The spectators hissed at Hagos. Some rituals still mattered, apparently. Without his meditations with Fana, Dawit might have been angry at such an insult. But, unlike Mahmoud, anger was not his friend in a battle; he had suffered his worst heartaches and defeats when his emotions roiled most. Dawit smiled instead. I am the better fighter, he told himself, holding the thought close.
He hoped so, anyway.
Dawit met Hagos in the Circle’s bright light.
Facing Hagos, Dawit remembered Khaldun’s first lesson when he and his Brothers had awakened with the new Blood in their veins: Your Blood makes you longer-lived than ordinary men, but you are still men. You are not stronger than ordinary men. You will hurt and bleed like ordinary men. You will heal, but healing takes time. Do not expect to be gods.
He wished he had not fought with Mahmoud first, or with such vigor. Dawit was alarmed at his own sluggishness. At first, he seemed to be only watching Hagos spring around him as he tested for weaknesses, his gloves’ blades pinwheeling close to Dawit’s face and belly. Hagos’s sweeping kick toward his groin came within two inches of slicing Dawit’s most tender region, an indignity he had avoided in five centuries of life. Dawit’s legs and arms were leaden, and Hagos was fresh. Even the wound on his arm throbbed enough to distract him.
His mind arts were a disappointment, too. Most of Hagos’s thoughts were incoherent, and the signals often came too late. Hagos fought by instinct, not strategy.
NECK, a thought came through, and Dawit ducked in time to avoid an assured swipe with Hagos’s right hand that might have been strong enough to behead him. The spectators clucked, excited, another distraction. Their thoughts would attract others, and Dawit was already struggling to stay focused on Hagos. How did Fana tolerate her heightened sensitivity?
Dawit’s mental clumsiness cost him. While he fumbled with Hagos’s thoughts, a blade suddenly pierced him to the bone just above his knee, unheralded. The pain was so dazzling that his leg nearly buckled.
Dawit yanked his flesh free from the blade, slashing an X across Hagos’s bare chest before he leaped away with the strength of his uninjured leg. When he landed several meters away, the soles of Dawit’s slippers whined against the blood spotting the Circle’s floor. His pierced leg was numb in places, afire in others.
Hagos charged.
Finish him, Dawit thought. His mind went as placid as the waters of Miami’s Biscayne Bay, which he imagined during meditation.
The approving clicks and clucks from his Brothers vanished as the room went silent. Hagos’s chaotic thoughts, too, went silent. All Dawit heard was his own steady heartbeat, slowing even as it strengthened. His flesh vanished, too, taking his pain away.
Images appeared in sudden flashes of bright light: Hagos’s right arm hooking toward him. The flash of the sinister blade on Hagos’s right foot.
Dawit watched Hagos’s spectacular, spinning midair flip, as if he had taken flight. Saw the luminous tip of Hagos’s blade nearly rake his eyes.
Dawit rolled, springing and leaping as soon as his feet found the floor. Calmly, he noted that he was behind Hagos when he landed. His eyes fixed on the brown skin at the nape of his opponent’s neck. To Dawit’s perception, Hagos stood as still as a monument.
No one will harm my daughter, Dawit thought. No one will harm my family again.
Dawit did not recognize the yell that spilled from his lips. He spun toward Hagos with both arms outstretched, his twin blades blurred as he snapped them like scissors.
A wet thunk at his feet, like a tumbled melon, told Dawit that the match was over. He saw Mahmoud’s delighted grin beyond the Circle, through the void between Hagos’s hulking shoulders. Then Hagos’s headless torso slumped to the floor.
This time, Dawit mused, his Brother might be luckier.
Perhaps he would wake up with a full head of hair.
Sixteen
The tires of Johnny Wright’s ATV whirred over a pile of gravel on the winding, polished-stone path, skidding, and the Lalibela Colony sprawled above and below him as he drifted toward the ravine. The vehicle righted itself with a tap from Johnny’s thumb on the handlebar controls, as sensitive as a nerve-controlled artificial limb.
The colony had three levels, each two or three stories high, and the oval courtyard below was at least the size of a football field. Like a giant beehive, or an ant colony, but without the activity, Johnny thought. It always looked deserted, most of the immortals out of sight.
The lighting was bright, like midday sunshine, so Johnny slipped on his shades. The colony never had night, and he had never missed the dark so much. Johnny’s watch was still set to Southern California, so it was the middle of the night for him.
Like an immortal, Johnny didn’t sleep much these days. He was bone tired, but the nightmares in his waking hours kept him from going to sleep.
Dawit had warned Johnny to stay away from the House of Science, but they needed news about a vaccine or an antidote. Then they needed to pray there was time to flush it into the Glow network. Suddenly, the Glow network seemed to exist for no other reason than to give people a chance to survive the Big One.
He and Caitlin didn’t rely on anyone else to make sure the House of Science was cooperating, and not in immortal time. Fana vanished into meditation for six hours straight, trying to be ready for Michel one day.
When Johnny rounded the bend, he saw two men approaching in animated conversation. Amharic? Arabic? Their voices were too soft to tell. Dawit had advised him to avoid direct contact with immortals he did not know.
These two men quieted as they neared him, but they didn’t slow their pace. Johnny coaxed his ATV to a careful stop on the narrow path, brushing his knee against the smooth, blood-colored stone wall to allow them to pass. His heart sped as he pasted a polite smile on his lips. If one of them decided to give him a friendly shove over the side, it was a long way down to the rock garden, where a clawlike stone spindle would skewer him.
Like all the immortals here, they walked nude. Johnny averted his eyes as the two men approached him in a cloud of thick cologne. Scented baths were a religion here.
One man seemed to return his smile when he glanced at them, so Johnny grinned more widely. Damn—a mistake. They stopped walking, towered above him; one in front of him, one behind. Their gazes were heavy enough to carry weight.
“Good morning,” Johnny said, a nervous reflex. Who knew if they spoke English? And that greeting was meaningless in a place with no day or night.
The man in front of him looked like a pro wrestler, squat and thick-muscled. Johnny gripped his handlebars. He kept his smile, but he would mow over this guy if he made a sudden move. On such a narrow path, he didn’t have room for diplomacy.
Just try it, Johnny thought. Johnny hoped he was a HiTel, and he’d gotten the message.
The squat man wrinkled his face and made an exaggerated sniffing sound for his friend, and they both chuckled. Johnny didn’t need a translator to tell him they thought he stank like a mortal. They walked on, still laughing and almost surely talking about him. They hadn’t been taunting him—he could have been an animal at the zoo.
Glad to entertain you, Johnny thought. At least I don’t smell like I fell into a vat of Polo.
The immortals seemed to laugh more loudly. Johnny tapped his accelerator and raced on.
Only a few more days, he told himself. Fana wanted to spend some time with her teacher and her mother, and then they would all go up to the real world to get back to healing. Johnny didn’t think he could get used to the Lalibela Colony if he had a lifetime.
It had been a year since Fana and her family had first brought him to Lalibela, but the immortals had never let him and Caitlin forget that they were mortals. Caitlin hated the word “mortals”—she said it was like “nigger.” Almost every immortal they met, even the ones in Fana’s circle, gave him and Caitlin looks as if to say, What are YOU doing here, monkey?
Now that word, monkey, had more than a ring of “nigg
er” to it. Johnny had heard it only once, muttered under Berhanu’s breath, but once was enough. And Berhanu was on his side. Caitlin said she got it worse because she was a female, and no woman had lived there in more than five hundred years. And Fana’s last visit with Jessica had been a disaster.
The founder of the colony had forbidden female immortals, Fana had told him, because he didn’t want them to reproduce and dominate mortals. But why create Michel and the others?
The Lalibela Council had chosen his housing, so he and Caitlin had two large, spare rooms at the end of West Hell while everyone else got to live one level higher, closer to Fana. His room was twice as big and airy as a New York loft apartment, but it was empty and lifeless. It looked like a cave; all it was missing was real bats.
That’s why he’d gotten himself a Batmobile. Dawit had built it for him, probably because Fana had pressured him—and it looked like the real-world version of an ATV, except it didn’t use gas. The Batmobile was always on, and never made a sound. Dawit had explained the intricacies of the power source, which was the same as that which powered the globe that perpetually shone above them, something Dawit had called “solar transfusion.” Although Johnny had been premed at Berkeley and thought he knew his science, he’d mostly nodded his head and felt stupid. The Life Brothers kept technologies lying around like spare change.
He could learn so much, if he could slow down. If the immortals would share more.
Why wouldn’t Fana give him the Blood? Sometimes, Johnny’s frustration emerged as anger. He had asked her on two occasions, even if he’d pretended that the first time had been a joke. Fana did everything in her own time and way, but she should have offered him the Blood a long time ago. There was a ceremony that could turn mortals into immortals. He shouldn’t have had to ask, and she’d been selfish to deny him. Fana didn’t have to care what the Lalibela Council thought, or anyone else—even Michel.
Especially Michel.
Hadn’t he proven himself? Like Doc Shepard, he had risked his life to help heal with the Blood. And he wasn’t confused about the Blood like Doc Shepard and his wife, Alex, who were always bent over a microscope, looking for answers in the red cells, platelets, and leukocytes. Because they seeing see not, and they hearing hear not, just like it said in Matthew.
Johnny and Fana’s mother prayed together and talked sometimes, when Jessica was in the mood for praying or talking. And that’s when she’d told him: Fana wasn’t sure she believed her blood was from Christ, or that Christ had been anything except another immortal.
If Fana wasn’t a believer, she couldn’t recognize Michel, either. But Johnny didn’t need to meditate his days away to know who Michel was. Maybe Fana didn’t want to see it, because then she would have to remember the Book of Revelation:
Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?
Johnny felt a chill despite the colony’s temperate air.
When he saw the narrow cavern that housed the steps, he stopped his Batmobile again.
Time to start walking.
Johnny could smell the House of Science long before it was in sight. Unlike the rest of the colony he’d toured, the House of Science smelled green. Damp. Alive. A bird’s subdued warbling reminded him to turn left at a fork in the passageway, so he trudged on, his way lighted by glowing globes on sconces.
The walk took a solid hour. Johnny’s shirt was wet with perspiration from climbing the steps. He’d tried to pace himself, but three hundred steps were three hundred steps. Thank God the passage was saturated with oxygen from the foliage growing ahead. Johnny gulped at the air.
The passage opened up, and suddenly Johnny was in the folds of a jungle, moist soil sucking at his shoes. Doc Shepard had nicknamed this space the Rainforest, saying it reminded him of the rain forest in Peru, where he’d studied plants years ago.
Johnny was dwarfed beneath fifty-foot trees and colorful, big-leafed plants that were a botanist’s paradise. One had broad, waving leaves that looked like human hands in startling purple, snapping shut at intervals like a Venus flytrap. Rust-orange shoots of grass stood ten feet tall. One neon plant draped itself over the trees like netting, as delicate and intricate as a spider’s web. Like the animals he sometimes spotted in the House of Science, the plants were a combination of known breeds, past and present, and hybrids unique to the Lalibela Colony.
Something rustled near him, and Johnny tensed. He never knew what kind of creature would come crashing out of the brush here, but a glint of silver told him that it was only a tiny mechanical camera on legs, shooting up the tree trunk to broadcast his arrival. The immortals called them Spiders. Once he noticed one, Johnny counted a half dozen scurrying within sight. Spiders seemed to follow him, especially in the House of Science.
The immortals treasured their secrets.
The Rainforest was only the foyer in the House of Science, the equivalent of potted plants and a magazine rack in a doctor’s waiting room. Doc Shepard and Alex had been invited beyond this area twice, but Johnny never had. Returning, they had described an amazing information system that was part voice, part holograms. Antigravity chambers. And an arsenal that would give the DOD nightmares. The House of Science was one more benefit he would receive only after he had the Blood.
“Hello?” he called out. “Is Yacob here?”
Doc Shepard had told him to speak only to Yacob, not that anyone else would respond. Yacob was one of the few Lalibela immortals who treated them with courtesy, since he’d lived among mortals and was a self-proclaimed “mortalphile.”
A sharp tug at Johnny’s right pant leg and a blur of gray fur made him cry out, panicked. The creature was small, but it was fast. Johnny’s eyes could barely track the furry tail as the creature flew to a branch on a tree five feet from Johnny’s face.
It was only a chatter monkey, he realized when he took in the animal’s bony limbs and wide, childlike eyes. But this wasn’t a monkey from the real world: this was a genetically engineered monkey with a squirrel’s full, plumelike tail and a human’s opposable thumbs. They were roughly the size of squirrel monkeys, or lemurs. Johnny was partly enchanted by the creatures, partly repelled. The furless, oval faces looked far too human.
And then there was the talking.
“Yacob!” the creature chattered at him. Almost perfect speech. A newcomer might not hear the distinct sounds forming the word, but Johnny did.
“Is Yacob here?” Johnny said. He always felt foolish talking to the bright-eyed monkeys; they seemed to have the mental capacities of a four-year-old. If not for Michel and the virus, he would have been awestruck.
“Yacob come!” the monkey said, and bounded into the treetops, vanishing.
“Tell him it’s … urgent.” Johnny’s voice trailed off. Judging from the swaying treetops ahead, the monkey wasn’t listening anymore. And they did only what amused them, so he’d learned the hard way that they weren’t reliable receptionists.
The talking monkeys reminded Johnny of the singing frog from the old Warner Bros. cartoon. He imagined himself stealing one to get rich, only to be humiliated when it refused to make a sound after the curtain rose. He’d had a similar experience when he tried to coax one to talk for Caitlin: silence and those big who, me? eyes.
Hell, the chatter monkeys were better off with the immortals. Would their lives improve once they were introduced to the world outside? The thought made Johnny shudder.
Immediacy was a foreign concept at the Lalibela Colony, so it might be a long wait. Johnny was looking for a dry stump on which to sit down and rest when Yacob appeared from a shadow, as if from nowhere, dressed in a white lab coat. A tangle of hidden passageways beneath the surface gave the illusion that immortals could teleport themselves. Maybe they could.
Yacob looked about thirty, an older appearance than most immortals’, with a handlebar mustache that reminded Johnny of a sheriff in a bad Western. He had full cheeks and large teeth. Johnny took a step toward Yacob.
In more li
ght, the illusion shattered.
Johnny was face-to-face only with Yacob’s visage, lifelike except for a mild haziness that obscured fine detail. He should have known that Yacob would never wear a lab coat; he’d only made himself appear that way as a courtesy. Yacob didn’t smile as he usually did. Maybe it was only a lazy projection, but his face didn’t look friendly today.
“You should not be here,” Yacob said. “I’ve told you this, John. The council—”
“Doc Shepard said you would help me,” Johnny said. “Help us. I’m sure you’ve heard.”
Yacob, through his visage, sighed. “I’m so very sorry. We are aghast at Alem.”
“All due respect, but we don’t need hand-wringing. We need allies.” The sharpness in his own voice surprised Johnny. “Do you have a cure? A vaccine? Doc Shepard and Alex are still waiting to hear something in Nigeria. It could flare up anywhere, Yacob.”
“Dawit has spoken to me,” Yacob said.
“It started here,” Johnny said. “So you can fight it.”
Yacob spoke in a frustrated rush. “Some records are missing, it seems, and the tissue samples Dawit brought are useless to me. The virus mutates once it reproduces, to prevent decoding. Michel has altered it. It’s a damnable puzzle, which leaves me with millions of viruses to study in virtual darkness. I am extrapolating what I can, but I can only report my findings to Dawit and Fana. You cannot envision the furor you cause every time you leave footprints here, John. Our science is sacrosanct to us.”
Johnny’s teeth tightened. “Your science is about to exterminate us.”
Yacob’s visage went silent. He couldn’t deny it. No wonder Yacob had sent his visage—Yacob didn’t want to be seen with him. Yacob’s figure was already growing fainter. Johnny could barely see Yacob’s eyes anymore.
An invisible creature shrieked from the treetops, a sound that was half laugh, half crazed scream. Not one of the monkeys.
“Yacob, please wait,” Johnny said, but the visage was gone. Damn. He hadn’t climbed three hundred steps to talk to a monkey and an optical illusion.