Genesis Sinister

“Stones don’t work anymore,” Grant told him. “Trust my people, and we’ll get it out of you and anyone else that needs it. Leave them in there, and they’ll burn through your body in next to no time. That’s your choice. Are we clear?”

The man nodded, still rubbing at his sore jaw. “So what do you want me to do?”

Grant pointed at the second box of stones that Kane had now carefully retrieved from under the stage per Domi’s instruction. He had sealed the box to ensure nothing could touch his skin.

“The stones,” Grant said. “I want to know where they came from.”

The man looked at Grant with resignation, a shining droplet of blood budding at his split lip. “Okay, man, I’ll tell you what I know. But you said you’d help me, right?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Grant assured him.

Chapter 6

The graveyard was silent, its stone slabs overgrown, the ancient gravestones broken and ruined. A mausoleum stood in the center of the small plot, its faux-Roman columns subsumed by creepers, their leaves as red as sunset. Overhead, the sun itself was still bright as afternoon prophesized evening, a place marker burning whitely in the blue sky. For a moment, the leaves of the creepers bent in a breeze that could not be felt, and the chipped and broken gravestones seemed to shake and bulge in their spots. Then a burst of light appeared from nowhere, all the colors of the spectrum swirling in its impossible depths.

Brigid and Rosalia materialized in that lotus-blossom swirl of color as the twin cones of light shimmered. The beautiful light burst cut more than a dozen feet into the sky and, impossibly, the same distance down into the earth, creating an hourglass shape in the once-still graveyard. This was an optical illusion generated by the opening of a window through the cosmos, and it had been created by the ignition of the interphaser.

The interphaser was a simple metal unit, one foot tall and the same on each side of its square base. Its sides reached up to form a pyramid shape, and the light burst seemed to emanate from somewhere within it before disappearing a moment later with the speed of a popped balloon.

“Nice place,” Rosalia observed as she lifted her foot from the tangled vines that crisscrossed the ground. “Cerberus would feel right at home, huh?”

Working the controls of the interphaser, Brigid looked up to see what Rosalia was indicating. It was a statue of a dog on a stone plinth. The dog was a pointer, sitting obediently, its head cocked as if waiting for instruction. Vines had grown over the plinth and wrapped most of the hound’s body.

Brigid looked around as she packed the interphaser in its carrying case, seeing similar statues of dogs and cats poised amid the thick undergrowth. A pet cemetery, then.

“Do you know where we are?” Brigid asked her dark-haired companion.

Rosalia was pacing around the little graveyard, peering over its low walls. “I think so,” she said. “House over that way, I’ve seen it from the road a few times.”

Brigid looked where Rosalia indicated, spotted the house between the trees. It was a big mansion-type place, and the pet cemetery lay on its grounds. Presumably its one-time owners had thought a lot of their animals, Brigid guessed.

Standing, Brigid made her way across the overgrown graveyard and joined Rosalia at the gates. The gates themselves were missing, probably stolen and melted down sometime after the place had been abandoned. The nukecaust had dramatically culled Earth’s population at the start of the twenty-first century. A lot of things had been taken and applied to new uses by the struggling survivors.

“How far away are we,” Brigid asked, “from this village of yours?”

Rosalia smiled enigmatically. “Not far.”

With that, Rosalia stepped over the single fallen gatepost and tromped off toward the house. Back in the graveyard, Brigid watched for a moment, wondering about the logic of what she was doing. Kane trusted this woman, despite their previous run-ins, she knew that much, and his word had always carried weight for Brigid. She and Kane were anam-charas, soul friends linked throughout eternity, bonded at some spiritual level to always find and watch over each other. As such, their relationship ran to a far deeper level of trust than most people would ever know.

And what about their anam-chara bond, anyway? It wasn’t as if Kane was the center of Brigid’s world; they weren’t lovers in any traditional sense, even though they felt love for each other. Ullikummis had forced them apart, turning Brigid into something she could barely recognize. While under Ullikummis’s influence, Brigid had actually shot Kane, blasting him in the chest. With her photographic memory, she could replay that moment over and over if she chose to, and it haunted her every time she looked at Kane. Their anam-chara bond had meant so much, yet now she wondered if she could even bear to be near him after what she had done. Of course, Kane had said nothing of the incident, had only joked nonchalantly, making light of the whole wretched escapade. But it festered in Brigid’s mind, lurking in the shadows like a sinister face from a child’s nightmare.

To Brigid, it felt as if they were losing the anam-chara bond that had held them together for so long. No matter how much she wanted to reach out, something stopped her, emotionally stunting her.

“Are you coming, Red?” Rosalia called from across the mansion’s abandoned grounds, intruding on Brigid’s melancholy.

Brigid nodded firmly before tromping from the cemetery and trudging across the long grass, the carrying case holding the interphaser swinging at her side. Maybe Lakesh had been right. Maybe she needed to get away.

* * *

THEY TREKKED FOR TWENTY minutes, the evening sun warm against Brigid’s back even through the weave of the shadow suit she wore. The shadow suit acted as an independent, temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, but Brigid chose to ignore that, preferring instead to feel everything that the real world had to throw at her. She had been away from that for too long.

Rosalia set a fast pace, keeping to a comfortable jog as she led the way out of the overgrown grounds of the dilapidated mansion and onto the dusty road beyond. Rosalia kept herself in the prime of physical fitness, and Brigid noted how little the exertion seemed to affect her.

There was a paved road a little way beyond the forgotten mansion, and carts and scratch-built automobiles rolled down the street now and then, passing the two women as they made their way to their destination. Beside the road it was mostly open ground, sandy red earth giving the whole area a blushlike tint. Now and then the two travelers would pass a shack that had been constructed at the side of the road, and Brigid might spot a woman there by the porch, sitting down to darn the holes in a pair of man’s socks or leaning over to water the potted plants proudly arrayed by the front door.

“Who lives here?” Brigid asked as they passed one of the shacks.

Rosalia looked around her. “People. Just people. Why, what did you expect? Caballeros and banditos, swashbuckling their way down the streets?”

Brigid shook her head. “It’s just you forget sometimes what the world really is, all the people who make up its diversity and color.”

Marching onward down the road, Rosalia turned back and smiled. “I thought you never forgot anything,” she teased.

“I don’t know,” Brigid mused. “The world we inhabit—Cerberus—it’s all so frenetic. I guess I do forget sometimes that a normal world is out here.”

“Life’s not just memory, is it?” Rosalia observed. “It’s for living.”

Together, the two women continued along the road until Rosalia found the junction she had been searching for. The road itself continued on, but a rough dirt track had begun to run parallel to it at about fifteen feet away, rutted wheel marks crisscrossing between the two.

“Come on,” Rosalia instructed, stepping off the paved road.

Brigid followed, joining her companion on the other track.

Before long, the track veered away from the paved road once more, following a gentle incline that ultimately led into the mountains.

They walked for another quarter hour, following the path through the foothills and around the mountains themselves.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Brigid asked once, gazing around the desolate, uninhabited path.

Rosalia simply turned to her and smiled, offering nothing more than the incline of her head.

Eventually the narrow path dropped again, and Brigid saw buildings waiting in the distance, hidden within the recess of the valleys. The buildings were white-painted stucco, no doubt to reflect the sun’s heat during the daytime, now turned pink by its setting glare. Most of the buildings were just one-story, sprawling structures that accommodated perhaps five or more rooms, but there were a few two-story buildings, one with a high steeple dominating its western side. A few people could be seen milling between the buildings, and the occasional sound of voices and laughter came from below.

“Does this place have a name?” Brigid asked as she trekked with Rosalia along the pathway.

“Not anymore,” Rosalia told her with a shrug.

Brigid knew better than to probe her reticent companion too deeply, and together she and Rosalia marched past a sprawling graveyard that sat about a mile from the town itself. The graves were indicated by simple gravestones, each one marked not by a name but merely a number. Some of them looked more than a hundred years old, and not a single one had flowers.

All around, fields of crops were waiting to be harvested, a herd of cows and a sheep flock grazing in other fields patterned with long grass. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that this hidden community could feed itself. Brigid guessed it had perhaps sprung from some old survivalist troop dating back to the nukecaust that had reshaped the world.

“Do you come from around here?” Brigid asked as they walked toward the town’s outskirts.

“No,” Rosalia said. “I was schooled here. In the nunnery, over there.”

Brigid looked, saw the little chapel with its bell tower. It was just two stories high and built of stucco like the rest of the town, and it was probably the largest single building here.

The sun setting to their left, the two women walked past the simple stone marker that indicated the town limits, with Rosalia leading the way toward the nunnery. “You’ll like it here,” she promised. “It’s quiet.”

Brigid thanked her. She had agreed to come here when Lakesh had proposed it because it meant relief from the incessant questions from her colleagues. Rosalia was different. She didn’t ask questions; she just seemed to listen and to observe. Before they had left Cerberus, she had assured Brigid that she would take her to a place of tranquillity and meditation. It sounded preferable to therapy from Reba DeFore and, away from Cerberus and still carrying the interphaser, Brigid knew she could just run and keep running if she chose to, until she finally disappeared.

They walked through the open gates to the nunnery, an arch that was high enough to accommodate a horse and cart, and stepped into the courtyard within. Whatever Brigid had expected, she was left dumbfounded by what she saw. Women, all of them young and many of them still just girls, were involved in various forms of combat, throwing one another on straw mats, engaged in swordplay, shooting arrows at targets and working nunchakus in a furious display of fighting prowess.

“What kind of place is this?” Brigid said, taking everything in.

“I told you already,” Rosalia explained. “It’s a school.”

* * *

HOW LONG HAD IT BEEN? Black John Jefferson’s eyesight was dimming as he trudged heavily along the stone corridor. The walls to either side of him sloped subtly inward, narrowing the tunnel at its roof, fourteen feet above his dipped head. The walls themselves were solid, and the whole tunnel echoed with each heavy footstep.

“Where is this place?” Black John muttered, his words echoing.

He had climbed down the stone steps, slowly and heavily, his blood spilling onto each one as he passed. In his weak and wounded state, the stairs seemed to go on for a long time, and the light from the sky above had narrowed to just a single foot-wide shaft by the time he found the bottom stair.

Down there, Black John had trudged on, step by laborious step, following the only path he could see in the dim light from the stairs. There should be sconces here, or some other way to light the area, he felt sure, but he could find none. His head was reeling too much to care.

It took twenty minutes to walk the corridor, each footstep like running a marathon now, blood filling his blouse and streaming down his legs. His wounds just wouldn’t scab over anymore; they had been pulled about too much.

Ahead of him a doorway led into an open room. He stopped on its threshold and leaned heavily against the wall, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps that echoed through the underground maze. In the darkness, he could only see hints of the room beyond. It was wide, roughly circular, and it seemed to take up the whole expanse of the building. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be any furniture in the room, only a broad floor covered in dust.

Well, he had come this far, hadn’t he?

Black John removed his hand from the wall, and when he did so a bloody handprint remained there, clinging to the stone like some awful, red arachnid. He walked into the room, bent almost double, the pain in his ruined guts like a burning blade.

Maybe there is treasure in here, he thought. He was delirious now from the loss of blood, and he had all but forgotten what had brought him here in the first place, forgotten that he was dying.

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