prop the door open before going to take a closer look at the paintings. Well, kind of paintings. She supposed technically they'd be called mixed media. The three pieces were of women, one on each canvas, but each also contained an octagonal clock – the first and last set at midnight, the one in the middle at five o'clock. A small, bowl-like tray protruded from the bottom of each frame. They were labeled as the goddesses of the past, present, and future, from left to right.
'On the postcard, it said something about putting your hands together,' Carlos said. 'That's like the clock hands, right?' Jill nodded. 'Yeah, makes sense. It's just obscure enough to be annoying.'
She reached forward and lightly touched the tray on the middle frame, a dancing woman. There was a tiny click and the tray dipped like a scale, the weight of her hand pushing it down. At the same time, the hands of the clock started to spin. Jill jerked her hand back, afraid that she'd set some-thing off, and the clock hands quickly spun back to their previous settings. Nothing else happened. 'Hands together…,' she murmured. 'Do you think they mean that all of the clocks have to be set for the same time? Or do they mean literally, the hands aligned?'
Carlos shrugged and reached out to touch the tray of the future goddess, definitely the creepiest of the paint- ings. The past was a young girl sitting on a hill, the present a dancing woman… and the goddess of the fu-ture was the figure of a woman in a slinky cocktail dress, her body enticingly posed, but with the bald, grinning face of a skeleton. Jill suppressed a shudder and didn't let any thoughts get started on the theme of imminent death, like I don't have enough of that already.
The tray Carlos touched dipped down, but again, it was the hands on the clock of the present goddess that moved. Apparently, the other two were fixed at mid-night. Jill stepped back from the wall, arms folded, think-ing – and suddenly she had it, she knew how the puzzle worked, if not the exact solution. She turned around, hoping that the missing pieces were nearby, and she smiled when she saw the three statues – ah, the symme-try – and the shining objects they held in their slender stone fingers. 'It's a balancing puzzle,' Jill said, walking to the statues. At closer inspection, she saw that each held a tray with a single, fist-sized stone. She picked them up, hefting each orb, noting the different weights. 'Three balls, three trays,' she continued, walking back to the pictures, handing the black stone -made from obsidian or onyx, she wasn't sure to Carlos. An-other was clear crystal, the third a glowing amber.
'And the goal is to make the middle clock hit mid-night,' Carlos said, catching on.Jill nodded. 'I'm sure there's a motif to the solution,a color match, like black for death, maybe… ormaybe it's mathematical. It doesn't matter, it won'ttake that long to try all of the combinations.'
They set to work, trying each ball on one painting at a time, then using them all, Jill carefully studying the present clock's hand movements with each placement. It appeared that the different balls held different values, depending on which tray they were in. Jill was just starting to feel like she could figure it out – it was defi-nitely mathematical – when they lucked across the so-lution. With crystal in the past, obsidian in the present, and amber in the future, the clock in the middle struck mid-night, chiming softly. The minute hand started to move backwards with a clattering sound – and then the face of the clock itself fell from the picture, pushed out by some machinery that Jill couldn't see. In the revealed hollow was the glittering gold cog that had been miss-ing from the tower's bell mechanism.
Sneaky, you pricks, but not sneaky enough.
Carlos was frowning, his expression openly con-fused. 'What the hell is all this, anyway? Who would hide the gear at all, and why in such a complicated way?'
Jill plucked the shining gear from its hiding place, remembering her own thoughts on that exact subject only six weeks before, standing in the dark halls of Spencer's mansion. Why, why such elaborate secrecy? The files Trent had given her just before the estate mis-sion had been full of clues to the mansion's puzzles, lucky for her; without those, she might never have got-ten out. Most of the bizarre little mechanisms had been much too intricate to be practical, time-wise or func-tionally. What was the point? After giving it a lot of thought, Jill had finally con-cluded that Umbrella's real board of directors, the ones no one knew about, were paranoid fanatics. They were self- involved children, playing secret agent games and betting with other people's lives, because they could. Because no one had ever explained to them that hiding toys and making treasure maps was something people outgrew.
Because no one has stopped them. Yet.
Suddenly eager to wrap it all up, to place the gear and ring the bell and just leave, Jill phrased it much more simply to Carlos. 'They're wacko, that's why. One-hundred-percent grade-A jacked-up batshit. You ready to get out of here, or what?'
Carlos nodded somberly, and after a final look around the room, they headed back out the way they'd come.
EIGHTEEN
CARLOS WATCHED JELL CLIMB THE LADDER once more, trying not to get his hopes up again. If this didn't work, he was going to be deeply – no, majesti-cally pissed.
Hell with it. If this doesn't work, we should just walk out, or see if we can get to that factory and steal our- selves a ride. She's right, these people are andar lurias, lost in space; the sooner we get out of their territory, the better.
He stared blankly out at the dark yard for a few mo-ments, so bone-weary that he wondered how he would do one more thing, take one more step; it seemed im-possible. All that kept him going was his desire to leave, to get away from this holocaust and try to re-cover. When the first massive peal of sound rang out, its deep and hollow tone rolling out from the top of the tower, Carlos realized he couldn't keep a lid on his hope. He tried, telling himself that there was going to be a glitch in the program, telling himself that Um-brella would send assassins, that the pilot would be a zombie; nothing worked. A helicopter was coming for them, he knew it, he believed it; he just hoped the res-cue team wouldn't have any trouble finding a place to land…… spotlights! There were four of them on the ledge and a crusty-looking control box near the door that led back inside; the light would guide the transport in faster. Carlos hurried toward it, glancing up to see if Jill had started down yet. She hadn't…… and when he looked ahead again, he saw that he wasn't alone. As if by magic, the giant, mutilated freak that had been chasing Jill was simply there, close enough for Carlos to smell a burnt meat smell, snarling, its piggy, distorted gaze turned to the top of the ladder. 'Carlos, look out!' Jill screamed down, but the Nemesis-monster ignored him completely, taking a mammoth step toward the ladder, the eyeless snakes that were its tentacles whipping around its colossal head. One more step and it would be at the base of the ladder and Jill would be trapped.
– she said bullets don't hurt it
Desperate to do something, Carlos saw the large green power switch on the spotlights' control panel and lunged for it, not sure what he expected. To distract it, if they were lucky…… and all four lights snapped on at once, blinding, instantly heating the air around them and illuminating the tower, probably for miles to see. One of the beams was full-on blocked by the freak's hideous face. The light actually forced the thing to stumble backwards, giant hands covering its mutant eyes, and Carlos acted. He ran at the blinded Nemesis, M16 held high, and slammed the rifle against its chest, pushing as hard as he could. Off balance, it stumbled backwards, its legs slapping the ancient railing…… and with a brittle snap, a wide section of the rail-ing gave way, falling into the darkness, the Nemesis plummeting after it. Carlos heard a sickly thump from the ground below at the same instant that the over-heated spotlights shut down, making glowing dark shapes float in Carlos's eyes for a moment. The huge, mellow sound of the bells continued to fill the air as Jill scrambled down the ladder and un-slung the grenade launcher, joining Carlos at the bro-ken railing. 'I… thanks,' Jill said, looking into his eyes, her own gaze sincere and unwavering. 'If you hadn't hit the lights, I would have been dead. Thank you.'
Carlos was impressed and a little flustered by her candor. 'De nada,' he said, suddenly very aware of how attractive she was – not just physically – and how little experience he actually had with women. He was a self- educated twenty-one-year-old mere, and he hadn't exactly had a whole lot of time or opportunity to date.
She can't be much older, twenty-five at the outside, and maybe she…
Jill snapped her fingers in front of him, bringing him back to reality and reminding him of how tired he re-ally was. He'd totally spaced out.
'You still with me?'Carlos nodded, clearing his throat. 'Yeah, sorry. Didyou say something?'I said we need to move. If it's still that feisty after a
grenade in the face, I doubt a two-story drop will kill it.'Right,' Carlos said. 'We should circle around front,anyway. They'll probably drop a harness if they can'tset down.'Jill nodded. 'Let's do it.'Ushered inside by the deep voice of hollowed metal,Carlos suddenly wondered if Nicholai was still alive -
– and if he was, what he would do when he heard the tolling bells. Nicholai heard the bells on his walk back
