Cameron nodded as if this was expected.
“What are they?” Zowan asked.
“The creatures in your seed arks. They want us to come and let them out.”
Creatures in the seed arks? Zowan stared at him, trying to make sense of his words. “Cameron, why does everything that comes out of your mouth have to be so . . . difficult? It’s like . . .”
“I come from a different world? Because I do. Swain and his people have lied to you all your life to keep you here. Why wouldn’t the truth seem strange and odd and wrong? Why wouldn’t it be hard to believe, when compared to the lie you’ve grown up with?”
“I guess it would be.” Zowan rubbed his finger along the table’s edge. “So, assuming you’re telling me the truth, what kind of creatures are these?”
Cameron leaned back and folded his arms. “First know this: there are no seeds in those arks. And no plans for reseeding the earth— which, as you’ve seen for yourself, has no need of it. I’ve seen these arks before—in a tomb on the other side of the world. Some people think they are special containers for the dead. Except that what’s inside isn’t dead. Others believe they are protective containers whose passengers should long ago have been freed.”
“Which is why Andros—or whoever he is—is trying to get me to come down and let him out.”
Cam nodded. “But even he doesn’t know how you’re supposed to accomplish that.”
“Zowan? Why aren’t you down here yet? I’m hungry. I want out of here. You owe me.”
“He’s awake again,” Zowan said.
“Yes. I can hear them, too. I think talking about them draws their attention. It’s better to focus on something else.”
They fell silent, the conversation momentarily derailed. Then Zowan went back to their earlier discussion. “Okay, then—tell me about Jesus and why the people killed Him. ‘Crucified Him,’ you said.”
Cam’s brows flew up. “You want even more difficult and unbelievable thoughts to wrestle with?” he asked. But he seemed pleased.
“I may not understand all that you’re saying,” Zowan explained, “but I know this part is truth. And the more I hear of it, the more I know I’ll understand.”
Cameron unfolded his arms, regarding him with a quizzical look. “You are very wise for someone who has been hidden away, Zowan. You do realize, though, that understanding is not going to come in one or two conversations. The pursuit of God is a lifelong process.”
“Yes. But you said we’d be here for a while. And you did promise me a better explanation than what you gave this morning.”
Cameron grinned. “I’ve been thinking about that conversation all day,” he confessed. “Trying to figure out a better way of saying it . . .”
Andros insisted again that Zowan free him. Zowan ignored him.
“We’re all born disobedient to God,” said Cameron. “Unrighteous. And God can’t have a relationship with us when we’re like that. But we can’t do anything about it because righteousness demands perfection, and we’re not. We’re lost, helpless, and condemned to go to a terrible place forever when we die. A place without God. We need someone to rescue us. So God sent His son.”
“Jesus.” Zowan supplied. Andros, he noted, had completely withdrawn.
Cam nodded, and went on to explain more of who Jesus was, and as they talked, the blue bar on the computer screen crawled slowly across its slot until it reached the end. Yet still they talked.
And sometime in all that, Zowan believed in the seed of the woman, the son of I Am, this Jesus who wasn’t just a man but God, too . . . though that part he struggled still to comprehend. It didn’t matter. He wanted to know this God who had personally called him out of darkness, who was willing to put aside the trappings of His deity and take on a man’s form, to die on a Roman cross in humiliation and suffering for the sake of His creatures—for the sake of Zowan himself—so that they could come to know Him.
When he told Cameron what he had done, the man sat in his chair as if stunned, staring at him without expression, though for a moment it seemed that tears glistened in his eyes.
Then the muffled sound of voices and the not-so-distant clatter of the library’s front doors being unlocked jerked them back to the reality of their present situation. Hurriedly Cameron removed the cable and his little device, tossed them and the special pen into the duffle bag at his feet, then closed down the program. Meanwhile Zowan stole into the adjoining room and across it to see who was at the door. He was horrified to see four bald, black-robed Enforcers already striding into the library’s main entrance area.
He hurried back to find Cameron stowing the duffle under the far back corner of the table. “Enforcers!” he whispered. “Four of them. I don’t know why they’re here. It’s still early.”
He came over to where Cameron was backing out from under the table. “We’re trapped. There’s no way out from here.”
“Yes, there is.” Cameron stood, his head lamp back on his head. In his hands he held a small gray canister with a ring on it and an extra head lamp, which he gave to Zowan. As Zowan slid on the lamp, an Enforcer came through the door.
“They’re in here!” the man cried.
Jerking the ring off the gray canister, Cam tossed it toward him, gray smoke spewing out of it.
Zowan was standing flat-footed when Cameron pulled him away and into the dead-end sorting room behind the one they had been working in. Only it wasn’t a dead end. At the room’s far end, a narrow stairway ascended to a door with a palm-panel lock that must lead into . . .
“The Wives’ Residence!” Zowan exclaimed. “We can’t go in there.”
“Hit the panel, Zowan,” Cam commanded him.
He did so, and with a series of loud clacks the door opened into darkness. Switching on their head lamps, they raced into a small supply closet, mops and brooms leaning in a tangle against the wall. In passing, Zowan hit one with his foot. It fell to the floor with a crack, but by then he was following Cam into a larger room where girls slept on quilted pallets, already stirring from their slumber at the sounds of the unlocking door.
As the beam of Zowan’s head lamp fell on one, she screamed and lurched away from him into the wall. Startled, he stepped back himself and bumped into a wooden screen, which fell over with a crash.
By now almost all the girls were awake, some screaming, others staring about in confusion. As he turned to follow Cam through the room, Zowan’s light fell on another girl—brown eyes wide in a heart-shaped face framed by rivers of unbraided red-brown hair—and he stopped in his tracks. “Terra?”
She put up an arm to shield her eyes, squinting at him.“Zowan?!”
Suddenly Cam was back, grabbing Zowan by the arm and dragging him onward as the Enforcers pounded up the stairs in their wake. “You can’t help her now,” he hissed as he led through the mazelike chambers of the Wives’ Residence. He must have seen this when he was looking at the graphics, must have planned out the route in advance, judging from his complete lack of hesitation as they went forward.
Finally they emerged into a wide, low-ceilinged chamber lined with bookshelves and wooden screens and furnished with large floor pillows. Looms and bowls of wool and yarn stood about on a thick, intricately patterned rug, and a huge computer screen hung on one wall. Several more girls slept on quilted pallets, but Cameron ignored them, making straight for the pair of wooden doors on the far side. They were almost to them when the doors crashed open, the lights went on, and three more Enforcers burst through, cutting them off.
“I thought God would help us,” Zowan murmured in horror.
“It’s all right,” Cameron told him. “God decreed this long ago. For our best.”
“I don’t see how this can be for our best.”
Wives stood in the openings between the wooden screens and bookshelves, peering at them curiously, their long hair unbound as was never allowed in public. They all wore sheer, floor-length sleeping gowns, many of them with hugely swollen bellies. Zo
wan looked at them in added horror, wondering what Father had done to them, and fearing he would do it to Terra, as well. The cry of a small child threaded through the sudden silence as a fourth Enforcer stepped between the others to face them.
“He looks kinda like you,” Cameron remarked to Zowan.
“He is my gene brother Gaias.”
Cameron glanced at him in surprise. “You know what genes are?”
“I know they’re what make us look alike.”
A sweeping glare and a flick of Gaias’s bald head sent the women in the doorways scurrying back into their beds and those on the floor burrowing into their bedding.
Gaias strode up to Cameron, looking him up and down, while Cameron stared in openmouthed revulsion at the oculus on his forehead. “Take this one to Father,” Gaias said to his subordinates. Two of them seized Cam from either side and led him out of the room.
Gaias had already turned his attention to Zowan. “So, little brother. I hear you’ve been up to the surface—not once, not twice, but three times. And brought back some of the vermin there with you.”
He’ d asked no question, so Zowan said nothing.
“They are evil and corrupt up there. Poisoning their world, as they poison themselves. You have profaned the purity of our enclave by bringing him here. He will have to die, of course.”
Zowan swallowed hard. He’ d been so concerned for his own safety, he’d not even considered Cameron’s.
“Where is Parthos?” Gaias demanded. “Did you leave him up there?” The question was so out of the blue, it drew Zowan’s gaze back to him in puzzlement.
“Parthos?”
Gaias was implacable. “I know he went with you. Him and that little vixen Terra . . . ah, but we have her. Oh, she was sweet in my arms . . .her flesh so soft and full, and the way she moved under me . . .”
“Shut up!” Zowan burst out, shocked at his sudden aggression. “If she was moving, it was only in her struggle to escape you.”
Gaias drew back in the face of Zowan’s sudden ferocity. He stood rigidly, as if fighting some deep emotion, the surface of his third eye rippling like a larvae struggling to burst free of its cocoon. For a moment Zowan thought his brother would attack him. Instead, Gaias relaxed and chuckled aloud. He said something more, but his voice was eclipsed by another’s:
“You must come down now.” Andros had awakened. “Kill him and be done with it. Then come and free me.” The words carried with them a vision of his brother with the eye put out and blood streaming from his slit throat.
“Answer me, Zowan!” Gaias’s barked command shattered the gruesome image as he shook Zowan by the arm. For the first time Zowan realized his brother had gotten bigger than he was.
“Answer me!” Gaias shook him again, hard, and Zowan struggled to recall what he’ d asked.
“Where is Parthos?” Gaias repeated.
“I don’t know.” But he suddenly realized what Gaias was asking him, and a perverse joy swelled up. Parthos had gotten away!
He clamped down on his excitement, watching Gaias from the corner of his eye as the oculus swiveled in its socket, gleaming in the pale light from the ceiling lamps as it focused and refocused upon him.
“You’re lying,” Gaias said finally, his tone one of astonishment mixed with anger. “You’re lying to me. Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
Zowan said nothing, shocked that Gaias would say such a thing, and almost wanting to laugh. Neos was right: they really couldn’t read his mind.
“Did you think because I’m new that I wouldn’t be able to tell?”
Zowan had no answer for him.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Gaias drew up, scowling at him. “Very well, then. Let us see how the Enclave judges your treachery.”
He glanced over Zowan’s shoulder to the Enforcers behind him, and they came forward to seize Zowan’s arms, dragging him off to his inevitable meeting with the Cube.
Chapter Forty-Four
New Eden
Lacey awoke from a nightmare wherein Erik chased her through Swain’s penthouse with a baseball bat while people chanted a weird version of the Lord’s Prayer in the background.
She lay on a thick, quilted pad in a long, low-ceilinged room. The weak light filtering through a screened opening at the chamber’s far end showed ranks of similar pads—all unoccupied—laid out in two parallel rows down the room’s length, with a walkway between. An annoying, wheedling music emanated from somewhere outside the opening. From the aroma of coffee and toast she guessed it was morning.
Sorting through her memories, she tried to figure out where she was. . . . The party, the moments with Cam in the garden, the standoff with Swain in his loft-museum. Ah, that’s right. . . . Swain had drugged her, probably with a tranquilizer dart to the back of her neck as she’ d fled. That was no doubt why she felt so muzzy-headed and jittery.
The wheedling music faded to silence, and a man spoke briefly in the other room, something about a trial and that everyone was to meet someplace in two hours. Then he, too, fell silent. After a moment she heard sounds of people stirring and women’s voices.
“Well,” one said, “I guess that explains last night.”
“Except he only mentioned Zowan being on trial. What about the other fellow?”
“I heard they took him to Parker himself.”
“I’ve never seen the other man down there before.”
“He was cute, though, wasn’t he?”
Lacey sat up to find she no longer wore the blue cocktail dress but rather a set of white cotton pajamas with red and brown embroidery down the front. Pushing herself to her feet, she shuffled unsteadily to the screen and peered around it. A group of young women sat about the room on a thick Persian rug, all dressed in similar pajamas, though in different colors and styles. Several sat tailor-style on pillows and worked at wooden looms. Others spun thread from baskets of wool using ancient drop spindles, while still others embroidered or worked at needlepoint in their laps. A few—hugely pregnant—merely reclined on the large pillows, chatting.
Mirrored ceiling fixtures cast a diffuse light upon the room, where bookshelves stood here and there against three walls, and a large-screen television hung on the wall to Lacey’s right, flanked by potted Kentia palms. To the left, a series of carved wooden screens filtered light from what seemed to be a long window on its far side.
The dark-haired girl nearest Lacey stopped her spinning to watch the newcomer closely. She looked familiar.
“Where am I?” Lacey asked her.
“You’re in the Residence of Father’s Wives.”
Father’s wives . . . Lacey’s eyes fell to the girl’s pregnant abdomen, swelling like a basketball beneath her billowy tunic. A quick scan confirmed that nearly every woman in the room was in some stage of pregnancy. Memory returned in a rush: Swain’s palm coming to rest on her belly. “Most of all I want this. . . . ”
She’d just spent who-knew-how-many hours unconscious during which they could have done anything to her. Depending on where she was in her monthly cycle, the implantation of an embryo was an easy outpatient procedure accomplished in twenty minutes at most. She could, right now, be pregnant with one of his “gods.” Maybe that was why she felt so strange.
Her knees buckled, and she sagged to the floor. This can’t be happening.
The girl set her spindles aside and came to sit beside her. “I know it’s a bit of a shock, but . . . you’ll be fine. Really.”
“Fine?! I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, am being held here against my will, and you say I’m going to be fine? The only way I’ll be fine is when he lets me out of here.”
The girl looked at her with sympathetic brown eyes. “It’s not that bad a life, really. Our needs are more than met, our work is easy, we have fun, and the food is great. They have a great spa, too.”
Lacey stared at her as if she were out of her mind. Maybe she was. Maybe that was the only way to survive the o
rdeal. To live in self-delusion, telling herself everything was great while ignoring reality.
One of the girls pressed a button in the wall near the TV screen, and soft music filled the silent room. The others were all concentrating on whatever work they had, avoiding Lacey’s gaze. She returned her attention to the first girl and suddenly realized she’ d seen her in the articles about the young women who had disappeared from Kendall-Jakes. “You’re Andrea Stopping!” she cried.
The girl smiled sadly. “Sorry,” she said. “My name is Isis.”
“No, you’re Andrea. I’m sure of it. I read all about your disappearance. They said you were depressed and went out to kill yourself.”
Now the oldest of the women, almost to term from the look of her giant belly, spoke. “Welcome to Paradise, Eve,” she said warmly, as if Lacey had said nothing at all. “We are so glad you have joined us. I am Theia, wife mother. I have borne precious fruit ten times.”
Lacey looked over her shoulder to see this Eve, but no one was there. Is she talking to me? She turned back to find all the girls watching her. “My name’s not Eve,” she said.
“It is now, dear,” Theia informed her with a smile. “That is the name your husband gave you when you became his wife.”
“My husband?! I have no husband, and my name is Lacey McHenry. Not Eve.”
And just like that the women’s pleasant expressions turned disapproving, and except for Isis, all turned away from her very deliberately and went back to their work. After a few moments they resumed their conversation, discussing why those two young men had burst into their chambers last night.
Lacey heard them as through thick wool, words she sensed should have meaning, but did not. Her ears began to roar.
Andrea-Isis gave her shoulder a squeeze. “It’s hard at first,” she whispered. “But it’s better if you don’t fight it. In the end, Parker’s will is done, regardless.” She glanced aside, then added, “And it really is an honor to be part of what he’s doing.”
Lacey leaned away from her, aghast. How could she say such a thing? Accepting slavery as if it were an honor? They were insane. Living in denial and sublimation while.—