daughter's rope, and she darted from his side. His mind filled. His heart emptied. He gave himself to the abyss.
At last, thought Ike, falling to his knees.
Him.
Shoat hummed tunelessly in his sniper's nest, his rifle nested in a stone groove overlooking the abyss. He kept his eye to the scope, watching the tiny figures play out
his script. 'Tick-tock,' he whispered.
Time to nail the coffin shut and start the long road back out. With the exit tunnel sterilized by synthetic virus, there would be no critters left to dodge or run from. His worst dangers would be solitude and boredom. Basically, he faced a lonely half-year of walking with a diet of Power Bars, which he'd secreted at caches all along the way. Finding the hadals mobbed together in this foul pit had been a stroke of good luck. Helios researchers had projected it would take upward of a decade for the prion contagion to filter throughout the sub-Pacific network and exterminate the entire abyssal food chain, including the hadals. But now, with his last five capsules taped inside the laptop computer shell, Shoat could eradicate the nuisance population years ahead of schedule. It was the ultimate Trojan horse.
Shoat felt the high of a survivor. Sure, there'd been some rough spots, and there were bound to be more ahead. But overall, serendipity had favored him. The expedition had self-destructed, though not before carrying him deep. The mercenaries had unraveled, but only after he'd largely run out of uses for them. And now Ike had conveyed the apocalypse straight into the heart of the enemy. 'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,' he muttered, setting his eye to the sniperscope once again.
Just a minute ago, it had seemed Ike was ready to run off. Now, oddly, he was on his knees, groveling in front of some character emerging from the inner building. Now there was a sight, Crockett servile, head glued to the floor.
Shoat wished for a more powerful scope. Who could this be? It would have been interesting to see the hadal's face in detail. The crosshairs would have to do.
Pleased to meet you, Shoat hummed. Hope you guessed my name.
'So you've returned to me,' the voice said from the shadows. 'Stand up.' Ike didn't even raise his head.
She stared down at Ike's bare back, frightened by his subjugation. It upended her universe. He had always seemed the ultimate free spirit, the original rebel. Yet now he knelt in abject surrender, offering no resistance, no protest.
The hadal khan – their rex, or mahdi, or king of kings, however it translated – stood motionless with Ike at his feet. He wore armor made of jade and crystal plates, and under that a Crusader's chain-mail shirt, sleeves short, each link oiled against rust.
She felt sick with realization. This was Satan? This was the one Ike had been seeking, face by face, in all those hadal dead? Not to destroy, as she'd thought, but to worship. Ike kowtowed blankly, his fear – and shame – transparent. He ground his forehead against the flowstone.
'What are you doing?' she said, but not to Ike.
Thomas solemnly opened his arms, and from throughout the city the hadal nations roared up to him. Ali sagged to her knees, speechless. She couldn't begin to fathom the depths of his deceptions. The moment she comprehended one, another cropped up that was more outrageous, from pretending to be her fellow prisoner to manipulating January's group, to posing as human when all along he was hadal.
And yet, even seeing him here, draped in ancient battle gear, receiving the hadal celebration, Ali could not help but see him as the Jesuit, austere and rigorous and humane. It was impossible to simply purge the trust and companionship they'd built over these past weeks.
'Stand up,' Thomas ordered, then looked at Ali, and his tone softened. 'Tell him, if you please, to get off his knees. I have questions.'
Ali knelt beside Ike, her head by his so that they could hear each other over the roar of the hadals' adulation. She ran her hand across his knotted shoulders, over the scars at his neck where the iron ring had cinched his vertebrae.
'Get up,' Thomas repeated.
Ali looked up at Thomas. 'He's not your enemy,' she said. An instinct urged her to advocate for Ike. It had to do with more than Ike's submission and fear. Suddenly she had her own grounds for fear. If Thomas was truly their ruler, then it was he who'd permitted Walker's soldiers to be tortured through all these days. And Ike was a soldier.
'Not in the beginning,' Thomas conceded. 'In the beginning, when we first brought him in, he was more like an orphan. And I brought him into our people. And our reward? He brings war and famine and disease. We gave him life and taught him the way. And he brought soldiers, and guided colonists. Now he's come home to us. But as our prodigal son, or our mortal enemy? Answer me. Stand up.'
Ike stood.
Thomas took Ike's left hand and lifted it to his mouth. Ali thought he meant to kiss the sinner's hand, to reconcile, and she felt hope. Instead he parted Ike's fingers and put the index finger into his mouth. Then he sucked it. Ali blinked at the lewdness of it. The old man took the finger in all the way to the bottom knuckle and wrapped his lips around the root.
Ike looked over at Ali, jaws bunching. Close your eyes, he signaled. She didn't.
Thomas bit.
His teeth snapped through the bone. He yanked Ike's hand to one side.
Ike's blood slashed across Thomas's jade armor and into Ali's hair. She yelped. His body shivered. Otherwise he gave no reaction except to lower his head in supplication. His arm remained outstretched. More fingers? Ali thought.
'What are you doing?' she cried out.
Thomas looked at her with bloody lips. He removed the finger from his mouth as if it were a fishbone, and wrapped it in Ike's mutilated hand, which he then released.
'What would you have me do with this faithless lamb?' Now Ali saw. Here was the real Satan.
He'd misled her from the start. She'd misled herself. With their systematic study of her maps, and their promising interpretation of the hadal alphabets, glyphs, and history, Ali had tricked herself into thinking she understood the terms of this place. It was the scholar's illusion, that words might be the world. But here was the legend with a thousand faces. Kindly, then angry; giving, then taking. Human, then hadal.
Ike knelt, his head still bent. 'Spare this woman,' he asked. The pain told in his voice. Thomas was cold. 'So gallant.'
'You have uses for her.'
Ali was astonished, less by Ike trying to save the day than by the fact her day needed saving. Until a few minutes ago, her safety had seemed a reasonable bet. Now Ike's blood was in her hair. No matter how deeply she penetrated with her scholarship, it seemed, the cruelty of this place was adamant.
'I do,' said Thomas. 'Many uses.' He stroked Ali's hair, and the armor tinkled like chandelier glass. She started at the proprietary gesture.
'She will restore my memory. She'll tell me a thousand stories. Through her, I'll remember all the things time has stolen from me. How to read the old writings, how to dream an empire, how to carry a people to greatness. So much has slid from my mind. What it was like in the beginning. The face of God. His voice. His words.'
'God?' she murmured.
'Whatever you want to call him. The shekinah who existed before me. The divine incarnate. Before history ever began. At the farthest edge of my memory.'
'You saw him?'
'I am him. The memory of him. An ugly brute, as I recall. More ape than Moses. But, you see, I've forgotten. It's like trying to remember the moment of my own birth. My first birth as who I am.' His voice grew as faint as dust.
