“Lower!” Takeo Yoshihara demanded again, understanding that the flatter the angle, the better the chance of hitting his target.
Michael gazed up at the rifle barrel protruding from the door of the helicopter and instantly knew that the man holding the gun intended to kill him. For some reason, though, the thought did not disturb him. The calmness that had come over him as he’d watched the fires boil remained intact. Instead of turning in an attempt to flee the hunter, he moved closer to the caldera’s lip, as though something deep inside him had instructed him that the fires of the earth were his protection, not his enemy.
“Good,” Takeo Yoshihara said to himself as he watched Michael move closer to the edge. Now, when the boy dropped from the single shot that was all that would be required to execute him, he would pitch forward, plunging into the sea of churning molten rock, his body instantly incinerated. “Lower!” he again commanded the pilot.
The pilot, hands tightening on the controls, peered down into the fiery hell below, then looked away as he felt himself losing his nerve.
Only ten more feet.
He would drop only ten more feet, and that would be it. Even if it cost him his job, he would go no lower.
His eyes glued to the altimeter, he nudged the helicopter downward.
He could feel the heat now, even through the protective bubble of Plexiglas that formed the cabin.
Six more feet.
Five.
Only three more, then he would hold steady, and rotate the cabin around to give the marksman a clear bead on the boy who still stood on the edge of the caldera, calmly watching.
Why didn’t he run?
Was he crazy?
Three more feet …
Michael felt no fear as he watched the helicopter hover over the caldera, dropping lower and lower. He could feel something in the ground now, a slight tremor, as if the earth itself were about to come alive. Then, as the helicopter edged lower, the glowing surface of the lake inside the caldera awakened.
The level of the lava rose steeply, the oddly rhythmic undulations of the boiling rock suddenly interrupted by a column of fire that fountained out of the caldera’s throat, hurling rock, ash, and fire into the air in a burst that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
Michael ducked beneath the cover of a thick lip of lava, but his eyes remained fastened on the spectacle in front of him.
For the helicopter, there was no place to hide, nor time to flee.
The sniper saw the flicker of red on Michael’s face as the laser sight found its mark. But in the instant before he could squeeze the trigger, a fragment of molten lava struck the helicopter’s enormous propeller. One of its blades broke free of the shaft, and as the helicopter yawed wildly in response to its injury, the metal blade boomeranged back, lashing through the open cabin door, severing the marksman’s arm just above the elbow, and sending him, screaming, into the maelstrom below.
Blood from the severed arm splattered across the Plexiglas cabin, blinding the pilot, who was still trying to control the mortally wounded aircraft.
A terrified howl issued from Takeo Yoshihara, his self-control deserting him as he looked down into the yawning hell into which the helicopter was plunging. His scream, unheard by anyone beyond the confines of the Plexiglas cabin, was suddenly cut off as the fuel tank, heated beyond endurance by the all-consuming fire welling up out of the mountain, exploded into yet more flames, blowing the helicopter into a thousand pieces even as it plummeted into the depths of the churning lake.
The fire spout, as if sensing that it had completed the mission for which it had been summoned, subsided back into the bowels of the mountain. Beneath Michael’s feet, the trembling of the earth began to subside.
By the time Katharine and Rob reached Michael, the helicopter and its occupants had vanished, incinerated as completely as if they had never existed at all.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Michael asked, still gazing out over the caldera’s surface.
Katharine slipped one arm around her son, the other around Rob Silver. “It is beautiful,” she agreed. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
EPILOGUE
TWO WEEKS LATER
It didn’t seem like two weeks. It barely seemed like two days. Yet the exhaustion that had become Katharine’s most familiar and constant companion since the night she and Michael had fled from Takeo Yoshihara’s estate told her that the time had, indeed, passed.
She was back on the estate, now in an office of her own, though not in the north wing of the research pavilion.
The entire north wing had been turned over to the army of press that had descended on the estate. Katharine and Rob had moved into what had been the Serinus Project laboratories, and found it ironic that Takeo Yoshihara’s security system now served to protect them from the swarm of reporters upstairs, freeing them to concentrate on finding a way to reverse the damage that had been done to Michael and a dozen other adolescent children scattered around the globe.
Wherever the victims were found, fumatoria had been immediately set up, funded by the companies that Takeo Yoshihara had controlled, to keep them as comfortable as possible until an answer could be found.
If there was an answer.
Most of the scientists who had been involved in the Serinus Project, acting on the advice of their attorneys, refused to discuss anything about the sphere — or the Seed, as it was still called, the press having latched onto the term the moment they heard it — let alone the project that had been centered around it.
“We knew nothing of it until two days ago,” Herr Doktor Wolfgang von Schmidt had insisted. “As far as we knew, we were called here to be briefed on a new project that Takeo Yoshihara had in mind. Needless to say, when we heard of his plans to indulge in human experimentation, we were all appalled. And we all refused.”
Juan-Carlos Sanchez and all but two of the other scientists who had been housed at the Hotel Hana Maui had clung to von Schmidt’s position, though now they were protesting their ignorance from prison cells in Honolulu rather than hotel suites on Maui.
The laboratory staff, save for the one man whose job it had been to fill the scuba tanks before they were sent to Kihei Ken’s Dive Shop, was still intact, now working under the supervision of Katharine and Rob and the team of biologists and geneticists they had assembled to reanalyze the compound within the Seed and attempt to find a way to reverse its effects.
Thus far, no progress had been made. Though Katharine was doing her best to remain optimistic, with each day that passed a little more of her hope faded. This morning, when one of the lab technicians rapped on her open door, she looked up from the data she’d been studying and braced herself for more bad news.
“There’s something I think you should see, Dr. Sundquist,” he said. “Right away.”
Following him out of the office, she threaded her way through the laboratory and then into the room in which the walls were lined with the Plexiglas boxes where the animals waited for death.
The technician stopped in front of a cage. Katharine herself had paused at this box earlier this morning to try to comfort its sole occupant, a chimpanzee whose energy seemed finally to have been sapped. The animal, so heart-breakingly close in appearance to a human child, was still breathing, but seemed unaware of her presence, its dull eyes staring off into space, as if looking at something that wasn’t there. Katharine had talked to it for a moment or two, but it gave no more sign of hearing her than it had of seeing her. Finally, knowing there was nothing she could do for the creature, she’d turned away.
But even as she’d gone on toward her office, a thought had lingered in her mind:
