If anything, Isaac had grown more imposing. Gone was the sticklike ascetic's body. He had put on muscle weight, meaning the hadals had granted him higher status and, with it, greater shares of meat. Calcium outgrowths formed a twisted horn on one side of his painted head, and his eyes had an abyssal bulge. He moved with the grace of a t'ai chi master. From the silver bands cinching his biceps to the protruding demon stare and the antique samurai sword in one hand, Isaac looked born to rule down here, a caudillo for the underworld.
'Our renegade,' Isaac greeted him. His grin was ravenous. 'And bearing gifts? My daughter. And a machine.'
The girl bucked forward. Ike hauled her back, making another wrap of rope around his fist. Isaac's lip peeled back over his filed teeth. He said something in hadal too intricate for Ike to understand.
Ike gripped the knife, stifled his fear. This was Ali's Satan? It would be like him to deceive her into thinking he was the khan. To deceive Ike's own daughter into believing in a false father.
'Ali,' Ike murmured, 'he's not the one.' He didn't speak the name of Older-than-Old, even as a whisper. He touched his claim mark to indicate who he meant.
'Of course he is.'
'No. He's only a man. A captive like me.'
'But they obey him.'
'Because he obeys their king. He's a lieutenant. A favorite.' Ali frowned. 'Then who is the king?'
Ike heard a faint jingling. He knew that sound from the fortress, the tinkling of jade against jade. Warrior armor, ten thousand years old. Ali turned to peer into the shadows.
A terrible gravity began pulling at Ike, a feeling you got when your holds failed and the depths peeled you away.
'We've missed you,' a voice spoke out of the ruins.
As a familiar figure surfaced from the darkness, Ike lowered his knife hand. He let go of his daughter's rope, and she darted from his side. His mind filled. His heart emptied. He gave himself to the abyss.
At last, thought Ike, falling to his knees.
Him.
Shoat hummed tunelessly in his sniper's nest, his rifle nested in a stone groove overlooking the abyss. He kept his eye to the scope, watching the tiny figures play out
his script. 'Tick-tock,' he whispered.
Time to nail the coffin shut and start the long road back out. With the exit tunnel sterilized by synthetic virus, there would be no critters left to dodge or run from. His worst dangers would be solitude and boredom. Basically, he faced a lonely half-year of walking with a diet of Power Bars, which he'd secreted at caches all along the way. Finding the hadals mobbed together in this foul pit had been a stroke of good luck. Helios researchers had projected it would take upward of a decade for the prion contagion to filter throughout the sub-Pacific network and exterminate the entire abyssal food chain, including the hadals. But now, with his last five capsules taped inside the laptop computer shell, Shoat could eradicate the nuisance population years ahead of schedule. It was the ultimate Trojan horse.
Shoat felt the high of a survivor. Sure, there'd been some rough spots, and there were bound to be more ahead. But overall, serendipity had favored him. The expedition had self-destructed, though not before carrying him deep. The mercenaries had unraveled, but only after he'd largely run out of uses for them. And now Ike had conveyed the apocalypse straight into the heart of the enemy. 'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,' he muttered, setting his eye to the sniperscope once again.
Just a minute ago, it had seemed Ike was ready to run off. Now, oddly, he was on his knees, groveling in front of some character emerging from the inner building. Now there was a sight, Crockett servile, head glued to the floor.
Shoat wished for a more powerful scope. Who could this be? It would have been interesting to see the hadal's face in detail. The crosshairs would have to do.
Pleased to meet you, Shoat hummed. Hope you guessed my name.
'So you've returned to me,' the voice said from the shadows. 'Stand up.' Ike didn't even raise his head.
She stared down at Ike's bare back, frightened by his subjugation. It upended her universe. He had always seemed the ultimate free spirit, the original rebel. Yet now he knelt in abject surrender, offering no resistance, no protest.
The hadal khan – their rex, or mahdi, or king of kings, however it translated – stood motionless with Ike at his feet. He wore armor made of jade and crystal plates, and under that a Crusader's chain-mail shirt, sleeves short, each link oiled against rust.
She felt sick with realization. This was Satan? This was the one Ike had been seeking, face by face, in all those hadal dead? Not to destroy, as she'd thought, but to worship. Ike kowtowed blankly, his fear – and shame – transparent. He ground his forehead against the flowstone.
'What are you doing?' she said, but not to Ike.
Thomas solemnly opened his arms, and from throughout the city the hadal nations roared up to him. Ali sagged to her knees, speechless. She couldn't begin to fathom the depths of his deceptions. The moment she comprehended one, another cropped up that was more outrageous, from pretending to be her fellow prisoner to manipulating January's group, to posing as human when all along he was hadal.
And yet, even seeing him here, draped in ancient battle gear, receiving the hadal celebration, Ali could not help but see him as the Jesuit, austere and rigorous and humane. It was impossible to simply purge the trust and companionship they'd built over these past weeks.
'Stand up,' Thomas ordered, then looked at Ali, and his tone softened. 'Tell him, if you please, to get off his knees. I have questions.'
Ali knelt beside Ike, her head by his so that they could hear each other over the roar of the hadals' adulation. She ran her hand across his knotted shoulders, over the scars at his neck where the iron ring had cinched his vertebrae.
'Get up,' Thomas repeated.
Ali looked up at Thomas. 'He's not your enemy,' she said. An instinct urged her to advocate for Ike. It had to do with more than Ike's submission and fear. Suddenly she had her own grounds for fear. If Thomas was truly their ruler, then it was he who'd permitted Walker's soldiers to be tortured through all these days. And Ike was a soldier.