If she didn’t . . . she’d be a slave for the rest of her life.
Or dead within the hour.
FORTY-SEVEN
A LONE HYBRID Neanderthal crept through the jungle, avoiding twigs and dry leaves that might give away his position. As a sentry it was his duty to patrol the area directly surrounding the settlement. There were other sentries keeping watch, some on the ground, some in the trees, all keeping an eye out for dangerous animals or human military units that might pose a threat. He looked forward to the day when the renovations to Meru City were complete and their people could move out of the settlement and into the mountain itself. He had been chosen as chief lookout because of his keen eyesight. He would keep an eye on the city from high in the temple—the last line of defense against those who might manage to slip past their outer defenses. His days of sneaking around the jungle were almost at an end.
The hybrid stopped and sniffed at the air. Something unfamiliar had passed by recently. But he couldn’t place it. Perhaps an animal, or even one of the old mothers? They often smelled foreign as they roamed the jungle, killing and eating whatever they could find. He envied the old mothers sometimes. They were free to hunt and eat what they wanted. Red had taken him to hunt once, when he was still young. They found two human women fetching water at the river. He’d tasted, and enjoyed, both, washing the blood from his hands and mouth before returning home. Father would have been upset because he was human, but he was not like the others. He was family.
He pushed thoughts of his parents from his mind. The internal battle between the old and new worlds of his people would distract him from his duty. His nose and ears lacked the sensitivity that his eyes possessed, so he stood perfectly still and observed the world around him. Light shimmered as the canopy overhead swayed in a light afternoon breeze. Branches groaned, leaves rustled, and the denizens of the forest sang out. Everything sounded normal. But the smell lingered.
Then he saw it. A piece of torn fabric hanging on a dead branch. He walked to the branch and picked up the cloth. With the fabric pressed against his nose, he breathed in deeply. The smell filled his nostrils. Someone had been here . . . someone human had made it past. Humans were really no threat; even armed with guns they rarely put up a fight. He never felt the need to carry a weapon of his own, though sometimes they used their enemies’ weapons against them as they had during the attack on the VPLA camp. Of course, Father taught them that some human weapons were powerful enough to destroy entire mountains.
Even one human making it into the settlement could be disastrous.
He thought for a moment about hunting down the invader on his own. With no one around he could have his fill and bury the evidence, or throw the body in the river. But he decided against it. There was no way to know how many humans there were.
With his powerful lungs and broad chest, the guards back in the settlement would hear his call and know that someone had made it inside the perimeter. Their entire population would set out to find the humans and would no doubt round them up within minutes. He took a deep breath and then . . .
“Hey, buddy.” It was just a whisper, but the sound spun the hybrid like a top.
Expecting to see his foe approaching by land, the hybrid failed to see the figure descending from above until it was too late. Before any warning could be shouted, a spear fashioned from a straight branch sharpened to a point burst from his stomach, thrust through from behind. The hybrid’s eyes went wide as the plummeting shadow resolved into a mud-covered, nearly naked human female. Her eyes showed bright white and blue from behind her darkened mud covering. And in her hands . . . another spear, thrust out toward his open mouth.
Queen’s spear pierced the back of the hybrid’s throat, severed vertebrae, and exited through the back of its neck. The creature fell back, convulsed, and then laid still. Queen pulled her spear from the hybrid’s mouth as Rook stood from his hiding place behind the bush. He retrieved his spear from the hybrid’s back, twisting and turning it to loosen the body’s grip.
Without a word shared between them, they dragged the body behind the bush and covered it with leaves. The job done, they picked up their spears and began climbing. Queen went up quickly, stopping every now and then to give Rook a hand. After two minutes of hard climbing, they were in the canopy, invisible to the world below, but facing a new group of dangers.
Moving through the trees was slow and nerve-racking. A misstep might mean falling fifty feet to a very quick end or, at the least, a painful debilitation. They were also in unfamiliar territory. Fighting in the trees. Hiding in the trees. Queen had some experience, but given Rook’s size, he hadn’t spent much time climbing trees since he was a kid. They had considered going separate ways, but decided against it. They fought better together. They had also considered staying on the ground where they would have been more mobile, yet easier to spot. But recon was their goal at this point, not infiltration, so they opted for a high perch that would allow them a bird’s-eye view. Perhaps they were too used to satellite imagery, but both could more easily assess a situation when seeing it from above.
They made their way, without incident, to the edge of the forest, where the hybrid settlement began. After working their way into the branches of a tree whose bark most closely matched the drying mud on their bodies, they turned their attention to the community below. Rook summed up his assessment in one word. “Shit.”
They looked down on a large clearing at the base of the mountain. Perhaps fifty large huts filled the area. A line of caves pocked the side of the mountain. Fires glowed and cast off streams of smoke that billowed up and dispersed into the ominous rain clouds above. Animals paced in cages built from stone and wood—two tigers and four bears—and two crocodiles were fenced inside a small pond. But it wasn’t the collection of predators that surprised Rook, it was the Neanderthal population.
“There must be more than a thousand of them,” Rook said.
Queen nodded. She wouldn’t bother counting. As the population moved about, some building, some foraging, some gathering, the total number would be impossible to discern. “You said Weston was here for only fifteen years, right?”
“Yeah . . . ,” Rook said. “But he also said these guys matured and had kids by age three.”
“So these . . . things . . . are all fifteen years old and under? A bunch of kids?”
Rook shook his head. “In our years they’re kids. But they’re not human. They’re not kids. They’re as adult as you and me, and much more deadly.”
They watched in silence for several minutes as two elephants entered the camp, pulling fallen trees behind them. The trees were quickly cleared of limbs and then, using stone blades and raw strength, a group of large males began splitting the wood into long planks. Within fifteen minutes, the trees had been split into ten planks each. The elephants returned to the jungle with their keepers, and the hybrid males who had cut the wood carried it away. Two men carried each long stack of ten planks, nearly the equivalent weight of the trees they had been hacked from, one on each end.
“They’re not even exerting themselves,” he said.
“Look where they’re going,” she said. The male hybrids headed into the largest cave and disappeared into the darkness. “Why would they need all that wood inside a mountain?”
“I’m telling you,” he said, looking at the mountain. “As many as we see out here, we’ll find more in there. They’re like ants. If they have King and Pawn, they’ll be in there.”
“If they’re not dead already.”
Rook cast a serious glance in Queen’s direction. “Don’t even think it.”
She looked away from him and nodded. She could be a ruthless and efficient killer, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care about her teammates. It was hard to stay positive when the odds of survival, let alone rescue, seemed so insurmountable. Queen forced herself to look on the bright side; she’d already killed two of them. She could kill more.
“What’s the plan?” he aske
d.
Queen looked up at the sky and then to Rook. The ferocious gleam in her eyes returned. “Wait until night, pray it doesn’t rain, and then set the captives free.”
FORTY-EIGHT
KNIGHT READ THROUGH the pages, enraptured by the text as though it were a good novel. The story, interpreted and annotated by Weston as he put the puzzle pieces together, was gripping.
It was an unknown history of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. The pages chronicled the rise of the human race, thousands of years of peaceful coexistence and commingling bloodlines, until something changed. Whether it was a leap in evolution or the will of a single human leader the story didn’t say, but one thing was clear—humanity became violent. The Neanderthals had done their best to defend themselves, and despite their greater numbers and technological advances, they had little skill with war. Over generations, the Neanderthals were pushed north, out of Africa and into Asia, where they fled east.
They fled so fast, in fact, that the human race could not keep up. The Neanderthals chose to settle in the remote Annamite range because food and shelter were abundant, the terrain was easily defendable and . . . they found peace within the mountain. Mount Meru.
It spoke of giant crystals that healed the mind, of the construction of the necropolis from the bones of their dead, and of the building of a temple dedicated to the crystals and the god that provided them with this new home.
Three pages later, the story took on a new tone. Humans had been spotted. Scouts. Easily killed, but they knew more would come. The Neanderthals adopted a new form of leadership that Knight thought, despite their advanced civilization, was still quite primal . . . quite Neanderthal. The largest, most aggressive males would lead. Not the smartest. Not the most cunning. The warriors. They were preparing for war. The translation ended there. Knight read the last line.
To the largest and fiercest among us we bestow the rights of leadership that we might survive what is to come. It is to be taught, throughout the generations, so that we might become warriors, so that we become what the humans fear most.
This is it!!
Knight turned the page, but Weston had stopped writing. It was his final entry and Knight realized it was most likely made the day he left everything on the floor of the cave and . . . then what?
The answer struck Knight, causing him to laugh. “The devil.” Weston saw his chance to claim leadership. If his captors still lived by these rules, and Weston was a large man, he could assert his dominance and take control. But had he succeeded or was he dead? He hadn’t returned to this place, that was for sure, but why was a mystery.
He placed the notebook back on the floor and shuffled through the large pages of wall rubbings. As he looked at the symbols he marveled at the ancient knowledge on display here. So much potential. If not for Homo sapiens, how high might the Neanderthal race have soared? They appeared on Earth long before modern humans and apparently got off to a good head start. But they hadn’t developed a thirst for blood.
A folded piece of paper fell from the notebook. He picked up the page and opened it. Filling its surface was a detailed map of both the exterior and interior of Mount Meru. Knight longed for a YOU ARE HERE label, but even without one he was quickly able to locate the maze drawn on the map. An exit on the other side of the maze led up toward a chamber that didn’t look possible. The drawing showed a city, with a familiar-looking temple at its core, surrounded by what looked like giant crystals hanging from the ceiling.
The crystals.
Knight looked at the giant crystal lighting the maze and remembered the Neanderthal account of crystals that healed the mind. “No way,” he said, but it had to be true. Having seen the necropolis and read the Neanderthals’ history, he believed they were indeed capable of such a thing. But what made the decision to head toward the city easiest was that it led further away from the old mothers, Neanderthal 2.0. He wanted nothing to do with them. Had he been a large man, he might try to assert his dominance, but he was a plaything in the hands of the savage women.
He certainly couldn’t take charge, but Rook, or Bishop . . . they were just the men for the job.
Knight folded the map into a neat square and pocketed it. He limped his way through the second half of the maze and hobbled up the staircase that led to a tunnel opposite the one he had entered through. As he stepped into the tunnel, darkness surrounded him.
“Damnit.” He’d left the bandanna saturated with glowing algae on the other side of the room . . . all the way back through the maze.
Screw it, he thought, then headed up into the darkness.
He stopped after only a few feet.
He’d heard something.
A squeak.
Then another. He held his breath and listened. The sound of tiny claws on stone filled the tunnel ahead.
A rodent.
Knight felt the thing hit his foot. It squeaked again, and then ran past. He saw it run down the staircase and enter the maze without hesitation. It was either out for a jog or something was chasing it. His fears were confirmed when a deep growl accompanied by heavy footfalls approached from the darkness beyond. Whatever was chasing the rat would find him first.
FORTY-NINE
SARA’S FOOTSTEPS ECHOED on the cobblestone street, bouncing off tall stone buildings and the mountain ceiling high above. Weston, being barefoot, walked in silence. His stride was confident and calm, the way a kid walks in his own house; every turn known, every contour familiar.
He really does belong here, Sara thought. She would have been happy to let Weston and his little clan live out their lives here, too, but she knew without a doubt that he could never be convinced of that.
Seeing the city up close, the architecture took on a new shape. Asian meets ancient Rome. Elegance amalgamated with power. Beautiful and chilling. The curved roofs sported long corner beams. The walls of the buildings were constructed from thick stones, perhaps once polished, but now rough. The larger buildings, with overhanging platforms, were supported by rows of columns that smacked of Rome’s early Doric order. They had already passed through four of the five galleries, each one separated from the next by a large, gated stone wall.
Light shifted and rolled through the chamber, climbing buildings and sliding across streets. Weston had explained that clouds were moving by the mountain, shifting the sun’s beams on the giant crystals. Sara’s mother had hung crystals in the windows of her childhood home and the effect had been marvelous, but they were a joke compared to this. The cool, crisp air filled the nose like New England in the fall.
The walk had been long, yet after days of unsure footing in the jungle, Sara found the hard, smooth stone beneath her feet a welcome change. If not for the circumstances of her visit to Mount Meru she would have loved to explore. As it was, she was totally tuning out Weston’s ongoing history lesson about the decline of the Neanderthal civilization. Apparently, the entire history of the species was recorded in another chamber, going back to a time before Homo sapiens existed. The temptation to become enraptured with the place was intense. The history, the mystery of it all. But Sara’s mind remained preoccupied with something even more glorious—escape.
So far, she hadn’t gotten beyond, “Take off my boots so he can’t hear me running.” The rest of her mental energy focused on learning the layout of the city. There could be no hesitation when she made her move, no delay in choosing a path. She felt confident she could find her way out through the gates, working through back alleys and avoiding open space, but once out of the city her plan fell flat. Climbing the stairs again wasn’t an option. She’d be exposed. Weston could easily catch her. And she’d be headed straight back into the den of her enemies. The only other option she’d come up with had her jumping in the subterranean river and letting it sweep her away . . . wherever it went.
A sudden tap on her shoulder jolted her from her thoughts.
“Lost in thought, are we?” Weston asked, pushing the handgun against her shoulder. He could tell she wa
sn’t listening to everything he said. Who could blame her? She had to be overwhelmed by the place, just as he was when he’d first stumbled upon it. And years of constant work had nearly returned Meru to its former glory—a city fit for gods. He pointed up. “We’re almost there.”
Sara looked up. She’d been so distracted by the buildings around her and plans of escape that she’d failed to notice the temple rising high above them. The fifth and final gate stood before them, open like the others. Sara took a step back. She had no desire to enter the temple. She knew it was the end of their trip and the beginning of her nightmare. But with the gun to her back, what choice did she have?
She walked through the open thirty-foot-tall arched gate, noticing the restoration work on its two massive doors had yet to be completed. No longer blocked by the fifth gallery wall, the temple stood boldly before her. Rows of balustrades surrounded the outer perimeter of the structure proper. Each vertical column featured a serpent wrapped around it, each different from the next. An entrance lay just beyond the balustrades. They walked through it, into a long courtyard featuring palm trees and flowering bushes. Lit by the colorful crystals above, the lush inner court erased the dire emotions brought on by the rows of snakes outside.
But Sara’s sense of dread remained regardless of the inner temple’s beauty. Weston had fallen silent when he should be talking the most. This place was no doubt home to a thousand stories worth telling. Yet, Weston simply pointed the way and kept his jaw clenched tight. Now he was distracted by his thoughts . . . by his plans. Was he simply hoping to change her heart by the power of the place, or was he taking her to a cell? There was no way to know.
She decided to see if the man could be softened, or at least understood. As they walked across the courtyard, she said, “Tell me about your family.”
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