“I need to go back up there,” she pointed and he knew she meant the portal, the junction of their worlds. “There is another,” she insisted. “Another who will come. I need to go.”
“The other?” she asked.
It was clear she had no idea what he meant. Nor did she seem to have any knowledge of the Interloper. The mind-speak was not mind reading. Galfar had no way to pluck that knowledge from her; she would have to tell him. However he knew reactions, and this girl clearly knew nothing of that other man. Who she waited for was someone else altogether.
“Can I just go?” Then: “Please?”
Young though she was Galfar sensed wisdom in her. Understanding. Far beyond her years. She was scared, she was in a hurry, she was speaking quickly and on the edge of panic but, beneath that was something more. Something much more.
Of a sudden he found himself glad of her.
Without further question he led her back outside, into the night, where he instructed the Elnab to let her pass and follow at a distance. He doubted anyone else would be coming through, if the reports of the Elnab were true. Something quite unusual had transpired up there at the Junction this night, and at once Galfar saw the arrival of this girl as an omen.
An omen indeed.
He looked to his glowing hut, then back to the valley. Inhaled deeply, taking in a lungful of the sweet aromas all around; the smell of burning wood drifting out from inside, the flowering trees. He took a moment to gaze up at the colorful Heart of the World in the night sky high above.
Wondering if this girl was the one for whom he waited.
Fervently hoping that she was.
**
The heavy pant of Jessica’s breath was the only sound in her ears as she scaled the last of the steps to the summit of the wide, upper plateau, fast as she could, bursting out onto the open in what she realized was a needless rush but which frantic worry compelled. She never should’ve left; never should’ve let herself be led away from the very spot Zac would come for her. Blue Saturn was behind, in the direction of the old man’s hut, and as she looked across the breadth of the stone expanse, surrounded on all sides by a hemisphere filled with stars, there was nothing else in sight, nothing in her peripheral but flat rock and night sky.
No Zac.
She hadn’t expected to find him, really, and was glad to know she hadn’t missed him—surely he would’ve followed the trail if he’d come through, and the trail led only to the hut—but she could not dismiss the burning and irrational impulse to be there. To be there, in that spot, when he arrived.
She walked further, hands on her hips, working to get her breathing under control. The dead Bok lay crumpled in the same spot, a dark shadow in the starlight, grisly marker for the exact point of their arrival. She gave the body wide berth, though that was where Zac would appear. For a bit she paced in a circle, breathing more and more normally with each passing second, until at last she was recuperated and whole. She heard the guards clanking up down below, following, and it wasn’t long before they ascended and walked out onto the plateau with her. Unwelcome guests, but she knew they’d been instructed by the old man to stay with her.
How did he do that? The thought of how he’d spoken to her in her head made her reel. She tried to forget about it.
Same as what Lorenzo did.
How?!
Slowly she eased herself to the stones, turning so she wasn’t in sight of the dead Bok or the guards. Once situated she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them close.
Soon she began to shiver.
She’d sweated a little with the exertion of getting there and the night air was chill. Roughly she rolled down the sleeves of the old farmer’s shirt, then reached and rolled down the legs of the overalls. All the way. Fully unrolled until she was able to pull the sleeves and legs over hands and feet, covering the exposed skin. She turned up the collar of the shirt, pulled her knees in tighter and hugged herself into a snug little ball. Slowly she began rocking back and forth on her heels, willing the warmth to build.
Zac would come.
**
Zac wandered aimlessly. He’d searched the forest and given up, finding no more evidence of the Kel fighter.
Why did Satori leave?
Maybe she and Willet left long ago, right after he and Jess lost the tablet and fell off the radar. They should’ve gone back to the fighter at once. He should’ve insisted on it. Not taken a motorcycle and gone off chasing Lorenzo on their own. Maybe it made sense at the time, maybe it didn’t, all he knew was that he was so taken with Jessica, so ready to follow her every move, he would’ve done anything she said—and did. And it cost her dearly. Now he had no idea where she was.
No way to save her.
He vowed not to let it happen again. When he found her, he would be firm and do his job and protect her in all ways. More of the little tears came. He rubbed at them with his fingertips in frustration. Regret solved nothing, despair even less. Something needed to be done. Why Willet and Satori abandoned them … Maybe when they saw things had fallen apart Satori flew in to help. Maybe she was back where he’d just been. Something impulsive like that wasn’t beyond her. Had she done that she would not have found them at the club, only the tablet, forgotten in the chaos. Their chase on the motorcycle had been fast and furious, covering a lot of ground in a very short time. Nevertheless Zac expected their progress had been followed from above. At the time he thought Nani must surely have them under some sort of observation. Even thought she or Satori might come swooping in. But no one did. And with no way to contact them directly—
He smacked a tree as he walked. It gave a mighty splinter that echoed in the quiet woods.
Why did they leave themselves so unprepared? One single way to make contact: the tablet. One single way.
Why?!
But he knew the answer.
Him.
That was why. They’d placed all their confidence in him. And he had too. After all, how could anything have gone wrong? There was nothing here on Earth that could even remotely challenge him.
Only it turned out there was. At least long enough to shock him. Long enough for Lorenzo to make an escape, which triggered a reaction and a bad, bad decision that led them far afield and put them impossibly out of touch with the rest of the team.
Damn!
In spite of the stupidity of what they’d done Willet and Satori still should not have left. Zac could think of no good reason. While the chaos in the club was not in any of their contingencies, the fighter being in one spot until Zac or Jess signaled … that much, at least, was. They were supposed to stay. To be there for just such an emergency. Obviously something happened. Did they get spotted? Were they flying around looking for him even now?
Satori and Willet wouldn’t abandon him. They just wouldn’t. No matter the evidence to the contrary, no matter how hard it was right then not to feel as if they had, he couldn’t believe they would do it without good reason.
So what now? Start a forest fire? Go on a rampage until he got noticed? He had no idea where any of them were, what they were looking at or even if they were looking. How could he get their attention? How could he k
now he got their attention?
He couldn’t.
Go back to the castle? The farm? The vault? See if there was yet another Icon? He’d swept the castle in his blood rage. Maybe there were more Icons, but even if there were, even if there were many, using an Icon without knowing where it went could send him anywhere. Should he go back to the Project agents? Use them to help him? Only, even with a stack of Icons … the only certainty was in his hand. The only way for certain he could get to Jess was right here, with him,
He looked down at the device. Shiny. Damaged.
Ruined.
And the only way to understand it was Nani. Only she could solve it. And the only way to get Nani was Satori and Willet.
At some point he realized he’d wandered high up one of the taller peaks. The moment of that realization was like waking from a dream. How long have I been walking? He found a path, went all the way to a steep edge and found an outlook. Earlier he’d been alternating between leaping and running, covering ground in tremendous bounds, no clear direction in mind, letting the frustration run its course, but somewhere along the way he’d slowed and shifted to his current, meandering pace.
He had no recollection of most of it.
It was late afternoon and the sun was setting. He leaned against a tall tree. More mountains cut a jagged edge across the horizon, rugged valleys stretching in all directions, no immediate sign of civilization from that high vantage.
He was all alone.
Dark clouds were gathering.
He looked down at the broken Icon in his hand. Twisted it absently.
Lost. Utterly …
Lost.
CHAPTER 8: NEWS REACHES THE FIELD
The interior of the castle was filled with clues, all of which needed a full investigation. Drake watched Bobby as he made another attempt to access the array of servers in the large computer room. He worked at a keyboard/monitor station, flipping randomly between machines, trying what he could to get into the Bok network. So far no luck, though it was a long shot at any rate.
Other members of the Project were fanned out through the Bok castle and so far the reports were the same. All the Bok were dead. Bloodied, mangled bodies throughout, caught in grotesque positions, fleeing or trapped in corners. One lay in sight right there, at the back of the computer room. The work of the superhuman guy, they had to assume; made more likely by the fact that there was no evidence of bullet or stab wounds. All the Bok had died from blunt trauma. Severe blunt trauma. And while Drake had no love of the Bok, this was no way for someone to go.
He breathed a sigh of relief that his own men had held themselves in check and not attacked the guy immediately when he jumped in. Otherwise they would also be dead. It was clear all the muffled, sporadic gunfire they’d heard inside the castle earlier was directed at him. Nearly every Bok’s gun was empty, or at least discharged, bullet dings in the stones all over the interior castle walls, floors and ceilings.
Who the hell is that?! How?! Each time he let his thoughts take off in that direction he got spun up on the impossibility of it all and had to pull himself back. He was used to the fantastic. This was just more of the same, he told himself.
But …
As it was the guy had chosen, curiously, to leave Drake and his team alone. Just jumped away. Frustrated, annoyed. Sad. It was impossible to tell for sure. He was a young man, so far beyond a “man” he might well have been an alien. And that, Drake had to admit, was a distinct possibility. He carried one of the transport devices and was seen with Jessica. Where he’d jumped off to Drake had no idea, nor did he intend to break silence to start tracking him. Right now they were in a severely remote location making no calls, taking no chances. When the time came they would go after him.
Somehow he had the idea the guy would not be difficult to find.
“We’re gonna have to do some deep evaluation of this,” Bobby was saying.
Drake looked to him.
Bobby turned from the keyboard. “But this is the mother lode.” The banks of computers and network cable were an anomaly in the ancient stone room. Drake’s small group had already been through most of the castle. This discovery was huge. The mother lode indeed. They had no set, physical location for the Bok prior to this and certainly no files. Now, quite possibly, they had everything. As huge as it was, however, it was clear there were bigger things on Bobby’s mind.
“This isn't just about the Bok, is it?” Bobby asked. “I mean, that tablet is not from Earth. I think we can agree on that. Then there’s the teleportation devices. We already know what ours could do. Now that guy had yet another one. And the guy ...”
Drake had no answers.
“I mean,” Billy was one of the Project’s brightest minds, yet he looked utterly lost. Standing there in the archaic stone room, at the heart of the world’s greatest secret society, backdrop of servers and cutting-edge technology … the contemplation of that had taken a backseat to this other, more incredible discovery. He glanced at the crumpled Bok at the back of the computer room. “How is anything he did even possible?” The full import of that encounter, out there beyond the hill, everything they’d found there in the castle, evidence of the super human’s rampage … seemed at last to be settling. “How is he possible?” Bobby wanted to know. “He looked, sounded … totally human.”
Drake shook his head. Whoever that guy was, something happened here, in this very castle, that set him off.
Drake suspected it had everything to do with the girl.
Just then one of his team called from down the hall, rushing up.
“You’ve got a call,” he said. Drake noticed he had a phone in his hand.
“A call?” That couldn’t be good. “I instituted Alpha Protocol. Radio silence.” No one but the highest in the US chain of command would have their numbers, and everyone on that list would know better than to break protocol once initiated. Drake had full authority on this op and only he could authorize communications.
Not good at all, he thought, even as the other confirmed his fears:
“It’s General Peterson.”
Drake was handed the phone and he took it slowly, trying to put together any scenario involving the United State’s top military officer calling the chief of a highly specialized task force that did not officially exist, in the field, in the middle of an op that also did not, by any record, Top Secret or otherwise, exist.
“Hello?” Drake took the call, prepared to call Peterson to task—no matter his rank—but fell silent as the General wasted no time laying out the scenario unfolding. Drake said nothing after that initial Hello, listening quietly as Peterson finished, bringing himself around enough to manage a “Yes, sir,” and hang up.
A few more of his team had walked up, curious. They and Bobby looked to him.
“They want me back,” he said simply.
“Why?”
Drake took a deep breath.
“We’re being invaded.”
The others were shocked. “America?” one of them managed. “Who?” Drake could see they were thinking Russia, China. All the normal, if unlikely, things one would think if someone told them there’d been an invasion.
But that wasn’t it at all.
He looked to each of them, struggling to understand it himself. Struggling to grasp what he’d just been told.
Feeling the hollowness in his own expression.
“The world.”
**
Hansel drove directly into the setting sun, picking his way through the disorderly Cairo traffic. All-in-all an unpleasant drive. An hour earlier one of the Bok’s private planes had landed with him aboard, fresh in from Spain; before that, enroute—on his way to break the news to Lorenzo that the raid at the farmhouse failed—Hansel was getting a call to inform him that the castle itself had been raided. Apparently the superhuman and the girl showed up and the ancient Kel teleportation device may have been used. Now Hansel was on his way to the small Bok site here in Egypt to let their leader know al
l this, in person, and he could no longer raise anyone at the castle and, following the frantic calls aboard the plane, had to assume the whole Bok HQ in Spain had been compromised.
Not a pleasant drive at all.
But the increasing disorder of things along his route was starting to impinge; starting to break through this funeral mood. As much as he dreaded the imminent confrontation with Lorenzo, the activity in the streets was beyond even the usual chaos of Cairo. He’d been unable to reach anyone for the last half hour. In fact he was getting nothing but “circuits busy” messages any time he tried to make any call at all. Add to that the confusion in progress all around him and he was starting to get the idea something definitely was not right. He’d flipped on the radio and dialed through a few stations, nothing English he could find, all Arabic, and he had no idea what they were saying. They could’ve been reporting the latest unrest or describing a pandemic sweeping the world. He flipped it off. People outside the Range Rover were in a hurry to get nowhere. Rushing with no clear purpose. Almost as if in a panic. As they hurried this way and that they kept glancing to the sky. Hansel shielded his eyes and leaned forward over the dash, looking up through the windshield, into the glare.
Nothing up there.
What was going on?
He reached his crossing and turned down a more narrow street, heading a few more blocks until he reached the dark green double garage doors marking his destination. He clicked the opener on the dash and the doors opened, he wheeled the Range Rover carefully inside and they closed behind. He stepped out, shut the driver’s door with a solid thunk and thumbed the keychain. BooBoop the car locked and the alarm set. He stood a moment in the warm garage, waiting for the light to shut off; breathing in the musty smells, listening to the voices shouting outside in the distance.
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 7