The 6th Extinction

25

Who knew so much trouble could come in such a small package?

Standing in the shadows at the edge of his estate, Cutter Elwes watched the young woman step tentatively from the helicopter to the summit of the tepui. She held a hand up against the sun’s glare, pulling the brim of her baseball cap lower. She wore a loose blouse and vest, her hair in a ponytail in back.

Not unattractive.

But nothing like the beauty that followed out at her heels and grabbed her elbow. Cutter smiled, seeing the twin of his wife, a match to Ashuu’s every feature, except Rahei had a heart of stone compared to her sister’s gentle soul. Even now Rahei showed no emotion at seeing Cutter, only turning those obsidian eyes upon him and drawing her captive in his direction.

Earlier, Cutter had received a fax of the newcomer’s passport, found while searching her belongings after she’d been captured. A brief background check had revealed many interesting details about his new guest, a woman named Jenna Beck. Apparently she was with the California Park Rangers, stationed at Mono Lake, where Kendall Hess had established his research facility.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Mateo had reported a persistent ranger who had possibly witnessed the kidnapping of the good doctor. The man had also related the details of a hilltop firefight with that same ranger.

Could this be that person?

Interesting.

Curious to know more, Cutter stepped out of the shade of the cave that sheltered his home. The sun blazed above, but still failed to burn off the mists that shrouded the flanks of his mountaintop home.

He noted several emotions flash across the woman’s face as she spotted him. From the slight widening of her eyes, one expression was plain and easy to read.

Recognition.

So she knows me.

Had her ill-timed visit to that base at Mono Lake triggered events that led to the American team arriving in Boa Vista, inquiring about a dead man? This one question raised others, but there would be time for that in a moment.

He stepped forward and offered his hand to shake.

She ignored it. “You’re Cutter Elwes.”

He gave a slight bow of his head in acknowledgment, seeing no reason for subterfuge at this stage.

“And you’re Jenna Beck,” he answered. “The park ranger who has caused us so much grief.”

He found a certain amount of pleasure in her crinkled look of surprise. Still, the woman recovered smoothly.

“Where is Dr. Hess?” she asked, glancing around, her gaze lingering on the house behind his shoulders.

“He’s safe and sound. Doing some work for me.”

Doubt shone in her face.

Cutter had a question of his own. “How did you find me, Ms. Beck? I’ve gone to great lengths to stay among the deceased.”

The woman weighed her answer before speaking. A defiant lift of her chin suggested she opted for the truth, devil be damned.

“It was Amy Serpry,” she said. “The mole you planted in Dr. Hess’s lab.”

Cutter had already suspected as much, as his prior attempts to contact his young Dark Eden acolyte had failed. Initially he had assumed she had died during the containment breach, but plainly she must have been captured.

“And where is Amy now?” Cutter wondered how much the woman had told the authorities. Not that he was overly worried. Amy had never visited his tepui and knew nothing about the true extent of his plans.

“Dead,” Beck said. “From the same organism she unleashed in California.”

Cutter searched inwardly to judge how he felt about this loss, but he discovered no strong emotional response. “Amy knew the risks. She was a dedicated soldier for Dark Eden, happy to advance the cause.”

“She didn’t look happy at the end.”

He shrugged. “Hard sacrifices have to be made.”

As will many more, which this young woman will soon learn.

He motioned for Rahei to bring the prisoner along as he turned away. He headed toward his home’s front door. He caught a small face peering from around the edge. His son, Jori, was always curious about strangers. It was his own fault, for keeping the boy so isolated.

He waved his son back inside.

Here was one visitor Jori didn’t need to meet.

“I want to see Dr. Hess,” the woman persisted. “Before I say another word.”

Despite the woman’s bluster, he knew Rahei had the skills to get her talking within the hour, but that wouldn’t be necessary.

He glanced back. “Where do you think I’m taking you?”

It can’t be…

Kendall stared at the computer screen in the main lab as Mateo loomed in the background.

After completing his analysis of the genetic code that Cutter designed — the code meant for Kendall’s viral shell — he had shed his biosafety suit and returned to a workstation in the outer room.

He had used the CRISPR-Cas9 technique to break down Cutter’s code, gene by gene, nucleotide by nucleotide. He discovered the code was a simple one: a single strand of RNA, a common presentation for a whole family of viruses.

This minimalist approach suggested that Cutter had likely picked an ordinary virus, then engineered new code into it, using the same hybridization technique that he employed to create the chimeric species populating that sinkhole.

But what was the original viral source?

It was a simple puzzle to solve. He ran the code through an identification program and found a 94 percent match with the common norovirus. This particular bug was the plague of cruise ships or anywhere people gathered in great numbers. It was one of the most highly contagious viruses in nature, requiring only twenty or so particles to infect a person. It could be transmitted through bodily fluid, through the air, or simply by coming in contact with a contaminated surface.

If you wanted to create a universally contagious organism, the norovirus would be a good choice. The disadvantage was that it was highly sensitive to common disinfectants, bleaches, and detergents, so could be readily thwarted.

But if that virus were armored inside my engineered shell, nothing would stop it.

Still, the norovirus was not generally fatal, especially in healthy individuals. It only triggered flu-like symptoms. So that raised a larger concern.

What did Cutter add to the mix?

What made up that other 6 percent of the code?

The remaining material appeared to be the same repeated sequences for a specific protein-coding gene. To figure out what protein that was, he ran his findings through a modeling program that converted the code into a string of amino acids, then from that chain, the computer built a three-dimensional model of that final protein.

He stared at the model of it now, watching it slowly spin on the screen.

Though it had been slightly altered, he still recognized this unique foldable protein. He confirmed it with that same matching program.

My God, Cutter, what are you planning to do?

As if summoned by this thought, the door to the lab opened and Cutter arrived. Two women accompanied him. One was his wife — or at least she appeared to be, but something felt off about her. She had none of the sultry allure of Cutter’s wife, nor was there the unspoken affection he’d formerly witnessed between husband and wife.

Then it dawned on him, remembering the unusual tribal heritage.

This must be his wife’s twin — Mateo’s other sister.

Supporting this assessment, the scarred man’s reaction to the woman was very different from the way he had greeted Ashuu. Mateo would barely meet this sister’s eyes, looking strangely fearful and nervous.

Before he could discern why, the second woman stepped into view. From her clothes and manner, she must be American. Still, there was something oddly familiar about her, like they had met before. But he could not place when or where.

Cutter made introductions. “Kendall, this is my sister-in-law, Rahei. And this lovely young woman at my side is from your own neck of the woods. A California park ranger. Ms. Jenna Beck.”

Kendall blinked in surprise, suddenly remembering. He had met this young woman briefly in Lee Vining, over a cup of coffee at Bodie Mike’s. She had been inquiring about his research at the lake. He struggled through his confusion.

What was she doing here now?

From the anger in her face and her stiff stance, she was no accomplice in all of this.

Jenna crossed to his side, touching his elbow in concern. “Are you okay, Dr. Hess?”

He licked his lips, too shocked to know how to even answer that question.

Cutter’s gaze fell upon the computer screen. “Ah, Kendall, I see you’ve accomplished much while I was gone.”

He glanced back to the slowly revolving protein. “That’s some type of prion, isn’t it?”

“Very good. It is indeed. In fact, it’s a modified version of the infectious protein that causes Creutzfeldt — Jakob disease, an illness that presents with rapidly progressive dementia in humans.”

Jenna looked between the two men. “What are you talking about?”

Kendall didn’t have time to fully explain — not that he understood it all himself. Prions were mere slivers of protein with no genetic code of their own. Once a victim was infected, those proteins damaged other proteins — usually in the brain. As a consequence, prion diseases were usually slow, more difficult to spread.

But not any longer.

Kendall faced Cutter. “You engineered a contagious norovirus, one that could spread rapidly and churn out this deadly prion in great volumes.”

“First of all, it’s not exactly deadly,” Cutter corrected. “I modified the prion’s genetic structure so it would not be fatal. Like I promised you from the start, no human or animal would be killed as a direct result of my bioorganism.”

“Then what is your goal? Clearly you want to insert your creation into my armored shell, to make your code almost impossible to eradicate. Once encapsulated, it could spread swiftly with no way of stopping it.”

“True. But it was also the small size of your shell that intrigued me, a genetic delivery system tiny enough to pass easily through the blood-brain barrier. To allow these little prion factories ready access to the neurological systems of the infected.”

Kendall could not hide his horror, and even the ranger understood enough to go pale. Prion diseases were already incurable, the damage they wrought permanent. The typical clinical symptoms were generalized dementia and the progressive loss of higher cognitive functions, turning an intelligent person into a vegetable.

He pictured Cutter’s engineered disease spreading throughout the population, as unstoppable as the organism that escaped his lab, leaving a path of neurological destruction in its wake.

Cutter must have read the dismay in his eyes. “Fear not, my friend. Not only did I engineer the prion to be nonfatal, but I also designed it to self-destruct after a certain number of iterations. Thus avoiding complete annihilation of the victim’s brain.”

“Then what’s its purpose?”

“It’s a gift,” Cutter smiled. “It will leave the infected living in a more simple state, one harmonious with nature, permanently free of higher cognitive functions.”

“In other words, reducing us to animals.”

“And the earth will be the better for it,” Cutter said.

“That’s inhuman,” Jenna gasped out, equally horrified.

Cutter turned to her. “You’re a park ranger, Ms. Beck. You should surely understand better than anyone. Being inhuman is human. We are already beasts who feign morality. We need religion, government, and laws to force a level of control over our baser natures. I intend to strip away the disease that is intelligence, to rip away the deception that allows humanity to believe itself mightier and more deserving of this planet.”

Cutter waved an arm to encompass everything. “We burn the forests, we pollute the oceans, we melt the ice caps, we dump carbon dioxide into the air… we are the main driving force behind one of the greatest extinctions on this planet. It is a path that will inevitably lead to our own end.”

Kendall tried to argue, but Cutter cut him off.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best. The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. We’re already at that cusp, but what will we leave in the wake of our death throes? A planet polluted to the point where nothing survives?”

The ranger stood up against that rant. “But it’s civilization… it’s our innate intelligence that holds the possibility to save ourselves, too, and along with it the planet. While the dinosaurs failed to see that asteroid heading toward them, many of us do see what’s happening and are fighting for change.”

“You share a narrow perspective about civilization, my dear. The dinosaurs reigned for a hundred and eighty-five million years, while modern man has only been around for the past two hundred thousand years. And civilization a mere ten thousand.”

Cutter shook his head for emphasis. “Society is a destructive illusion of control, nothing more. And look what it’s wrought. During this short experiment with civilization, we as a species are already at the precipice of total ecological collapse, one driven by our own hands. Do you truly think in this industrial world of warring nations, of greed-driven politics, that anything will change?”

Jenna sighed loudly. “We must try.”

Cutter snorted. “It will never happen, certainly not in time. The better path? It’s time to uncivilize this world, to halt this ridiculous experiment before nothing of this planet is left.”

“And that’s your plan?” Kendall asked. “To let loose this contagion and strip humanity of its intelligence.”

“I prefer to think of it as curing humankind of the disease called civilization, to leave only the natural animal, leveling the playing field for all. To let the only law of the land be survival of the fittest. The world will be stronger and healthier for it.”

Jenna stared at Cutter, her face full of suspicion. “And what about you?” she asked. “Will you also take this cure?”

Cutter shrugged, but he looked irritated by her question — which made Kendall like her all the more. “Some few must be spared, to oversee this transition.”

“I see,” Jenna said, clearly calling him out on his hypocrisy. “That’s very convenient.”

With his feathers duly ruffled, Cutter faced Kendall. “It’s high time, my friend, that you show me your method for arming your viral shell.”

Kendall took strength from the young woman’s demeanor. “I can’t,” he said honestly.

“Can’t or won’t?” Cutter asked. “I’ve been very patient with you, Kendall, because we were once friends, but there are ways to convince you to cooperate fully.”

Cutter glanced to his wife’s sister. A glint in Rahei’s dark eyes suggested she would invite such a challenge.

“It’s not a matter of refusing you, Cutter — which I would still do if it made any difference, but it doesn’t. It’s a simple matter that the key you want is beyond both of our grasps. I can’t synthesize it. Not here. The XNA sequence necessary to unlock my engineered shell can be found only in nature.”

That nature you love so well.

“Where?”

“You know where, Cutter.”

He nodded, closing his eyes. “Of course… Antarctica,” he mumbled. “There must be a particular species from that shadow biosphere, something with a unique genetic code that acts as that key.”

It still disturbed Kendall how quickly this monster’s mind worked.

Cutter opened his eyes. “Which species is it?”

Kendall met that stolid gaze, ready to draw a line in the sand. If Cutter put a mole in his lab, he surely had a person or a team inserted at Harrington’s station. Cutter certainly knew enough details about Hell’s Cape. If that bastard learned the truth, he could obtain the last piece to his horrifying genetic puzzle.

That must never happen.

Cutter read the resolution in his face and gave a sad shake of his head. “So be it. Then we’ll have to do it the hard way.”

Kendall felt his knees shake. He would do his best to hold out against whatever torture would follow.

Cutter turned to Jenna while waving a hand to Rahei. “We’ll start with her and make Kendall watch, so he’ll better understand what’s to come.”

“One hour out!” Suarez called from up front, seated next to the Valor’s pilot.

Painter looked out the window behind his bandaged shoulder. Before lift-off, he had popped a handful of ibuprofen and abandoned his sling, but even this small movement triggered a dagger-stab of pain. He studied the passing terrain, seeing only the green sea below the droning nacelles of the tiltrotor. Somewhere ahead lay their destination, the tepui where the dead man, Cutter Elwes, might have made his home.

And hopefully where we’ll find Jenna and Dr. Hess.

Time was rapidly running out.

He still had the satellite phone pressed to his ear. “There’s no way to hold Lindahl off?” he asked.

Lisa answered, “The weather patterns have changed in the last hour. And not for the better. The next storm front is moving in faster than originally projected, expected to hit the mountains by midafternoon. The wind speeds and rainfall estimates suggest this storm will be three to four times as fierce as the prior one. Because of that threat, the timetable for the nuclear option has shifted from sundown to noon.”

Noon…

He checked his watch and calculated the time difference. That was only two hours from now. And they were still sixty minutes out from reaching the tepui, leaving them almost no time to find Kendall Hess and discover if a non-nuclear option for dealing with the threat existed.

Painter recognized the impossible task before him. He stared at the Marines around him. He was flanked by Sergeant Suarez’s two men: Abramson and Henckel. Across the cabin, Drake conversed in low tones with Malcolm and Schmitt. He took strength from the rugged team accompanying him.

Still…

“When are they evacuating the base?” he asked.

“It’s already under way. The National Guard combed the countryside at daybreak, clearing any recalcitrant locals who hadn’t obeyed the mandatory evacuation order. Base personnel are breaking down the labs, moving Josh as I speak.”

“And you and Nikko?”

“I don’t trust Lindahl. I’m going to wait for the last bus out. Sarah… Corporal Jessup has prepped a small helicopter to ferry us out of harm’s way.”

“Don’t wait too long,” he warned, fear for her drying out his mouth.

“I won’t. Edmund updates me regularly on the status of the nuclear team who are prepping the device. They’re still doing final calculations. The plan is to lift the bomb via a drone helicopter to a specific altitude for maximum effect across the local mountaintops and valleys. The team is still working on those last details.” Lisa’s voice hardened. “So, Painter, you need to find something… if not a cure, at least some hope to delay the inevitable.”

Painter sighed heavily. It was a tall order. Even if he could discover some solution to this threat — some unknown biological counteragent — could it be engineered or employed fast enough to discourage this pending nuclear response?

“I’ll do all I can,” Painter promised.

He said his good-byes and ended the call, resting the phone on his lap.

Drake must have read his face. “Let me guess. The news from home isn’t good.”

He slowly shook his head.

Not good at all.

With a twinge from his shoulder, he turned to the window, finally noting a distant dark mountain rising near the horizon.

I doubt the situation is any better over there.

“This may sting,” Cutter Elwes said.

Jenna sat on a chair in the lab, pinned in place by the hulking native, Mateo. It was the same man who had ambushed her at that hilltop ghost town. She recognized him from the purplish scar running down his cheek to his chin. It seemed everything had come full circle.

“Don’t do this,” Kendall said. “Please.”

Cutter straightened, holding a pistol-shaped tool in his hand. She recognized a modified jet injector used for delivering vaccines. Sticking out the top was an inverted vial, holding an amber liquid.

She suspected she wasn’t being threatened by a flu shot.

“Simply tell me the name of the XNA species that is the biological key,” Cutter told Kendall. “And none of this nastiness needs to continue.”

“Don’t do it,” Jenna said. Fingers dug painfully into her shoulders, warning her to stay silent, but she ignored the threat. “Don’t give him what he wants.”

Kendall clearly vacillated, but finally he crossed his arms.

“Very well,” Cutter said.

The dark woman, Rahei, tugged Jenna’s sleeve higher up her arm.

Cutter pressed the muzzle of the injector against her shoulder. “Last chance, Kendall.”

The researcher’s gaze shifted guiltily away from her.

Cutter gave a small shrug and pulled the trigger. Compressed gas whistled, and a sharp bite penetrated her skin, felt all the way down to the bone.

She swore under her breath as Mateo released her. She rubbed her arm and gained her feet. “What was that?”

Cutter lifted the injector, sloshing around the remainder of the vial’s contents. “Non-enveloped viral RNA.”

Jenna recalled the discussion from earlier. “It’s that genetic code you engineered. The one that affects the brain.”

“Correct. But in its current form, it’s only mildly infectious and very fragile to environmental stresses. It’s why I need Kendall’s viral shell.”

She understood. He wanted to engineer a superbug that could knock the human race back to the Stone Age — or even before the Stone Age.

“But in its raw state,” he added, “the neurological damage will be the same.”

She took a deep breath, fearful of the answer to her next question. “How long do I have?”

“You should start feeling the effects within the next thirty minutes. Mild fever, slight headache, neck stiffness… then over the following few hours, the degenerative changes will progress at an exponential pace. Language is usually affected first, then complex thoughts, finally the sense of self wears away, leaving only base desires and survival instinct.”

Horror settled into the pit of her stomach.

“So… so you’ve tested this on people before?” Jenna asked, expecting him to try to justify his heinous acts.

Instead he answered calmly, “Thoroughly, my dear. Most thoroughly.”

Kendall touched Jenna’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

Cutter turned to Rahei. “Take Ms. Beck to one of our test cages. Down on Level Black.”

Upon hearing this, the native woman’s lips pulled into a smile of dark delight. It was the first strong emotion Rahei had shown.

That scared Jenna more than anything else.

Rahei grabbed her upper arm and led her off, collecting another native near the door, who carried a rifle over one shoulder. Jenna noted the weapon was fitted with a U-shaped yellow rod sticking past the muzzle like a bayonet, with exposed copper contact points at the tips.

She recognized the design.

Electric cattle prod.

She kept well away from that weapon as Rahei led her out of the lab. She was marched down a long tunnel that seemed to cross through the stone heart of the mountain. After stepping through a heavily bolted door at the end, she found herself outside again.

She shaded her eyes against the sun, which blazed directly overhead, shining brightly down the throat of what appeared to be a sinkhole. Someone had converted it into a series of tiered gardens, festooned all around with orchids, bromeliads, and flowering vines. Down at the bottom, the green canopy of a forest reflected the sunlight. Each level from there to here appeared to be broken into fenced-off tiers, connected by a corkscrewing stone ramp carved from the walls.

Rahei pushed her toward a ladder that led off the steel apron and down to that winding road. An enclosed golf cart waited below. She was forced to sit in the back with Rahei while her armed guard joined the driver up front.

Once everyone was seated, the golf cart rolled down the ramp, its electric motor purring. It passed through a series of gates, which magically opened in front of them, possibly responding to some RFID chip embedded in the cart.

At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary about these gardens, but after passing through a few levels, she started to notice oddities. While she wasn’t intimately familiar with all rain forest life, some of the plants and animals appeared otherworldly. At first the signs were subtle: bees the size of walnuts, a wall of black orchids whose petals opened and closed on their own, a dwarf boa that slithered into a clear pond, revealing a series of gills along its flanks.

But the deeper they traversed, larger creatures appeared, more boldly abnormal. From a slim branch over the road, a row of zebra-striped rats hung from prehensile tails, similar to those found on an opossum. While they waited for a gate to fully open, a thick vine shot thorns at them, peppering the sides of the cart. Around another turn, a flock of oversized Amazon parrots took flight at their passage, revealing a riot of plumage in every shade, a kaleidoscope of feathers that dazzled the eye.

One of these last flew too high — then suddenly seized up and tumbled several yards before regaining its senses and winging away to join its flock.

Jenna stared upward. Was Cutter utilizing electronic tags or chips to keep each creature restricted to its own tier? She pondered this possibility — anything to occupy her mind and stave off the terror inside her.

All the while, the cart continued to wind down through the levels, the air growing ever warmer and more humid. Sweat beaded on her forehead and rolled down the small of her back.

She searched longingly up at the distant mouth of the sinkhole, estimating they were a mile down by now.

I’ll never get out of here.

Despair dampened her attention — until finally they reached forest growing at the bottom of the sinkhole. She estimated it was over twenty acres in size.

Crossing a final gate, they dropped through the canopy.

Welcome to Level Black, she thought grimly.

But what was down here?

Their descent along the ramp grew progressively darker. The blaze of sunlight filtered down to a dull green glow. As her eyes adjusted, she spotted shelves of fungi, softly aglow, sprouting along the trunks of trees. Across the floor, tiny ponds and thin streams reflected that meager light, while stands of heavy-leafed ferns towered all around, densely packed along the lone gravel road into the forest.

The cart reached that road and headed off into the jungle.

Their head lamps finally clicked on.

Using that brighter light, Jenna tried to peer through the thick walls of undergrowth, but she could not see very far. Occasionally the cart’s bumper would brush a fern and its leaves and rubbery stems would retract and curl up, opening a wider view into the jungle.

But it was only more of the same.

Giving up, she turned her attention forward, wondering where she was being taken. Gnats buzzed thickly in the beams of their headlamps. Everywhere, water dripped from leaves, and flower petals gently drifted down.

The chatter between the driver and guard had died away upon reaching this level. Their fear was palpable, which set her heart to pounding harder.

Then thirty yards ahead, something large dropped from above and splattered onto the road. When they reached the site, the cart edged past what lay broken in the gravel.

Jenna stared down at the bloody skeleton of a goat or deer. Some flesh still clung to the carcass, including one eye that stared forlornly back at her as the cart passed by.

Leaning against the window, she searched the tangle of thick branches overhead and the leafy bower of the dark canopy.

She spotted nothing.

Who or what had—

A tremendous roar shattered the heavy silence, full of territorial anger and hunger. It was answered by cries deeper in the forest, echoing all around.

Horrified, Jenna turned toward Rahei.

The woman was smiling again.

26

“Is everyone okay?” Gray hollered. “Call out!”

He climbed off the floor of the snow cruiser’s cab and took personal inventory, fingering a scalp wound where his head had clipped a stanchion. A glance forward showed the river flowing past the vehicle’s cracked windshield. A moment ago, the cruiser had toppled off the blasted bridge, crashed through the trestles below, and struck the river flat-bellied.

So why hadn’t they plunged fully underwater?

Kowalski helped Harrington out of the footwell in front of the passenger seat. The professor had a wicked knot on his forehead, and his eyes looked glassy and dazed.

Jason called up from the main cabin in back. “Need help down here!”

Gray responded to the panic in his voice and shoved over to the ladder that led down from the cab. He found the lower level roiling with water, the river flowing in through the open back hatch. A huge black spike pierced up from the floor to the roof. Gray remembered spotting the fang-like stalagmites rising from the river. The cruiser must have impaled itself onto one of them as it fell, piercing its underbelly.

The stone stake was likely all that was holding them from being dragged away by the strong currents and rolled into the depths.

Jason struggled with Stella. He clung white-knuckled to a pipe near the roof; his other arm clutched Stella to his chest. Her head lolled drunkenly, half her face bloody. The riptide inside the cabin threatened to tear Jason away at any moment.

And it wasn’t only the kid at risk.

The entire cruiser lurched under the pressure of the current, spinning a few degrees upon that spike. Neighboring wooden trestles snapped free, bringing more of the bridge raining down into the river. Their precarious perch would not hold out much longer.

He prepared to dive into that black maelstrom — until Jason yelled.

“Something’s in the water with us!”

Gray pulled his night-vision goggles back into place and swung his DSR rifle from his shoulder and flicked on its IR illuminator. The beam penetrated the water enough for him to search its depths, reflecting off the steel bottom of the cruiser. He scanned the cabin until he discovered a clutch of tentacles reaching through the back hatch and probing into the cruiser. Unlike an octopus, these appendages bore sharp pincers in place of suckers. An unwary fish brushed too close and was sliced in half in a lightning-fast attack. Smaller limbs snatched up the pieces and reeled them away.

Gray didn’t want to know what creature belonged to those tentacles.

“Try not to move!” he called to Jason.

Unfortunately, Stella began to regain her senses, flailing in surprise in Jason’s grip. A few of the black tentacles snaked toward them.

Gray considered firing a sonic bullet, but he doubted the weapon would have much effect against the tentacles, when the main adversary still hid outside. But that thought gave him an idea. For the most part, life down here was sensitive to vibrations and sounds. A single bullet might not do much to discourage the hidden predator, but if he could amplify the effect, he could turn the entire rig into the equivalent of a hot foot.

“Jason, on my signal, you haul ass toward me.”

He looked terrified, but he gave a firm nod.

Gray shifted his rifle away from the water and pointed it at the roof. He hoped the noise in the confined space didn’t knock Jason out, but he had to take the chance. He pulled the trigger. The sonic pulse struck the steel roof and reverberated through the entire carriage of the cruiser, setting it to ringing like a bell.

Jason flinched under the assault, losing his grip and plunging into the water. Gray dove in after the pair, noting the tentacles spasm and flail back out of the cabin. The current carried Jason partly in Gray’s direction. Thankfully the kid kept hold of Stella.

Gray caught them both, and together he and Jason swam with Stella back to the ladder. The plunge had woken her enough so she was able to climb the rungs. Kowalski pulled her the rest of the way up, where Harrington hugged his daughter tightly.

“I’m okay,” she mumbled into her father’s chest.

But none of them would be for long.

Gray followed Jason back into the front cab and pointed to a hatch in the roof. “Everyone topside!”

The cruiser’s bulk lurched again in the current.

“We’re still wedged in the remains of the bridge,” he explained. “We can try to climb up what’s left of the trestles to reach the top, then cross back to shore.”

Kowalski went first, hardly needing the ladder to pop the hatch and haul himself out, even while burdened with his machine gun. Once topside, he helped Harrington and his daughter up. Jason and Gray hurried behind them.

Gray straightened, relieved to see that the broken trestles should be easy enough to climb to reach the top of the bridge.

“Company’s coming,” Kowalski intoned grimly.

Gray swung around to see headlights racing along the river toward them. It was the CAAT that had ambushed them, likely coming to make sure they were all dead.

Gray pointed to the opposite bank, in the direction of the Back Door. “Jason, you get Stella and her father up into that substation, blow those bunker busters, and seal this place up tightly. Kowalski and I’ll deal with the others.”

“What’re you going to do?” Jason asked.

“They ambushed us… only polite for us to return the favor. With luck, we’ll commandeer their vehicle.”

Jason eyed him, his brows pinched. “You’re planning on going after Wright, aren’t you?”

“If something goes wrong with those bunker busters, we can’t let that bastard use that LRAD to cause a stampede, to flush this cavern system out into the world.”

Jason nodded and headed toward the supports near the front of the cruiser. Gray moved out with Kowalski toward the tangle of steel and wooden trestles at the back end.

Kowalski glanced back at the other three. “Since when is splitting up ever a good idea?”

Free of the bridge, Jason slogged with Stella and Harrington toward the substation high up the back wall. They had only the one DSR between the three of them. Stella lost her weapon during the crash. Still, after so long in the dark, the single IR illuminator cast enough light to let them see with their night-vision gear.

Like hiking under a full moon.

Jason studied his goal ahead. The Back Door was a collection of boxy workstations jammed into a high crack. A few units spilled out and were stuck to the wall, like toy blocks glued to the side of a building.

“How do we get up there?” Jason asked.

From the cables running along the roof, the aerial gondola must be the normal way of reaching that steel penthouse in the sky.

Stella marched with her father, holding his hand. Both of them were bruised, battered, and bloodied, but they forged on through the knee-high tufts of moss and boot-sucking expanses of thick algal mats.

Stella pointed her free arm toward the substation. “There’s a ladder. Steel rungs pounded into the wall that climbed from the cavern floor to the station.”

They had crossed only thirty yards when a loud grinding crash drew Jason’s attention over his shoulder. The war between the river’s current and the jammed cruiser ended. Byrd’s old machine tore free of the bridge and rolled into the depths.

Farther out, a flare of bright lights closed toward the far end of the bridge. Jason prayed Gray’s ambush was successful. Otherwise, the CAAT could probably ford that river atop its floating treads and quickly run them down.

Knowing that, Jason urged the others faster.

“On the left,” Stella warned.

Jason swung his rifle, casting his IR beam in that direction. Dark shapes came loping across the plain toward them, looking like a pack of wolves, each about the same size as a large dog.

He counted at least a dozen.

“What are they?” Jason asked.

Harrington answered. “Trouble.”

Gray lay on his stomach in pitch-darkness, an unnerving experience considering the harsh life found in this hellish landscape. A few yards off, Kowalski breathed heavily, plainly not any happier.

After climbing the trestles to the bridge, Gray had insisted they go dark, clicking off his IR illuminator. He didn’t want to alert the approaching CAAT of their presence on this side of the river. The two of them crawled blindly on their hands and knees until they found a cluster of rocks twenty yards from the bridge, then went into hiding. They also coated their bodies with algal muck to reduce their body heat signatures.

In the darkness, creatures skittered across his skin or buzzed around his face, likely drawn by the smell of his sweat and the blood dripping from his scalp. Some bit; others stung. He did his best to swipe them away.

Luckily they didn’t have long to wait.

The CAAT came blazing forward, brightly enough that Gray shifted his night-vision goggles off his eyes.

The treads tore across the terrain, skidding slightly as the vehicle made a sharp turn at the bridge, stopping at the river’s edge.

After a moment, the cabin door on the passenger side popped open. A figure climbed out and rolled expertly over the treads, dropping lightly to the ground. He lifted a set of night-vision goggles and stared down at the river, then across to the other side.

“Got three targets!” the man shouted in a British accent. “On the move… headed toward the Back Door.”

The driver swore. “Bloody bastards got nine lives.”

The commando outside studied the river. “Sir, the current looks too treacherous to risk the CAAT. Could pull us under.”

“Understood.” The driver sounded like the squad leader, his words flavored with a distinct Scottish brogue. He called to another teammate. “Cooper, grab the AWM. Clean this mess up.”

Gray tensed. AWM likely stood for Arctic Warfare Magnum, a cold-weather version of a common British sniper rifle. They were planning on picking the others off.

Gray waited until a second man exited the same door. Once on the ground, the commando slapped a box magazine into his rifle and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, adjusting the sight.

“No worries, sir,” he announced. “They’re all out in the open. Easy shots all around.”

Same here.

“Now,” Gray whispered, leaping forward.

Kowalski fired from his right side. His machine gun chattered and rounds ripped through the sniper’s chest. Even before his body fell, Kowalski swung his gun and took out the commando at the bridge, blasting him into the river.

Gray sprinted to the CAAT and lunged at the open door. He fired his DSR point-blank into the confined space of the vehicle’s cabin, a deafening barrage of sonic bullets.

As cries erupted inside, he rolled into the interior.

Before Gray could stop him, the driver bailed out the far side, plainly dazed, but with enough wits about him to expect such a follow-up attack. Another wasn’t so quick. Gray planted a dagger through the man’s throat and twisted. As he yanked the blade free, the man choked, clawing at his neck, then collapsed.

Gray searched the remainder of the cabin.

Empty.

So only the four.

Through the windshield, he saw the squad leader sprinting along the riverbank, smartly keeping the CAAT’s bulk between him and where Kowalski was firing. While running, the commando struggled to free a radio.

If he reached his superior, alerted him of the attack, any hope of using the CAAT as a Trojan horse to get close to Wright would be gone.

Gray jumped out the driver’s door and lifted his rifle, but he knew the distance was too great to do much good. Likewise, Kowalski came charging around the back of the CAAT, machine gun in his arms, dragging a belt of rounds.

The squad leader already had the radio to his lips.

Too late.

Then something dark snapped out of the river, wrapped around the man’s waist, and yanked him off the bank. He vanished into the water with a thrashing splash.

Gray had recognized that pincer-lined tentacle. The gunfire — both sonic and regular — must have drawn the beast to the shoreline here. Apparently giving that monster a hot foot earlier had not only shocked it but also pissed it off.

Even in Hell, revenge is sweet.

Jason ran alongside Stella and her father. He had heard the firefight break out across the river, but he dared not take his focus off the closing pack of predators in order to check on Gray and Kowalski.

With the DSR locked to his shoulder, he shielded Stella and her father. He took potshots at the beasts, but the sonic rounds only seemed to scatter the pack temporarily, buying them an extra few seconds. Worst of all, the power meter on the side of his rifle had flickered into the red as he fired repeatedly.

Almost out of juice.

“I’ll lead them off,” Jason gasped, his boots heavy with mud and algae. “You two make for the Back Door.”

He slowed, waving them toward the far wall.

“Go, father.” Stella pushed the professor forward, while slipping out a knife from her belt. “I’ll help Jason.”

“We stay together,” Harrington said, stopping with them, breathing heavily. “Leox depilis are like their African lion counterparts. They try to split off the weak. And besides, I don’t think I could run the rest of the way. We’ll make our stand here.”

Jason fired another shot, hitting the lead Leox, which reacted as if struck in the snout with a baseball bat. The others jerked to the left and right, slowing until their assaulted pack member could recover his senses.

Must be the leader.

By now, Jason had gotten a good look at them. Their muscular shoulders stood waist-high, their hairless skin oiled in black, almost iridescent under the IR beam’s glow. Their heads were wolfishly long, with jaws hinged near the back of their skulls, allowing them to open their dagger-lined maws disturbingly wide, reminding him of photos of the now-extinct thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger.

A hair-raising howl burst from the throat of the pack leader, plainly a challenge. Apparently, in this dark world, the louder you shouted, the bigger your balls.

The pack closed ranks to either side, stalking more cautiously forward now, preparing to close the last of the distance.

Jason lifted his rifle, which slowed the leader.

Smart… he recognizes the threat.

Jason’s only hope was that at closer range the sonic weapon would do more harm, encourage the pack to go after easier prey. A glance to his rifle’s power meter suggested he had only one shot left, so he had better make it count, which meant letting the pack get as close as possible before firing.

He fixed his aim upon the pack leader, knowing that was his true adversary.

Stella shifted to his side, ready to defend her father.

“Give me the gun,” she whispered.

Jason hesitated.

“I have an idea,” she pressed.

He relented and passed her his rifle, taking her dagger in trade. “I think we only have a single pulse left.”

“Then let’s hope I’m right about the dominance patterns of this species.”

She extracted what looked like a small microphone from where the rifle’s stock joined the gun. Jason suddenly remembered Harrington’s prior instructions about the DSR: how it could not only fire a sonic bullet, but it could also be used to amplify voices like a megaphone, or in reverse mode, to eavesdrop from a distance.

Stella settled the butt of the rifle to her shoulder, bringing the microphone to her lips. Instead of pointing the muzzle toward the pack as it silently stalked toward them, she lifted the gun toward the roof.

And howled.

It was a fair mimic of the pack leader’s cry, only magnified a hundredfold as she pulled the trigger, pulsing that scream of challenge up to the rooftop.

The blast echoed across the cavern.

The savage wail stopped the leader in his tracks, driving the beast into a wary crouch. It was plainly intimidated by the volume of that echoing scream.

Jason recalled his own thought from a moment ago.

In this dark world, the louder you shout, the bigger your balls.

The leader pushed away from them, one step, then another, never turning his back. The pack followed his example, shifting and darting to either side nervously, all the while slowly retreating.

Then upon some unknown signal, the pack turned and fled back into the darkness, yipping as they ran, ready to pursue less noisy prey.

Jason stared over at Stella. “You’re amazing.”

She shrugged and returned his rifle, now out of charge. Still, she tried to hide a smile of pride as she turned away. They continued on toward the far wall. At least there was enough trickling juice to keep the IR illuminator lit, but for how much longer?

He set a hard pace and crossed the last hundred yards in a matter of minutes. Far overhead, the substation shone dimly, lit by a couple of standby emergency lights.

Closer at hand, Jason stared at the steel rungs bolted into the wall. They formed a ladder that climbed the dozen or so stories to reach the Back Door.

It would be a tough haul.

Stella pointed out into the cavern. “Over there!”

Jason tensed, swinging around, expecting another attack. But she was pointing to a pool of light on the far side of the river. It was the CAAT. As they watched, it began to roll along the waterway, heading off.

Jason held his breath, then a distant triple beep of a horn sounded.

It was the prearranged signal.

Gray and Kowalski were okay. They had successfully commandeered the enemy’s CAAT, ready to pursue Dylan Wright.

Must’ve held off departing until our own lights reached the back wall.

Jason didn’t know if the others could see him, but he lifted his arm.

Good luck.

In retrospect, he should’ve saved some of that luck for himself.

As he lowered his arm, the IR illuminator flickered and died, plunging them into darkness.

27

What have I done?

Kendall sat at a workstation in the main lab. He had no choice but to stare at a large LCD monitor. It displayed live video feed from a tree-mounted camera. From the stark shades of grays, it must be recording through a low-light sensor. The view revealed a thick forest, draped in vines, shaded by a dense canopy. The lens pointed down into a clearing lined by gravel.

A series of three tall cages stood in the middle of the glade. Hazard signs warned the pens were electrified, like the fences between the tiers of Cutter’s macabre garden.

This must be the lowest level.

Kendall remembered catching a glimpse of that isolated piece of rain forest. But what else was down there?

On the screen, he watched Jenna being manhandled into the centermost cage. From the way she hugged her arms around her chest, keeping clear of the bars, she must know about the danger.

Rahei slammed the pen closed.

“Our Ms. Beck should be feeling the first signs of infection,” Cutter said, pacing behind him, shadowed by Mateo in the background. “Headaches, maybe neck pain.”

“Please don’t do this,” Kendall said.

On the screen, Rahei retreated with the two other men. The pair kept a close watch on the jungle, guarding with electrified cattle prods and rifles. They all quickly piled back into the cart, swung the vehicle around the clearing, then headed out the way they’d come in.

“Why did you take her down there?” Kendall asked, glancing back at Cutter. “Why leave her alone?”

“Oh, she’s not alone.”

Proving this, something massive moved past the camera, too fast to catch more than the briefest glimpse of huge hooked claws and a shaggy coat. Still, Kendall recognized the species, falling back into his seat in horror.

“You didn’t…” he moaned.

Cutter shrugged. “It was an early experiment, taking a page from your preservationist playbook. De-extinction was the word you used in that paper, as I recall. It was a simple matter of using the MAGE and CAGE techniques to take a species already found in this rain forest, alter its genetic code, and resurrect its ancient ancestor.”

Kendall knew it was theoretically possible, that labs around the world sought to accomplish this very goal, and would likely succeed in the next few years. Already multiple facilities searched for ways to resurrect the woolly mammoth from elephant DNA, another sought to revive extinct passenger pigeons from its common relative, yet another worked to pull the long-deceased wild aurochs from the genetic heritage of present-day cattle. These ventures went by many names: Revive & Restore, the Uruz Project, even one appropriately called the Lazarus Project, which sought to de-extinct an Australian frog that gave birth through its mouth.

But what Cutter accomplished here…

“You can’t leave her down there,” he insisted.

“She’s safe enough for now, behind those electrified bars. We’ll give her another half hour, when the infection reduces her to something simpler. Then you’ll get a glimpse of what this new world will be like for humankind, when our species is stripped of its cancerous intelligence.”

Kendall felt tears threaten, knowing this monster would force him to watch what happened to Jenna.

“But you can stop all of this,” Cutter insisted. “Just tell me the name of the XNA species that holds the genetic key to unlocking your armored viral shell. One name… and this all ends. I will take matters over from there.”

If Cutter ever got hold of this last critical piece of information, Kendall knew he could figure out the rest of his biological puzzle.

“Do not take long.” Cutter waved to the screen. “There is a counteragent to what plagues Ms. Beck, but it must be administered within the hour or the neurological effects will be permanent.”

“There’s a cure?” Kendall swallowed.

“Indeed.” He glanced toward the large refrigerator at the back of the BSL4 lab. “A protein that’s a mirror image of what I engineered. It’s capable of repairing the neuronal damage wrought by my prion, but like I said, there is a time limit. A point of no return for Ms. Beck.”

Kendall had a larger worry beyond the young park ranger. “And if I give you that name, you’ll tell me how to stop what’s spreading in California.”

Cutter rubbed his chin, plainly feigning concentration. “I am a man of my word. That was my original offer. But that was before Ms. Beck arrived.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you choose. I can either teach you how to eradicate the horror unleashed from your lab… or I can save Ms. Beck. But not both.”

Kendall stared at the screen, knowing he would have to tell Cutter the truth eventually. With time, the bastard would get the information out of him anyway.

He turned to Cutter, his voice low with defeat. “You’ll need the blood from one of the Antarctic species.”

“Which one?”

“Volitox ignis.”

Cutter looked truly thoughtful now. “Those fiery eels. A daunting task indeed. I’ll have to make a call before it’s too late. Seems I might have gotten ahead of myself with my plans. Jumping the gun, as you Americans say.”

The man began to turn away.

“Cutter, you promised.”

He turned back. “Of course, sorry. Which cure do you want? The one for Ms. Beck… or for the world?”

Kendall stared back at the screen, at the small woman huddled in the cage. At the same time, he pictured the wrath of destruction spreading over the mountains of California.

I’m sorry, Jenna.

Kendall turned to Cutter. “How do I kill what I created?”

“It’s the simplest of all solutions. Have you never wondered why that biosphere under Antarctica never spread to the greater world? Surely there have been breaches in the past, small escapes that have leaked out. But it’s never fully broken loose. I suspect it would take great numbers to do that.”

Kendall struggled for an answer. What was so unique about Antarctica? What kept that world trapped below? Was it the salty seas, the ice, the cold? He had already experimented with such variables in the past at his lab.

“We’ve tried subzero temperatures, various salinities, heavy metal toxins, like those found in the surrounding oceans,” Kendall admitted. “Nothing’s killed it.”

“Because you were thinking too small, my friend… that’s always been your problem. You look at the trees and miss the forest. You think locally versus globally.”

Cutter lifted an eyebrow, as if testing Kendall.

He pondered the significance.

Globally.

What was Cutter driving at?

Then he suddenly knew.

Jenna rubbed the nape of her neck, careful not to shift too close to the bars of the cage. The dull ache in her cervical vertebrae had become a tight muscular spasm, shooting fiery lances of agony throughout her skull. Even her eyes hurt, making the dull green glow of the forest seem too bright.

She knew the significance of these symptoms.

It’s already starting.

She began to repeat a mantra, fearing what was coming.

I am Jenna Beck, daughter of Gayle and Charles. I live at the corner of D Street and Lee Vining Avenue. My dog’s name is Nikko, his birthday is…

She fought through the pain to hold on to every scrap of her identity, testing her memory for any sign of deterioration.

But will I even know when it’s happening?

She breathed deeply, taking in the rich perfume of the jungle, trying to find her center, to keep panic at bay. All around, she heard water dripping, the thrush of bird’s wings, the creak of branches, the whisper of leaves.

One detail struck her as wrong, nagging at the edges of her consciousness. It was still too quiet here. She detected no birdsong, no chatter of monkeys, no scurried passage of something small through the underbrush.

Then, as if something sensed her awareness, a branch snapped to her left. Her gaze flicked in that direction, but all she saw was a shift of shadows. Her eyes strained to pierce the walls of ferns surrounding the clearing.

Nothing.

But she knew the truth, remembering the angry roaring from earlier, along with the extreme caution of the guards when delivering her to this prison.

I’m not alone.

Think globally…

Was that the answer all along?

Kendall closed his eyes, picturing the planet spinning, the crust riding atop a molten sea, all surrounding a sold iron core that was two-thirds the size of the moon. Convection currents in that molten iron, along with the Coriolis forces from the earth’s rotation, generated an electrical geodynamo that engulfed the earth in a vast magnetic field.

“Magnetism,” Kendall said. “That’s what keeps that shadow biosphere trapped under Antarctica.”

“And where on the planet is the earth’s magnetic field the strongest?”

“The poles.” He imagined that field blasting strongly out from either end of the earth, encircling the globe. “And it’s weakest near the equators.”

“But where else is it weakest?”

Kendall knew the answer had to be tied to the location of the Hell’s Cape. He pictured that hot world far beneath the ice, the perfect incubator for strange life. He remembered the sulfur, the bubbling pools.

He looked up at Cutter. “Geothermal zones,” he said. “The earth’s magnetic field is weaker in regions of volcanic activity.”

“Correct. The molten magma underlying those regions cannot hold its ferromagnetism, creating a local dip in the earth’s field, an island if you will in a sea of stronger magnetic currents.”

Kendall imagined Hell’s Cape as that island, trapped within Antarctica’s stronger field. It still seemed a far stretch to assume that magnetic differential was enough to keep life trapped in place. Something had to make life down there especially sensitive to magnetic fields, something basic to its nature.

“XNA,” he said aloud, sitting straighter in his chair. “All life down there is based on a genetic helix that doesn’t use the sugar deoxyribose as its backbone. It’s unique, unlike any other life. That sugar backbone is replaced by a combination of arsenic and iron phosphate.” Kendall stared at Cutter. “It’s the iron, isn’t it? That’s what makes the XNA life so sensitive to magnetic fields.”

“I studied that iron structure using X-ray diffraction and photoelectron spectroscopy. It forms ferrous nanorings throughout the XNA helix, somewhat like vertebrae that make up a spine.”

“And with exposure to the right magnetic signature, it should be possible to shatter that spine.” He looked hopefully upon Cutter. “Have you calculated out what that signature is?”

“I did… and tested it. It’s not all that groundbreaking. Your own FDA has already been testing oscillating magnetic fields to kill bacteria, viruses, and fungi in water and food supplies. I simply modified that study’s finding and discovered the signature that works best in this case.”

Kendall pictured the organism he created in his lab, shriveling up inside his synthetically created capsids, leaving behind those shells like so many discarded snakeskins.

“Without this cure,” Cutter said, “I would never have unleashed your organism. Like you, I don’t want the world destroyed by what you created. In fact, if you had chosen to cure Ms. Beck instead of seeking this answer, I would’ve told you anyway. I can’t have the world dying before I can save it, now can I?”

Kendall glanced to the video feed. A flicker of dismay rattled through him, but he had to force it down. There was still too much at risk. “So you’ll allow me tell the authorities in California about the magnetic cure.”

“In time.”

“What do you mean, in time?”

“From what I hear, your illustrious colleagues are about to ignite a nuclear device in those mountains. Foolish as that may be. As we both know it will do little good, beyond casting your organism over an even wider field, while irradiating much of that area for decades to come. But that is humanity’s penchant: to destroy before thinking. It is why we are doomed as a species.”

“But you said you didn’t want my organism to destroy the world.”

“I don’t. Once you give them the solution, it’ll simply take longer to clean their mess up. It’ll keep them busy for a much longer time.”

“And the radiation? All that damage?”

“The earth has survived such flesh wounds from mankind before, and it will abide this one, too.” Cutter sighed. “Besides, this distraction will serve me well. To keep humanity looking one way while their doom comes from another direction entirely.”

From your work here.

“And if you’ll excuse me, I do have to make that call. See about getting a sample of blood from a Volitox before it’s too late.”

“Too late?”

Cutter paused. “You’ve been hiding that subterranean world for too long, Kendall, keeping it trapped, stunted from its full potential.”

He thought he could feel no deeper level of dismay and shock. “What… what are you planning?”

“I’m going to flush that darkly beautiful and wonderfully aggressive biosphere into our world. I believe it’s time they left their tiny island of isolation. Some will perish during this transition, of course, victims of the very magnetic flux we talked about, but as you know Nature is the greatest innovator. In such volumes and varieties, some species will survive by adapting, bringing forth to our world that XNA hardiness and mutability, perfect traits to survive the harsh times to come.”

Kendall pictured the environmental damage from the sudden onslaught of so many alien species. An entire aggressive biosphere set loose upon the world. The ecological repercussions would be devastating.

“I plan to pit your ancient world below against the modern above. During that war, I’ll unleash my species from here, casting them wide and far, bringing new and innovative genetic permutations, speeding up the evolutionary process by gifting these traits with the ability to jump between species. It will be the ultimate evolutionary crucible, where survival of the fittest will be the law of the land. To paraphrase the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, within such chaos lies opportunity.”

Kendall must have looked aghast.

“You can be at my side, Kendall. To witness this transformation, the genesis of a new Eden, free from the degradations of man.”

Kendall pictured that prion-induced wildfire, knocking humankind back to a primitive state.

His eyes exultant, Cutter stepped back to the workstation. “Watch a small glimpse of that war to come, where the plague of man’s intelligence is stripped away, leaving humanity bound at last to natural law.”

Kendal knew which law Cutter adhered to with a religious conviction.

The Law of the Jungle.

Cutter tapped a key.

On the screen, the door to Jenna’s cage swung open.

“How much longer?” Painter called up to Sergeant Suarez.

“Another thirty minutes, sir!”

Too long.

Painter shifted in his seat, impatient, his upper arm burning, the pain stoking his anxiety. He was all too conscious of the deadline. The nuclear device was set to detonate in California in another ninety minutes.

And here I am sitting on my ass.

After another minute, Suarez shouted. “Sir, you might want to come up front and see this.”

Glad for any distraction, any reason to move, Painter undid his seat harness and ducked forward. Drake snapped free and followed him up to the cockpit of the Valor.

“What is it?” Painter asked.

Suarez passed him a set of binoculars and pointed toward the distant tepui. It was still too far to make out any details, but Painter obeyed.

Suarez found a second pair of scopes and tossed them to Drake.

Painter took a moment to focus upon that distant mountain, its flanks shrouded in clouds.

“Look toward the south end,” the sergeant instructed. He also motioned to the pilot. “Give us a little waggle.”

Painter concentrated, leaning his bad shoulder against a bulkhead to keep his balance as the pilot shimmied the tiltrotor back and forth.

At first he didn’t see anything, just wind-sculpted rocks and a scraggly forest at the north end. Then as the plane shifted again, something flashed brightly, reflecting the sunlight, sparking out from the forest of stones along the southern rim.

Drake whistled. “To get that much flare, that’s got to be something metallic.”

“I’ve been studying it for the past couple of minutes,” Suarez said. “I think it might be a wind turbine.”

Turbine?

Painter squinted, but he still failed to discern enough details to come to that same assessment. But the sergeant had the eyes of a younger man and had logged countless hours of aerial surveillance aboard the Valor.

Painter took him at his word. And if there were wind turbines up there, then somebody must have set up an encampment atop that mountain.

That could only be one person.

Cutter Elwes.

“Can you make this bird go any faster?” Painter asked.

This news made him all the more anxious to make landfall.

“Going top speed already,” the pilot said.

Suarez checked his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes still to go.”

The click from her cage door drew Jenna’s attention out of the fog of pain. Agony stabbed through her skull as she looked up. The persistent red light at the top of the gate had turned green.

The door fell open a few inches.

She remained standing, fearful it might be a trick. She used the rubber sole of her boot to touch the bars. There was no discharge, so she pushed the gate the rest of the way open and stepped free of the cage. Her boots crunched onto the gravel outside.

She froze at this small noise, the hairs quivering at the back of her sore neck. She sensed eyes observing her. She studied the road leading through the forest, picturing the gate and the electrified fence that closed off this level.

Even if I made it there, I’d still be trapped.

She faced to the cage again. The safest place might be back inside, locked tightly up, but there must be a reason the pens were electrified. It suggested steel bars alone were not strong enough to resist what haunted this forest.

Still, steel was better than nothing.

She edged back toward the cage — only to see the door swing and clamp magnetically closed in front of her. The light flashed to red again.

Locked out…

She struggled to think, to plan, but her mind had turned slippery, unable to concentrate on one thought for very long. She wanted to blame this lack of focus on pain and terror, but she feared this difficulty was a symptom of a more serious condition.

She whispered to the silent forest. “I am Jenna Beck, daughter of Gayle and Charles. I live at the corner of D Street and Lee Vine Road…”

Wait. Was that right?

She pictured the small Victorian with green gables.

That’s where I live.

She took strength from this memory. “My dog’s name is Nikko, and his birthday is…”

With each whispered word, she took another step across the clearing, choosing to avoid the road. Though, the decision might not have been a conscious one. Instinct drove her to hide, to get out of the open. She decided to trust that instinct. Her mantra dissolved to a silent internal monologue as she reached the forest’s edge and pushed into the shadowy bower.

My best friends are Bill and Hattie. She let the image of the older Paiute woman grow more vivid in her mind’s eye. Hattie belonged to the Kutza… She struggled for a breath, trying to remember her friend’s specific tribe, her feet stumbling with her frustration; then she found the name.

Kutzadika’a… that was it.

She reached forward to move the frond of a fern out of her way — but she had forgotten about the unusual nature of the botany here. The plant flinched from her touch, curling its leaves and rolling all its stems into a tight ball.

Beyond that contracted fern, a massive creature appeared in plain view, only yards away. It stood on all fours, the size of a rhinoceros but as furry as a brown bear with a long thick tail. Its front legs curled atop savagely hooked claws, five to a side. Its muzzle and neck were massive, thick with muscle. Large brown-black eyes stared at her.

She froze, recognizing enough of the physiology to know that what stood before her belonged to the sloth family, those slow-moving arboreal herbivores that lived in the Brazilian forests. But this example was monstrous in size, a throwback to a great ancestor of the modern sloth. Though it looked like something out of the prehistoric past, in reality this species had gone extinct only ten thousand years ago.

Megatherium, she remembered. The giant ground sloth.

But Jenna sensed this creature was no more natural in form than what she had witnessed during her trip down here. Proving this, lips rippled back to reveal thick, sharp teeth, built for rending flesh from bones.

This was no herbivore — but a new carnivore born to this world.

With a roar, it reared up on its hind legs, rising to a height of twelve feet. A short arm lashed out, lightning fast, cleaving a sapling in half.

Jenna fell back, stumbling away.

More throaty cries burst from the jungle all around her, echoing off the stone walls, making it harder to think.

Still, she remembered the goat carcass getting tossed down to the road from above, possibly meant as a warning.

Heeding that warning now, she glanced up — and screamed as a shadow fell out of the canopy toward her.

28

“How long until this bloody thing is set up?” Dylan asked, pointing the radio clutched in his fist at the partially assembled LRAD dish.

The lights of the large CAAT shone upon the three-man team working at getting the six giant panels, each weighing eighty pounds, secured in a standing frame. Another two men connected cables from the portable diesel generator. Dylan had chosen a spot as far back into the Coliseum as he could get, facing the dish toward the mouth of this tunnel system, toward Hell’s Cape station.

So far so good.

Dylan had left a small contingent of men back at that station. They had successfully blasted and blowtorched a tunnel through the station, opening a gateway to the world at large. Their efforts took longer than expected due to the additional caution necessary not to trigger the bunker buster bombs, which had been booby-trapped to explode if interfered with.

But everything went well.

All that was left now was to get this lost world stampeding for the new exit. The LRAD 4000X that was under assembly could blast an ear-aching 162 decibels and had a range of three miles, even farther with the echo-chamber acoustics of these caverns.

“How long?” Dylan asked again.

“Need another ten minutes!” a teammate answered, yanking on a cord to start the generator chugging.

Dylan shouted to be heard over that racket. “Christchurch and Riley, you’re with me! I need the smaller LRAD atop that CAAT unhooked and brought down. Grab its portable battery and the remote activator for the 4000X.”

His orders were immediately obeyed without question, even though what he requested had not been a part of the original plan. Dylan and his men knew the ramifications of what they were about to do, understood the ecological damage that would be inflicted from releasing this isolated and aggressive biosphere into the larger world, but considering how much they were getting paid, it didn’t matter. Fixing the environmental damage would be someone else’s problem.

Still, it nagged at him that he didn’t know the entire picture. Especially after this call. He stared down at the radio in his hand. A connection had been patched through to him from Hell’s Cape station, relayed from South America. It seemed Cutter Elwes had decided to alter the mission parameters at the last minute. After negotiating for a hefty hazard pay bonus, Dylan had eventually agreed, pushing aside his worries.

An extra two hundred thousand quid bought a lot of peace of mind.

Christchurch hopped off the CAAT, carrying the heavy two-foot dish under his arms as easily as if lugging a rugby ball. In fact, the man was built like a fullback, with his stout limbs and huge hands. Riley, a head taller and ten stones lighter, followed with the battery pack, winding the cables around his forearm.

When they joined him, Dylan pointed deeper down the tunnel behind the parked CAAT, to parts unknown. “Looks like we’ve got some hunting to do.”

“For what?” Riley asked.

“Volitox.”

His two teammates exchanged glances, looking none too happy. He didn’t blame them, but orders were orders. Plus, he was up to the challenge. He let his palm rest atop the butt of his holstered Howdah pistol. He looked forward to testing his skill against one of the most aggressive species down here — and the most dangerous.

Still, when it came to this hellish place—he glanced to the portable LRAD—you couldn’t be too careful.

“Sir!” a man shouted to him and pointed to a pair of lights in the distance, coming their way.

It was McKinnon’s team returning.

Finally.

“Once his team gets here,” Dylan said, “start getting everything packed up. Keep this channel open in case I need to reach you.”

With everything locked down here, he set off. Still, something nagged at him, kept him more on edge than usual. After following the river that flowed out of the Coliseum for fifty yards, he glanced back toward the pool of light around the work site — then off to the pair of lights still crossing the cavern.

McKinnon had reported in earlier, detailing the successful ambush of Harrington’s snow cruiser. Ever the thorough soldier, the Scotsman had gone to make sure there were no survivors. But Dylan had heard no further updates from his second-in-command.

Distracted by the unexpected call from South America, Dylan hadn’t given it much thought. But now…

He pictured that resourceful American firing from the back of that cruiser.

“Hold up,” Dylan said. He pulled out his radio and dialed McKinnon’s channel. “Wright here. McKinnon, what’s your status?”

He waited thirty seconds and repeated the inquiry.

Still nothing.

Sighing heavily, he dialed up the work site and got an immediate answer.

“Sir?”

“Is the LRAD assembly complete?”

“All done.”

“Keep hailing McKinnon. If there’s no response by the time his vehicle reaches thirty yards out, activate the LRAD.”

“But that’ll knock his team—?”

“Do it. Once they’re stopped, switch it back off, and go in fully armed. Secure that CAAT.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dylan lowered his radio.

No more surprises.

He pointed ahead. “Let’s bag us a Volitox.”

Through a set of night-vision binoculars, Gray stared at the men working around the massive LRAD dish. He counted nine men. Earlier, Dylan had left with two others, heading deeper into the cavern system.

Bad odds… even with the element of surprise on their side.

“Ready?” Gray asked, yelling a bit to be heard.

Kowalski drove the rumbling CAAT, expertly learning to maneuver the treaded vehicle in the short time it had taken to cross the remainder of this massive cavern.

“As I’ll ever be.” The big man patted the machine gun across his lap, as if making sure it was still there.

Gray gripped his DSR rifle, its battery almost drained from so much recent use.

The radio on the dash squawked again. “Respond, McKinnon. If your comms are down, flash your lights if you hear this!”

Kowalski glanced to him.

It was the third call in as many minutes.

“Don’t do it,” Gray said. “That’ll only make them more suspicious, not less.”

The former British X-Squadron ahead might believe the CAAT had lost communications — antennas did get damaged in battle — but Gray suspected this last call was the equivalent of the enemy casting out a fishing lure. It would take extraordinary circumstances to allow their equipment to receive calls but not transmit a response.

For now, better to play deaf and dumb.

“They’re getting antsy,” Kowalski said.

With no other choice, they continued in silence, holding their breath, waiting for the inevitable. Then it happened.

The world exploded, screaming at them, vibrating the windshield. Gray’s ears felt as if they’d been stabbed with ice picks. His vision closed in at the edges. Bile rose in his throat as vertigo spun his senses around.

Beyond the shaking windows, the world exploded around the CAAT. Creatures burst into flight, fleeing the cacophony. Others bound out of hiding, leaping, crawling. A towering Pachycerex thundered past, a blurry sight as Gray’s eyes started tearing up. Soon it was hard to make out any details, just a tide of movement, retreating from that sonic assault.

Can’t hold out much longer…

To the side, he watched Kowalski finally slump over the wheel.

Without its pilot, the CAAT slowed and stopped.

Then Gray fell to his side, sagging along the passenger window, but not before one last worry.

Not for himself, but for the others.

Jason, you’d better have reached that Back Door.

Make it stop…

Jason hung halfway up the cavern wall, an elbow hooked around a rung bolted into the stone face, his toes jammed into the step. He hugged his other arm around his head, trying to block the sound and keep his skull from splitting in half. Snot ran down his face, mixed with tears.

Far off, a distant star glinted near the far end of the Coliseum, marking Dylan Wright’s encampment. While climbing up the ladder, Jason had glanced frequently in that direction, worried that the British team would finish their work and activate the LRAD before Jason’s group could reach the well-insulated substation.

His worst fears were realized a moment ago.

He also noted a tinier star on the cavern floor. It was the CAAT that Gray had commandeered. While scaling the wall, Jason had monitored its slow progress, but now he saw it had ground to a halt. Jason could only imagine the intensity of that sonic barrage when so near to its source.

It took all of his effort to crane his neck and stare up. Stella and her father were yards ahead of him. A small flashlight hung from the professor’s belt. After the DSR died, it was their group’s only remaining light source, found in Stella’s backpack. She had given it to her father to help him see the rungs better as they ascended the ladder.

It was a mistake.

The noise suddenly ended, as abruptly as it had started. Caught off guard, Jason’s toes slipped from the rungs for a hair-raising second. He scrabbled back to his perch, gasping, grabbing again with both hands. It was as if the strength of the sound had pinned him to the wall, and when it suddenly ended, his body rebounded outward.

He knew it was only an illusion from his assaulted senses. Still, he clung tightly for two more breaths before lifting his face.

Stella stared down at him, back lit by the glow of her father’s flashlight.

“I’m okay,” he said, his ears still ringing, responding only to the concern in her face.

Past her shoulder, something swept along the wall.

A Hastax.

It was plainly still panicked from the noise and lashed out at the nearest target, that irritating bright light invading its lofty territory. It dove and struck her father a glancing blow — hard enough to knock Harrington off the rungs.

In slow motion, Jason watched the professor go cartwheeling past him, tumbling silently, vanishing into the darkness, nothing but a falling star now.

Stella cried out, a wail of anguish, one arm reaching, as if ready to follow her father’s plunge.

“Stay! I’ll go down!” He descended rapidly, though he didn’t hold out much hope. “I’m sorry, Stella, but you must get to the station. Blow those bombs.”

But was it too late?

A glance below showed a shadowy migration already under way, lit by patches of bioluminescence, flowing away from the source of that sonic assault. Even that short blast could have dire consequences. The panic here would inevitably spread and amplify down the long tunnel toward the exit, like a snowball rolling downhill.

Jason glanced to the distant lights of Wright’s camp, knowing one other certainty: That blast won’t be the last. With each toot of that horn, the panic would worsen. Unless that far exit was sealed, the world above was doomed.

“Wait!” Stella called down to him, tears in her voice. “I can’t—”

He didn’t have time to argue. “You have to!”

“Listen, damn it!”

He paused and glanced up at her.

“I… I don’t know the code,” she said, choking down a sob. “Only my father knows it.”

Jason hadn’t considered that possibility. He had assumed she knew the password, too. He looked down between his toes, to a small dot of light near the foot of the ladder. He closed his eyes for a steadying breath, then opened them.

“Continue up anyway,” he said. “Prep whatever needs to be done. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” she answered, her voice small and fragile.

Good.

Even if there was nothing she could do above, he didn’t want her to see her father below, not in the state he expected to find the old man.

Jason hurried, praying her father was still alive.

29

Jenna stumbled back from the shadow falling out of the canopy. Her scream stifled away as she struggled to make sense of what landed before her. It was a gangly boy of ten or eleven, with black hair and bright blue eyes. He was barefooted, wearing shorts, with a safari vest over a T-shirt.

He rushed to her, grabbed her hand, tugging a bit for her to follow.

“Come…”

In his other hand, he carried a long yellow cattle prod.

He pointed it toward the giant fern that had begun to unfurl its fronds again, starting to hide the massive beast on the far side.

The Megatherium dropped from two legs down to four. It hunched its shoulders, hackles raising high, the dark fur striped in blacks and browns, perfectly shaded for camouflage in this shadowy primeval forest.

It bared its thick, sharp teeth.

The boy pressed the button on the prod. Electricity danced in bright blue sparks across the U-shaped contacts. From the fierce display, the tool must be much stronger than any standard model.

The Megatherium’s eyes narrowed. Its massive razor-sharp claws dug deep into the soft forest loam.

The boy tugged on her arm again.

She retreated with him.

The beast stalked after them, moving deliberately, keeping its distance. At least so far. She glanced right and left, hearing branches snap and leaves rustle, paralleling their path.

This beast was not the only one of its kind here.

Moving more quickly, they backed their way to the gravel-floored clearing. The three conjoined cages stood in the center, still locked and electrified. There was no hiding inside there.

Still, the boy retreated until their backs were against that electrified pen. The cages at least protected against any attack from behind.

And maybe it wasn’t just the cages that offered protection.

The Megatherium reached the clearing’s edge and stopped. One clawed foot retracted back from the gravel, plainly wary of this place. Was this arboreal predator just uncomfortable stepping fully out in the open, or was it some memory, a warning of old pain? It clearly recognized the cattle prod.

The boy leaned his head a bit, checking the status of the pens.

The red light glowed from all three cages.

From the frown, he clearly had not expected that. He stared up at the canopy overhead. Branches hung low, easily reachable if you could mount those cages.

“Was that the way you wanted to go?” Jenna asked, not sure how well the boy spoke English. “Up into the trees?”

He nodded, showing he understood, but his eyes looked scared.

He must have done this before, learning to explore this forest from a safe distance. If he stayed up high, scaling among the thinner branches, the large predators couldn’t reach him. Anything smaller he encountered could be discouraged with that cattle prod.

It was a good exit strategy, but surely they didn’t need the cages to take advantage of it.

She pointed to a neighboring tangle of vines, one among many that draped down from the branches. “We could climb those.”

“No,” he said.

He bent down, picked up a larger stone from the gravel bed, and tossed it toward the vine. Where the rock struck, the leafy cord gave a muscular twitch, and hooked barbs sprang out, glistening with sap.

“Poisonous,” the boy said. “Stings very bad, then you die.”

She flinched, thinking about how blithely she had entered this bower earlier. She watched those hooks retract again, reminded of an Australian rain forest vine that was armed with similar barbed hooks. She tried to remember the name, but the growing fog in her mind made it harder and harder to think.

Off at the clearing’s edge, the Megatherium returned a paw to the gravel, its claws digging furrows. Whatever fear held it back was waning.

The boy found her hand and squeezed tightly.

More shadows shifted around the edges of the glade, closing in around them.

Jenna pulled the boy closer and slightly behind her, ready to protect him. She whispered to him.

“What’s your name?”

A concerned voice drew Kendall’s nose out of the stack of Cutter’s research notes. He glanced over to see Cutter’s wife enter the lab. She looked distraught, lifting an arm upon seeing her husband.

“As-tu vu Jori?”

“Jori?” Cutter asked, crossing from a workstation toward his wife, speaking French. “I thought he was with you.”

Ashuu shook her head.

Kendall placed a finger down on the paper to mark his place. He had been reading rapidly for the past few minutes, not sure how long Cutter would allow him access to these files. They concerned his experiments with magnetism to shatter XNA strands, ripping those iron backbones under just the right pulse. He had scribbled down the man’s findings on a notepad: must generate a field strength of at least 0.465 Tesla using a static magnetic field.

“We’ll check the cameras,” Cutter said, touching his wife’s shoulder reassuringly. “You know the boy. He’s always exploring. He’s at that age, full of curiosity, his hormones beginning to surge, struggling to find his place in that world between a boy and a man.”

Cutter crossed to Kendall and shooed him out of the way. “You can read those later.”

Kendall rolled his chair aside, taking the papers with him. He had dimmed the monitor after seeing Jenna leave her cage and wander into the forest. He hadn’t wanted to see what happened from there. Cutter woke the screen back up, returning the view into that forest clearing.

Kendall had been about to return to the notes when movement caught his eye on the screen. Jenna had returned, her back against those cages — but she wasn’t alone any longer.

A young boy had her by the hand, holding a cattle prod.

Cutter leaned closer. “Jori…”

Ashuu hurried forward, saw the screen, and let out a small gasp of fear, clutching her throat.

Cutter turned, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gently but firmly shifted her toward Mateo. “Stay here, mon amour. I’ll get our boy.”

Kendall kept staring at the screen. He saw a dark, hulking shadow move into the clearing. Whatever it was, it remained at the periphery, but he imagined it was what he had briefly spotted earlier. He pictured those claws, that shaggy dark coat.

Megatherium.

A creature out of the last Ice Age.

“Look!” Kendall called out, drawing the other’s attention back to the screen.

Cutter stepped over, glanced at the monitor, and swore.

By now more shadows shifted at the edges.

“You’ll never make it down there in time,” Kendall said. “But look at Jenna. Look at what she’s doing.”

C’mon…

Jenna faced the camera. It was strapped high up a tree, pointed down into this glade. Earlier, she knew she must have been under surveillance. Luckily the boy had known where the camera was located.

She craned up to the lens and pointed an arm toward the cages, while making a cutting motion across her own throat.

Turn the damned electricity off.

The boy called to her. “Light is green!”

Finally.

She swung back to the cage. They had two options: hide inside and hope someone reelectrified the bars again… or travel the boy’s path up into the canopy.

It was not a hard choice.

She glanced over to the Megatherium. The beast stood half in the clearing, half in the forest, balancing at that edge. She remembered it rising up to its full twelve-foot-height, each claw eighteen inches long. She didn’t feel like trusting her life — or the boy’s — to those thin steel bars, electrified or not.

And it wasn’t just this one sloth they needed to fear.

She had caught glimpses of at least another four.

Pointing to the top of the cage, she said, “Up you go.”

Jori passed her his cattle prod and clambered like a monkey up the bars. Once he reached the top, she passed the prod up to him. He crouched above, covering her, snapping sparks of electricity toward the Megatherium in the clearing.

She grabbed the cage, set a foot in the first crossbar — and watched as a sloth crashed out of the forest on the far side of the pens and came charging toward her.

She realized her mistake.

It hadn’t been fear that held off the pack.

The beasts had waited until they knew the electricity was off, and not likely to be turned on again, using the boy like a test balloon. As long as he was up there, they knew they could attack without fear of getting shocked.

“Jori! Jump!”

She got the door open a second before the sloth struck the far side. She rolled inside the pen and slammed the door. Overhead, Jori leaped from the top, caught hold of a branch, and flipped expertly over it.

Under his heels, the sloth hit the triple pen, rocking the entire unit up on one edge. As the beast reared, claws grabbed the top edge, ready to topple the cages the rest of the way over. She would be trapped inside if it landed door side down.

“Jenna!”

Jori hung upside down and dropped the cattle prod toward her. Rather than falling cleanly through the bars, it struck askew, and began to roll down the slanted side of the pen, right between the paws of the giant. She scrabbled for it, grabbed the handle, and flipped its business end toward the towering sloth. She stabbed at the tender armpit, where it was less furred, and the contact points exploded against its skin, looking hot enough to sear.

The Megatherium bellowed and fell away, letting the cage settle back into place. Twisting to the side, the creature dropped down, licking at the sting under its arm, and retreated.

Jenna popped back out of the cage, waving the prod broadly, trying to encompass the entire clearing.

The Megatherium who was still in the clearing eyeballed her, one lip curling. But after a moment it also slipped backward into the shadows. In those eyes was a fury, a promise that this was not over.

She took advantage of the momentary lull to climb the cage door, roll onto the top of the pen, then leap to join Jori in the trees.

“Follow me,” the boy said. “Very careful.”

He led the way higher into the canopy, moving from stout branches to limbs that swayed under her weight. Once seemingly satisfied with their height, Jori set off on a trek that led toward the distant gates of this level. She imagined he must have some way of getting past that barrier.

Then what? she wondered. I’ll still be trapped on this island in the sky… while a virus ravages a path through my higher consciousness.

She pushed those worries aside for now. One problem at a time. That’s all her mind could handle.

Jori followed a path with which he seemed familiar, knowing where branches between trees were close enough to leap or a bridge of vines could be crossed by hanging from hands and feet. Together they worked their way across the canopy.

“No!” Jori warned, moving her away from what appeared to be a simple jump to the next mahogany tree. He pointed to a hive growing on the far side of that trunk. “Hornets.”

She nodded, not in the mood to get stung.

He led her to another, more difficult path, but she kept watch on that hive. A small sparrow darted among the branches and came too close to that buzzing mud-and-daub nest. A flurry of hornets burst forth, swarming the little bird. With each sting, its flight grew more erratic. Then it tumbled away toward the forest floor, still coated in hornets.

“Are they poisonous?” she asked Jori, who had noted her attention.

“No.” He continued across a dense net of vines, balancing with his arms out. He reached the far side. “Sting with…” He plainly struggled with the word and rubbed his belly. “Juices that melt food.”

She glanced more warily at that hive.

Digestive juices.

So their stingers must produce chemicals similar to spider venom.

“Eat you from inside out,” Jori warned, as if this were the most normal thing in the world to state.

They continued for another twenty yards in silence, accompanied by nothing but birdsong and the squawk of parrots from a higher level of this garden. Then a softer mewling reached her, rising from the left. The plaintive cry drew her closer.

“No,” Jori warned again. “Too dangerous.”

She wanted to obey, but the noise sounded close, just in the next tree. She shifted around the bole of the mahogany and pushed leafy branches out of her face.

It took her a long moment to identify the source of the soft crying. A nest of vines hung from the branches across a short gap. A small movement caught her eye, a furred limb, about the size of a small child’s, seemed to beckon, to plead. A set of hooked claws opened and closed, more in pain than any conscious will. She followed the arm down to a body the size of a bear cub, encased in loops of vines. Even from here she could see the barbed hooks, the dribbles of crimson blood. The body shifted, and the vines tightened, squeezing another cry out of the small creature.

Her heart ached at the sight.

Jori pushed her arm down and the branches she had been holding down snapped back up. “Law of the Jungle,” he said.

She could tell he tried to say this bravely, as if it were a lesson he wanted to show her that he learned, but he looked mournful nonetheless.

He continued across the canopy, trying to draw her with him.

“Why did you help me?” she called out. “Why break the Law of the Jungle for me?”

He stopped and turned. He glanced to her face, then down to his hands, then away again. “You’re pretty. Law of the Jungle.” He shook his head. “Not for you.”

With those sage words, he set out again.

Cutter slammed through the hatch into the sinkhole, trailed by a pair of armed men. He had radioed for two carts to meet him. One held four more armed Macuxi. His sister-in-law stood before the second.

Rahei glowered at him, as if this were all his fault. Though the woman had the cold-bloodedness of a snake, she loved Jori. Only the boy could bring out a measure of warmth in the woman, but that love could also turn savage, transforming her into a lioness defending a cub.

Still, he welcomed that now.

They piled into the electric carts and raced around and around, barely waiting for the gates at each level to fully open, before scraping through to continue onward.

Cutter could not erase the image of his son vanishing into those dark trees, a habitat as dangerous as they could come. What was I thinking stoking his curiosity for the life I’d created?

He knew a part of it was pride, to see the respect and awe in Jori’s young face. It was all the accolades he needed for his hard work and ambition. He had an audience of one and that was enough, especially if it was Jori.

He found his breath growing labored as tension and fear mounted. Rahei must have sensed it and grabbed his knee, fingers digging like daggers, telling him silently to hold it together.

For Jori.

At last they reached the final gate, and the two carts parked on the far side. “Leave the gate open,” Cutter said as he climbed out. “If Jori is hurt, I don’t want to lose a second.”

He left one driver guarding the carts and the gateway. He headed down the ramp with the others, descending deeper into the forest’s depths.

Cupping his mouth, he bellowed his challenge to this harsh world. “Jori! Where are you?”

Kendall sealed the last zipper on his biosafety suit and entered the BSL4 lab. Before Cutter had stormed out, he had warned Kendall to begin his preparations for inserting that destructive code into his engineered shell. More worrisome, Kendall was instructed to expect a sample of Volitox blood before nightfall.

Kendall hadn’t argued. He wanted access again to this quarantined space anyway. He glanced out the window to where Mateo and Ashuu spoke in low voices, their heads bowed together, a brother and a sister consoling each other. The giant loomed over the fragile form of his sister. She sheltered under his strength and support.

Kendall felt bad that he would have to kill them, but he had to reach a phone, some way of sharing with the outside world about the cure to what plagued California, a magnetic frequency that could rip apart his bioengineered organism at the genetic level.

The current chaos with the boy offered him his best chance.

Even Cutter had slipped up, a rarity for the genius.

Kendall patted his pocket, where he had hidden the object he had stolen from a tabletop while everyone was distracted. He crossed to the large refrigerators at the back, opened the doors, and searched the racks of vials. He thanked Cutter for his thorough cataloging and indexing. He quickly found what he needed and grabbed a dozen vials, shoving them into a pocket.

He glanced over his shoulder, making sure Mateo stayed occupied.

Only for another minute or two.

He strode over to one of the medical exam rooms at the rear, the spaces used for studying tissues and gross anatomies of Cutter’s creations. Kendall stepped past the X-ray machine and the PET scanner and entered the copper-lined MRI room.

Magnetic resonance imaging.

The irony did not escape him. Magnetism was the key to saving the world, but it could also lead to Cutter’s downfall.

He stared at the table surrounded by the enclosed ring of giant magnets. They were powerful enough to do great damage when operated by someone improperly trained or careless. Injuries, even deaths, had occurred due to mismanagement of these massive magnets, but they were dangerous for another reason.

He moved over to the quench box on the wall near the door and lifted the spring-loaded cover. The magnets of an MRI were cooled by liquid helium. In case of emergency, the helium could be rapidly vented to power down a magnet, but it was a dangerous proposition in an enclosed space, as in a sealed-up BSL4 lab, especially one buried in the heart of a tepui.

Most hospitals vented this pipe to the outside, but Kendall had already investigated and found that Cutter in his hubris had not bothered to do so.

Kendall leaned out the MRI room and checked on the situation in the main lab. Mateo was alone now, staring straight back at him. It looked like Ashuu had already left.

Kendall met the native’s gaze, then pounded the button.

He dove out the door and flew headlong, sliding across the floor on his belly.

Behind him, a frigid blast exploded with tremendous force as the helium liquid expanded eight-hundred-fold, pushing oxygen ahead of that wave. Windows blew out into the main lab, smashing into Mateo’s face. A chunk of magnet whistled past and struck a row of oxygen tanks in the next room. They exploded, ignited from a spark, and rolled into a fireball, challenging the freezing white cloud of helium erupting out that shattered window.

It was more of a detonation than he had been expecting.

He pushed to his knees, then gained his footing. He stumbled for the exit, choosing to climb out the observation window versus using the air lock.

I think I already broke containment here.

He saw Mateo crumpled on the floor, his face burned by the fireball, his hair singed away. Kendall had to step over him to get past the window, prepared to climb to the main villa above, to find a phone.

Something snagged his leg.

He glanced down to find fingers clamped to his ankle.

Mateo lunged up, his eyes shining out of his blackened flesh.

Kendall tried to escape, but Mateo lifted a broken glass cylinder and plunged it into his side.

30

“Nymph nest ahead,” Christchurch announced, swinging his DSR rifle and pointing its IR beam along the riverbank.

Dylan called a halt and examined the site with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Twenty yards ahead, a small pool jutted from the main waterway, formed by a dam, not unlike what a pack of beavers might build.

Only this dam was made of bones.

The mud-packed mound of broken skulls, ribs, and other decaying remains rose waist-high, spreading in a curve, dividing the shallow pool from the river. Squirming in that pool and scrabbling over that abattoir were hundreds of gray muscular slugs that ranged from the size of fat thumbs to as long as his forearm. A few scrabbled on the neighboring bank, rooting through the mosses and algal beds.

He watched one of the older nymphs — as they were euphemistically called — bunch itself and leap from the rocky bank, fly across the pool, and dive into an opening in its foul dike, vanishing into its depths.

Dylan shuddered.

The nest was clearly still agitated from the sonic blast that had ended a minute or so ago. Though this tunnel was behind the LRAD, the backwash and echoing acoustics still extended somewhat in this direction. The low-frequency infrasonics had set Dylan’s teeth on edge, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“We’ll move up another ten yards and set up the LRAD,” Dylan ordered.

“So close?” Riley asked.

Normally Dylan wouldn’t tolerate anyone questioning an order, but in this case, he didn’t blame his young teammate. Dylan hated these vile little hunters with a passion. They were an abomination.

But right now he needed one.

“Move up,” he said.

They crept slowly, careful with each step. Nymphs were known to attack en masse. To rile one of these nests was like stirring up an anthill. The term used by the researchers was a boil-out—when the entire lair burst forth in response to a threat. It was one of the most terrifying sights he’d ever seen, a carnivorous explosion that could reach tens of yards through the air.

So he understood Riley’s concern.

Still, Dylan was a skilled hunter. He led the way himself, picking a silent path. Finally he lifted a fist and motioned for Christchurch and Riley to move to his right side and prepare the portable LRAD.

They worked as an experienced team. Christchurch lifted the dish high, letting Riley hook up the power cables. Once this was done, Riley took a step behind his teammate’s shoulder, cradling the battery pack.

Dylan pointed to the nest, then gave a thumbs-up.

Riley hit the switch. The LRAD hummed for a second, then screamed at the nest like a banshee in heat. The reaction was instantaneous. While not as dramatic as a full boil-out, it was still a sight to behold, something out of the deepest circle of hell. Hundreds of gray bodies squirmed, bounded, and flew out of their nest, pouring into the main river. Those in the pools or along the banks followed their foul brothers, fleeing from the noise as if blasted by a leaf blower.

Dylan waited for a count of three, then made a cutting motion across his neck.

Riley flipped the battery off and Christchurch lowered the dish.

Dylan rushed forward toward the pond, his scrotum still tightening at the thought of getting near that rotting nest. He searched the pool, but he found what he wanted near the edge of the bone pile.

A single slug squirmed leadenly, stunned by the assault.

Dylan snatched it up in a gloved hand, careful of its circular maw of needle-sharp teeth. He hung it upside down, knowing that the glands rimming its mouth were full of flesh-burning acids, capable of dissolving through his glove to his skin.

With his bait in hand, he hurried to the river’s edge. The nymph was already reviving, pushing out little appendages from its muscular segments, like legs on a centipede.

As it began to squirm more violently, he slipped out his dagger, slit the creature’s belly open, and held out the gutted carcass.

Black blood flowed into the river.

He waited until the nymph stopped writhing, then draped the body on the bank near the water’s edge. He bent down and tied a length of fishing line around its midsection — then took ten fast steps backward.

Once in position, Dylan signaled his teammates to move to his right side and switch the LRAD back on, to keep it pointed at the bone pile. While he lay in wait, he didn’t want those other nymphs to come flooding back to the nest. Unlike the nymphs, what he sought to lure here was deaf to these sonic discharges.

He crouched to one knee, slipped the assault rifle from his shoulder, and placed it at his toes. To hunt this prey, he preferred another weapon.

He pulled out the Howdah pistol from its holster. He’d already chambered the .557 cartridges, one in each of the double barrels. Though the gun was over a century old — used to hunt rhinos and tigers by his ancestors — he maintained it in perfectly good working condition, expecting it still to be firing another century from now when his great-grandson eventually wielded it.

But he wasn’t hunting something as meek as a lion here.

Faster than he expected, his prey arrived. The only warning was a V-shaped eddy in the water, sweeping toward the shore. Then from the river, a scintillating globe rose to the surface, borne aloft on a muscular tentacle. The toxic orb swirled in bioluminescent shades: brilliant blues, electric greens, blood reds.

It was easy to see how these deadly lures might dazzle and attract the denizens of this dark world, but Dylan ignored the display and used a thumb to draw back the hammer of one barrel.

The sphere lowered to the rocky bank, searching the shoreline blindly until discovering the slug’s body. Nymphs were the offspring of Volitox ignis, an immature stage of this monstrous adult hunter.

The orb rolled the limp body around. Its oddly gentle touch did not burn the nymph’s flesh, as if this Volitox queen could control her acidic fire. Little was truly known about the life stages of these creatures. They were too violent, too dangerous to truly study. But the researchers here had already recognized the strong maternal instinct of these queens.

Dylan took advantage of that now.

Lowering one hand, he pulled on the fishing line and drew the carcass farther up the bank and away from its mother. He teased the Volitox closer, letting it believe its offspring might still be alive and trying to crawl away.

The orb probed along its retreating path, stretching to reach the fleeing nymph’s body. Finally the queen had to arc its bulk out of the water to continue her pursuit.

About time.

Her head beached up onto the riverbank, revealing its torpedo-shaped bulk, the size of an orca whale, but tipped by a circular mouth, like that of a lamprey eel. Inside that puckering maw lay a bottomless well of spiraling hooked teeth.

Dylan let go of the fishing line and steadied his aim, cupping one hand under the other. He centered his shot on the exposed base of the stalk, where he knew a huge ganglion lay, leading straight to the brain.

One shot there should drop this beast.

And if he missed, he still had a round chambered in the other barrel.

I never need more than two shots.

His finger firmed on the trigger and began to pull—

— when gunfire erupted down the tunnel.

Surprised, he twitched and his Howdah exploded. The wild round sparked off the rocky bank and ricocheted harmlessly into the darkness.

The firefight continued at the far end of the tunnel, accompanied by the distinct chatter of a machine gun.

What the hell?

Huddled in the cab of the CAAT, Gray took out another man with a shotgun blast to the chest. The soldier’s body went flying back. Out of shells, he tossed the weapon aside and lifted the Heckler & Koch assault rifle from beside his seat.

Nothing like commandeering a vehicle full of your enemy’s weapons.

Not that he and his partner hadn’t come without some firepower of their own.

Across the way, Kowalski stood outside the cab, crouched on the belted tread of the CAAT, shielded behind the open armored driver’s door. He balanced his machine gun on the door’s edge, creating his own makeshift gunner’s nest.

Bodies littered the ground around the vehicle.

Seven total.

The two remaining soldiers teamed up and strafed the CAAT, giving up their attempt to reach the tunnel leading out of here. They turned tail and ran into the depths of the Coliseum, fleeing the lights and disappearing into the cover of darkness.

Gray took a few potshots at them, but they were gone.

“What now?” Kowalski asked.

Gray stared off into that cavern. “Guard the fort,” he said, not trusting that the vanished pair might not try to retake this base. “I’m going after Wright.”

Kowalski hauled his machine gun up and hopped down to the ground. He pointed his weapon at the bigger CAAT. “Time to switch rides. We have a river to cross if we still want to reach that Back Door.”

It was a smart choice. Back at the bridge, he remembered overhearing a commando express concern about taking a smaller CAAT across those treacherous currents. The bigger vehicle would have a better chance.

“Keep a watch out there,” Gray said.

“You watch yourself.” Kowalski glanced back to the tunnel leading out from the Coliseum. “You’re not going to catch these bastards with their pants down. Not a second time. Especially Wright.”

Gray silently agreed, reaching to his ears and tugging out the plugs.

Their ruse had worked perfectly. Earlier, when he had first caught sight of the camp here, he had used the directional microphone built into his DSR rifle to eavesdrop on the soldiers’ conversations. He heard Wright talking to someone on the radio. He could only pick up the commando’s side of the call, but it was clear Wright had new orders, something important he needed to get before evacuating with his men.

Whatever that was, Gray intended to stop him.

Also, while en route, he had overheard the enemy’s plans to use the LRAD against the approaching CAAT, to knock the occupants out and take the vehicle by force. Knowing that, he and Kowalski had found protective gear in their ride: plugs and noise-dampening earphones. Down here, where many of the CAATs came equipped with portable LRADs, such emergency gear was likely standard equipment.

So it was a simple matter of feigning incapacitation, slumping in their seats, which wasn’t a hard act since that sonic assault was agonizing, even with the noise-suppression gear. Still, the trick got the enemy to successfully lower their guard. Once the ex-British soldiers were near enough — laughing at their supposed victory — Gray and Kowalski had let loose with both barrels, firing from either side of the CAAT, catching the entire crew by surprise.

But that’s where their ruse ended.

Surely Wright had heard the brief firefight — and would be waiting for him.

So be it.

As he headed into the tunnel, he glanced to the far right, to where a twinkle of a star glowed high up the wall on that side. Jason and the others should have reached the Back Door by now. Gray had expected to hear that earth-shattering blast of those bunker busters by now.

But so far nothing.

What’s taking them so long?

Jason leaped off the last rung and rushed toward the small glow in the darkness. He had made the descent as fast as he could in the darkness, coming close to falling twice. But he knew now was not the time for caution.

He hurried through the muck and moss and reached Professor Harrington’s body. The man lay on his back, his eyes open and glassy. Blood ran from the corner of his lips, one arm broken and twisted under him.

Oh, God…

Jason fell to his knees in the ankle-deep algal sludge. He touched the professor’s shoulder, reaching with his other hand to close his eyes.

I’m sorry.

Then those eyes twitched, following his fingers. A small bloody bubble escaped from a left nostril.

He’s still alive!

But Jason knew it would not be for long. A bony kink in his thin neck looked like a cervical fracture.

“Professor…”

His pale lips moved, but no words came out.

Jason hated to disturb the last moments of his life, but the situation here was too dire, the need too great. He reached to Harrington’s cheek and held it.

“Professor, we need the code. Can you speak?”

Harrington’s gaze found Jason’s face. Fear shone there — but not for himself. Those eyes flickered up toward the distant substation, toward his daughter.

“I understand,” he said. “Don’t worry. Stella made it safely up top.”

He wasn’t certain of that, but a lie that brought comfort couldn’t be a sin.

With his words, some of that anxiety dimmed from the professor. His entire body sagged into the soft bed beneath him. He likely only lived because of the thick, damp growth covering the stone floor.

“The code, professor,” Jason pleaded.

The only acknowledgment was the slightest nod, only detectable because of his palm resting on the man’s cheek. Jason tried to get him to speak, but the professor’s gaze never left the glow of that distant station, to where he believed his daughter was safe.

Finally the old man gave one last breath that sounded like a sigh, dying with a measure of peace, taking his secrets with him.

Jason rose to his feet, defeated and grief-stricken.

There’s nothing else I can do…

31

“Picking up a smoke column ahead,” Sergeant Suarez said from the cockpit of the Valor. “It’s rising from that summit.”

Painter leaned to the window as the tiltrotor swept toward the lofty plateau of the summit. The engine nacelles turned, slowing their forward momentum. The pilot expertly shot the Valor over the tepui, banking slightly, then came to a perfect hover. Its blades chopped through a stream of smoke flowing out the open doors of a rustic French Normandy — style home, hidden within the mouth of a cave.

Had to be Cutter Elwes’s abode.

Elsewhere, Painter noted a still pond and a sinkhole in the middle of a stunted forest. As they hovered, a handful of men ran into view on the ground, taking potshots at the intruder.

“Abramson! Henckel!” Suarez called out. “How about we show them how the Marines say hello?”

The Valor swooped lower, lifting Painter slightly out of his seat. The hatch opened on one side, bringing in the roar of those engines and the bluster of the props. The two lance corporals already had their lines hooked. The ropes were thrown down and the men rolled out just as quickly. They fired as they spun along those lines, dropping several assailants, scattering the rest.

The Valor’s wheels touched down a moment later.

“Let’s join the party,” Drake said to Malcolm and Schmitt.

Painter followed, a SIG Sauer in his fist, as the Marines bailed out.

Suarez came behind them. “My men and I’ll hold the summit.” He tapped his ear. “Comms are open. Call if you need help.”

Painter looked to the haze-shrouded home, knowing where they needed to search first.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Painter led the team at a low run toward those open doors. The Marines had rifles at their shoulders, their beard-rusted cheeks fixed to their stocks. Painter kept his pistol ready, gripping the weapon two-handed.

A lone assailant shot from an upper-story window.

Drake shifted faster than Painter could react — and fired. Glass shattered, and a body fell through and toppled to the stone. They rushed past and entered a huge reception hall.

Empty.

“Elevator!” Painter said, pointing his pistol toward the wrought-iron cage.

They hurried forward and found a handsome woman huddled on the floor in a neighboring alcove. She appeared unarmed, distraught. She offered no sign of resistance. From her puffy eyes and tear-stained face, whatever distressed her had little to do with their arrival.

Painter pulled out a pair of laminated photos: one of Kendall Hess, one of Jenna Beck. He held them in front of her face. “Are these two people here?”

She looked up, pointed to Hess, then the elevator.

Painter had no time for niceties, not with a nuclear device set to detonate in California in under an hour. He pulled the woman to her feet. “Show me.”

She stumbled to the elevator and pointed to a lower-level button, somewhere beneath this home.

Painter let her go and piled into the cage with Drake. “Malcolm, Schmitt, search this place floor by floor. Look for Jenna. For Cutter Elwes.”

He got confirmatory nods.

Drake yanked the cage gate, and Painter pressed the button. The elevator sank away, passing through solid rock, dropping for longer than Painter had expected. Finally, the smoke grew thicker, and the cage dropped into a huge lab.

Fires burned in spots, soot hung in the air, and a wall of glass looked like it had been shattered into this room from a neighboring lab.

A pair of struggling men rolled into view from behind a workstation.

The one on the bottom was clearly losing, his belly bloody, his neck throttled by a huge hand. His attacker lifted his other arm, baring a shattered piece of bloody glass. The aggressor’s face was a blackened ruin — but Painter still noted the trace of a familiar scar.

He aimed his SIG Sauer and shot twice, both rounds piercing the man’s forehead. The giant toppled backward to the floor.

Painter hurried forward, going to the aid of the injured man. He wore a biosafety suit with the hood torn away. It was Kendall Hess.

“Dr. Hess, I’m Painter Crowe. We’ve come to—”

Hess didn’t need any more encouragement. Maybe the Marine in full battle gear behind him was enlightenment enough. Gloved fingers clutched Painter’s arm.

“I need to get word to California. I know how to stop what was unleashed from my lab.”

It was the first good news in days.

“What about Jenna Beck?” Drake asked.

Hess glanced to him, likely hearing the distress in the Marine’s voice. “She’s here… but she’s in grave danger.”

“Where is she? What danger?”

Hess’s gaze flicked to a wall clock. “Even if she lives, she’ll be gone in another thirty minutes.”

Drake’s face paled. “What do you mean, gone?”

Jenna struggled through the fog filling her head. It took an extra thought for every movement:

… grab vine.

… hook leg.

… shimmy to the next branch.

Jori kept glancing back at her, his brow wrinkling in concern, not understanding why she was slowing so much.

“Go on,” she said, waving him forward. Even her tongue felt sluggish and leaden, refusing to form words without that same extra bit of attention.

She tried her mantra to keep her moving like before.

I am Jenna Beck, daughter… daughter of… She shook her head, trying to dislodge that haze. I have a dog.

She pictured his black nose, always cold, poking her.

Nikko…

Those sharp ears.

Nikko…

His eyes — one white-blue, the other brown.

Nikko…

That was good enough for now.

She focused on the boy, following his actions, mimicking instead of having to think. He slowly got farther ahead. She lifted an arm to call him, but no name came out. She blinked — then remembered, the name rising through the fog, but she feared if that haze got any thicker soon nothing would come through.

She opened her mouth again to call him, but another beat her to it, shouting from somewhere ahead.

“JORI!”

Cutter called again, growing hoarse. “Jori!”

Earlier he had heard an explosion, saw a strange aircraft thunder past the sinkhole, followed by an echoing spatter of gunfire. He felt his world collapsing around him, but nothing else mattered at this moment.

“Jori! Where are you?”

His group had reached the base of the corkscrewing ramp and started along the long gravel road through the forest. Rahei had the lead, shouldering a rifle equipped with a stun attachment. Five more men flanked and trailed him, all heavily armed. Cutter also had a triggering device for the munitions buried below the floor of this sinkhole. It was a contingency plan if he ever needed to cleanse this place, but at the moment, he contemplated it more as an act of revenge.

If these beasts harmed my son…

“Jori!”

Then to the left of the road, a faint call pierced the forest. “PAPA!”

“It’s him! He’s alive.”

A joy filled him like no other — accompanied by a measure of dread. He could not let anything happen to his son.

Rahei fell back and pointed into the forest in the direction of his son’s voice. If anyone could find him, it was his sister-in-law. She was one of the best hunters he knew. She set off, dragging them all with her. She did not curb her pace to compensate for any deficiency in those that followed, and Cutter would have it no other way.

“Papa!”

Closer now.

After another minute, Rahei rushed forward as a figure that was all gangly limbs dropped out of the trees into her arms. She swung Jori in a full circle, then placed him on his feet, giving him one hard hug.

Cutter dropped to one knee, his arms wide.

Jori ran up to him and leaped into his embrace.

“I’m very angry with you, my dear boy.” But he hugged his son even tighter and kissed the top of his head.

From that same tree, another figure climbed down, falling the last two yards, but still landing on her feet.

Rahei looked ready to stun her into submission, but Cutter knew Jenna had not caused any of this. In fact, she likely saved Jori’s life. He crossed to her and embraced her, too, feeling her stiffen in his grip.

“Thank you,” he said.

Once loose, she swallowed visibly, looking like she was trying to say something. Her eyes were stitched with thick blood vessels, as they flicked around the forest.

She was nearly gone.

I’m sorry…

“Take her with us,” he said. She didn’t deserve to die down here, not any longer, not after saving his son. “Let’s hurry. We’ll take the secret tunnels down to the forest. I don’t know what’s happening topside, but I think we’re compromised.”

Rahei led the way again, setting a hard pace.

The road appeared ahead, but before they could reach it, the man to Cutter’s left dropped, his head falling backward, his neck cleaved to the bone. Blood spayed the branches as he toppled.

Something struck Cutter from behind, lifting him off his feet and throwing him several yards. He crashed and rolled through a thornbush. He caught sight of a massive furred flank barreling past him. He rolled to his side, staying low as gunfire erupted all around, shredding through ferns, ripping away bark, but there was no longer any sign of the attackers.

Cutter sat up, searching around.

What the hell happened?

“Jori…” Jenna said, her voice strained. “They took him.”

Cutter spun around, rising like a whirlwind, searching everywhere.

His son was gone.

Rahei stalked to his side, her face cold with fury.

“Where?” Cutter turned to Jenna. “Where did they go?”

Jenna pointed toward the darkest part of the forest, where the ancient jungle washed up against the walls of the sinkhole.

“Their caves…” he realized.

Megatherium were cave dwellers, using their thick claws to dig out burrows and dens.

Without a word, Rahei ran off, heading in that direction. Her disdain for all of them was plain. She intended to take matters into her own skilled hands. Even if it meant wiping the entire species back into extinction.

“Let’s go,” Cutter said, preparing to follow.

Jenna stepped in front of him, placing a palm on his chest. “No. That’s not… the way.”

She struggled, shaking her head as if to knock her words loose.

He tried to move past her, but she blocked him, her eyes pleading.

“They didn’t kill him,” she tried again, pointing to the dead man. “Took him. Rahei. Her way — survival of the fittest — will get him killed.”

“Then what do we do?”

She stared at Cutter, showing on her face all the sincerity and earnestness that she struggled to find in her words.

“We must go another way.”

Lisa stood at the chapel window and stared across to the neighboring airfield. A drone helicopter the size of a tank sat on the tarmac. It was boxy in shape with four propellers, one at each corner. It looked like a giant version of those toy quadcopters sold in hobby shops, but this was no plaything.

In its cargo hold was a nuclear device strapped by thick belts to a metal pallet. A group of technicians still labored alongside it. Others stood on the tarmac clearly debating. She knew one of those men was Dr. Raymond Lindahl. As director of the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command, it was appropriate he was out there, but Lisa wished it was Painter instead, someone less reactionary, more able to think outside the box.

A voice cleared behind her. “You did hear that it’s time to evacuate,” Corporal Sarah Jessup said. “Detonation is set for forty-five minutes from now. We’re already cutting matters close, especially as I heard that they might move that time frame up due to the crosswinds kicking up.”

“Just a few minutes longer,” Lisa said.

Painter has never let me down.

As if summoned by this thought, the phone rang. Only a handful of people had this number. Lisa spun to the receiver and yanked it up. She didn’t bother getting confirmation that it was Painter.

“Tell me good news,” she said.

His voice was full of static, but it was oh-so-welcome. “It’s magnetism.”

She was sure she hadn’t heard that correctly. “Magnetism?”

She listened as Painter explained how he had found Kendall and that the man did have a solution, an answer as strange as the disease itself.

“Any strong magnetic force would likely do,” Painter ended, “but according to some real-world testing, you want — and I’m quoting — to generate a field strength of at least 0.465 Tesla using a static magnetic field.”

She jotted the information down on a sheet of paper.

“The effect should be almost instantaneous as that field shreds the organism at the genetic level, while not harming anything else.”

Oh, my God…

She stared out the window, knowing the destructive force about to be unleashed needlessly here.

Painter had additional information. “Hess says that the nuclear blast will have no effect on this organism. It will only succeed in spreading it farther and wider.”

“I have to stop them.”

“Do what you can. Kat is already working up the chains of command to stop this, but you know Washington. We have less than forty-five minutes to move a stone that seldom budges.”

“I’m already gone.” She hung up, not even sparing a good-bye. She turned to Jessup. “We need to move Nikko. He’s our only hope.”

32

Dylan Wright cursed his failed shot.

He thumbed the second barrel’s hammer back, wary of the beast before him. The Volitox queen still quested for the body of its offspring, hunching higher out of the water, its glowing lure rolling along the rocky bank.

Whatever that recent volley of gunfire was, it had ended as quickly as it had started. He pushed it out of his mind for the moment, concentrating on the immediate task at hand, at the looming danger before him.

A hunter let nothing distract him from the kill.

He pushed aside the humming backwash coming from the portable LRAD to his right, the dish still pointed toward the neighboring nest. He ignored the brilliantly hypnotic glow of the Volitox’s lure before him. He even dismissed the primitive terror at the base of his brain in the face of this huge monster.

Instead, he lifted his pistol and fixed his aim at the base of that tentacle, to where the buried ganglion offered a kill shot.

And fired.

The large-caliber round blasted slightly to the left of the thick stalk. While it wasn’t a perfect kill shot, it was good enough.

The Volitox queen reared out of the water in a spasm, her flanks jolting with bioluminescent energy. Her mouth peeled open to splay thousands of hooked teeth.

To his left, Riley stumbled back a couple of steps, bumping into Christchurch, who dropped the LRAD dish. It clattered with a spark of electricity against the stone floor.

While the Volitox species might be deaf and blind, they were keenly attuned to electric fields or currents—any currents.

The spatter of sparks triggered a reflexive attack. The tentacle lashed out, finding Christchurch’s neck. It wrapped once around his throat, burning that flaming gelatinous sphere into the side of his face. Flesh smoked as the soldier screamed, choking on a flow of acid down his lungs.

Christchurch was yanked off his feet, his neck snapping, and thrown far into the river.

Riley fled past Dylan and out into the darkness, back toward the distant camp.

Coward.

Dylan held his ground, remaining still, trusting his shot. He waited for death to take its course.

The Volitox queen — her last energies spent on this attack — slumped to the ground, her huge head cracking hard against the rock.

He waited a full minute, then approached cautiously with his dagger. He slipped a screw-top metal water bottle out of his pack.

Cutter Elwes had said he only needed the creature’s blood.

Easy enough.

He stabbed the beast in the side and collected the black flow into the aluminum container. Once filled up, he secured the cap.

Mission accomplished.

Now to get out of here.

The pound of running boots reached him, growing louder. He leaned around the dead bulk of the Volitox to see Riley returning toward him.

Apparently the young soldier had found his spine after all.

Unfortunately he quickly lost his head.

A rifle shot blasted loudly, and the side of Riley’s face exploded into a mist of blood. His body flew forward, crashing headlong across the cavern floor.

Dylan dropped back behind the carcass of the Volitox. His hand found his holstered Howdah, but he had shot his load. He looked across the cavern to where he had set down his assault rifle. If he attempted to reach it, he knew he’d suffer the same fate as Riley.

Whoever was out there was a keen shot.

He could guess who it was, picturing that American, knowing it had to be him.

Not dead yet, are you?

Maybe it was time to change that. He knew his adversary wasn’t as knowledgeable about fighting in the dark as Dylan was. He planned to take advantage of that.

He called out. “It’s high time we talked, mate!”

“About what?” Gray yelled back.

He crouched behind a rocky outcropping about thirty yards from where Dylan Wright hid. He studied the terrain through his night-vision goggles. The body of the soldier lay sprawled on the rock between them. Earlier, he had heard another man scream, followed by a loud splash — then the commando he’d just shot had come running in terror.

By Gray’s count, only one man should be left, the X-Squadron leader.

He kept his rifle fixed on the bulk of the dead beast beached on the riverbank. From the slack tentacle draped over its side, it had to be one of those predatory eels with the bioluminescent lures.

“About a deal,” Wright answered. “The bloke I work for can be very generous.”

“Not interested.”

“Can’t say I didn’t try then.”

Suddenly the world exploded in front of Gray, blinding him. He ripped off his night-vision goggles — just in time to see Dylan click off a flashlight and dash out of hiding. The sudden flare of bright light in the darkness, amplified by the goggles, still left a burn on his retina.

Gunfire erupted from Dylan’s new hiding place.

Gray fell back, realizing his mistake. The bastard had used the darkness against him in order to reach a weapon. But it wasn’t just the gun. A pop of electricity and a short hum erupted into a screaming wail.

An LRAD.

The noise stabbed into his ears, shaking the sutures of his skull. He had no protection against it this time. Vertigo quickly set in. He lifted his rifle and blindly shot in the direction of the sound, but it didn’t stop.

His vision squeezed tighter from the sensory overload.

He was moments from passing out.

Positioning the LRAD dish atop a boulder, Dylan kept it pointed toward the location of the American. He then shouldered his assault rifle and shifted sideways, staying clear of the sonic cannon’s blast. Still, some of the infrasound backwash crawled over his skin, raising the hairs on his arms.

He smiled, imagining what the American must be experiencing.

Ready to put an end to this standoff, he took another two steps to the side, almost back to where he hid beside the bulk of the Volitox. He sought a clear shot to take out his target.

Another step — and something bit deep into the back of his leg.

He reached to his thigh and yanked off a sausage-sized slug, taking a chunk of skin with it. Teeth gnashed at his fingers, burning his palm with acids. Disgusted and horrified, he tossed the nymph into the river.

He glanced back to the nest. With the LRAD diverted away, the builders of that bone pile must be returning. But for the moment, he saw no movement, no evidence of that missing horde. The nest looked as empty as before.

So where were they?

In his fear, his shoulder brushed against the Volitox’s body. He felt a tremor in that dead flesh, as if the beast were suddenly reanimating.

No…

He stumbled away, suddenly realizing the truth.

It wasn’t the queen that was stirring.

It was something inside her.

Proving this, a fat gray grub squirmed out of a gill slit and dropped heavily to the shore.

Choking on horror, he backpedaled away from the carcass as more nymphs squirmed out of other gills, poured from that gaping maw, or corkscrewed out of nasal folds.

After fleeing the nest earlier, the nymphs must have sought their mother, hiding inside her, fleeing from the sonic assault to a refuge that was safe. The adults were immune to such attacks, likely protected by the bioenergies surging through them, which in turn protected their offspring in times of danger. He knew some species of fish and frogs could carry their young — but no one suspected this trait in the Volitox.

Dylan could also guess what had just stirred them up.

I did…

He glanced over his shoulder to the LRAD unit. He remembered how agitated the nest had been when his team had first arrived, still disturbed by the infrasonic backwash of the larger dish. When he activated the smaller weapon a moment ago, its echoing infrasound must have agitated the horde hiding inside that lifeless body, angering them.

He knew what was coming, what this activity was building toward.

By now nymphs poured into the river, onto the bank, several bounding with muscular leaps toward him. He dodged and batted at them with his rifle butt until he reached the LRAD.

He snatched the dish off the boulder and swung it to his chest like a shield, turning the sonic cannon toward the horde — and just in time. From river, rock, and flesh, the nymphs boiled toward him, a carnivorous wave of vengeance.

He held his ground, sweeping the sonic cannon before him like a fire hose. The nymphs cringed and squirmed away. Some sought to regain their mother’s refuge, drilling through her dead flesh. Others dove back into the river, splashing heavily to escape the onslaught.

He let out a sigh of relief — until two blasts of a rifle exploded in the tunnel.

The first round severed the power cord to the LRAD.

The second took out his right knee.

As the cannon died in his arms, he toppled to his side, landing hard. He twisted to see the American standing near a rock pile, his smoking rifle at his shoulder.

Dylan faced his adversary for the first time.

No, not the first time, he suddenly realized, remembering that same face staring at him through a window at DARPA headquarters.

“That’s for Dr. Lucius Raffee,” the man said.

Enough…

Still dazed and partially deafened from the sonic assault, Gray turned away, leaving Wright bleeding on the cavern floor — but not before he watched several of those carnivorous slugs leap across the rock and strike the man’s chest and belly.

Wright swatted a few from his rib cage, but when he tried to grab the one on his abdomen, his hands were too bloody, his skin smoking from acids. He failed to get a grip in time and the creature drilled inside him, snaking away, like a worm into a diseased apple.

Wright cried out, writhing on the rock.

Satisfied, Gray swung around and hurried back down the tunnel to the entrance of the Coliseum, chased by the man’s screams until they finally went silent. He found Kowalski waiting inside the cab of the larger CAAT. He clambered up the opposite tread and hauled through the passenger door.

“All done?” Kowalski asked, putting the vehicle into gear, the engines growling.

“For now.”

“Been all quiet here… except for some cries out there in the dark. I think this place took care of those two deserters for us.”

And Wright, too.

Gray pointed to the lights glowing up the wall, worried about Jason and the others. He didn’t want to wait a moment longer. “Let’s get to that Back Door.”

Jason crouched over the control console of the substation. Stella stood behind him, her arms hugging her chest, her eyes glassy with tears. She would glance often to the window that overlooked the Coliseum.

After Jason had climbed up here, he had told her about her father, about what had happened. She had merely nodded, the news expected but not welcome. She had barely said a word since then.

“Tell me about this code,” he said, trying to get her talking, needing her help for any chance to solve this riddle. “Do you know if the password must be a certain length? Is it case sensitive?”

Jason stared at the access screen to the detonation controls. He had tried hacking his way past this level, but he kept hitting sophisticated firewalls. The security was rock solid. Without Sigma’s decryption software, this was a lost cause.

He needed that code.

Stella finally spoke. “If this system is like the others at the station, the password could be any length. But the sequence must have both upper and lowercase letters and at least one number and symbol.”

That was common protocol.

“Do you know any of your father’s old codes?” he asked. Many people reused the same password for convenience sake.

“No.” Stella moved closer to him. “And my father gave you no clue at all to his password?”

Jason stared into her wounded face. “He was more concerned with you. I think he only held out for as long as he did to make sure you were safe.”

A single tear finally fell, rolling down her cheek. It was quickly wiped away. “What if it wasn’t all about me, about my safety?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if the password has something to do with me? Maybe that was what my father was trying to communicate to you.”

Jason considered this. Many people picked meaningful people in their lives to base their passwords upon. The professor certainly loved his daughter. “Let’s give it a try.”

Jason typed in Stella and tried various common iterations, but with both a number and a symbol required, the possibilities were too broad, too variable. It still could be anything.

He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate.

“Tell me about your father,” he said. “What sort of man was he?”

A small trickle of confusion entered her voice at this odd question. “He… he was smart, loved dogs, was a stickler for details. He believed in order, structure, everything in its place. But when he loved something… or someone… he did it with all his heart. Never forgetting birthdays or anniversaries, always sending presents.”

These memories slowly warmed the cold grief from her words.

Jason rubbed the scruff on his chin. “If he was that structured, then your father likely wouldn’t have picked something whimsical as his code. It would be something practical, yet personal, to him.” Jason turned to Stella. “Like your birthday.”

“Maybe…”

Jason leaned over the keyboard, glancing back at her. He typed as she told him her birthday, using the British order for denoting dates.

He held a finger over the enter button. “This password does have an upper and lowercase letter, along with numbers and one symbol.”

Stella’s hand found his, squeezing hopefully.

He hit the button.

The same error message came up.

“That’s not it,” he said.

He had been so sure. It had felt right.

He tried the Americanized version.

Another failure.

A defeated tone returned to Stella’s demeanor. “Maybe we should just give up.”

Jason considered this option. He pictured that tide he had witnessed below, flowing away from that the earlier blast from Wright’s camp. That tidal wave of panic was surely rolling inevitably toward the station.

But maybe I’m wrong… maybe one blast wasn’t enough.

Plus so far, that sonic cannon continued to remain silent.

Surely that was a good sign.

Dylan Wright lay in a bloody pool, racked in pain, barely able to move. He felt the nymphs squirming inside him.

I’ve become their nest.

Others fed upon his flesh, latched on to his legs, his arms, his face. They wormed under his clothes, burrowed beneath his skin, and explored every orifice.

In his right hand, his three remaining fingers clutched a small device. Shortly after being abandoned, he had pulled it from his belt. He must have passed out for a few minutes, but death would not take him.

Not yet.

Not until I do what I must.

He moved his thumb to the button of the remote activator for the LRAD 4000X — and pressed it.

Distantly, the world wailed, mourning its own doom.

If I must die this way, then let Hell take the rest of the earth, too.

Gray covered his ears against the sonic assault, staring back the way they had come.

“Turn us around!” he hollered.

Kowalski had stopped the CAAT at the edge of the river, not far from the blasted-out bridge. They had almost made it back to the substation when the LRAD ignited once again.

What the hell?

Even at this distance, the barrage rattled everything on the vehicle and everyone inside it.

A moment ago, they had both searched for noise-suppression gear aboard this CAAT, but all they found were moldable earplugs, which they quickly donned. The crew working on the LRAD must have nabbed those more powerful sound-muffling headphones.

“Never make it to that camp without better protection,” Kowalski warned. “By the time we got there, our eyes would be bleeding, probably our brains, too.”

Gray knew his partner was right. He stared across the river toward the glow of the Back Door.

Then, Jason, it’s up to you. You need to bottle this place up tight.

“What do we do?” Kowalski asked.

Gray considered his options. “I know one piece of noise-suppression gear we overlooked.”

“What’s that?”

Gray shifted out of his seat and retrieved something from below. He returned with it in his arms.

Kowalski nodded when he saw it. “That oughta do the trick.”

Let’s hope Jason is just as resourceful.

Up in the substation, the wail of the LRAD rattled the glass in the frames and vibrated the floor underfoot. Stella and Jason stood at the window, staring across the Coliseum toward the pool of light near the back wall.

Had Gray failed to stop Wright?

Someone had plainly reactivated the large dish.

“Look down there,” Stella said. “There’s a CAAT stopped on the far side of the river.”

Jason had already noted the twin spears of light glowing along the floor.

But are they friend or foe?

The answer wasn’t as important as stopping that blaring train whistle that was driving all life down here toward the surface — or better yet, sealing that far exit permanently.

Jason returned to the control console. His last entry — Stella’s birthday — was still entered with the red error message overwriting it. He hadn’t tried anything else, stuck with a vague certainty that he was right about the password being Stella’s birthday.

What am I missing?

Working swiftly, he tried other variations, abbreviating JANUARY to JAN. He changed 17 to 17TH. He tried writing the Latin and Greek equivalents, the ancient languages her father preferred.

Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

Jason pounded his fist on the console. “Is there something else we’re missing about your birthday?”

Stella shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

Jason fought to concentrate, which was made especially hard by the muffled screaming of the LRAD.

“From your description,” he said, “your father was a stickler for details, not prone to flights of fancy.”

“Right,” she said. “Maybe with the exception of this place. Antarctica. To him, the bottom of the world was always a magical place.”

As magical as his daughter…

Then the answer dawned on him.

Of course.

People often employed a simple trick to make obvious codes seem more complicated, yet still maintain their simplicity or significance. That solution would have been especially amusing to someone whose only fancy was Antarctica, the land at the bottom of the world.

Jason typed in the new password and hit enter.

A green acceptance window opened.

“You did it!” Stella said.

Jason stared down at the accepted code.

It was Stella’s birthday, simply written backward, a flipped-around version, like how one would have to reverse the globe in order to view this continent properly.

Jason clicked on the acceptance window to reach the detonation controls. A new screen opened with simple instructions. Jason followed them to the letter until at last a red warning blinked with a button that read Detonate.

Jason shoved back and motioned Stella to take his place.

“You should do this.”

She nodded, reached forward, and touched that button.

Gray stood atop the CAAT when the world jolted underfoot, bouncing the vehicle on its treads. A thunderous boom accompanied it. He glanced back toward the distant station — then up to the Back Door.

Good job, kid.

But in case those bunker busters failed to fully collapse the mouth of the cavern system, Gray lifted his own improvised noise suppressor and rested it atop his shoulder. Considering it had been Dylan Wright’s weapon of choice up top, it was no surprise Gray had discovered it below in the man’s CAAT.

He aimed the long tube of the rocket launcher and fixed its sights on the distant glow of the LRAD workstation — then pulled the trigger.

The rocket-propelled grenade blasted out of the tube and tore across the near-empty Coliseum. It exploded with a flash of fire at the back wall, striking true. The blast quickly echoed away.

He closed his eyes, enjoying this moment.

At long last, silence had returned to Hell.

33

Jenna stood at the base of a Brazilian mahogany tree, her arms crossed. It had taken too long to retrace her path, the one she and Jori had followed through the canopy. Instead, it was the familiar buzz of the hornet’s nest — the same hive that had killed that poor sparrow — that finally helped her find her way back to this spot.

Cutter touched her shoulder and drew her aside. “Stand clear.”

From the canopy overhead, a pair of natives dropped to the forest floor. One carried a machete; the other bore a blanket-wrapped object under one arm.

“Hurry,” she said.

The blanket was placed on the ground and folded back. Inside was the sloth cub, still painfully tangled in the barbed vine.

Was it still alive?

Jenna reached to pull the vine away, but Cutter pushed her arm back.

“Watch,” he said.

He took a cattle prod and shocked the severed end of the vine, sending a charge down its length. It contracted once, then relaxed, withdrawing the hooked barbs back into its green flesh. Cutter used the tip of the prod to tease the loops off the cub.

Once it was free, Jenna bent down next to it, placing a palm on its chest. She felt a heartbeat. The ribs swelled and contracted with shallow breaths. Multiple small punctures covered its body, seeping blood.

“Jori… said poison,” she struggled out through the haze and thick tongue.

“Megatherium are tough. I engineered them that way. It’s why I made them omnivores, instead of herbivores. Gives them a wider range of nutritional options.” He nodded to the cub. “They’re also more resistant to this vine’s toxin. Slowly adapting to it due to the vine’s presence in their immediate environment.”

She leaned down and scooped the cub into her arms. He was heavier than she suspected from his compact size, at least forty-five pounds. She carried him over one shoulder. She heard that soft mewling again, and his snout moved closer to her neck, leaning against her with a sigh.

“Caves,” she said.

“Over this way,” Cutter set off with his remaining four men.

Jenna kept among them, letting them lead, placing her boots where they did, wary of this dangerous forest. She held the cub close, shifting it from one shoulder to the other.

“Do you want me to carry it?” Cutter asked.

“No.”

She couldn’t explain why, but she knew she had to be the one carrying this burden. The creatures they sought were not dumb animals. Back at the electrified pens, they had waited until Jori climbed the cages before attacking. And now they had kidnapped the boy, possibly hoping the unspoken threat would drive these trespassers off their lands. For Jori to have any chance, she had to respect their intelligence.

Slowly the forest grew taller, the canopy thicker. The sunlight waned down to a persistent emerald twilight, while the fungi growing along the trunks seemed brighter. As they hiked, the undergrowth also thinned out, starved of the sunlight by the taller trees.

At last the darker shadows ahead became discernible as cliffs of black rock, draped with vines and orchids. The air grew muskier with the reek of damp pelts and the rot of spoiled meat. Multiple cave openings appeared. Some looked entirely natural; others looked widened by the scratching and sharpening of claws.

Cutter slowed their pace.

The denizens of these caves were nowhere in sight.

“What now?” Cutter asked.

“I should go,” Jenna mumbled out. “Alone. Stay here.”

She passed Cutter and headed forward on her own. She crossed until she could see the darker shadows shifting in those black caves.

Watching me…

She lifted the cub, crossed her legs, and sank to her backside, cradling the small sloth in her lap. He mewled a soft complaint, batted her with a hooked claw, but then settled.

She sat there, waiting.

At some point she started to hum a lullaby, not remembering the words, but the melody remained inside her.

Finally a lone sloth appeared, knuckling on her claws, and it was plainly a female from her stained teats on her chest. The female bobbed her head up, letting out a soft chuffing noise.

The cub stirred, rolling his head toward the sound, and gave off a couple of answering bleats.

Clearly mother and child.

Very slowly Jenna lowered the cub to the ground and retreated away, staying hunched, her head bowed submissively.

The female crept forward, scooped the body up one-armed, using those claws like gentle hooks to pull the cub to her chest. Then she turned and lumbered back into her den.

Jenna sat again, waiting. Occasionally she would nudge her chin up and imitate that chuffing noise. The pack here had seen her traveling through the canopy with Jori. They would believe he was her child. It was why she had to carry that cub herself. Getting its scent all over her. To intensify the sense of maternity and nurturing.

After another ten minutes passed, she found it harder to think. For a brief moment, she forgot why she was here. She started even to rise. Then movement again. A small figure came running out of a cave to the left.

Jori ran up to her and hugged her, flying hard enough to roll her to her back.

“Careful,” she said hoarsely.

He helped her up. She did so with great care.

Then a massive bull sloth charged out of a cave and barreled toward her. She pushed Jori behind her, knowing if she ran they’d both be killed. She stood her ground, arms out, sheltering the boy. She kept her face turned, not wanting to challenge him.

The Megatherium bull skidded to a stop, its nose right at her face. Its breath blew the small hairs from her damp face, reeking of blood and meat and savageness. She knew it was the same creature from earlier, the same one who had followed her to the edge of the clearing.

It sniffed her in turn, moving from face to crotch — then bumped her with that nose, not to dismiss her, but as some manner of acknowledgment, as if to say I know you, too.

It began to turn away, and she took a step backward.

A gunshot cracked across the silent jungle.

The bull’s ear exploded into a pulp of blood and fur. It roared, swinging around and clubbing her in the side, knocking her flying.

Another shot struck its flank, flinching the limb on that side.

“Run, Jori,” she said, struggling for breath after the blow.

The boy refused, coming instead to help her. Cutter saw this and came rushing low toward them, ready to protect his son.

Another shot struck the beast in the head, but it glanced off the thick skull. Jenna spotted Rahei flat on her belly near a rock fall by the cliff’s edge. She must have crept into that position very slowly, keeping her presence from the pack.

Cutter reached them, grabbed Jori by the arm, and pulled the boy back with him.

The bull noted this movement and charged.

Jenna managed to pull Jori to the ground, rolling on top of the boy. Cutter took the full brunt of that fury as he was bowled onto his back and a claw ripped through his vest and shirt, scouring a bloody track down his chest.

The other men behind Cutter opened fire, a fierce barrage.

The poor beast hunched itself against that onslaught, as if leaning into a stiff breeze. But even its majestic bulk could not sustain such damage for long. It trembled, took a step backward, and fell heavily to the ground, almost crushing Cutter.

Jenna hurried with Jori in tow, both of them collecting Cutter from the ground.

Rahei came bounding as light as a gazelle from out of hiding, plainly triumphant for her part in slaying the beast. Still, she kept wary watch on the cave openings, never turning her back.

From one of the tunnels, a smaller Megatherium charged out of a den, maybe the mate to the slain bull. Rahei swung her rifle and fired, but the first shot only grazed the beast’s shoulder. The creature’s other forelimb cast out toward Rahei, claws unfolding, as the beast braked hard in the loam. From its grasp, the Megatherium launched something wrapped in a leaf. As it flew, the leaf fluttered open and fell away. What it had held — something small and black — spun through the air and struck Rahei in the cheek.

She stumbled back as if hit by a bullet. Her face turned, revealing a small ebony-skinned frog glistening on her cheek. Rahei screamed, dropping her rifle and pawing at her face. She knocked the amphibian off, but emblazoned on her skin remained a bloodred burn in the shape of that frog. Rahei fell to her knees, her spine arching backward, her mouth open, her limbs quaking in a grand mal seizure.

Then finally she collapsed to her side, unmoving, dead, the mighty hunter brought down by a lowly frog.

Must have been one of Cutter’s toxic creations.

As if the violent death were a cue, more of the sloths charged out, drawn by the scream, the bloodshed, the death of one of their own.

Jenna retreated with the others, pursued through the jungle, chased by the roaring from many throats. They all simply ran, forgoing any attempt to even fire at the beasts.

Never make it…

Then the canopy ripped apart over them, letting in the blinding sun shattering the darkness. Winds whipped and tore at the forest. The craft overhead roared far louder than any Megatherium.

The pack fell back, intimidated and confused. Then as one, the beasts slunk back into the deeper shadows and retreated.

Lines fell from the aircraft, and men traveled smoothly down them to land in the forest, carrying heavy automatic weapons and wearing body armor.

Cutter’s group was quickly subdued, stripped of their weapons.

One of the soldiers came forward to her. “You’re a hard lady to find.”

He tipped his helmet back, revealing a familiar face. Even through the fog, she knew him — and smiled. Relief flooded through her, accompanied by a surge of warmth from deeper inside, an emotion still new and unexplored with this brave man.

“Drake…”

“At least you remember me. That’s gotta be a good sign.” He reached forward, jabbed a syringe into her neck, and pushed the plunger. “A small gift from Dr. Hess.”

Cutter rose through the air on a stretcher, lifting free of the dark canopy and out into the blaze of the day. He surveyed his handiwork, the many-tiered gardens, his Galapagos in the sky. He took a moment to appreciate his triumphs and defeats.

Around him was a crucible of evolution, one driven by a simple edict.

Survival of the fittest.

The Law of the Jungle.

But doubt had settled into that perfect garden of his soul, a bright seed of new possibility, shown to him by the small figure of a woman, an Eve in the guise of a park ranger. She had pointed to a new Eden, maybe one that need not be so dark.

He had witnessed today something new.

The Law of the Jungle was not all there was to life, to evolution, but that in equal parts altruism, even morality, could be as strong an environmental factor as any, a wind for change to drive the world to a more vital, healthier existence.

Yes…

It was time to start anew, to plant a fresh garden.

But to do that, the old one must die and be tilled over.

Besides, it is my work. Why should I share it with a world that was far from ready, too myopic to see as clearly as myself?

He slipped a hand to his pocket, picturing the munitions buried in the oldest tunnels underneath the sinkhole.

He pressed the button, activating the countdown.

God created the heavens and the earth in seven days.

He would destroy his in seven minutes.

Lisa rode in the back of a Dodge Ram 2500 fitted with a camper shell as it raced across the Marine base. She kept a hand on Nikko’s sealed gurney to steady it. Up front, Corporal Jessup sat beside her boyfriend, an apple-cheeked young chaplain with a big heart named Dennis Young.

As she requested, he had the pedal firmly pressed to the floor, flying across the deserted base. They had no time to spare with trivialities like stop signs or traffic lights. She stared down at Nikko. The dog would not likely last past the next couple of hours. He was showing evidence of major organ failure.

Hang in there, Nikko.

They sped into the empty parking lot of the small base hospital. The medical facility had just upgraded their radiological suite to include an MRI machine. Edmund Dent already waited at the entrance. Lisa had used the time preparing Nikko for transport to gather all key players to this one spot.

The Ram truck blasted into the emergency bay and braked hard in front of Edmund. The virologist waved to some of his colleagues who were also scheduled to leave on the last chopper. Together, they all got Nikko out and rolling toward the radiology unit.

Edmund panted beside her. “Already got the scanner warmed up. A technician attuned the magnets to”—he checked what was written on the back of his hand—“0.456 Tesla. Static field.”

“What about a sample of the engineered organism?”

“Oh, right here.” He reached to a pocket and pulled out a test tube that was tightly plugged and duct-taped.

Nothing like improvisation.

They reached the radiology unit to find two members of the nuclear team, along with Dr. Lindahl.

“This had better not be a waste of everyone’s time,” Lindahl greeted her. “Plus after this is all over, I’m going to initiate a formal inquiry into your behavior. Absconding with a test patient.”

“Nikko is not a test patient. He’s a decorated search-and-rescue dog who just happened to get sick assisting all of us.”

“Whatever,” Lindahl said. “Let’s get this over with.”

It took four of them to lift Nikko’s sealed patient containment unit from the gurney and place it on the MRI table.

The technician pounded on the glass. “No metal!”

Lisa swore under her breath. In all her haste, she hadn’t considered this detail. Nothing metallic could go through an MRI machine; that included the components of Nikko’s patient containment unit.

Edmund looked at her.

Got to do this the hard way.

She pointed to the door. “Everyone out.”

“Lisa…” Edmund warned. From his tone, he knew what she was planning. “What if the data is false? Or simply wrong?”

“I’ll take that chance versus nuking these mountains. Besides, the science sounds right.” She shooed him toward the door, taking his test tube first. “Out.”

Once clear, she crossed to Nikko’s PCU, took a deep breath, and cracked it open.

Painter, you’d better be right.

With great care, she gently lifted Nikko over to the table. His limp form seemed much lighter, as if something vital had already left him. She placed him down and rested a hand on his side. It felt good to be able to touch him with her bare hands rather than with a glove. She combed her fingers through his fur.

Good boy.

She placed the tube of virus next to the dog and gave the technician a thumbs-up.

After a few seconds, the machine erupted with a noisy clacking, and the table holding Nikko slowly slid through the ring of those magnets. They did a double pass to make sure.

All the while, she paced the room nervously, chewing a thumbnail.

Gonna need a manicure before the wedding.

“That’s it,” the technician announced over the intercom.

Lisa quickly took a syringe from a rolling plastic cart and drew a blood sample from Nikko’s catheter. She injected the syringe into a Vacutainer tube. Then sealed both it and Edmund’s tube into a hazardous waste bag, which she handled only with sterile gloves. She left it near the door and stepped back.

Edmund risked collecting it himself.

“Hurry,” she said.

He nodded and raced off, heading to his lab at the hangar.

It was the longest ten minutes of her life. She used the time to pass her own body through the scanner to kill any contamination from handling Nikko. She then sat on the table with him, cradling his head on her lap.

Finally a call came through, patched through the intercom.

She heard the triumph in his voice. “Dead. It’s all genetic mush. Both the raw sample and the viral load in Nikko’s blood.”

She closed her eyes and bent over Nikko.

“See what a good boy you are,” she whispered to him.

She took another moment to collect herself, then picked up the phone and spoke to Edmund. “What’s the plan from here?”

She heard arguing in the background, raised voices, most of it coming from Raymond Lindahl.

“Still trouble,” Edmund said. “And you can guess from who.”

She hung up and stared at the door, wondering what she should do.

Before she could decide, the door shoved open, and Sarah flew in, pointing a finger at her. “I heard. You’d better get over there. I’ll dog-sit. Dennis will drive you.”

She smiled, hugged the corporal, and flew out the door.

Dennis drove his Ram truck at top speed over the quarter of a mile to the hangar. She was out the door before it had even stopped moving. She ran into the hangar to find Lindahl with his back to her, nose to nose with the head nuclear technician.

“We stick to the original plan until I hear otherwise from D.C.,” Lindahl said. “All these new results are… are at best preliminary. And in my opinion, still disputable.”

“But, sir, I can readily modify—”

“Nothing changes. We stay the course.”

Lisa strode up behind Lindahl and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned with a look of stunned surprise to find her there, she drew back her arm and punched him hard in the face. His head snapped back, and he slumped leadenly to the floor.

Wincing, she shook her hand and nodded to the head tech. “You were saying?”

“From what we just learned, I should be able to lower the yield of our nuke to as little as a single kiloton. If we can get that bomb to blow four miles up — which that drone chopper can reach — it should produce an electromagnetic pulse of at least 0.5 Tesla. It’ll cover more than enough territory to sweep the hot zone with negligible radiation. Nothing worse than what you’d get from a dental X-ray.”

“How long will it take?”

“I can still make that noon deadline.”

She nodded. “Do it.”

“What about D.C.?”

“Let me worry about D.C. You get that nuke in the air.”

As he hurried off, she looked at her bruised knuckles.

Definitely will need a manicure.

Kendall watched the tepui drop below as the V-280 Valor fled from the summit. They had only a minute to spare before Cutter’s charges exploded, destroying his macabre experiment in synthetic biology and genetic engineering.

Good riddance.

He returned his attention to the cabin. The space was packed with people. Cutter’s private helicopter had already left with Ashuu and Jori, but only after ferrying two flights of native workers out into the surrounding rain forest, getting them clear of any danger.

He presently shared the back of the cabin with Cutter, who was strapped down in his stretcher, one wrist handcuffed to a railing. An IV line ran to a catheter in the back of his hand. His deep wounds still needed surgical attention, but a thick compression wrap around his chest should last until the aircraft reached Boa Vista in a couple of hours to refuel.

Cutter stared out the window near his head. “Ten seconds.”

Kendall followed the other’s gaze toward that cloud-wrapped summit. He silently counted down. When he reached zero — a towering blast of smoke and rock shot from the summit, occluding the sun, turning it bloodred. Thunder rolled over that shattered mountaintop, as if mourning the deaths of so much strange life. Then slowly the plateau cracked, shedding a shoulder of rock, like a calving glacier. The pond on top spilled over that fracture, reflecting that bloody sunlight, becoming a flow of fire down that broken rock.

“Beautiful,” Cutter whispered.

“A fitting end to Dark Eden,” Kendall added.

Cutter glanced over to Jenna. “But you saved a sliver of it. For her.”

“And maybe for the world.” He pictured his frantic search for those vials before destroying the lab. “That counteragent may hold some promise of treatments for other mental disabilities. It will certainly bear more study. Some good may yet come from your work.”

“And you saved nothing else? Nothing from my genetic library?”

“No. It’s better off lost forever.”

“Nothing’s lost forever. Especially when it’s all up here.” Cutter tapped a finger against his skull.

“It won’t be there for long,” Kendall said.

The man was simply too dangerous.

With everyone distracted by the show beyond the window, Kendall lifted what he had secretly pocketed back at the lab, what Cutter himself had foolishly left on a tabletop in his panic over his son. He leaned forward and pressed the jet-injector pistol against the side of the man’s throat. It was the same tool used on Jenna. The intact vial still held one last dose of Cutter’s engineered code.

Cutter’s eyes widened with horror as Kendall pulled the device’s trigger. Compressed gas shot the dose into the man’s neck.

With his other hand, Kendall injected a sedative into Cutter’s IV.

“By the time you wake, my friend, it’ll all be over.”

Cutter looked on in dismay.

“This time Cutter Elwes will die,” Kendall promised. “Maybe not the body, but the man.”

34

“Wasn’t exactly your beachside wedding,” Painter said, swirling a glass of single malt in one hand, the love of his life snuggled under his other arm.

“It was perfect.” Lisa pulled tighter against him.

They had both changed out of formal attire and found this deep-cushioned love seat before the massive stone fireplace of the Great Lounge of the Ahwahnee Hotel. The reception party was winding down behind them as guests either filtered to rooms or headed home.

The wedding had been at sunset on a great swath of lawn, beautifully lit, flowers bountiful, including his wife’s favorite chrysanthemums, each petal a deep burgundy trimmed in gold. The hotel had even picked up the tab, a small thank-you for all the pair had done to save the valley and surrounding area. The generous offer was made possible because tourism was still slow to return.

Bioterrorism and nuclear bombs…

It would take a little more time to shake that reputation, but it made it easier to arrange these last-minute wedding plans. They had held off until Josh was recovered enough to attend, sporting the latest in DARPA prosthetics. He and Monk had plenty to talk over at the dinner table. Lisa’s kid brother was remarkably resilient considering the circumstances, even amped to get back out on the mountains and face new challenges.

The final reason they’d chosen this venue was its proximity to the cleanup and monitoring of the neighboring Mono Lake area. Lisa was still working with Dr. Edmund Dent, the virologist, and his team. In turn, Painter used the opportunity to spend some time away from the office with Lisa. Kat was able to handle the day-to-day, with the exception of this weekend.

She and Monk had left shortly after dinner with the two girls propped up in their arms, returning to their rooms before an early morning flight home. During their absence, Gray had been holding down the fort out in D.C., having to stick close to home for personal reasons.

Some other guests, well…

Kowalski sidled up to them, his jacket over one arm, the top two buttons of his shirt undone. He puffed on a cigar.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke in here,” Lisa warned.

Kowalski took the stogie out and stared at it. “C’mon, it’s a Cuban. Can’t get any more formal than that.”

Jenna passed behind him with Nikko on a leash. “Gotta see a man about a horse!” she said, heading for the parking lot. “Or at least Nikko does.”

Like Josh, the Siberian husky had fully recovered, even earning a medal for his actions.

Kowalski scowled after the pair and shook his head. “First Kane, now that dog. Before long, Sigma will have to build its own kennel.” He pointed his cigar at Painter. “And don’t get any ideas — I’m not cleaning up after them.”

“Deal.”

Kowalski nodded and headed away in a cloud of cigar smoke.

Painter sighed and held out his hand. “Shall we retire ourselves?”

“Certainly.” She placed her palm atop his. “But you weren’t expecting to sleep?”

With a gentle tug, Painter pulled her to him, slid his hand behind her head, and kissed her, breaking away only long enough to say, “Who can sleep? We’ve got a family to start.”

Jenna headed down 395 through the center of town in her new Ford F-150 pickup, freshly decaled with the star of the California State Park Rangers. It was courtesy of the department after everything that had happened. Even the interior still had that new-car smell.

Not that it’ll stay that way for long.

Nikko panted in her ear from the backseat. She would normally scold him, but instead she reached back and scuffled his muzzle. Though he had recovered physically, she could read the smaller signs of post-traumatic stress. He clung more to her and was incrementally less apt to charge into situations, but he was slowly recovering even from that.

Like me.

She still remembered the sense of feeling herself slipping away, the fog flowing thicker, filling her up and pushing all else out.

Even now she shuddered. She found herself constantly doing personal inventory. If she forgot her keys, was that a sign of residual damage? What if she fumbled for a word or couldn’t recall an address or phone number? That alone was disconcerting.

So she had taken to getting up at daybreak. She had always loved the mornings on the lake. The sun turned the mirrored waters into myriad shades, changing with each season. The streets stayed mostly deserted. Or if it was high season, then the city would just be beginning to wake, yawning and stretching its legs.

The quiet of the mornings had always given her time to think, to collect herself. And right now she needed that more than anything.

But mornings meant one other thing to her now.

She picked up the radio and called into dispatch. “Bill, I’m going to stop and fuel up.”

“Got it.”

She parked under the yellow sign of Nicely’s Restaurant and hopped out, followed by Nikko. She headed inside, the bell tinkling. Behind the counter, Barbara lifted the to-go cup already full of hot black coffee, the best in town, and tossed Nikko a dog biscuit, which he caught midair, a skill learned from years of experience.

But she now had a new routine.

A figure called to her from a booth, not even bothering to look up from his paper. “Morning, dear.”

She crossed and slid into the booth with her coffee. “So what’s your day look like?” she asked Drake. He had accepted a permanent position as a Marine trainer at the mountain base.

“You know,” he said, “probably have to save the planet again.”

She nodded, sipped her coffee, winced at the heat. “SSDD.”

Same shit, different day.

He passed her the sports page, which she accepted.

Nothing like keeping it simple.

“Mate, if you keep coming back here, you might want to sign up for my frequent flier program.”

Jason clapped the UK airman on the shoulder and zippered more snugly into his parka, pulling up the hood. “I just might have to do that, Barstow.”

Jason hopped out of the Twin Otter and onto the ice. He stared at the cluster of buildings that had spread like a tumble of toy blocks in the shadow of the black crags of the Fenriskjeften mountains. It was as if the Back Door substation had been a seed that had germinated out of the warmth below and sprouted into this ever-growing international research complex on the frozen surface.

They’d made a lot of progress.

Still, he remembered that journey a month ago, rising out of Hell’s Cape through that Back Door with Gray, Kowalski, and Stella. As Stella had promised, they found an emergency CAAT garaged on the surface and used it to venture back to the coast, joining up with Dr. Von Der Bruegge and the remaining researchers from the Haley VI station. With the solar storm ended, they were able to contact McMurdo Station for help.

Now I’m back again.

But he had a good reason. She came out of one of the tallest of the new structures, which was painted in the red-and-black of the British Antarctic Survey, a match to the Otter’s coloring. Even her parka had the letters BAS emblazoned on the chest.

She strode toward him, her hood down, as if strolling across a park versus forging through an Antarctic winter. This time of year the continent was sunk into a perpetual midnight, but the sweep of bright stars and a silvery full moon offered plenty of light, especially when accompanied by the swirling electric tides of the aurora australis.

“Jason, it’s so great to see you.” Stella hugged him, her embrace lingering a little longer than expected — but he wasn’t complaining.

“I’ve got so much to show you, to tell you.” She started to lead him toward the station, but he kept his place.

“I’ve been reading the reports,” he said, smiling. “You do have a lot on your hands. Opening select sections of Hell’s Cape as protected biospheres must be a sensitive endeavor. I kept promising you some experienced help, so I’m here finally delivering on that in person.”

Jason waved to the rear compartment of the Otter. The hatch opened and two people climbed out in well-worn arctic gear. The woman tucked a long tail of curly black hair, shot through with a few strands of gray, back as she pulled up her parka’s hood. She was helped out by a taller man, ruggedly built, whose age most people would have never guessed. Like their gear, they looked well worn together, an inseparable couple.

Jason introduced them. “My mother, Ashley Carter. And stepdad, Benjamin Brust.”

Stella shook their hands, a surprised smile making her look even more beautiful. “It’s great to meet you both. Come inside and we can get you all warm.”

She led them all toward the Back Door station, the new entrance to the subterranean world below. As she turned way, Ben hung back and nudged Jason in the side with an elbow.

“Nice, mate,” Ben said, his Aussie accent twanging a little richer, like it always did when teasing him. “Now I see why you wanted to come and introduce us in person. Found yourself a little sheila.”

Both women glanced back at them.

Jason lowered his head, shaking it a bit.

Ben scooted up between the others and took both Ashley and Stella under his arms. “So the kid tells me you found an interesting cavern system under the ice.”

“Do you know much about caves?” Stella asked.

“I’ve been known to putter around a bit.”

His stepfather was actually an expert caver, with decades of experience, most of it right here on this continent.

“Well, I doubt you’ve seen anything like what we found down here,” Stella said proudly.

“You’d be surprised how much we have seen,” his mother said with a grin. “Someday we’ll have to invite you back to our place.”

Ben nodded. “Might be an adventure in there for all of us.” He glanced back to Jason. “What do you say? Up for some fun?”

Jason hurried to keep up with them.

Why did I think this was such a good idea?

Kendall Hess drove the rental car up the long tree-lined entryway to the private mental health facility. Rolling manicured lawns spread to garden parkways and small fountains. The building itself was divided into four wings, branching out like a cross in the center of these highly secured grounds.

The hospital wasn’t on any directory and few knew of these forty acres that bordered the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Roanoke, Virginia. It was for special cases, those of interest to national security. He had to reach out to contacts with BRAG, the FBI’s Bioterrorism Risk Assessment Group, to facilitate getting a bed here.

He pulled through the final checkpoint, showed his identification, and parked. He had to leave a fingerprint at the front desk and was escorted by one of the nurses.

“How’s he doing?” Kendall asked.

“The same. If you’d like to talk to his case clinician?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

The nurse — a soft-spoken, sober young woman dressed in blues and thick-soled shoes — glanced to him. “He does have a visitor.”

He nodded.

That was good.

They crossed together down a long sterile hall painted in pastel colors that were said to be soothing. Finally they reached a door that required a special passkey. It led to a small clinical assessment space neighboring the patient’s room. A one-way glass mirror separated the two spaces.

Kendall stepped to the viewing window. The neighboring room was paneled in rich woods, with a faux fireplace that flickered silk flames. Bookshelves lined the far wall, packed full.

He found it both sad and somehow reassuring that books still brought Cutter comfort, as if buried deep down under the assaulted cerebral cortex some memory persisted, some love of knowledge.

He saw that Ashuu sat in a corner, but she stared leadenly out the window.

Kendall had arranged for Cutter’s family to be taken care of, to offer them lodging and a small stipend to remain nearby. Jori was going to a local Roanoke school, settling in well with the adaptability of the young. Cutter’s wife was more worrisome. He suspected she would eventually return to the forests, maybe once Jori was in college. The child was bright, certainly his father’s son.

Cutter lay on his back on the bed, his wrists in padded restraints, not that he was violent, but sometimes he harmed himself if not watched. He did take daily walks with the staff, and as he was in the presence of the books, he was also calmer when out in nature, some echo of his former self.

“They’re getting him settled for the night,” the nurse said. “The boy reads to him most every evening.”

Kendall flicked on the intercom to listen as Jori sat on a bedside chair, the book propped on his thin knees, and read to his father.

The nurse nodded to the volume in hand. “His son told me his father used to read that book to him every night.”

Kendall read the title and felt a twinge of guilt.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Jori’s voice was sweet, full of love for the words, for the memories they conjured.

Gray sat on the porch swing, a cool beer balanced on the rail in front of him. The night was still hot, over ninety degrees, heavily humid. It put him in a sour mood — or maybe it was the long day visiting various assisted living facilities, narrowing his choices to those with memory care units.

A cool hand slipped into his fingers. With just the touch, the pressure inside him loosened. He squeezed her hand, thanking her.

Seichan sat next to him, freshly returned from Hong Kong. She had dumped her bags at his apartment and come straight here, roaring down the street on her motorcycle, arriving in time for dinner. She and his father got along handsomely.

Then again, who wouldn’t?

Look at her.

Even in the darkness, she was a sculpture of grace and power, feral and tender, soft curve and hard muscle. Her eyes caught every bit of light. Her lips were as soft as silk. He lifted a hand and ran a finger down along her chin, tracing a trickle of sweat along the pulse of her throat.

God, how he had missed her.

Her voice dropped a full octave to a sultry darkness. “We should get you home.”

His body ached at that invitation.

“Go on ahead,” he said. “I’ll make sure the night nurse has everything she needs, then I’ll follow.”

Seichan stirred, began to rise, but she must have sensed something and settled back to the slats of the swing. “What’s wrong?”

He turned away, noticing a flicker of fireflies in the bushes beyond the porch rail. They came earlier every year, some said as a harbinger of the changing climate, a reminder of the great forces that truly controlled the world, making everything else seem insignificant and small.

He sighed, hating to admit that sometimes he was too small. “I can save the world countless times. Why can’t I save him?” He shrugged heavily. “There’s nothing I can do.”

She found his hands and held them between her palms. “You’re an ass, Gray.”

“I never denied that,” he said, discovering a small smile.

“There is always something you can do. You’re already doing it. You can love him, remember for him, live for him, care for him, fight for him. You show that love with every hard decision you make… that’s what you can do. It’s not nothing.”

He remained silent.

There was one other thing he could do — but for that, he needed a moment of privacy.

“I get it, Seichan.” He shifted her hands back to her. “Go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then more deeply on the lips. “Don’t leave me waiting.”

Never.

As she headed down the steps toward the driveway, he entered the house and nodded to the night nurse on the sofa. “Going to go check on him before I go.”

“I think he’s already asleep,” she said.

Good.

He climbed the stairs and crossed down the hall to his father’s bedroom. The door was partly ajar, so he quietly entered and moved to his bedside.

From a pocket, he slipped out a vial and a syringe.

Days ago, he had made an inquiry with Dr. Kendall Hess about the counteragent to Cutter Elwes’s threat. He had heard Hess believed the drug might help improve other neurological impairments. Gray made his case to Hess directly, and a sample was sent overnight to his address.

He filled the syringe now.

Once, what seemed like decades ago, he had been offered a similar choice, something that might help his father’s Alzheimer’s. He ended up pouring it down the drain, believing he had to learn to accept the inevitable, not to fight what couldn’t be fought.

He lifted the syringe, pushing a bead to the tip of the needle.

Screw that.

Seichan’s words echoed to him.

… fight for him…

He leaned over his father, jabbed the needle into his arm, and pushed the plunger home. He yanked the syringe back before his father’s lids could flutter open. When he did wake, those eyes got wide upon seeing his son looming over him.

“Gray, what’re you doing?”

Fighting for you…

He leaned down and kissed his father on the crown of his head.

“Just came up to say good night.”