Only blackness, now shining with thousands of tiny lights, was behind him. He imagined Lily running through the lights, somehow free, desperate to escape, emerging to the clean night air outside.
She hadn’t understood how she’d escaped, and it was suddenly clear why. She hadn’t found a way out. Without her understanding, without her realization, she’d been sent.
To see if she could find him. To bring him in.
“What the hell is happening?”
Kate looked up from the blank screen that had been, just moments ago, displaying the image from the drone above her nephew. General Wolve was practically screaming now.
“Get that drone back up! Or send another that way!”
“Sir,” a soldier said, turning around another laptop screen on the table. “They’re all down. All the drones we sent in. They just crashed.”
“Jesus! Did you try that phone again?”
“It’s dead sir. It’s like something wiped it all out.”
“Dammit!” The general strode away. Kate quickly followed behind.
“General—”
“We’ve been had, Senator, just in case you’re slow on the draw,” the general said. “And your nephew has left me no choice.”
“My nephew isn’t doing this—”
“How the hell do you know?” He momentarily whirled around. “How do we know he isn’t being controlled? That all this is what they intended?”
“Let’s cut to the chase. You know how the president feels. You drop bombs on that mesa, you are wiping out the country’s only chance at stopping—”
“General Wolve!”
Two men emerged from the tent, running towards them, representing the general’s split command, the soldier dressed in camouflage, the agent in a black suit. The SSA agent held out a laptop.
“Sir, you need to see this.”
The agent pointed to the screen, which displayed white pinpoints over a satellite view of the United States. “This is from our weather radar that picked up the light transmissions a year ago. Since the four appeared, there’s been nothing since. In the last five minutes, there have been ninety-two. Just as storms literally formed all over the world. At the same time.”
“Ninety-two?” The general took the laptop to examine it closer. “My God, the entire middle of the US is covered. Do we have a visual yet?”
“Just outside of Philadelphia International in a wildlife refuge. Federal worker happened to catch it on his phone. He counted more than a thousand.”
“A thousand what?” the general demanded.
“People sir. They just appeared in lights from the storm. We’re already getting reports from the other agencies. They’re returning, sir. All over the world.”
“Kate!”
She looked over to see Roxy waving. “Kate, come quick! It’s your mom!”
Her stomach lurching, she hurried around the general to see Roxy now standing before her mother, who had remained near the cage, looking out beyond the edge of the barricade.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Mom,” Stella said, reaching down to take her mother’s hand.
“What’s wrong?” Kate asked. “Mom’s, what’s—”
She stopped, holding her breath. Her mother was as unmoving as a statue, her eyes, usually a sparkling blue, had rolled back into her head, revealing nothing but white.
“My God,” Kate said softly. “General!”
She broke away, seeing soldiers running out of the tents where the others had been quarantined. She knew without asking that the girl, the doctor, the immigrant, and Ryan all now stood erect, their eyes a horrible white.
“General!”
“Get them in the air!” General Wolve shouted. “And keep guns on those people! Get ready!”
“General, please listen—”
He shot Kate a furious glance. “Back away, Senator. You won’t want to see this.”
“General, don’t—”
He snatched a phone brought to him by a subordinate.
“When those jets are in position, fire when ready,” he directed.
TWENTY-TWO
The fear was old and buried, yet returned with the smell of trapped air, a taste of metal, the curving of the walls with layers of carvings beginning at the ceiling and scrawling across the floor. A hum rose from deep within.
William watched as the passageway lengthened like a spinal cord, adjusting and uncoiling. Though his earliest memories had been stolen, it still felt disturbingly familiar: the lights throbbing within the walls, the greenish tint of the air as if he were underwater, his lungs absent of air and unable to reach the surface.
He thought of Nanna, a little girl at five years old. Of Jane. Of Lily and her sister. Of Ryan and Juan and all of them, ripped from their lives and forced down murky throats into whatever waited within the dark.
He wished for the immigrant’s weapon, to see it all burn.
Find the girl and get her out.
When it at last stopped reshaping itself, he crept down the passage, his right hand close to his hip to quickly reach for the pistol. An opaque light shone from beyond, blurred by the ever-present fog. His entire body clenched as he passed through the clearing mists.
He was wrong to assume that whatever had landed here had somehow taken refuge inside the ancient rock formation in order to hide itself. His inability to determine how high the ceiling rose, to comprehend the vastness of the space, proved that it had adapted over time, shedding its original skin, replacing it with rock and dust and clay, existing here longer than the time it took for the waters to erode the canyon outside.
The cavernous walls soared like tidal waves, their deep hollows and rising mounds frozen just before impact. The slender knolls appeared to breathe, rising and falling, reaching into the darkness above where they merged together at a zenith, reaching down in a thick, pulsating appendage towards the machine below.
It too was riddled with the harsh, grotesque inscriptions that lined the walls of the artery that brought him here. Dim, throbbing lights infected every inch of its sprawling girth. It took up nearly the entire center of the chamber, not with defined and sharp edges, but organically; a tumor from which the infection grew.
In its core was the girl.
He could feel her more than he could see her, as the curved pod she lay within was coated in a thick film.
Reaching her would mean crossing a floor pockmarked with hollows and peaks, like a churning sea suddenly frozen. Ridges, like raised veins, scrawled across the surface, giving the only semblance of a passage to her.
As he began to cross, he dared, at last, to open the channel to her mind.
Ava, I’m here. My name is William. I’m coming.
Don’t slip. Don’t think about what’s within those deep crevices. Find a way to break her free. Just one touch—
No.
He almost stopped, he was so surprised by her response.
Your sister, Lily, brought me. To find you.
He could feel her tremble, see the outside of her form flinch within the encasement.
Run.
Ava—
Run!
The chattering of a thousand swarming rattlesnakes preceded it, slowing and stretching. It rose from behind her: a mud-stained shell of a snapping turtle swollen to the size of a monolith dome. Skin beneath parted to reveal shapes narrowed and long like drowned canoes at the bottom of a polluted river. A maw opened slightly beneath, its saliva thick as dripping tar.
The air around it moved in sways of thrashing locks, thousands of coils born from beneath the shell and lifting like a leviathan free from the water. While most of the tendrils were free to flail, other, larger cords stretched out to sink into the ground and walls. It was everything beneath them, above them; the very air now in their lungs.