Black Sun Rising

Chapter Twenty

The white room was worlds away from the beaten earth and gnarled wood of the corridor that Sam had just left. For a moment he thought he was back in the Verbena hotel, with all its clean lines and highly polished surfaces. It was a large room, circular, like sitting inside a drum. The door blended into the wall when Sam closed it behind him.

A bank of seats formed another circle in the center of the room, and the initiates who had already passed the corridor of challenges were sitting quietly, scattered across the seating bank. The chairs themselves were little circles with low backs, capable of spinning like bar stools, and there was no screen or podium, nothing to indicate which direction the initiates should face. Sam selected a seat at random and could not resist giving it a quick spin around. He caught the eye of Sakura Ito as he spun and was pleased to see that he had made her laugh.

One by one, the other initiates completed the challenges and filed in. Sam counted the ones he knew. Christopher Slack, the British MP, who had recently been caught in a minor scandal concerning data protection and the sale of people's tax records to private companies, but had emerged almost unscathed after a more junior minister took the fall. Dylan Thoreau, whose star was rising rapidly as his social media network, KNCT, looked set to overtake Facebook. Ethan McCluskey, whom Sam had met previously, the man reputed to be the unsung hero behind microblogging.

Sam racked his brain for the details of the Chinese politician who entered next. He knew his name was Xiang Ma, and that he was a member of the National People's Congress, perhaps even the standing council, but Sam could not recall the exact nature of the political office he held. I'm slipping, he thought. There was a time when I'd have had all of these details at my fingertips. He remembered Seth Spencer well enough, though — the senator from Nebraska who had recently caused controversy by suggesting that everyone's full medical records should be available to their employers, freely and with no need to seek permission.

There were several others who were not familiar to Sam, except as faces he had seen around the campsite. He wondered whether they were also important people. He knew from talking to Purdue that there were other chief executives here, other powerful people in search of some kind of enlightenment. What are they experiencing? Sam pondered. I'd love a chance to interview a few of them, maybe compare their experiences to Jefferson's. I should speak to Paige and Henley too, find out how they've been doing — ah, speak of the devil.

Henley appeared in the doorway, looking a little shaken. She scanned the room, clearly looking for a friendly face. Sam gave her a little wave, and she rushed over and took a seat beside him. "Hey, Sam," she said, smiling faintly, determined to conceal her nerves.

"Hiya, Henley. How did you get on with the corridor?"

She replied with a one-shouldered shrug. "I don't know. It was kinda dumb, I guess. Like a crappy haunted house or something. Did you have something try to poke into your mouth at the end? That was just gross. I really hope they sterilized whatever that was. I kind of wish I would have been here when my mom did this, though. She must have pitched a fit. She hates anything unsanitary."

"I can imagine. So she's been down here before?"

"I guess. She and my dad talked about stuff that happened in the inner sanctum. It's cooler than I expected down here. I thought it was just going to be more sand and crap, but it's clean, at least. You know, when we—"

She was interrupted by another door sliding open, revealing Sara, now dressed in a sharply tailored linen suit. She strode in, followed by the acolytes. The door slid silently shut behind them. They took up a position to Sam's left, prompting a moment of shuffling as everyone repositioned their seats to face Sara.

"Welcome, initiates!" She threw her arms wide as if to embrace them all. "Congratulations on passing your challenges! I am so happy to see you all here — not a single one of you balked at the things you were asked to do. I applaud your bravery. Before we progress any further, we have to break the spell for a moment and attend to a few minor housekeeping matters." She slid one of the wall panels aside and produced a sheaf of papers. "First, if you have decided that you wish to proceed to initiation, we will need to get you to sign one of these forms. Just stay where you are and we'll bring them to you. Second, despite the fact that it's cooler down here — air conditioned, even! — it is still important to keep yourselves hydrated. So we will bring around some water for everyone, along with the forms."

Sara did not move, but the two acolytes wove through the seating bank, one handing out papers and pens, the other carrying a tray laden with small cups of water laced with the familiar sweet herbs. Once they had collected all the signed forms and empty cups, they spirited everything away, allowing Sara to command everyone's attention once more.

"Initiates," she began, "you have begun to understand the principles behind FireStorm. You know the mythology that underpins our ideology. You know that we believe in connection — complete, limitless, and absolute connection. We dream of bringing the whole world together so that no one ever has to experience isolation or loneliness, that crushing sensation of being on one's own in an unfriendly world. We believe that connection is the key to the end of war, of poverty, of all humankind's suffering. To know that nameless, faceless masses on the other side of the world are starving and dying is one thing. To know that individuals with whom you are connected are suffering is quite another.

"Could you look a man in the face and tell him that you are sorry, but there's nothing you can do about his pain? That you can do nothing about the fact that you have plenty and he has nothing? Most of us could not — not if we knew the man, not if we were aware of his name, his age, his place of birth, his education, his family, his likes and dislikes, the suffering he has already endured, and the triumphs that have defined his life. If we knew the things that defined him as an individual, we could not help but see him as a real, live human being just like us, rather than as part of an amorphous mass. We would feel compelled to end his misery, because connection would bring us to a point where we believed we shared it.

"Imagine also the potential for our own growth! You are all educated people who have seen something of the world. You know the vastness of human experience and intelligence. You have all traveled and experienced other cultures, and I have no doubt that you have learned from them. But I am sure that you are also aware that there are many who have not been afforded that opportunity. There are people whose worlds are small, whose parameters are limited, whose minds have never been expanded the way ours have been.

"Time was when people in that situation would have been doomed to stay that way, to live out their lives without ever being taken beyond their existing limitations. Even an experience like this would have been unavailable to them, because their limited lives would never have allowed them to achieve the excellence that marked you as candidates for this Mind Meld. But now, things are different! Now there is a way to bring connection to the entire world, and every single person in this room has something to contribute toward making that vision a reality. We can harness the power of technology to bring about the spiritual growth of the human race.

"Make no mistake — this will be a long and difficult journey. We can bring about this change, and I believe that we must — but there will be technical issues. There will be human resistance. It must be treated as a process, not as an overnight change. The first step alone will demand a change that people will find frightening until they learn to accept it. The first step on the road to global connection will be better explained by a man who has been working with us to develop the technology required to bring it about. Please welcome the man who will introduce you to the death of privacy — Mr. David Purdue!"

Nina kept running until she reached the river. She could not see Cody when she looked over her shoulder, but the thought that he might be stalking her, tracking her like a predator, would not leave her. She wanted to get away from him, as far away as possible, until she was certain that the others were back at the camp.

That's assuming they come back, she thought. Where are they? How can a whole group of people just vanish like that? I don't know what's going on here, but this place is like some long, weird nightmare. I don't know how to escape. I don't know whether escape is even possible. But what I do know is that this is not a good place to be alone.

As a precautionary measure, she scooped up handfuls of the cool water and drank deeply. She wanted to put more distance between herself and the base — or at least between herself and Cody — and she did not want to risk finding herself far away from a source of water.

I don't want to get myself lost either, she thought. All I want to do is steer clear of Cody for a while, not end up as vulture meat. She looked toward the cinder cone they had previously visited, just a short walk away. That's probably my best bet. At least I've walked the trail before, and I know there are water sources and a few sheltered places there. I'll go that way.

By the time she had made her way to the cinder cone, she was absolutely certain that Cody was not following. Instead, she deduced, he must be waiting for her to return to the campsite. I have no idea what I'm going to do if the others don't reappear soon, Nina admitted to herself. This really wasn't a long-term plan. Well, first things first. I need to get out of the sun. I seem to remember that there's a little stream with some bushes beside it this way…

She followed the faint trail around the side of the hill, alert for any sign of movement. This was inhospitable terrain, and she wondered whether she had leaped straight out of the frying pan and into the fire. Perhaps I should have just stayed and found a way to deal with Cody, she thought. Or just dealt with whatever he had in mind. Out here… there's plenty that's less reasonable than Cody. I'm going to get myself eaten if I'm not careful. By coyotes. Or bears. Or snakes. Or spiders. Or scorpions… Oh, god, I wish I was back in Scotland…

Cautiously, scanning the surrounding environment with every step she took, Nina worked her way around to the little patch of bushes surrounding the tiny stream. The patch was just big enough that she would be able to stretch out beneath it, unseen, safe from the sun and from any predator that relied more on sight than smell. Admittedly, that's really just humans, she realized, but it's better than nothing.

Picking her way across the rocks, Nina reached the bushes and pulled a couple of branches aside. Beneath the layers of leafy green there lay a dark shape. Ugh, not a dead animal, she hoped. I really don't want to have to share my space with a dead coyote. Or have to drag it out and get it out of sight somewhere. Please let it be nothing more than someone's discarded sleeping bag or something, otherwise I'm not going to be able to—

She never completed the thought. As she brushed the branches aside she realized that the black mass was cloth, and that the dead animal was in fact a dead man, a murdered man. It was a man who had been repeatedly stabbed and had chunks of his flesh torn off; a man whose black T-shirt she recognized; a man with whom she had shared a tent… Hunter.

For only a moment Nina stared. The scream that her soul was trying to make died in her throat. Then she turned back toward the camp, ready to run back and get help — or, if not help in a meaningful sense for Hunter, at least a few people who could retrieve the body

A sturdy root hooked round her left ankle as she turned, and as she tried to launch into a run she found herself flat on her face on the sand. She opened her eyes to find herself staring into Hunter's empty eye socket, the eyeball already taken by a predator. The pain that surged through Nina's leg, originating in her ankle, was immense. It occurred to her that she might have broken a bone, or at least sprained it badly, but there was no time for that now. Fueled by terror and desperation, she ignored the pain. The campsite was visible on the horizon. All she could do now was hope that the others would have arrived back before she did.