by James Axler
Kane pressed his hand harder against the open wound. “I’ll be fine.”
“You look a little pale,” she told him.
“Careful,” Kane warned. “You’re starting to sound like you care.”
“Well,” Rosalia said noncommittally as she replaced the sewing kit in the hidden pocket of her robe.
Kane watched the proud woman as she ran her hand over her dog’s head until it whimpered with affection. The canine looked at Kane with its strangely expressive face, pale eyes peering into his.
“So, what are you going to do?” Kane asked. “Just ride off into the sunset?”
“Something like that,” Rosalia agreed.
“It’s a dangerous world out there,” Kane said. “More dangerous than it’s been in a long time.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way,” Rosalia spit. “More opportunities.”
Kane didn’t know what to say to that. The woman was stubborn, proud, a loner. But she had helped him, helped everyone in Cerberus, whatever her ultimate reasons for doing so. Plus she was smart, a solid fighter. Right now, with the team depleted and the redoubt in ruins, someone like Rosalia was just what they needed. He gazed out at the evening sun as it sank toward the horizon, its warm colors reminding him of the dismal magma lights that had illuminated the redoubt, and of Brigid Baptiste’s vibrant hair. Baptiste was still among the missing, and without her, Kane knew, their side would struggle against the threat of Ullikummis.
“Why don’t you stick around?” Kane proposed suddenly, still gazing out at the evening sun sinking over the forest.
Rosalia looked at him, staring at his strong profile in the fading light. “I’m a free agent, Kane,” she told him. “I go where I please.”
Kane fixed her with a look. “There’s safety in numbers,” he said. “Doesn’t need to be permanent, just a temporary arrangement until we work out all this mess. We’d appreciate your help, Rosalia. I’d appreciate your help.”
Rosalia chuckled. “Oh, Magistrate man, are you going misty on me?”
Kane pushed himself up off the ground, brushing dirt from the robe. “Hey, the offer’s there,” he said. “Now, I’d better go see what kind of brouhaha Lakesh is working up.”
As Kane walked back toward his friends, Rosalia looked at the dog before her, wagging its tail, tongue hanging out. “Well, I know what you’d do,” she told it. “You’d go where the food is, stupid mutt.” After a moment, she stood up, glancing across the plateau toward the group that had gathered around Lakesh. “Screw it, let’s go make some new friends,” she said, glancing down at the animal. “Don’t you look at me like that—I have the sense to go where the food is, too. Food and shelter and maybe a noble Magistrate man to put his life on the line and keep me safe.”
A moment later, Rosalia and her pale-eyed dog joined Kane at the edge of the crowd listening to Lakesh outline their plan. Kane turned, looking at the dark-eyed woman as she stood beside him, and he raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“What?” she challenged. “You’ll get yourself killed without me, and we both know that’s true, so don’t give me none of that Magistrate bullshit you spout.”
Kane inclined his head, turning his attention back to Lakesh as the Cerberus leader revealed their next move. They would leave the redoubt, Lakesh explained, for it was too dangerous to remain here right now. Instead, the Cerberus team would scatter to the four winds, go underground and infiltrate Ullikummis’s strongholds, try to track down and halt this monster’s advance. As Kane listened, Rosalia tucked an arm around his waist and leaned her head into him, pressing against his chest.
From where he stood on the other side of Kane, Grant peered over, surprised at the choice of dark-haired companion Kane had found. Still, Kane knew what he was doing, Grant thought—in Grant’s experience, his partner always did.
Before them, Mariah Falk took center stage and began explaining what little she had extrapolated about the rocks.
Things had changed, but that wasn’t so bad. After all, Cerberus was an organization, a mind-set, a calling, not just a headquarters hidden inside a mountain.
It was a new world, and a new team of heroes would emerge to strike out for the freedom of all humankind.
THREE DAYS BEFORE it had all been so obvious to Ullikummis. He had stood there in the main artery of the Cerberus redoubt, poised over the fallen forms of Kane and his teammates. Kane had put up a valiant fight, but he was doomed from the very start.
Ullikummis turned, ignoring his fallen foe, searching the floor for the one that truly interested him. There, with her vibrant red-gold hair like the rays of the setting sun, lay Brigid Baptiste, the apekin who had tricked and subsequently expelled him from the Ontic Library. Baptiste had a memory like no other. Her ability to file and recall facts was truly exceptional, even to one of the Annunaki, whose shared memories reached countless millennia back to the dawn of their race.
Ullikummis had turned then, the final vestiges of the hydrochloric acid still burning at his face and chest, scanning his loyal subjects as they stood over the group of captured Cerberus rebels. Infiltration had been easy, their defeat a matter of time rather than in any sense a challenge.
Dylan had stepped forward at the stone god’s beckoning, bowing his head in subjugation to his acknowledged master. Dylan, who had taken the title of first priest, was a man easily impressed with simple favors, meaningless tributes from the ones he considered his betters.
“You shall be tasked to turn them,” Ullikummis had explained, his voice rumbling through the tunnel. “A life camp, whose role is to open their minds to the new lives they will lead.” Then he had indicated the unconscious woman with the red hair. “All except this one,” he said. “She is something special—she will form a key part of the future.”
Dylan had nodded once with reverence, acknowledging his master’s instructions in silence. Ullikummis had foreseen even then that Dylan would be replaced, his position as first priest coming rapidly to its end.
Now Ullikummis stood on the windswept shore on his self-raised island of Bensalem, staring out across the crashing waves of the Atlantic, the woman at his side. She seemed small in comparison to him, her figure a slender mixture of curves, where his was rough surfaces, jutting spikes. She had changed her clothes, dressed in some ensemble she had found among the discarded raiment of his new slaves. She stood now in black, appropriate enough in its connotations to human beings and their primitive fear of the dark. She was a dark creature now, the black leather clinging to her like a second skin. Her fire-red hair whipped around her head in the wind that blew in from the sea, and a cape of fur was cinched around her shoulders, the pelt of a dead thing.
“My father conceived me as his hand in the darkness,” Ullikummis said, “his all-consuming hate made manifest.”
The woman watched the sea with emerald eyes that seemed to mirror the color of the waves, her hair echoing the red-gold rays of the sunset.
“Now I have you, my own hand in darkness,” Ullikummis continued, “my own hate made flesh.”
The woman with the fire-red hair nodded, a thin smile on her lips as the waters of the Atlantic sloshed against the jutting rocks of the island, crashing there in big, foam-tipped breakers.
“Brigid Haight,” she agreed, the smile widening on her stone-hard features.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-0965-7
TRUTH ENGINE
Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
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