The Enclave (61 page)

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. Desperately 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.

A familiar voice speaking his name called him back from it, and he awoke to find an old friend bending over him. “Parthos?”

“Are you all right? You fell an entire story. Can you move?”

Zowan sat up, thinking he felt pretty good for having fallen that far. Was that I Am’s doing, as well? His eyes fell upon a dark pile of robes not far off, surrounded by a pool of blood: an Enforcer impaled by a three-foot sliver of glass. He knew the moment he saw him that the man was Gaias.

“Almost all the Enforcers are dead,” Parthos told him. “And most of the High Elders. A lot of other people, too . . . What did you
do
in there?!”

“I didn’t do anything,” Zowan said, getting shakily to his feet and staring up into the ruined Justorium. “God did it.”

“God,” Parthos said doubtfully. “You mean that I Am person you were talking about earlier?”

“Yes.” Zowan looked at his blood-spattered friend more closely. “You seem to have come through pretty much unscathed yourself.”

“Maybe, but the Elder next to me was decapitated.” He shuddered.

“Come on.” Zowan pulled his friend’s arm as he stepped across the glass-littered floor toward the spiraling staircase. “Let’s go get Terra.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

New Eden

Lacey found the trial in the Justorium to be one of the most repugnant spectacles she’ d ever witnessed. The only thing good about it was Zowan’s defiant, unwavering stand for the truth. But when that huge black Cube had risen into view and the lines of electricity snaked about it making the young man inside it writhe and scream, she was appalled. When it suddenly blasted itself to pieces in a flash of light and a boom both heard and felt, she wanted to cheer its destruction—even as she lamented the loss of the courageous young man it had taken with it.

The other women, however, were primarily distressed by the sudden loss of the video signal. Like clucking hens, they pecked about at what might have happened. Was it the camera? The feed? Had the Cube really exploded? No doubt it had been overloaded, what with everyone pushing their lever as far as it would go, but still . . .

It was Terra’s wailed “Noooooo!” and her subsequent collapse into inconsolable sobbing that brought them all to silence. Lacey alone moved to comfort her, wrapping her arms around the girl, as Andrea-Isis had done for Lacey not so long ago. It was some time before poor Terra regained her composure, and Lacey could only imagine how she herself would have felt had it been Cam in that Cube.

By then the other girls had worked themselves into a tizzy over what had happened in the Justorium, and why had no one come to tell them about it?

They were all chattering at once when loud clacking sounds erupted from the rear of the residence to silence them. A moment later, two young men burst into the main room, one a dead ringer for Swain— except for his buzzed-off hair—the other a tall black youth who was the clone of Mr. Abuku from the Ivory Coast. They were definitely the men Cam had photographed with his cell phone.

Theia leaned forward imperiously on her pillow. “What is this?! You boys have no right to intrude upon the sacred residence—”

Whatever else she said was lost in Terra’s shriek as the girl leapt free of Lacey’s embrace and threw herself into the Swain clone’s arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re alive!” she said, over and over. Eventually she stopped to ask how. “We all saw the Cube explode.”

And to Lacey’s astonishment, he credited his miraculous deliverance to God.

She was further astonished—chilled, in fact—to learn of the large death count that had resulted from the explosion. Zowan said most of the Enclave’s leadership had been killed, and many of the Enforcers.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Parthos said. “Destruction, blood, glass, bodies. People screaming. We stayed to help for a bit, but there were too many Enforcers.”

“And I wouldn’t risk my chance to get you out of here,” Zowan said to Terra.

“Was Father there?” she asked almost eagerly. “Was he among the dead?”

“How dare you ask that question in that tone, young lady!” Theia interjected. “As if you would be happy to hear of his death.”

“I
would
be happy,” Terra retorted.

“I don’t think he was there,” said Zowan. “At least I never saw him, and I had a pretty good view.”

Lacey took that moment to intrude with her own urgent questions about Cam.

Zowan looked at her in surprise, then must have reached the obvious conclusion, for he said only, “I haven’t seen him since they took him off to Father.”

She was drawing breath to ask where that might be when a second boom shook the floor, and this time the lights went out.

As Lacey’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, the dim light that still filtered through the wall of wooden screens drew her into the walking gallery. Despite the power loss, the mall remained partially illuminated by shafts of light spearing down from piercings in its vaulted ceiling. The rooms lining it and the corridors leading off of it, however, had turned into black holes.

Since most everyone had been at the Justorium when the Cube blew and were still involved with the disaster there when the power went off, no one was surprised to find the mall deserted. It wasn’t long before the other women busied themselves with moving the screens to let more light into the main room.

As they did, Lacey overheard Zowan speaking to Terra: “We have to leave the Enclave now, while everyone is distracted with the Justorium.”

Lacey purposed at once to go with them. Trapped in the residence, she was completely helpless to do anything to help Cam, and wandering about with no idea where he was, or even where
she
was, hardly seemed better. At least up top she might be able to contact his friend Mallory and tell him what had happened.

Suddenly light flickered at the mouth of the corridor feeding into the mall. It quickly resolved into separate narrow beams, and moments later a dozen soldiers in full battle dress burst from its mouth.

“Whoa!” she cried, drawing the others’ attention to the newcomers. The soldiers carried automatic weapons mounted with spotlights, which they flashed down the mall and up. Bringing up the rear was a man carrying a handheld tracking device, its green light reflecting off his camo-painted face. Now, at his direction, they all made straight across the mall’s island, clambering right over bush and stream to enter the library underneath the residence.

“We need to leave,” Zowan said.

But as he spoke, Lacey recalled the RFID chip lodged beneath her shoulder blade, placed there so she could be tracked if Swain took her. Might these men be coming for her?

She’ d barely had the thought when the back door of the residence blew open with a bang, and in moments half a dozen soldiers crowded into the main room. The wives screamed and huddled, terrified, into the farthest corner, but the soldiers ignored them, making straight for Lacey. Someone flashed his light into her face, and another said, “That’s not Reinhardt. What are you doing, Rudy?”

“That’s the girl Swain was after, Lieutenant,” said the man with the reader, and she immediately recognized Mallory’s voice. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and helmet, with bandoliers of ammunition strapped to his body, he did not look anything like Cam’s pseudo-insurance man, Mallory. Nor the trim, tidy servant with the dessert tray. In fact, between the darkness, the face paint, and the helmet, she couldn’t make out his features at all.

He continued to squint at the reader, then stepped away from her to squat over the black duffle bag Zowan had brought with him a few minutes earlier. Setting aside the reader, he was rifling through the bag’s contents when the lieutenant said, “I thought you were going to chip Reinhardt.”

“I was. With everything happening so fast, we never got around to it. So I put it in his duffle.” Rudy pulled out a small computer with attached keyboard and switched it on. “Ah, good boy, Cameron. You downloaded the floor plans!”

He stood and turned to Lacey. “Do you know where he is?”

“Some secret lab, we think,” she answered.

“In the orange sector,” Zowan added.

Rudy tapped the keys on his little computer and images flipped by on the screen.

“What’s he got all this C-4 in here for?” the lieutenant asked, now examining the duffle’s contents himself.

“To blow out doors if he needed,” Rudy said.

“There’s enough explosive in here to bring down the whole place.

What kind of op are you running here, Rudy?”

“The same one you are. Look here.” He shoved the computer before the man’s face as he tapped the keys. “See . . . here’s the orange sector—obviously some sort of lab. And now the red sector . . . ” Screens flipped by, then froze. “Look at the size of this space. That’s gotta be where they are.”

The lieutenant stepped to the window to eye the mall while Rudy pointed to the lower corridor off the front court and said, “That’s the one we’ll take.”

“Yeah, but where is everyone? It’s midday. Shouldn’t we be seeing people?”

Lacey told them about the situation with the Justorium, though she didn’t know where exactly the Justorium was.

“It’s along the upper corridor,” Zowan informed them, “the one opposite the lower corridor you are planning to take.”

“So we’re clear?” the lieutenant said. “Then let’s move.”

As his team exited the way they’d come in, Rudy hung back to speak to Lacey and the clones. “You all need to get out of here, ASAP. Use the route through the physical plant. We left it open.”

The lieutenant’s voice squawked out of Rudy’s earpiece: “Aguilar, you comin’ or not?”

“On my way, Lieutenant.”

“What about Cam?” Lacey asked as he turned to go.

“You can’t help him now,” Rudy said, slinging the duffle over his shoulder. “Besides, he’s a big boy. Just get yourselves out—along with as many of these others as you can.” With that, he followed his team members down the rear stair, the small computer with its glowing screen of floor plans still in his hand.

Chapter Forty-Eight

New Eden

Cam and Swain, surrounded by the four security guards, were on their way down to the red sector when they heard a distant boom. The floor shook and the lights flickered. Cam sensed the Nephilim become suddenly energized by the explosion, as if something dreadfully important had seized their attention, then dealt them a near-fatal blow. He sensed shock, disbelief, and finally despair, the latter quickly swallowed up by a rage that dwarfed all previous manifestations of their frustration.

Swain stopped in the corridor, waiting, perhaps, for an alarm to sound or a call to come in via the land-line phones mounted to the corridor wall nearby. When neither happened, he moved on.

The Nephilim, however, pelted Cam with demands to stop wasting time and let them out, their voices increasingly clear and compelling the closer he got to them. That proximity also seemed to be sparking unwelcome memories—striding out of a crisp fall morning into the Tirich Pazu facility’s upper service entrance with the rest of his transport team, while Rudy closed his deal with Dr. Garzi somewhere inside; washing his hands in the sink outside the pod-lab as he eavesdropped on the archaeologist Khalili arguing with someone about Canaanite religious rites; noting uneasily the six pods laid out on the tables inside the lab and wondering who else was purchasing a sarcophagus. . . . He kept shaking the memories off, but they kept returning.