Cam did not ask him what theories those were. He had a good idea, and they’d been over it before. Nor did he think Swain would welcome his observations that in his experiment, he’ d also had people breaking out of the mold, asking too many questions, trying to escape, and even believing in Christ.
Thankfully Swain returned soon enough to the eye, frustrated they’d not been able to induce the generation of an optic nerve to serve it. Of course, he added, it was possible the oculus was not an organ of vision at all, but something else entirely. They would find out for sure when the most recent subject was dissected.
“So Neos is dead, then,” Cam observed bleakly.
Swain looked at him in momentary surprise. Understanding cleared his brow. “That’s right. Zowan would’ve told you his name. No, Neos is not dead. We’ll keep him alive as long as we can. He’s turned out to be an incredibly valuable subject, and one whose development has astonished us all. Alone of all our subjects, his oculus does seem to have developed a function.”
He seemed unaware that everything he said confirmed Cam’s worst suspicion. That they’d apparently acquired a sequence of genes that would generate the third eye with no real idea what those genes did. Or even what the third eye did. Unless Swain was holding back— entirely likely.
“Cameron! You must come now!” His thought had drawn the imprisoned Nephilim’s attention. Its voice was distinctly angry, even desperate, as it had not been previously. Suddenly a succession of bizarre images flashed through his mind—the gleam of a knife blade, a man’s bloody carcass, tongues of fire licking upward as someone screamed in a distant hallway.
A sharp pain in his hand drew him out of the vision. He looked down to see that he had pulled up an edge of the glue-sutured slice on his palm, enough that it welled a single bright drop of red blood. A drop that seized and held his gaze with inexplicable power.
The compulsion to stare at it waned as quickly as it had come, and he looked up to find Swain staring at the blood, as well. As if he’ d been every bit as caught up in it.
Cam shook off the incident and returned to their earlier subject. “I know about Ecuador,” he said. “How your people released one of the Nephilim—”
“Nephilim?” Swain’s gaze snapped up to his. “From Genesis six?
Is that what you’re calling them?”
“It’s what they are.”
“I thought the Nephilim all drowned in the Great Flood.”
“It says, ‘The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward. . . . ’ ”
“And, of course, that couldn’t be an error.”
“When the Jews spied out the Promised Land they found the sons of Anak there, who were part of the Nephilim. Where did they come from if all the Nephilim drowned?”
“Perhaps the sons of God made new ones.”
“Or perhaps they made themselves their own individual versions of the ark, in which they planned to ride out the catastrophe should it occur.”
“I seriously doubt those in antediluvian times could have produced something as technologically advanced as one of those pods, Dr. Reinhardt.”
“Why not? We have no idea what the level of the antediluvians’ technology was. Even if it rivaled ours, it would have been completely destroyed in the geologic upheaval that accompanied the Flood. I think it was considerably higher than we give them credit for—a theory the nature of these pods supports.”
Swain grimaced at him. “I think you’re groping after straws.”
“Well, whatever these things are, I know you let one out in Ecuador and it destroyed your entire facility. I also know you went back and got the thing after it began to rampage the countryside. So you know what it can do.”
“An earthquake destroyed that facility.”
Cam stared at him without argument.
Swain stood up. “But you’re right. Our source for the transgenic DNA we’ve been using is indeed the remains of the first Visitor we released.”
They’d frozen him in liquid nitrogen in the same lab where they were keeping the sarcs. Using a personal DVD player, Swain showed him video and stills of the capture operation and of the unconscious specimen wrapped in some sort of white webbing. Surprisingly, it was a very strong Taser that had taken the creature down. Bullets had simply bounced off.
“As you can see,” Swain said, “the creatures within those pods are very like humans.”
Except for being twenty feet tall, and the thing had the same large brow, crest of golden quills, and third eye that had been slowly manifesting in Neos.
“Their genes are significantly more robust and resilient than human genes, however,” Swain continued, “and are consistently dominant when paired with human counterparts. Moreover, the changes they elicit have been exceptionally long-lived. In fact, we’ve not one instance of regression to the original form.”
“What about deaths?” Cam asked pointedly.
Swain shrugged. “Morbidity rates have been high, yes. That’s why we need to release one of them. We need to see exactly what it is we’re working with.”
“I don’t know why you’d want to work with it at all. Where’s the good in any of it?”
“They haven’t died, Cameron. After four thousand years, they’re still alive.”
Cam sighed his exasperation.
“Yes, I know they’re unstable and prone to violent outbursts. But I believe that’s a temporary reaction to their long imprisonment and slow starvation. Thus we’ve devised a system to restrain them using the same material we employed to capture the one in Ecuador. It should hold them still long enough for us to sedate them and feed them for a while by IV.”
“How can you possibly know what will sedate them—if anything? Or how much of a dose you’d need? They may be like men, but they’re not men, and—”
“Well, we’ll just have to work all that out. If we lose a few in the process, so be it. I have five of them on-site, so we have room to experiment.”
“It’s not them you should be concerned about losing,” Cam said. “It’s everything else.”
Swain smiled tolerantly as he pulled open the door. “Shall we go down and see them?”
Chapter Forty-Six
New Eden
At last Zowan understood why Andros had been so cowed. Even having been to the surface and knowing the truth, it was hard to hold on to his convictions when standing on the stage of the red-lit Justorium pinioned between two Enforcers—one of them his brother Gaias. He was glad they were holding him, because his knees felt like jelly.
Irrationally he kept searching the upper tiers of the women’s section for Terra, even though he knew she was in the Wives’ Residence. Maybe it was because he still couldn’t believe he’ d seen her there—or didn’t want to believe it.
He dropped his attention to the High Elders seated in the first three rows before him. He could see the face of nearly every one of them— Elder Horus, Elder Zayus, Elder Amrun, Elder Rhea, Elder Horus . . . He frowned. Wasn’t Elder Horus on the other side of that row?
Yes! One of them—likely the one at the very end of the row—must be Parthos! The realization cut through Zowan’s fear and energized him like nothing else. Parthos wasn’t dead! He wasn’t in the secret lab. He was right there!
Silence descended over the Justorium as Elder Zayus arose. In his sonorous voice, he began to speak the History, and Zowan heard it as he had never heard it before: nothing but lie after lie after lie. Worse than simple lying, since by it Father claimed the position Zowan now knew belonged only to I Am. Jesus Christ was the true savior of the world, and Father belittled both His person and His work by claiming that status for himself. By the time the charges were read—rebellion, defiance, blasphemy—Zowan was burning with outrage.
“Do you deny these charges?” Elder Zayus thundered.
“I deny the History!” Zowan shouted furiously. “It’s all a lie. Father did not save us! He concocted all this to hold us prisoner here. The world has not—”
A tingling, vibrating shock jolted through him, and he stiffened like a pole, his voice choking off.
“Silence!” the Elder commanded, though by then Zowan was completely incapable of speech. The current stopped, and he sagged limply in the hands of the Enforcers.
“You have heard his blasphemy for yourselves!” cried Zayus, voice thundering through the pit-like chamber.
Around him the Edenites exploded with indignant shouts and boos. “Put him in the Cube!” “He deserves the Cube!”
When the sound had died away, the Elder continued: “Father created you, and this is your thanks? He has cared for you, protected you, provided—”
“Father did not create me!” Zowan cried. “God created me!”
He braced for the shock that would silence him, but it did not come. For a long moment no one moved or breathed.
“You have broken the most sacred laws of New Eden,” said Elder Zayus. “You have defied Father, insulted him, blasphemed against him. For this you deserve death. Repent now. Ask forgiveness that you might live.”
Zowan clenched his teeth and said nothing, part of him wondering where in the world this wild obstinacy, this insane courage, had come from.
The Elder glared at him. “Very well.”
He gestured for the Enforcers to take Zowan away.
They jerked him sideways through the stage’s exit, then urged him down a spiraling, wrought-iron stairway into the basement below, where the black Cube awaited, floating, one corner down, about ten feet above the floor.
“Zowan, come and free me,” the false Andros nagged. “You owe me.”
“I can’t wait to see you fry,” Gaias said as he propelled Zowan across the rock floor to a spot beneath the Cube’s lowest corner. “I’ll be laughing with every hop and scream you make, you blasphemous ingrate!”
Once his words would have angered Zowan. Now they seemed irrelevant. The other Enforcer had gone to the control panel on the chamber’s far side and now guided the box slowly downward.
Zowan wasn’t sure what happened—one minute he was staring up at the point of the Cube, and the next he stood on a mountainside, battered by wind and water, staring down the deep, narrow valley below him. He felt a profound shock at having the wind hurl water through the air at him. It wasn’t right. Water didn’t fall from the air. And yet it was. Worse, it had been falling for hours, until the ground was saturated, and streams coursed down the hillsides all around him.
Iridescent ovoid aircars were arriving, one every few minutes or so, from seemingly every direction, many of them dashed to pieces on the rocks by the high winds before they could reach the landing plaza carved into the mountainside below him. But it was the rain that captured his attention. The old oracle had been right!
“Hurry up!” a familiar voice called from behind him. “We have no time to gawk.”
The ground lurched, pitching him off-balance, and the rain and wind disappeared as Zowan returned to the Justorium, where somehow he’d come to be inside the hollow Cube. Balanced with one foot on the meeting of two planes and the other flat in the middle of the third, he straddled the bottom corner where they all came together.
Suddenly the Nephilim called to him, not just “Andros” but many. He heard their voices more clearly than ever before, commanding him to come and free them as the wall in front of him slid downward and the Cube rose into the Justorium. The smoky glass blurred the chamber’s concentric levels of spectators into vague shapes of light and dark.
The Cube stopped moving. Zowan held his breath.
A thread of light flickered across the surface of glass, and a shock forced his foot off the crack as he yelped. It was followed by another, which dislodged his right foot before he could find solid purchase for his left. He went down to a knee, put out a hand, as again and again he was shocked and stabbed and burned by the currents—
And was abruptly transported back to the mountainside, the wind-driven rain lashing him furiously. It was not a dream, nor a hallucination, but a memory. Not Zowan’s . . . but one of the Nephilim’s. Someone named Avalan.
His friend Tumul pulled him around, and drops of water drove into his face. Overhead, the usual covering mist had clumped together into thick, swirling, black-bellied gouts. A flare of light crackled across the angry, churning surface, jolting him. Underfoot, the ground shook ominously.
Urgency beat at him as he hurried up the rain-slicked path, pulling himself along by the handrail. Ahead the Temple opening loomed, a lighted maw in the dark mountainside. Others of his order struggled up the stairs ahead of him and Tumul.
Again light flared and boomed across the heavens, water falling upon him like a river running off a cliff. As he reached the first porch, he came even with his friend, whose golden crest stood upright from the top of his head despite the pounding water, as sure a sign of his alarm as the wide-eyed expression on his face.
Together they dashed through the great arched doorway and up to the black Cube floating in the antechamber, lines of light-power snaking across it. Sidling between those of their brethren already present, they placed their palms against one of the Cube’s flat planes, depositing their memories into its depths. Around him, Avalan saw representatives of all three lines—the Three-Eyes, largest of their kind, strong and fierce defenders, the Golden Men, beautiful of face and form, full of grace, bursting with vitality, and the Wisdom Keepers, smallest in stature, but the most driven, the most intense, the ones who led.
As more and more hands touched the Cube’s great planes, the lines of light within it increased both in number and in intensity until its form pulsed with red-gold luminescence. Holding his position despite the increased jostling of the crowd, Avalan kept his palm against the glass until the sense of suction eased. Then he stepped back to let another take his place and hurried into the main rotunda.
As he stepped through the door, the air shook and rumbled as once more the floor trembled beneath his feet. He could spare but a moment to note these harbingers of catastrophe, hastening around the raised walkway of the central well toward his life pod, one of the fifty-five prepared and ready. Pod-generation monitors provided a pattern of colorful lighting along the rotunda’s curved outer walls.
Reaching his pod, he stripped off his tunic with shaking hands, still hardly believing what was happening. He climbed up the ladder to the platform beside the bright green pod, pressed back the edges of the opening that had been left in it. Then with the acolyte helping to hold it open, he plunged a bare foot into the dark green gel within.
Shivering at the thought of being submerged in the substance, Avalan assured himself he’d be out soon, and congratulated himself for having joined the Order of the New Seeds. At last all the mockery he and his fellows had endured for suggesting the crazy oracle’s predictions of calamity might be right was about to fall back on the heads of those who’d mocked.
He grabbed hold of the railing on the far side and plunged his other foot into the pod, the dark gel warm and tingly. Again the ground rumbled, and from the antechamber outside people shrieked about the hillside below exploding in a torrent of water.
With a gulping swallow and gritted teeth, Avalan sat down in the pod. Then taking one last look around, he slid all the way in and the gel seized him. He felt a terrible shrieking pain, the pressure of suffocation, the sense of his body being turned inside out as fire scoured his flesh.
Again Zowan was thrown out of Avalan’s memory and back to the Cube, where his body was jittering and yowling and lurching about as hot lines of light scored his skin and rods of fire plunged up the length of his leg bones, burning into his lungs, his heart, his brain. Desperately he shoved himself up in an effort to touch the surfaces around him no longer than he had to, but it was impossible. Soon he would lose strength to keep fighting and the currents would burn him to a crisp.
Then it all stopped and darkness swathed him. He was no longer flesh but color—green and blue surrounded by blackness. He was hungry. Desper
ately hungry. And he was heartbreakingly alone. When would someone come to let him out? How long could it take to open fifty-five life pods?
That was Avalan again. Not Zowan. And yet his dreadful isolation flowed into Zowan like the thick gel in which he floated, a smothering weight that blotted out all feeling, all hope, all significance. He was cut off, forgotten, cast away. . . . His insides were withering away, his soul shriveling, his heart drying up. . . .
No, Zowan, said a new voice. A warm, rich, very familiar voice. That is not you. That will never be you.
And the darkness became that which another man had endured long ago, a man who had hung and died on a cross and was cut off, despised and cast away. A man without sin, who was made sin for the rest, so they might live. So that Zowan might live.
He died and rose again so that Zowan would never be alone again. The seed of the woman crushing the serpent’s head.
The mind in the darkness of the pod startled out of its self-absorption. What? Zowan felt its attention fix upon him, seeing something he did not see. Died and rose again? Crushed the serpent’s head?
No. It cannot be.
It is, said the other voice. It was. It will be forever.
Who are you?
I Am.
“Noooo!” The creature in the pod erupted out of its dark, sad loneliness into fulminating fury, reaching into Zowan’s heart as if it meant to drag him down with it. But the light of I Am merely flicked it aside, blasting away the sticky, gooey darkness, and shattering the Cube that held it, deadly shards of black glass flying outward in all directions.
No longer imprisoned by the Cube’s planes, Zowan tumbled through the hole where the Justorium’s stage had been into the basement below, slamming into the stone floor and a darkness that knew nothing at all.