All in its time, he told himself.
Flora knew all of that too. She sat quite still-not because she feared for her life, but because she did not want to distract Skett needlessly. Not with the forces at his fingertips. And as heartless as it was, she too was curious. Adrienne was already in the thrall of the stone in the laboratory; Flora had noticed her fingertips stiffen when Skett boosted the power slightly. They were relaxed now. She suspected that Adrienne was the target of the experiment on this end. She had no idea what he was expecting on the other end.
“How is it going out there, Dr. Jasso?” Skett demanded.
“The truck is getting into position.”
Skett glanced at his watch. “You have another minute. One. That’s how long it should take.”
Mikel went silent and Skett saw Flora glaring at him.
“Oh, poor Flora, sidelined and denied her place in the modern Galderkhaani pantheon.”
“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “All I ever wanted to do was learn, to work with the tiles. You want to control them.”
“Like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other,” Skett said.
“It’s your mind-set that is objectionable,” she said. “All these years, these centuries of exploration and struggle, and this is how it finishes. With a prize in the hands of some Technologist.”
“Not ‘some,’” Skett said. “‘The.’ He is the senior surviving Technologist. His name is Antoa.”
“And what are you?” Flora asked. “A hireling.”
“You cannot humiliate me, if that is your intent,” Skett said.
She snickered. “You still have blood on the side of your hand… like a butcher.”
“It’s honorable blood, blood spit from the mouth of Yokane, the blood of a Priest,” he said.
“Lunatic hatreds,” she sneered.
“Which you have helped to perpetuate.”
“Not true!” she said. “I rejected the overtures of Priests, of those like Yokane. I knew they existed but I refused to communicate with them. I only served one cause: knowledge.”
“But you took their funding,” Skett said. “You had to know.”
“I didn’t know and I would have stopped, at once, had anyone interfered,” Flora said. “Whatever was arranged was set up long before my grandparents were born. And never did I kill, or advocate killing.” She raised a chin toward the tile. “Mikel was very careful about obtaining that. Stealth and thievery, not murder.”
“What about Arni? What about two decades ago, Dr. Meyers, who was killed in Hong Kong trying to buy an artifact from the Triad.”
“Unfortunate,” she admitted. “We all know this is dangerous work. I’m not naïve, Skett. We’ve robbed museums, private collections. People have gone to prison.”
“Not you, though. You are careful and pragmatic, and I salute that. But you also have no right to judge me.” Skett squatted to face her, held the side of his bloody hand to her cheek. “In the old days, I’m told, before ‘civilization’ came to Galderkhaan, human blood was a means of communication, of writing, of art.”
“Of sacrifice.”
“That too,” he admitted. “There was barbarism. The adolescence of an ancient people.”
“Galderkhaan banished it,” Flora said.
“Did they?” Skett said. “Even after violence was outlawed, bloodletting continued under the aegis of the Priests. Blood caused words to grow, quite literally.”
“That’s not been proven.”
“We have writings that verify it,” he said. “They describe how the mosses and molds that sprouted from paintings executed in blood gave rise to the accents, the hand movements, of the Galderkhaani. The ancients believed that the Candescents were speaking to them… through blood.”
“Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs,” she said.
“Questioned, yes. Disproved? Never quite that. Mosses grew differently, more eloquently, on certain stones. These stones. The ones that vibrated. If they were not special, why would we all have sought them these many centuries?”
“Not because we believed that a god was trying to talk to us through fungus sprouting naturally from biological material,” Flora said. “We were looking for deeper secrets that were locked in the stones, in matter that we believe dates to the dawn of the universe.”
“Then we should agree on what is about to transpire,” Skett said. “That is what I am looking for—more proof of all those ‘we believes.’”
“Skett?” a voice said in his phone.
“Here,” Skett replied.
“We’re ready to move on this,” Mikel informed him. “Do you know anything about that—hold on. Dr. Cummins, do you hear that?”
Skett heard a mumbled response.
“Mikel, what is it?” Skett demanded.
“I hear a sort of cooing. Definitely not a geologic sound,” Mikel said. “Skett, the thing that created this pit—could that entity still be down there?”
“It’s possible. What do you know about that?”
Mikel didn’t answer. Skett hadn’t expected him to. Always and still the careful Group agent.
“We’re setting up a rope,” Mikel said. “I’m going to keep this line open. If I need information, you will give it to me.”
“Of course,” Skett replied. “We both want the same thing. To understand.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mikel told him. “If you wanted to pool our resources, you would have done it long before this.”
“As would have Flora and her people.”
“Then you’re all stupid,” Mikel said.
“Save the editorializing, highwayman. You brought something to a city of more than eight million without vetting it, without quarantine. That, Dr. Jasso, was stupid. It caused death. Not just Arni, but Andreas Campbell, a mailman down the street. Maybe others. All I’m asking you to do is observe and report. Innocent stuff. Now, do you want to stand there and freeze or will you do what you went to the South Pole to accomplish—just for a different chief executive?”
“I’ve already agreed,” Mikel said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Skett was standing again, looking at the stone. It didn’t seem to have changed, nor had the digital numbers gone up or down on the monitor. Peripherally, he saw sudden anxiety on Flora’s face. It wasn’t just for Mikel Jasso: she was also no doubt starting to be concerned about her stone and the future of the Group. For all her faults, Flora had always been about the work.
Maybe that’s why she’s so good at this job, Skett thought. Her agenda is unbiased toward Priest or Technologist.
“I’m ready to make my descent,” Mikel said at last. “For the record—and I hope you’re keeping one—there is some kind of humming down there. It sounds almost like cooing of some kind. My companion hears it too.”
“Human?”
“Difficult to say.”
Skett motioned his head at Flora. She followed where he was pointing, saw a tablet on the table. It was the same one Arni had been using when his brain liquefied. She used it to turn on the audio recorder, to open a new file.
“I’m recording now,” Skett said. “I want to know everything.”