The intensity of the lightning was both blinding and deafening. It soared up into the high reaches of the cavern, dancing between the dangling stalactites like sunbeams in a crystal chandelier. The cave resonated with thunderclaps, vibrations that shook the ground and sent cracks shooting across the smooth stone.
Leeds’ clothes had been completely burned away, or perhaps vaporized and ingested like everything else, and he stood naked and exposed in the center of the pool. His skin was peeling away like bark from a tree, but as soon as it sloughed off, new flesh was revealed. Annie saw that something else had changed as well.
Dr. Leeds was growing.
When it had begun, he had been waist-deep in the pool, but now he stood like a titanic colossus with the water splashing around his knees.
Except something was wrong.
The growth wasn’t proceeding uniformly. Some parts seemed to be growing faster than others, giving the impression of a hideously deformed creature. Under his beard, his face had become distorted beyond recognition. His torso had grown bloated, top-heavy, on legs that seemed to be atrophying before Annie’s eyes. The ribbons of skin peeling away weren’t dead layers of epidermis flaking off, but living tissue that also continued to grow haphazardly. In a space of time that might have been measured in heartbeats, Dr. Leeds ceased to be anything remotely human.
And still it did not end.
The misshapen giant form collapsed back into the pool; a grotesque island of flesh that grew like a tumor, drawing still more material into itself with cataclysmic discharges of energy.
Annie felt movement against her body and cried out as something squeezed her arm.
Was this what it felt like? Was it her turn to be ripped apart, reduced to a spray of molecules and consumed by the thing Leeds had become?
But it wasn’t the jolt of an electrical discharge she felt.
It was a hand.
Kismet’s hand.
Death, it seemed, had no secrets to reveal. Kismet's plunge into the abyss of darkness was unremarkable in its similarity to countless reports given of near death experiences. His world had collapsed into a tunnel of darkness, and at its end…heaven?
And he had died, hadn’t he? His lungs had filled with blood, drowning him and causing asphyxia. His brain deprived of oxygen, shut down. The electrical impulses from his central nervous system that regulated the rhythm of his heart were cut off. Neurological flat-line; the clinical definition of ‘dead.’
And yet, every few seconds, his heart contracted within his chest.
Another source of electrical stimulation was at work within him. The mysterious element that had empowered the water of the pool to rejuvenate his cells — the very substance that reacted with that water to create the stunning plasma storm in the air above the Fountain — was generating random and discordant electrical shocks throughout his muscles.
His blood pressure had dropped to virtually nothing, no oxygen was being carried by the red blood cells that remained in his circulatory system, but something more important was going on. There were still traces of the Fountain’s water in his body, generating those tiny sparks as they went to work stimulating his cells to keep regenerating and reproducing.
What had happened to Leeds on a grand scale was happening to Kismet at the microscopic level. Damaged and ruined cells were consumed, broken down into raw material, transformed into healthy tissue.
After a time, perhaps only a minute or two, his blood vessels were whole again, his chest cavity repaired, the deluge of blood absorbed back into his body. His diaphragm twitched and the tiniest gasp of air was drawn in. His heart gave a spasm, and the blood in his arteries and capillaries and veins…moved.
Kismet sat up, like a sleeper awakening from a bad dream, only to discover that he was in the middle of a much more terrifying nightmare.
“What the…?”
He looked up into Annie’s eyes, then past her to Higgins…
Higgins! He felt a surge of anger as he recalled how his old comrade in arms had betrayed him, held him at gunpoint turned him over to Leeds…why exactly, he couldn’t remember.
Then what?
It came back to him in chunks. The ordeal on the lake bottom…traps…giant bats…The Fountain. I drank from the Fountain of Youth!
And that was it. The last thing he remembered.
He stared into the heart of the raging tempest at the center of the pool; there was something alive there, something that had once been human. “Leeds?”
Annie nodded.
The sight held him rooted in place. He could vaguely recall what he had felt after tasting the water, and thought he had at least a rudimentary grasp of the principles at work. It was probably beyond the grasp of science to explain, but there was certainly no magic to it. But what was happening in the center of the Fountain was like nothing he could have imagined.
Then he recalled something else, the thing Leeds had truly sought — the Seed.
He turned toward the elevated dais, and that was when he saw the man standing next to Elisabeth.
It had been twenty years since their last encounter, but he recognized the man as easily as if it had only been yesterday.
“Hauser!”
It was a barely a whisper, but somehow the man standing on the platform and likewise captivated, heard him.
Kismet felt a cold chill wash over him that had nothing to do with the cataclysm building in the pool.
Ulrich Hauser.
That was what the man had called himself — the man from Prometheus — the man who had somehow known all about him.
You are their grand experiment.
Ulrich Hauser had left him to die in Iraq—
Or had he?
Kismet, if I killed you, your mother would have my head.
Hauser had said that, all those years ago, just before leaving him on his own — he and Higgins had been captured, tortured — and then, for no apparent reason, they’d been allowed to escape. Had Hauser, or someone else acting on his orders, orchestrated that?
Higgins was right, he realized. I’ve never been anything but their bloodhound, their puppet. I found the goddamned Fountain of Youth, and here they are — here he is — to take it away.
Kismet had wondered if Leeds might be an agent of Prometheus; how else to explain his knowledge of a society so secret that twenty years of searching had not revealed to Kismet even a single clue regarding its existence. Leeds had used his knowledge of Prometheus to coax Higgins into joining his cause, and neither man had suspected even for a moment that their agent was already in place; the beautiful blonde — the disillusioned Sultana, the actress, the professional liar.
In hindsight, it all made perfect sense now. Elisabeth’s sham marriage to the Sultan, at the height of her career — the pirate raid on the cruise ship — there was a commonality there: the relics of the ancient world, illicitly acquired by the Sultan’s father. And then Nick Kismet — the great experiment — had wandered onstage.
She had tried to kill him, or had she really? She had seduced him — why? And then she had joined forces with Leeds, subtly goading both men into a rivalry that would not only add yet another fantastic treasure — a Seed of the Tree of Life — to Prometheus’ secret storehouse of mysteries, but would also give them a chance to put their grand experiment to the ultimate test.
God, she’s good.
“Hauser!” he shouted, getting to his feet. He felt strong, surprisingly so, given what he felt sure he had just gone through. “Not this time, Hauser. You’re not taking this one away.”