from beginning to end.
What does that mean? Deifilius thought at them angrily. What will happen again? Creation? The war? The doors––?
Everything, the silver angels whispered. Everything will happen again. We will find them. We will return.
There was a silence.
Then, behind his eyes, Deifilius saw a knowing smile.
Pale yellow eyes glowed at him in the dark.
So will you, my brother, they whispered coyly.
Before the thick-chested monk could think of a response, before he could utter so much as a thank you or a goodbye––
The silver angels vanished.
“THEY’VE BROKEN THROUGH! They’ve broken through the last OBE!” Dante yelled, her hand on her ear to hear through her headset with all the people filling the small cave. “Ten minutes! Then they’ll hit the first barrier outside the refugee area!”
Wreg nodded, turning towards me where I still crouched by the wall.
I met his gaze.
“I could go,” I told him. “I might be the only telekinetic with any juice left.”
I glanced in the corner where several seers, including Holo, Jax, Hondo, Chinja, Poresh, Dalai and a few others were feeding light to Cass and Maygar, trying to get them conscious and moving. Both of them had passed out not long after the last clone died of an embolism. They both appeared to be mostly awake now, but they looked entirely drained.
Wreg frowned, thinking about my words.
Then he shook his head, once.
“No,” he said. “We might need you here, princess. In case something goes wrong with the door. We just get them all through as fast as we can.”
I nodded, but frowned faintly.
Someone needed to guard the door. Wreg was right about that.
All of the seers in here had their hands full, keeping the humans calm and herding them towards the opening in the rock. They all looked exhausted too, especially Balidor, Wreg and Tarsi, who were probably the strongest seers we had left.
I glanced down at Revik, whose fingers I still held in mine.
I was relieved to see that his color was more or less back to normal––or at least the normal amount of flushed compared to everyone else in the sweltering, sauna-like cave. He still looked utterly exhausted. His eyes were closed, his face drawn where he leaned against the rock wall.
Hitting my headset, I turned towards Dante, even though I could barely see her through the passing bodies and legs.
“How many left?” I asked her through the link. “How many people still need to pass through the door?”
Turning, glimpsing me through the bodies between us, she frowned.
“Maybe eight or nine hundred?” she said. “I haven’t been counting. But that looks roughly like what we have left in the remaining caverns. Could be a little more. Possibly even as many as eleven hundred, but I doubt it.”
I nodded back. “Thanks.”
Eight hundred, maybe as many as eleven hundred. That meant Balidor had escorted more than that many through already.
Even now, when I glanced over, he was urging people to move faster.
They could only really go through one adult seer or human at a time, due to the narrowness of the passage. A few of the bigger seers and humans even shifted their bodies sideways to pass through more easily, but I didn’t see anyone who couldn’t get through at all, or who was even at risk of not fitting through, so that was a relief.
Doing the math in my head, I figured he needed, at minimum, twenty more minutes to get the rest of the Listers through. That assumed one person passing through roughly one every second or so, which wasn’t always possible, depending on the age of the person, whether they were wounded, how reluctant they were, how afraid, if they had small children.
Turning this over for a few more seconds, I clicked my fingers at Wreg, motioning in sign language to him. When he couldn’t see me through the intervening bodies well enough to understand, I tapped my head to indicate my headset.
Hesitating only a heart beat, his voice rose in my ear.
“What is it? Is something wrong? How’s Nenz?”
“He’s fine,” I assured him. “What’s the frequency for the fighters out there?”
“Bridge––” he began, his voice a growl.
“I’ll stay here,” I cut in, before he could get going. “I won’t go anywhere. But it can’t hurt to keep an eye on what’s happening over there. I might be able to do something remotely––”
There was a crashing sound.
My eyes jerked up. From across the crowd, Wreg stared up, too.
&n
bsp; I felt Revik follow my gaze to the ceiling, as well. His fingers gripped mine strongly as he pulled himself up, leaning higher against the wall as he brought his body upright.
The hole was small at first.
Then a big piece of rock fell.
Rock and dirt rained down after it in the middle of the floor of the cave, making humans scream and jump back, trying to flee. The cave was so full of people, they slammed into one another, breaking apart the line the seers had been trying to maintain as they panicked.
I saw the shape fall. Whatever it was, it was huge, and covered in black armor.
I didn’t think. I leapt to my feet and just ran.
Halfway through pushing my way there, I realized it was a man. He bellowed out something in Italian, unsheathing a glowing, bright-red sword. Before I could make sense of it, he was already slashing across and downwards, slicing a woman diagonally in half, then a child who’d been standing next to her.
The screams grew deafening, echoing against the cave walls.
I saw Sasquatch stand up, his eyes wide and terrified. It hit me that the man had fallen down right in the middle of where the comp-techs had been working.
“No,” I muttered under my breath. “No…”
I threw my awareness up with all my might, flooding light into the structures above my head, pulling those I needed for the telekinesis into alignment––but the man had already pivoted to face the seers and humans standing there. He raised his sword in an arc, and I realized Dante stood there, right in front of him.
Her face had completely drained of blood, but she looked stunned, paralyzed as she stared up at the massive human with the bushy beard and long brown hair.
I was still fighting to access the telekinesis, fighting my way towards them when someone shoved Dante violently out of the way.
I glimpsed the face of the Indian seer, the violet eyes tilting upwards.
Then the sword came down in a flaming arc.
I screamed, even as the telekinesis ignited.
The living light exploded out of me, catching hold of the giant man’s spine in six different places. I didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. I twisted each bone I held in opposing directions, ripping him apart with my mind.
Staring up at the hole in the cave, I saw the face of what looked like an enormous dog shoving through, raining down more red earth and rocks.
I didn’t think that time, either.
Sliding my light into the organic armor it wore, I found explosive charges in the bio-weapons. Throwing it backwards, away from the hole, I detonated the charges.
The cave shook, sending down more red dirt and rocks.
People screamed as the air filled with dust, but I was scanning the room, looking for something, anything I could use to plug the hole.
I found the computer consoles.
Throwing two of those up at the ceiling, I melted them into the rock with my mind.
There was an eerie silence when I clicked out, a few seconds later.
The room was choked with dust.
It wasn’t really silent, of course. Coughing surrounded me, humans and seers sobbing and moaning, people talking in low voices, some shouting out names, trying to find loved ones. Even so, that silence covered all of it, at least until I heard a voice I knew.
It was Dante, crying.
“Come on!” Balidor bellowed then. “Line up! Line up! Before they break through again!”
Yisso torches flickered, then hissed as they flared brighter.
The dust swirled as seers began to move through the room, urging humans to step forward, to approach the fissure in the rock.
A light flashed as the next person passed through the door.
I saw Wreg and a few others staring up at the roof, at where I’d melted the organic panels into the rock. The dark green material spiderwebbed where it merged into the red rock, holding it in place.
I hoped like hell it would be enough.
I just stood there, panting, as the line of humans more or less reformed around me. That line walked around me, and around the woman and child who’d been bisected with the sword, and another human who’d been decapitated before I got close enough to see.
They also walked around the armored soldier who lay in a broken pile near where our comp-nerds had all been working.
Pushing my way closer, not even looking at the humans or seers as I passed, I saw Dante kneeling on the red dirt, sobbing openly.
Vikram’s head and shoulders lay in her lap. He’d been cut in half like the woman, roughly at the waist instead of diagonally, but Dante barely seemed to notice. Holding the upper half of his body in her arms, she stroke back his black hair, sobbing.
Vikram’s violet eyes stared up at hers, his expression blank.
He didn’t look afraid.
He just looked… gone.
63
TIME TO GO
IT SEEMED TO take forever.
I watched in a daze as Balidor, Declan, Chinja, and Torek guided them through.
They passed each person over, hand over hand, one by one, taking their fingers, touching their arms and patting their backs to urge them forward.
I saw Balidor gently pull them towards the door at the end of the line, right before those lit crystals flashed brighter as they disappeared through the narrow opening.
I watched Declan and Torek joke with humans and seers as they passed, smiling, telling them to leave their possessions, telling them they’d meet them on the other side, coaxing and reassuring them and occasionally barking at the crowd to remain orderly and move fast.
I leaned against that rock wall, once more holding Revik’s hand, watching as if it were a dream. Revik watched silently too, as did Lily, who leaned on his opposite side, her damp head on his soaking wet shoulder, her two hands wrapped around one of his.
Some part of me really did see it as a dream, as not quite real.
So many things from this day didn’t feel real.
Wreg told me about Chandre.
Chandre had sacrificed herself so that Balidor and the others could get out of the command center, so they could make it down here to the rest of us. She led one of those hybrid hounds away from the populated segment of the upper caves, knowing the hound would catch up to her eventually, knowing it would kill her and eat her when it did.
I couldn’t even bring myself to cry over her yet, but there’d been a hard lump in my throat since Wreg told me about it.
Gina and Loki finally pulled Dante away from Vikram so they could pull him and the other bodies to the side of the cave so they wouldn’t get trampled on.
It had been quiet up top since I sealed the hole in the ceiling.
From what Wreg and Jon told me, it was hotter than hell up top.
Trees and vegetation were increasingly catching fire, starting on the nearby mountains and plateaus and moving down into the canyons and valleys. From what few satellites they could access, much of the desert was burning. Wreg said most of the Myther soldiers were likely either dead or fleeing the fires and the sun.
A few had apparently asked to come down here, to go through the door with the others.
I’d given the okay to let them through the barricades, as long as they disarmed and subjected themselves to a scan.
Still, it was a relatively small number.
Less than a hundred. Wreg said eighty or eighty-five at most.
The thought all those people burning up there made me grimace, but there was nothing I could do about it now. If they’d rather die for their Dreng gods than mingle with the great Satan that was me and Revik, that was their right.
I was more concerned with the other Shadow cities, truthfully. I’d been told messages had been sent to all of the other cities and hotspots, once Dante confirmed that my opening the door here opened all the others.
The Vatican one remained dormant, like I’d suspected––but the one in Beijing opened with all the others, so that was a relief. We’d received a grateful missive fr
om the Lao Hu seers there that they were already in the process of ushering through the humans and seers who’d been trapped underground since the nuking of Beijing.
Myther soldiers shot civilians who tried to access the doors in those Shadow cities they controlled. We’d been told they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers in Dubai, New Delhi, and Lhasa, however, despite severe casualties. In Zurich, apparently the Myther army put down their guns and surrendered when they saw what was happening to the sun.
We hadn’t gotten word on Hong Kong or some of the other cities, but apparently in many of the Shadow cities that hadn’t yet been overrun by Mythers, the military aided in ushering people to the doors, rather than trying to stop them.
There was no way to know numbers on how many people would die from this.
I knew it would be a lot.
Not as many as died from C2-77 probably, but yeah… a lot.
Don’t think about it, baby, a voice murmured in my mind. Not now.
I looked over and Revik smiled at me, kissing my palm. Heat flickered over me from his light, a liquid affection and love that relaxed something in my chest.
I knew he was right. There was nothing to do about it now.
There was no way to second-guess any of it, not anymore.
It was over.
If not over, it was definitely well past the point of no return.
Chuckling from next to me, Revik sent a pulse of agreement.
I think that’s safe to say, yes, wife. Kissing my hand again, he tugged me closer. We did all we could do. We’re saving as many as we can save.
I nodded, leaning up against his chest across from Lily, resting my head on his opposite shoulder. Smiling at her, I caressed her face with a finger.
She looked more and more like Revik to me all the time.
All three of us were soaked with sweat, but I didn’t care. The air was thick with heat and dust, but I barely noticed that, too.
I tried not to think about Vikram, about watching that animal cut him in half, or the heartbreak in Dante’s sobs as she hung over him. I tried not to think about Chandre, or Tenzi, or Garend, or any of the others we’d lost in just the last few hours, many of whom I hadn’t even had time to catalogue or think about.
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