“You killed them all?” King asked.
“In my defense, they were trying to kill me. And…” He set his eyes on King. “…they had already killed you.”
King looked down at his robe and realized it was not the same robe he had been wearing. He touched the spot on his chest where he had been stabbed, expecting to feel the welt of a thick scar under the rough-spun cotton. Instead his chest felt smooth.
“It was the tea. I hope you’ll forgive me, Jack, but I felt it might be safer for us both, considering the dangers of the present age. Turns out I was correct.”
“The tea?” King looked up. “You dosed me with one of your healing herbs? I thought I was dead. I didn’t realize those things were so powerful.”
Alexander smiled. “You were dead.”
“What?”
“The herbs are extremely powerful — similar chemically to the formula I used to heal you in Rome — but these can actually restore life. They alter the DNA in much the same way as Ridley’s Hydra serum. Your body healed all the damage from the sword strike, but the first full resurrection always takes a long time.”
King looked at his arms as if he expected to see something different, but they looked the same to him. “I died…and came back?”
“Congratulations, King. You’re immortal.” Alexander said the words casually, like he’d just proclaimed King the winner of a spelling bee. “Come on, let’s make for shore. You’ve been unconscious for twenty-eight days.” Alexander leapt nimbly over the side of the boat, his rope sandals in his hand, his feet splashing into the shallow water.
King felt sick, though not physically. He’d been kidnapped to the past, manipulated, and now, without his consent had been…altered. Into what? “What are the side effects of—”
“Side effects?” Alexander shook his head. “This isn’t some crude formula developed by Ridley. You’re not going to grow scales or go on a murderous rampage. You drank my original formula, Jack. There are no side effects. Other than not aging, the ability to heal from most any injury short of a nuclear blast, which, let’s face it, is a long ways off, and the resilience to handle some of my other…brews. If you ever need a boost of strength, we can—”
“Keep it,” King said. He had experienced Alexander’s strength-enhancing brew once before. It was like a nitrous-charged adrenaline shot that made him stronger and faster, but at the expense of his body. He tore muscles and ligaments, broke bones and landed himself in a coma. From what he understood, the strength-enhancing concoction caused significant injury to Alexander as well — he just healed immediately.
King pursed his lips, a thousand questions coming to mind. In the end, he decided to handle it like Rook might. “Fuck it.” King glanced around. “Where’s my rifle?”
“Lost at sea. In the fight. Let’s go,” Alexander called, as he began walking through the knee-deep water toward the distant shore.
King hopped the gunwale and landed in the water. “Are we swimming?”
“The water stays shallow like this all the way to the beach. We have to move by foot. Hopefully when we get to land I can find us some donkeys.”
“Donkeys? Where are we?” King splashed through the water, catching up with Alexander.
“Donkeys are miserable beasts, but they get us from point to point in Italy. I think we’re near what will be Naples.”
“That sounds like it’s going to take a long time,” King said. He’d seen enough time travel movies to suspect they would return to their present just seconds, maybe hours or days, after they left, making the departure a temporary discomfort for the people he left behind, but he didn’t relish the idea of spending a few months in the past. Not that he would age. Alexander had taken care of that. “Will it wear off? The immortality?”
“If it did, you wouldn’t be immortal, would you? We can reverse the effects later on. But for now, for this mission, you need to be strong, immune to injury and most of all, able to withstand the years. It will take us some time to get where we’re going and do what we have to.”
King ground his feet into the sand and came to a stop. “Wait.”
Alexander paused and looked back. King could see that the man knew what question was coming next. He didn’t even need to ask it.
Alexander sighed. He looked honestly apologetic. “Twenty-five years, Jack. Acca doesn’t die for another twenty-five years.”
THIRTY
Queen snarled as jets of gas sprayed down from the ceiling. She lunged across the room toward Seth while holding her breath, but she had already sucked in a lungful of the gas before realizing the true threat.
Her body flew through the air at the smiling bastard, but she could already feel an immense cough building in her lungs, and as her torso tightened, she could see Seth beginning to whisper. Alarm had registered on Knight’s Asian features, but his first response was to suck in a lungful of the gas, and he stood directly under a jet. As Queen reached her hands out to choke the shit out of the smiling duplicate, Knight’s body sank toward the floor. She heard a pistol fire from behind her, and then her chest shuddered and she coughed hard, whooping in a huge chest-full of the gas-laced air.
She smashed into Seth, the two of them toppling awkwardly to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Queen felt sleep taking over. It wouldn’t kill them, but she expected to wake in shackles. Or maybe not wake up at all.
She rolled on the floor. Her body felt heavy. She fought against her closing eyelids, but it was a losing battle.
Seth’s brow furrowed as he focused on whispering. Queen closed her eyes, promising herself she’d end Seth, the first chance she got. No more Ms. Nice Queen, she thought, and then she dreamed.
Thirty seconds after the gas stopped shooting from the nozzles in the ceiling, a ventilation fan in the wall behind Bishop’s slumped body activated. The vent sucked all the white gas from the room, while an air conditioning vent on the far wall pumped fresh air into the cell. The rubber seals around the sole door in and out of the room, which had activated when Seth’s body hit the large activation button, released. An audible hiss filled the room as the pressure equalized.
Jared was the first to stir, waking up and performing a perfect push-up, before springing to his feet. He moved to Richard Ridley, and checked the man’s pulse, his fingers touching his creator’s neck as delicately as if he were caressing eggshell-thin porcelain.
Satisfied that the man was alive, he stood from his squat and walked toward Enos. Something was wrong. Enos’s chest was not moving. The duplicate wasn’t breathing. Jared squatted down and rolled his brother over. In the center of Enos’s head was a perfectly round hole, just large enough for the tip of Jared’s pinky finger. Still in Jared’s grasp, the body softened and drooped. The color faded and the features that defined Enos fell slack. Jared lay the heap down and stepped away. Enos was now nothing more than a human-shaped mass of clay dressed in an expensive suit.
Jared growled. They had each been so focused on using the mother tongue to avoid the effects of the gas — a compound of Fentanyl altered by Richard Ridley to create a more effective and less potentially lethal type of knockout gas — that their self-defense lapsed long enough for a Chess Team member to squeeze off a single, but highly accurate shot. Jared considered using the mother tongue, taught to him by Richard Ridley before his incarceration, to animate the clay once more, but it wouldn’t be Enos. The memories and experiences that made him unique were gone forever. Enos was dead.