“You’re wrong, Flora,” Skett said. “They were quiet until Jasso found the other tile and Arni turned it on! Now none of the tiles are sleeping. You linked them all—or someone did.”
That revelation hit Flora with a shock so hard she actually wobbled. Caitlin O’Hara did that. The Group director did not like where this was headed.
“Your dead assistant here was linked with someone in the past,” Skett went on. “We knew that. But instead of being able to communicate with that person through her, which is what I was trying to do, instead of waking them both up, the tile here went ballistic and those two transcended against their will.”
Flora nodded. “And that connection between the tiles is still open,” she said, catching up to Skett.
“Very much so,” Skett said, regarding the tile with growing concern. “Open and growing, only now the power won’t be a simple, ‘Hi, how are you?’ connection as when Arni turned it on. It won’t be rats massing or intestinal bugs eating a mail carrier from the inside out or insects gathering at the South Pole. Mikel Jasso is standing beside a still-open doorway to Galderkhaan. I thought we could control that through this woman and her partner—”
“But the tiles are working on their own now,” Flora said. “Fueled by the Source?”
“I don’t know,” Skett admitted. “I sincerely pray they are not. There isn’t an acoustic monitor this side of the universe that can contain that.”
Flora eyed Adrienne’s body. Sirens blaring sounded closer. There would be an investigation; that was unavoidable now.
“I’m going to get a cooler,” Flora said. “Without the tiles, this will be a forensics nightmare.”
She saw Skett shaking his head.
“What, dammit?” Flora asked, approaching him through the thinning tester of smoke. “Why not?”
“A cooler is not going to work,” he said. “Not anymore.” He cocked a thumb toward the hallway, toward the storage room. “Listen.”
Flora reluctantly obliged him. There was a deep hum, like a long, low note on a bass cello.
“The other tile,” Flora said.
“Already active and getting livelier,” Skett said.
“It shouldn’t be!” Flora said.
“It’s drawing more and more power from this one and, I suspect, breaking its icy bonds. The freezer won’t contain it much longer, and a frigid little container certainly won’t stop this one.” He indicated the tile in the laboratory.
“There has to be a point of equilibrium,” she said. “Dammit, the tiles didn’t go chewing up Galderkhaan every time somebody used one!”
“No, but they were all—synched somehow. Honestly, Flora? I don’t know what the tiles can do. Until I held this specimen, I’d never seen one. But we had better continue this from a distance.”
Then the Group director looked around. “No. I’m staying.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stop this.” Flora began typing on the computer.
The tile was beginning to shake harder, creating a high-pitched sound that was beginning to pierce her skull. Several yards away, Skett too was beginning to wince. He edged into the hall.
“What are you trying to do?” he yelled at her.
“No one should control a power this monstrous,” she said.
Covering his ears, Skett returned to the laboratory. He looked over Flora’s shoulder, saw that she had opened a program that accessed Mikel’s phone.
“No!” he said. “We have worked too hard to reach this point! All of us have!”
“So did Galderkhaan,” Flora said, “and look where it got them.”
Skett reached for the woman and pulled her from the laptop. The woman pulled herself from his one-armed grab, turned toward a drawer in the lab table, and yanked it open. She withdrew a scalpel and spun back toward her unwanted guest.
“Get out!” she said, just as Skett drove his own blade hard into her chest, plunging the silver blade to the hilt, through her heart.
“Mikel, destroy the tiles!” she cried out as she slid off the knife and hit the floor, dead.
“Flora?” a voice shouted thinly on the other end. “Flora!”
Skett swore. He didn’t know if Jasso would figure out what had happened, couldn’t stay here to find out, and Skett wasn’t sure what he’d tell the archaeologist in any case. Jasso probably wasn’t carrying explosives on the vehicle and he would have a hell of a time obtaining them if he went back to the outpost.
What do you need them for? Bundy or one of the others would ask.
To destroy an archaeological find, Jasso would reply.
It would never happen.
Confidently slipping the blade back into its sheath and stealing a quick glance at the wildly shaking tile, he killed the connection to Mikel, closed Flora’s laptop, and tucked it under his arm. He glanced back at her.
“Sorry,” he said. “I no longer need you—just this to access your offsite storage.”
Then he turned and hurried back into the hallway. The olivine stone in the laboratory was a lost cause, already too active. Yokane probably kept it near her for that reason: it would immediately become alert if another stone were in close proximity. He’d collect the other. With luck, his exit should time out perfectly.
Behind him, the tools in the table drawer began to shake loudly and then the lab table began to hop around; a moment later the walls themselves began to undulate like sails in a typhoon. Below them, the remains of Flora Davies began to liquefy. First the brain and other internal organs; then, as the unchecked vibration of the stone increased, the rest of her cellular structure came apart. Within moments, the woman was a pool of biological material spilled across the laboratory floor. There was no longer a knife wound, or anything to point to homicide. The floor itself was quaking, spreading the material thin and wide.
Skett followed the steady pulse of the original tile. He went down a flight of stairs to a sub-basement where the Group maintained a row of subzero freezers. He had been down here before: this was where the door to the alley was located, the alley through which he’d transported Arni’s body as well as other biological mishaps over the years.
Skett waited anxiously. He stood there, his skin vibrating as the air around him began to quiver. The old beams in the mansion shook and screamed and the structural matter of the century-old building also began to tremble faster and faster and then groan, loudly. He heard crashing above and then a pop that wasn’t so much a loud noise as a dull punch in his ears. It was followed by a massive shockwave that slapped him from above and behind him—the location of the laboratory.
Hopefully, that was the tile reaching some kind of critical mass, releasing its energy before going quiet—
The tile in the freezer instantly calmed once its link to the southern tiles had gone silent. As the building above him fell to dust, Skett grabbed the tile and ran for the door. Behind him, large stone and wood pieces disintegrated as they dropped, the ceiling vanished completely, and millions of tiny pieces of laboratory fell into the sub-basement, the upper floors crashing on top of that, all of them creating a pile that rose nearly half a story above a shocked Fifth Avenue.
Observers wondered aloud if it had been weakened by the flooding and fires from the night before. The fire department arrived and pushed back everyone who was recording the event on cell phones. The police department sealed the block, in the event it was a crime scene.
Within that rubble, the olivine tile was quiet now. The collapse of the edifice had caused the orientation to be lost. It would take a boost to raise its energy sufficiently to find the others, to reestablish a connection with the collective. Until then, the now-subdued energy within resumed its waiting patiently, as it had done for an eternity. As it would do for an eternity more if it had to.