Ometeotl cheered and clapped loudly. No one else did.
“’Til tomorrow, then,” Quetzalcoatl concluded. “’Til the end.”
Mal and Reston were assigned separate but adjacent rooms for the night, featureless, bare-necessities spaces like belowdecks cabins on an oceangoing freighter. Mal settled down on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. She was beyond exhausted. It had been an extraordinary day as well as a long and arduous one. Was it only this morning that she had been woken by the phone call from Mixquiahuala Jaguar HQ? A few hours and a lifetime ago. Now Aaronson was dead and Reston was, against all odds, an ally and not an enemy any more. Her whole world had been turned upside down and inside out. Everything was wrong and yet somehow right. She felt as though she was a riddle she’d always believed she knew the solution to, only to discover that the true solution was something else altogether.
To cap it all, tomorrow she was going to be part of a brigade of gods — gods! — attacking the home of another god with a view to ending him and his Empire. The same Empire she’d served loyally and indefatigably for nigh on a decade.
Little wonder that, for all her numbing fatigue, she couldn’t sleep.
Eventually she got up.
She touched the door to her room and it vanished.
Keyed to my own bio-data. And it just pops out of existence. There’s another thing to keep the old brain awake and racing.
She padded barefoot down the corridor to the next room.
Hesitated a hundred times about knocking, then knocked.
Then that door vanished too, and there stood Reston, in just his underpants. A well muscled torso, with just the right amount of chest hair nestled between his pectorals.
Dammit.
“Can’t sleep,” she said.
“Me either. Should. Can’t.”
“Can I come in?”
“Shouldn’t. Can.”
She did.
They stood apart but facing, within reach of each other.
She put a hand on his forearm.
He moved the arm so that her hand fell into his.
“Ought we?” she said.
He nodded. “Ought. Will.”
She took a step towards him. “You’re still a smug dickhead, Reston. Know that.”
“Stuart,” he said.
“Mal.”
THIRTY-TWO
4 Flower 1 Movement 1 House
(Friday 21st December 2012)
Stuart lay stroking the hair of the maddening, mesmerising woman who lay snuggled against him. Her cheek was against his chest and she was snoring ever so slightly.
He cast his mind back to the previous night and smiled. Vaughn — Mal — had proved to be an energetic, enthusiastic lover. No surprises there. What had taken him aback was her overwhelming need, like the hunger of the starving. He had responded in kind, and there had been that sort of tough tenderness, that gentle greed, which typified the best lovemaking. The two of them had slotted together, fitted together, in a way Stuart had never experienced before. Not even with Sofia had he known the same mutual rightness or the same instinctive synchronisation. Barely speaking, communicating almost entirely through their bodies, he and Mal had brought each other to a climax that was gloriously gratifying. Mind-blowing, in fact. A moment of ecstasy that had erased all thought and ego, leaving no room inside him for anything other than itself. After that, sleep had come crashing over them both like a tidal wave.
If last night was a one-off, if it never happened again, Stuart could live with that. And if it wasn’t, if it was the start of something more substantial, he could live with that too.
He was, he realised, content. For the first time since Sofia and Jake died, he was at peace.
Mal’s serene sleeping face told him she was too.
Pity that today was scheduled to be -
A tremor shook the room.
Not just the room.
Stuart could feel it — the entire underground edifice shuddering around him.
“Huh, whuzzat?” said Mal foggily.
“Don’t know.” He leapt out of bed. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not good.”
The tremor subsided.
Then came another, fiercer, more violent.
“Earthquake?” said Mal, swinging off the bed and pulling a sheet around her.
“I don’t think we’re in a seismic activity zone.” Stuart danced into a pair of underpants. “And even if we are, earthquakes feel like waves on a rough sea. This is more like — ”
A third tremor overwrote the second. Everything in the room vibrated and shook.
Stuart disappeared the door. Distant shouts of alarm echoed along the corridor. He dashed out, Mal following. The first of the pantheon they encountered was Azcatl, who was scurrying along like one of his beloved arthropods.
Stuart grabbed him. “What’s going on? What is this?”
“Unhand me!” snapped the Red Ant. “We’re under attack is what’s going on. Tezcatlipoca’s forces. They’ve found us somehow. I must marshal my best shocktroops.”
He hurried onward. Stuart looked at Mal. “Armour time.”
“Where is it?”
“Toci’s lab. Which is… this way, I think.”
In truth, he had no idea. But as they ran, he hoped they would bump into another of the gods who would give them directions.
In the event, they bumped into Itzpapalotl. Stuart didn’t know it was her, having never seen her sans armour. All he saw was a tall and impossibly athletic female, almost as dark-skinned as Mictlantecuhtli, moving with obvious urgency but not in a blind panic. He made a deduction and called out her name.
“We need our armour, too,” he said. “Where do we find it?”
Without breaking stride, the Obsidian Butterfly made a gesture: follow me.
Two levels down, near the bottom of the inverted ziggurat, lay a chamber that was part armoury, part laboratory. The equipment that filled it was mostly unrecognisable to Stuart and Mal, a plethora of sleek machines and subtle instruments whose nature and purpose they could only guess at. What was familiar was the jumble of it all. Offcuts and oddments littered workbenches. There were disorganised shelf-loads of tools and spare parts. Everywhere, a sprawl of unfinished projects and experiments-in-progress. Scientific chaos was scientific chaos, no matter if the scientist who generated it was also a goddess.
Itzpapalotl went straight to her suit of midnight-black armour and began clamping it on. Huitzilopochtli was already here, doing the same. A woman with a thatch of blonde hair and keen, beady eyes — Toci, it must be — was busy loading flame spears into the rack the Hummingbird God toted on his back.
“Toci, please, our armour…?” said Stuart.
Toci wagged a finger distractedly towards a corner of the room. The Serpent Warrior suits were set out on armatures, no longer as snake-featured as before. The helmets had been reshaped, their fronts flattened and the eye lenses joined up into a single bulbous visor. All of the sections had been recoloured, not mamba green now but a silvery blue that would afford some camouflage in the daytime sky. There were other modifications, such as l-gun attachments on both arms and the tips of blades projecting from the wrists.
“Been busy on those all night,” Toci said. “You’ll find them very much improved, although there’s a limit to what I could do, given the crudeness of what I had to work with. Tezcatlipoca was never much of an engineer, and I discern human touches everywhere — shortcuts, quick fixes, general bodging, no finesse. The lightning guns are activated by studs on the palms of the gauntlets. They recharge more rapidly than you’ll be used to, and last longer too. The blades extend to full length with a flick of either arm and retract the same way. Both of you, I understand, are proficient with swords. Of necessity, these ones are short, but they’ll cut through anything short of a forcefield.”
“Forcefields,” said Stuart. “Any chance we have those?”
“Exclusive to Quetzalcoatl. Mictlantecuhtli has his gauntlets, Xipe Totec his knives, Huitzilopochtli his flame spears… Each a particular suite of capabilities, to fit each’s individual style and temperament. There is no sharing or crossover. That is not our way. Be grateful for what you’ve got.”