While the first mobile home served as a field lab, the second functioned as a combination break room and living quarters. There were framed photographs of various archeological digs and newspaper clippings on the walls. Sand art and crafts made of yarn. The furniture was on its last legs and some of it looked like it wouldn’t hold even Jade’s diminutive form. Emil was asleep in the back half of the trailer, behind the curtain, his arm flopped over his face, snoring softly. They spoke in whispers not just to keep from waking him, but to make sure that no one else heard.
“You’re telling me that Barnett never once contacted you prior to today,” Evans said. He took a sip of warm iced tea from a glass beaded with condensation.
“I don’t know how else to say it so you’ll believe me.”
“Look at it from my perspective. You show up here—out of the blue—and mere hours later we’re talking to the same guy who rescued us from the Antarctic research station the last time we were all together. Doesn’t that sound like more than just coincidence to you?”
He was seriously grating on Jade’s nerves, but she had to admit that he had a point. The way events were coming together made her feel like she didn’t have the slightest control over what was transpiring, as though she were merely an actor in a play for which she’d never read the script. What were the odds that Barnett would call her here in Mexico, where she’d gone on a whim because she needed to talk to someone who would understand what she’d experienced in Nigeria and not question her sanity?
Anya slurped the last of her lunch from her fingertips, leaned back in her chair, and drew her legs to her chest. The light passing through the gap between the drawn curtains behind her, which fluttered on the breeze from the open window, bisected the table and a stack of foil-wrapped tamales delivered by a local woman, close to three hours ago now, from the back of a dirt-brown Ford Aerostar.
“He didn’t even try to deny that it was still alive?” Anya said. “What possible reason could they have for keeping it that way?”
“Look around you,” Evans said. “What would a living, breathing Teotihuacano be worth to any of the researchers here?”
“They’d all be out of jobs,” Jade said.
“I don’t buy that they just want to keep it alive so they can study it,” Anya said. “When has mankind ever been content to merely observe? You know what my colleagues would do if they encountered a species of hominin they thought was extinct? They’d take it apart, piece by piece, just to put it back together again.”
“You’re talking about cloning,” Evans said.
“Cloning. Breeding. Hybridizing. You name it. The only reason no one’s done so yet is because all of our samples of DNA are too old and degraded.”
“They don’t need to clone this species,” Jade said. “It’s fully capable of cloning itself.”
“In a sense,” Evans said. “There’s something different about the drones, though. They lack a certain quality that only the original possesses.”
“Is that your professional opinion based on your extensive experience with them?”
“I got way closer to them than I would have liked. I looked into their eyes. They were different and you know it.”
Evans abruptly stood from the cot and paced the front half of the trailer. Despite having showered, he still reeked of the water from the underground tunnels.
“The distinction is of no practical relevance to us now,” Anya said. She picked up a tamale, opened the foil, and closed it again, as though she were still hungry but couldn’t bring herself to eat. “Whether an original or a drone, its main biological imperative seemed to be killing everyone and everything around it. There’s no precedent for that kind of behavior in the natural world. Predators hunt and kill for food. This is not a predatory species as we’ve come to understand it. It’s more like a virus in how it can infect other hosts without caring about the damage it does to the larger host population. If left untreated, a virus will continue to replicate itself until it eradicates an entire species.”
“While I don’t disagree with your analogy,” Jade said, “you have to be careful ascribing human traits to lower orders of life. There is nothing malicious about a virus. Its sole function is to reproduce. It neither knows nor cares how it affects the host organism. It will continue to replicate until it’s no longer able to do so and then it will die. It is incapable of what we consider communication. This thing, this species, is different. It is malicious. It can deliberately infect any host it chooses and it can communicate over great distances. How else could a drone in Nigeria have known that the creature we thought had died in Antarctica was still alive?”
“Assuming it was a drone,” Evans said.
“Tell me you’re just doing that to get a reaction. If we were ten years old, would you pull my pigtails?”
“You think I . . . ? I’ve been all around the world, and nowhere have I encountered anyone as maddening as—”
“Shh!” Anya hissed.
Emil groaned and flopped onto his side. The entire trailer shook.
Evans ran his fingers through his damp hair and plopped down on an overturned bucket that functioned as a chair. Jade caught herself staring at the way his shirt clung to the sweat on his broad chest and forced herself to look away.
“Like I said, the distinction is unimportant right now,” Anya said. “What is important is what Barnett said.”
Evans nodded and opened the cooler beside him. He tossed each of them a bottle of water and drained half of his in one drink.
“What exactly did he say?” Anya asked.
“He said we were in grave danger,” Evans said.
“From what?”
“He didn’t say, but he wanted to know if there was a secure location nearby where we could withstand a siege.”
“Jesus,” Anya said. “Do you think he was referring to more drones?”
“I don’t think so,” Jade said. “He admitted that the creature was still alive. I think he would have told me if the threat was drones.”
“Did he seem genuinely concerned about our safety?”
“We wouldn’t be having the conversation if he didn’t.”
“I agree with Jade,” Evans said.
“That’s a first.”
Evans opened his mouth to say something, but obviously thought better of it. He closed his eyes momentarily, composed himself, and spoke in a level tone.
“I believe that if Barnett suspected we were in danger from drones, he would have said so, if only to secure our cooperation. What worries me is that he didn’t tell us the nature of the threat. I’m not convinced he knows what it is.”
“Doesn’t know?” Anya said. “Then why call in the first place?”
“He was fishing for information,” Jade said. “That was the impression I got from the start. I surprised him with the knowledge that—what did he call it?—the subject was still alive, but he seemed to just be playing a hunch. It wasn’t until I mentioned the sleeping god that his entire demeanor changed.”
“That was the first thing he asked me about,” Evans said, “and yet he knew nothing about the maze. Even if he somehow hacked into our computers or our communications, he couldn’t have known about one without the other, which means that he had heard of the sleeping god before he called us. Maybe even before we saw the warning in the sacrificial chamber.”
“Do you think that our having any knowledge at all of this sleeping god was enough to confirm whatever suspicion led him to call in the first place?” Anya asked.
“Stands to reason, don’t you think?”
“But he doesn’t know any more about it than we do,” Jade said.
“That’s how it sounds to me,” Evans said.
“And yet what little you told him was enough to convince him that we were in so much danger we needed to barricade ourselves in here.”
“You don’t think this sleeping god is like Dale Rubley, you know, only . . . different, do you?” Anya asked.
Ja
de cringed at the thought. For all the time she had spent thinking about the creature and the physiological mechanisms by which it could have symbiotically—or, perhaps, parasitically—subsumed the body of the engineer Rubley, she’d never once entertained the notion that there was another predatory species like it out there. She looked at Evans, who appeared to have turned his eyes inward, as well. The prospect alone was overwhelming.
“No,” Evans finally said. “Barnett said to find someplace safe, not ‘get the hell out of there,’ which implies that we aren’t the direct target of this threat. Whatever he thinks is about to happen has more to do with the sleeping god than it does with us.”
“If that’s the case, then there’s something in that maze that someone really wants,” Jade said.
She rose from the cot and repeatedly tugged at the hem of her shirt to fan her chest. The scent reminded her that it had been far too long since her last shower. She sat at the table opposite Anya and forced herself to eat, if only because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done so.
“You said he didn’t know about the maze,” Anya said.
“But he knew about the sleeping god,” Jade said. “Mentioning it in conjunction with the maze could have been just what he needed to put whatever pieces he had together.”
“This site is connected with the one in Antarctica, right?” Evans said. “That’s the whole reason we’re here. What if the sleeping god is connected to both, too? And what if this god—who not even Dr. Villarreal has heard of—isn’t necessarily a mythical creation, but rather a literal one? What if the sleeping god is what’s at the center of the maze?”
Jade set down her food. It felt like she was swallowing stones just to fill her gut. She could see where he was going with that line of thought, but wasn’t entirely certain of the implications.
“We need to figure out what we’re going to do,” Anya said. “Do we believe that this threat is credible?”
“I believe that Barnett does,” Evans said, and looked at Jade. “Do you agree?”
She nodded and ordered her thoughts before speaking.
“Then if we all agree that we’re dealing with a legitimate threat, the first thing we need to do is clear this place out.”
“The site closes to the public at five,” Anya said. “That’s just over an hour from now.”
“Good,” Jade said. “So the way I see it we have three options. We can do nothing and leave with everyone else. That’s one. We can barricade ourselves in here and wait another ten-plus hours for Barnett’s team to arrive, which is what he wants. Or we can go back down there and see if we can find out anything about this sleeping god.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Evans said. “You saw the booby traps down there.”
“Nothing’s going to happen up here as long as there are witnesses everywhere, right?”
“You’re assuming the threat is human in nature.”
“If it weren’t, Barnett would have been here already. He would have told us to evacuate this place and get out of here ourselves.”
“He nearly let us all die in Antarctica,” Anya said. “He waited until the very last minute to send help.”
“I don’t think he would have called us at all if that was his intention. He could have just watched us via satellite and waited to see what happened.”
“I agree,” Evans said.
“So what about this?” Jade said. “We take a shot at discovering what’s at the center of the maze. If we don’t find it before this place closes, we get out of here before anything can happen.”
“You keep saying ‘we’ like you’re going to be down there.”
“You’re right, Cade. This is your call.”
He hesitated. It wasn’t Jade’s favorite option either, but she hadn’t traveled halfway around the world to lock herself inside a trailer that smelled of body odor and bad Mexican food, one that likely wouldn’t hold up to a stiff breeze, let alone anything resembling a siege.
Evans finally nodded, rose without a word, and headed for the back of the trailer, where his wetsuit hung in the shower stall.
Jade pulled back the curtains over the window with the intention of staring out across the ruins. Instead, she found herself looking right at the archeologist, Villarreal, who smiled awkwardly and strode toward the door like that had been his intention all along. She couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been standing there.
Or what he might have heard.
25
TESS
The Cage, FOB Atlantis
Tess had seen Subject Z agitated before, but never to this extent. It didn’t just pace its cage; it stalked it, as though aggressively scrutinizing it for any weakness it somehow hadn’t seen before. Testing and probing the walls. Digging its fingers into the seams around the barricade. Perhaps because of its physical form, or maybe because of its capacity for higher orders of communication, she’d begun to think of it in human terms, and yet what she watched on the monitor now lacked anything resembling humanity. It was an animal, one seemingly worked into a frenzy by the presence of the prey that had eluded it in the past.
Until Kelly and Roche arrived, she’d been able to distance herself from the events that had transpired here before her arrival. No, not events . . . the slaughter of nearly everyone inside AREA 51, the station preceding this one. The creature in front of her had ripped apart human beings just like her with its claws and teeth and infected others with whatever evil sentience animated it so they could join in the bloodletting. This was not a curiosity. It was a monster, and if it were to ever escape its cage, it would no doubt run her down and do the same thing to her.
Not since her first day had she felt this way, and even then she’d been more intrigued than afraid. She couldn’t help but notice that there was an element of escalation to its pattern of behavior. In a matter of days, it had gone from playing the perfect lab rat to hurling itself against the door in an effort to break out. Where before it had been content to humor her with its guttural clicking sounds, it was now talking directly to her and smearing the blood of its meals into messages on the window. It terrified her to think what might come next, although not nearly as much as it did Kelly, who sat several feet behind her, within visual range of the monitors and yet simultaneously with one foot out the door, as well. The girl with the red and green streaks in her hair had seen things that Tess didn’t want to imagine. She wondered if, had their roles been reversed, she would have been strong enough to survive, let alone come back here and share the same room with it.
Roche stood at the window, staring into the dark cage while the creature skulked invisibly in front of him. It was almost as though the being on the other side could smell him, for every few minutes it stopped, raised its face, and sniffed until it was again overtaken by bloodlust.
Barnett had instructed them to wait to begin until he got back, but he’d been gone for so long now that she was beginning to wonder if he’d forgotten about them. She didn’t know what was in Mexico, only that Special Agent Morgan and his team were on their way there in a big hurry. Whatever the reason, it had something to do with the underground maze he had shown her and the route Roche had drawn to the center. A part of her wished Barnett had sent her, too. Seeing the sun for the first time in months would have been amazing. More important, however, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was happening here in Antarctica. It was a sensation she couldn’t quite put into words, and yet one that grew more insistent with each passing minute.
“Do you really believe that aliens built structures on other planets?” Kelly asked.
Tess rounded on her, prepared to launch into her standard diatribe, but hesitated when she saw the expression on the younger woman’s face. She wasn’t used to people genuinely wanting to hear her answer.
“I can tell you with complete certainty that there are non-naturally occurring structures on any number of planets, including our own moon, although any theory about who or what built them w
ould be pure conjecture.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Nature abhors perfection. At its most basic level, it’s essentially an agent of chaos. There are no right angles in the natural world, no perfect squares or circles. Pyramids like the one above us don’t accidentally come into being. Not here, and certainly not on other planets with varying gravitational forces and, in some cases, complete lack of geothermal and hydrogeological activity.”
“So if sentient beings either lived on or visited these planets, then do you believe they’ve been on this planet? That they could still be here?”
That was the real question, and the one that destroyed her credibility in the world of academia. When it came to omnipotent beings living in gated communities in the clouds, people were willing to believe almost anything, but when it came to otherworldly species, they demanded a level of proof that couldn’t be demonstrated without producing a body. That was what Kelly was asking her, she knew. Was this creature in front of them a product of organisms that had arrived from another planet? Or worse, were there more of them out there?
“You’re asking a question for which there is no answer. Belief is the kissing cousin of faith. There are people who believe in the ancient astronaut theory, that life-forms from across the galaxy were responsible for building the pyramids or using slave labor to mine the Earth’s resources or even for the evolution of mankind itself. My own feelings are mixed. What I can say with complete certainty is that we are not alone in the universe and it’s only a matter of time before we make first contact, if we haven’t already, but if whoever’s out there is anything like this monstrosity, I have no desire to be around when we do.”
“Whatever it is,” Roche said, “they should have killed it six months ago. Nothing good can come from keeping it alive.”
The echo of footsteps announced Barnett’s arrival.
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