SKYLER PLACED HIS finger on the switch that controlled Russell’s external speaker, and held it there. “You’re going to want to stay very quiet,” he said in an even voice. “Understood?”
Russell nodded once. He looked pale, and not from fear of the surroundings. No, Skyler suspected the man was growing hungry and probably really did need to relieve himself. He carried himself differently than before. Slumped forward, shoulders turned in, head tilted down.
“We’re going to move you,” Skyler said, finger still resting on the speaker’s switch. “There’s a village, a few hundred meters. Can you walk it?”
Blackfield thought about it for a second, then nodded. A single shift of his head, as if it was all the energy he had. He seemed a shadow of the man who’d once confronted Skyler on the landing pad in Nightcliff, but then again he’d been a prisoner aboard Melville Station for weeks leading up to this. Besides, Skyler reminded himself, he’d lost everything before that.
Skyler flipped the switch. “Once we secure the aura towers, we’ll move you in range so you can eat something and take care of any personal business.”
“Let’s hurry, then,” he said. “Enough talk.”
“Fine with me.”
Ana took care of guiding Russell so that Skyler could carry the gear. He filled two duffel bags with what seemed like an obscene amount of weaponry and ammunition. Two assault rifles with several extra clips. A sniper rifle, as Ana had suggested. And a mortar tube with two explosive rounds. Skyler had almost forgotten about that last device. They’d found it a long time ago but never had a situation in which to use it. Placing it in the bag now, the beginnings of a plan began to form in his mind.
Outside, Ana guided Russell by the elbow. He moved like a kid walking to school on the day of a test. His feet scuffed the dirt; his head remained down. But he cooperated, and that was all Skyler cared about.
The weight of the duffel bags had Skyler’s shoulders burning by the time they reached the village. He dropped them in a room adjacent to the one where Ana took Russell. Rubbing his neck, Skyler left the arsenal on the floor and went to help her secure the man.
His assistance wasn’t needed. When Skyler entered the meeting room, Ana had already attached the cuffs to Russell’s wrists and looped them over the metal bar in the closet. Blackfield sat on the floor, back against the wall, eyes closed.
“He asleep?” Skyler asked.
Ana shook her head and led Skyler from the room. “I think he’s sick or something.”
“SUBS?”
She shook her head. “The suit shows green. But maybe he caught something in Belém. It’s not like SUBS is the only ailment around, and there’re so many insects there.”
Skyler glanced at Russell with new interest. He crossed to him and gave his shoulder a gentle shove. “Hey. You awake?”
Russell mumbled something inaudible and turned away, slumping against the back wall of the closet.
“Exhausted is my guess,” Skyler said.
Ana wrinkled her nose. “Maybe. Suppose he doesn’t survive to Darwin?”
Skyler shrugged, leading her from the room to where he’d left their weapons. “I don’t much care. He might not even be able to help us if he does make it, and I’d rather not be towing him around with us when we arrive.”
“How can you say that? He’s a human being. He’s in our care—”
Skyler placed a hand on her cheek and forced her to look into his eyes. “Would you say that if he was Gabriel?”
Her mouth clicked shut. A few seconds later she shook her head.
“See him as Gabriel,” Skyler added, “and you’ll see him as I do. At the first hint he can’t help us accomplish our goal, his life is over. I don’t have the patience for anything else.”
The words tumbled out with more vitriol than he’d intended. She searched his face for something, found it, and said, “All right. All right.”
He gave her a quick half smile and turned his focus to what waited for them outside.
They found the first corpse just a hundred meters outside the village.
“A scientist,” Skyler noted. “Or a doctor.”
The half-buried body was clad in a long white coat, and looked as if it had fallen shortly after infection, as most did. A black patch on the breast pocket of the garment had Chinese lettering.
Thirty meters farther toward the circle of aura towers they passed an abandoned troop carrier, the doors still open. Nearby lay a cluster of bodies. Soldiers, save one who looked like a civilian. A miner, perhaps. There’d been a struggle, evidenced by the way the bodies had fallen. The civilian had rushed them, Skyler thought, and been shot. Yet still the soldiers had all died. A picture of what had happened here began to crystallize in Skyler’s mind.
“I think Nachu was right,” he said.
Ana looked up from the grisly, if faded, scene. “In what way?”
“The disease started here.” He glanced back toward where the scientist lay. “They came to investigate that giant building, or ship. Whatever it is. I’m guessing they tried to keep it secret. Then the infections began, spreading faster than news of the virus.”
“Why keep it secret?”
Skyler shrugged. “A giant alien vessel thing in the middle of your vast mining operation? They would have had soldiers, technicians, all that here already. But they would have also had businesspeople. People who’d seen how Platz capitalized on the Darwin Elevator. Is it so hard to imagine they’d want to keep it to themselves?”
Ana looked at the scene with the new perspective, and visibly shuddered.
“They probably cut communications first,” Skyler said. “Maybe even rounded up the miners and forced them into the barracks.”
“Those bunks we saw, all full.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Ana let out a long sigh. “Sometimes I think we deserve what happened. Our species, I mean.”
“Maybe.” He thought back to what Tania had told him about Neil and what he’d known. He’d pondered it many times since then, imagined what would have happened if Neil had given the world some kind of warning. Would things have been any better? Or would the panic that spread like a bow shock in front of the disease have just started earlier? Perhaps Neil, armed with whatever knowledge he actually possessed, had done the right thing. Despite that possibility, Skyler knew the man’s reputation and found it hard to believe that he hadn’t kept the knowledge to himself for personal gain. He looked at Ana. “Greed played a factor, along with all our other legion of faults, but the way this disease spread … I don’t think any improvement in us would have made much difference. It’s not like anyone knew Darwin was safe at that point, and even if that realization had come out earlier, the city would have been worse off if more people had made it there. You didn’t see it in those early days, Ana. I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Another time,” Skyler said. “It’s not an easy story to tell, and this isn’t the best time. We have a rendezvous to make, remember? The important thing right now is that we find what we came for.”
She tried to hide a frown, and failed.
“On the flight to Darwin I’ll tell you the whole, sordid tale. Okay?”
Despite all the dangers that surrounded them, Ana moved up next to Skyler and rested her head against his shoulder. He felt her arm slip around his waist, as natural as if they were on a beach stroll. When she spoke, her voice was tender. “Okay.”
He tilted his head and inhaled the scent of her brown hair, somehow sweet despite the acrid odor of exposed minerals that clung to this place. “Good. Now, let’s focus, hmm?”
“Yes.” All signs of the frown had vanished.
Skyler took point again. The most direct path to Builders’ Crater, as he’d come to call the depression where the giant structure waited, required traversal of a narrow strip between two identical pit mines. The sides were steep, the bridge of land between no more than four meters wide at the top. Even this tiny bit of land had a row of solar panel installations running right down the center. Skyler tried to imagine a team of workers placing the equipment in such a perilous place, until it occurred to him that they’d probably been there before the pits.
The bridgelike strip of packed sand ran a hundred meters in a straight line toward their destination. Beyond, with most of a kilometer still to go, more pits of varying sizes waited, lined by the surreal rows of solar panels. The sun lay low in the sky now, and the panels that still functioned were tilted steeply to drink in every last photon.
A pushcart lay in their path, just before that first long bridge, its handles and wheels half buried in accumulated sand. Skyler moved next to it and hunkered down.
Ana slipped in next to him, peering around the side opposite his. “Why are you stopping?”
“Notice anything different here?” he asked, jerking his head behind them and up.
She looked back for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders.
“There’s almost no sand on the solar panels now.”
Her gaze went to the objects and her brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Good question. It’s not why I stopped, though. There’s not much cover on these ridges, and it’s almost dark. So let’s wait a bit. Maybe you should switch to the sniper rifle now.”
As Ana worked on changing her gear, Skyler continued to study the landscape around them. The longer he looked, it seemed, the more bodies he spotted. The more abandoned vehicles and equipment. The majority had Chinese lettering, but there were some in French and Russian, too.
Most, he noted, were pointed toward Builders’ Crater, lured in like ants to bait. They must have been racing to be the first to claim the alien object for their company or nation. Perhaps some were motivated for personal reasons. The first person to set foot inside a Builder …
A Builder what?
Skyler still couldn’t quite come to grips with the structure he’d seen from above. Was it a reactor? Or some kind of temple, purely without function?
Movement caught his eye. Above the horizon, stretching in a golden line from west to east, was a cloud. A cloud of sand.
“Ready,” Ana said.
“Change of plan,” he replied. “Look at that.”
Ana gasped when she glanced where he pointed. The coming sandstorm bore down on them from the vast Sahara like a tidal wave, and visibly grew larger and closer with each second.
“Forget the rifle,” Skyler said. “Visibility will be—”
The ground beneath them rumbled, cutting off his words. It started small, as if caused by the approaching sandstorm itself. But as the vibration grew Skyler knew it was something mechanical, something below the ground. The shaking grew with linear perfection, as if punctuating his theory. Sand began to shower down from above, shaken loose from the vast grid of solar panels. There’s one mystery solved, Skyler had time to think.
At that instant, the structure inside Builders’ Crater erupted.
A dark gray plume of gritty smoke shot upward from the pit like the initial belch from a long-dormant volcano. A single, enormous roiling ball of ejecta propelled high into the sky, stretching out as it went into one long smear. With its release the ground stopped shaking.
Skyler watched, mesmerized, as the dark cloud rocketed upward, slowed, and expanded. Then, as if pushed by some invisible hand, it started to stretch to the south. Propelled by the invisible bow shock of the sandstorm, he realized. He’d forgotten about that, and the wave of oncoming sand was almost upon them.
“Goggles,” he growled. “Bandannas.”
He tied a bandanna around his mouth and nose first, then fumbled for his goggles. A new sound began to grow, like a thousand rusty-hinged doors opening in sequence. The solar panels, caught up in the rush of wind and sand, were being spun away from the sunset. Skyler urged Ana to move to the south side of the tiny pushcart they’d hidden behind, and followed her, hunching over her as he had when the snow had fallen from the dome in Ireland.
The sound of it hit them first. In full force the noise bordered on deafening. The line of solar cells along the ridge flipped from west to south in almost perfect unison as the cloud of grit and sand rushed over them. Skyler felt his clothing tug in the rush. The cart offered meager protection, but there was nothing else, and anyway it was too late. He felt dry particles whip into his ears, his hair, and down his open shirt. All Skyler could do was press himself farther toward the ground, poor Ana below him screaming not from pain but surprise at the sheer ferocity of the maelstrom.
As quickly as it had begun, the storm weakened. Not entirely. No, Skyler still felt the rush of wind in his hair, against his clothing. Sand still spattered against his exposed forehead. But it weakened enough that he thought they could move. Perhaps find better cover, if not actually proceed with their mission.
He chanced opening his eyes and found that the air glowed.
A dim, pervasive yellow light enveloped the area around him. His stomach lurched from the fear that someone, or something, had found them. But as his eyes adjusted he realized what had happened. Mounted under each solar panel was an LED. They must, he thought, come on automatically when the sun sets, probably so the miners could keep working. And work they could have, for the light was bright and everywhere, save for within the pit mines themselves, which now stood out for their darkness rather than the bright spots they’d been under the furnace of the sun. It was like the world had reversed itself.
The lights in turn illuminated the fine sand that filled the air, creating glowing yellow orbs around each pole that held a solar panel aloft. To Skyler’s eye it was all bizarrely romantic.
He helped pull Ana to her feet as he rose. “Come on.”
“Shouldn’t we go back?” Her voice sounded distant under the constant buffeting of wind.
“We can use this to our advantage. Come on, it’s not that bad.”
The row of poles along the narrow earthen bridge acted as perfect guideposts, and the deep pit mine to their right tempered the gale, sucking the wind down into its depths and then pushing it back up the steep side next to where they walked. Halfway across, Skyler found he didn’t even need to hold the poles, so he increased his pace without complaint from Ana.
The landscape became a maze of such bridges, all lined with those glowing yellow orbs that constantly swirled and shifted. Visibility ranged from fifty meters down to just a few, and twice Skyler had to stop when he couldn’t see the ground at his feet. The skin on the side of his face felt caked with sand, dry as flour.
As their goal drew closer, Skyler noted more and more evidence of what had occurred here. Scenes of confusion, chaos, and violence marked the landscape. Half-buried bodies of laborers, soldiers, and scientists. A crashed flyer, no pilot inside. Just two dried-out corpses in the back, a man and a woman in business suits. “Fly us out to see the object,” Skyler could hear them saying.
One body wore a familiar outfit. A blue jumpsuit, like the kind Tania and so many other Orbitals favored. The corpse, a woman by the fine blond hair, lay faceup. Mummified as she was, Skyler thought he saw a smile there. He grimaced and moved on.
More and more the bodies he passed were subhuman. He’d seen enough over the years to know that they’d been in that state for some time. Hair grown long and wild. Thick shaggy beards on the men. Yellow, uneven fingernails and toenails caked with dirt. These had come here well after the event, as if drawn by some latent migratory instinct.
A few wore the clothes they’d been infected in. Skyler even saw one woman in a formal gown. He doubted there were any weddings or fancy dinners happening within a hundred kilometers of this nightmarish place when the disease hit, so she must have come from a long way. A broken high-heel shoe still clung to one filthy foot.
Most were naked, or at most wearing a few tattered remnants. While the soldiers and scientists were well on their way to being buried under the wind-driven sands, the subhumans spanned a range from there to just a light coat of the yellow powder. Their skin hadn’t dried to the point of leather yet. Fresh corpses. Recent arrivals.
Skyler swallowed down the growing lump in his throat. This, he thought, was an evil place.
When the yellow glow of the aura towers finally cut through the swirling sands, Skyler turned back to Ana and pulled her close enough that he could whisper. He tugged the bandanna covering his mouth away and cupped one hand over her ear.
“Visibility sucks,” he said. “Might work to our advantage.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” If she was scared, she hid it well.
Skyler pointed toward the nearest tower. “I’ll move up first. Stay just close enough to keep me in sight; keep your gun ready but don’t fire unless there’s no other choice.”
She nodded, pulled down the bandanna that covered her mouth, and kissed him. Her dry lips tasted like the sand. “Be careful.”
“You, too.”
Skyler turned away from her and crept forward toward the row of alien pillars in front of him. They were spaced about twenty meters apart. The pillar in front of him was one of the taller versions, its tip mostly obscured by the maelstrom of sand. The two to either side were just vague columns of shifting golden pulses.
Near the lip of the mine he began to hear the sounds of activity below. The pit itself looked like a giant inverted pyramid, though he had to mentally fill in the picture of it from what he’d seen during their initial flyby. The sandstorm prevented him from seeing even a quarter of the way to the other side. But he could see all the way down. The artificial crater was largely sheltered from the windblown sands above, and what did make it down into those depths was pushed right back up again by the warm air that vented from the strange alien structure in the basin.
Again the ground shook. A low rumble Skyler felt in his gut, building to one he felt in his teeth. At the crescendo the sound of it released in a booming sha-coom sound. In that instant, the hundreds of sunken cavities on the topside of the building spewed material into the air. The oily black smoke reminded Skyler of the footage he’d seen as a child illustrating the pollutants factories used to release into the atmosphere. The inky puffs quickly merged and rose. Near the top of the pit mine the winds of the sandstorm caught the rising cloud and pulled it into long, arching tendrils. Vortices of black and tan that snaked up into the sky with dizzying speed before melting together.
Skyler had lain down at some point, he couldn’t exactly remember when, on the edge of the pit next to a tower that rippled with glowing yellow patterns. Ana lay next to him, a look of terror and amazement on her face that mirrored how he felt. “What is it doing?” she asked.
He shook his head, though in his gut he knew. The kid in Belém, the scavenger, had been exactly right. SUBS had started here, only that wasn’t all. It was being perpetuated here. This place, this … forge, was pumping the manufactured virus into the atmosphere, letting the swift Saharan winds propel the material into the upper atmosphere, where it could fall like volcanic ash across the planet.
And directly overhead, the massive Builder vessel had parked itself. Fifth in a series of six events, if Neil Platz had accurate information.
One more to go.
A crazy thought entered his mind. Like the virus being thrust upon the world from the building below, the thought spread through him like a cloud and wouldn’t go away. Somehow, someway, he had to destroy this place. Even if it took months of hauling explosives in, he had to blow it up. If there was even a chance it would end the disease, he had to try.
Do I? Would it matter?
He suddenly doubted blowing up the structure would make any difference. The virus replicated just fine on its own. This place probably still functioned because that’s what it had been programmed to do.
At that moment the storm subsided. The howl of wind became a rush, then a whisper. Then sand began to fall from the sky like snow. Thick at first, but even that abated with astonishing speed. Within ten seconds Skyler could see the entire pit as clear as day. The LED lights under the solar panel field were their characteristic white now, forming a gleaming band between the yellow ground and the blood-red remnant of sunset.
Skyler didn’t know how long the calm would last. “Now or never,” he said to Ana.
There was no hint of confidence or bravery in her face until she looked directly at him. When their eyes met, she seemed to drink his courage in. Courage he hardly felt himself.
With the air clear, Skyler assessed the pit in an instant. The mine had a square footprint, with steep sides that plunged down a half kilometer before becoming obscured by the Builder structure set within.
There were entrances, or what looked like entrances, at the corners. Shifting yellow light came from within, spilling out in bright pools onto the sloped sides of the open mine. Subhumans loitered at each. Some moved in and out as if carrying out tasks, though what they could be doing Skyler had no idea. Others just stood around. Some lay on the ground, unmoving. Dead, or sleeping.
A sloped ramp provided the only way in or out of the pit, just like the one they had landed in. It entered on the side opposite where Skyler and Ana lay and ran in a wide, flat path around the perimeter of the mine. Surprisingly wide, in fact, until Skyler realized the need to haul debris from the pit as it was dug. In evidence of this, on the side to his left about halfway down to the alien structure, a massive rock-hauler truck sat abandoned. Each of its massive tires was as big as a military APC, and the Magpie could have fit in the huge bin that made up the vehicle’s bed were it not already piled high with boulders and crumbled earth. The vehicle had been on its way out when it stopped years ago. The side facing inward on the pit was all charred, likely from the violence of the alien structure’s landing. Its driver had probably been cooked inside the cab, a mercy considering what followed. The huge tires, caked with sand, had almost melted away. They practically dripped over the precipice of the sloped road, causing the massive truck to list heavily toward the pit’s depths.
An idea formed. A crude plan. “Keep an eye out for a minute,” he said to Ana as he began to rummage through their gear.
“What are you going to do?”
He grinned at her. “What Jake would do.”
Ana raised one eyebrow, confused.
“Sorry,” he said. “Haven’t told you that story yet, I guess. You’re going to cause a diversion. I’m going to capitalize on it.”
When he removed the sniper rifle from the gear bag, Ana figured out the plan. She pulled her sunglasses and bandanna off and took the gun, a hint of mischief playing at the corners of her mouth. It took her a few seconds to screw on the bulky silencer. Then she settled into a sniper’s lie with practiced ease and pulled the lens cover from the scope. “Which one am I aiming for?”
“None of them, actually,” Skyler said, removing the mortar tube from the bag. “Go for that dump truck, somewhere that will make a lot of noise. Get their attention. The side of the bed should get a nice loud bang. It might even rattle around inside.”
She studied the decrepit vehicle through the rifle’s scope, then flexed her fingers. “One of the rear tires is still inflated. I could pop it.”
“Perfect.” He unfolded the mortar’s two stabilizing legs and locked them into place, turning the launch tube to face roughly in the same direction Ana sighted. Once in rough position, he thumbed wheels on each leg, fine-tuning the setup until the sight’s leveling bubble came to rest in the center.
“Tell me when.”
Skyler dialed in the primitive sighting system, adjusting the launch angle and hoping his estimates for elevation would be close enough. “Once you shoot, ditch the gun and be ready to move on foot.”
“Okay.”
“Fire when ready.”
She did. A dull thwick. Sand on the ground near her barrel hopped into the air as the round flew.
There was no pop of the tire. Instead Skyler heard a crack, like a boulder splitting in half. Exactly like a boulder splitting in half, in fact. Ana cursed. She’d missed, her round slamming into the compressed earth just below the rear tire. Rocks began to slide down the sloped side of the pit mine as she took aim again.
“Wait,” Skyler said.
The rock slide grew. With total fascination and more than a little horror, he watched the back of the vehicle dip suddenly. Then the giant machine groaned, an anguished sound louder than any exploded tire could have achieved. The groan of tortured metal grew as the vehicle began to list more and more toward the drop-off. Larger rocks began to tumble loose from beneath its tires. And then, in one violent instant, the whole section of access road collapsed.
The massive truck tilted and rolled into the depths, spilling the contents of its hauling bin in the process. Below, the subhumans closest to it began to spew agitated shouts, unaware of the catastrophe about to befall them.
Skyler all but forgot about the mortar. His hand rested on the trigger as his focus remained utterly transfixed on the tumbling morass of metal and rock that rolled down the side of the pit toward the alien building below. The subhumans there had lost the part of their minds that could evaluate a threat and know when to run. Get the fuck out of the way! Skyler’s mind screamed. His mouth remained closed.
The dump truck, which Skyler thought must weigh twenty tons even unloaded, actually left the ground and tumbled over in the air when it cleared the last strip of road. It slammed into the crowd of subhumans and then the side of the Builders’ structure with a noise as loud as any explosion. A split second later the avalanche of rock, sand, and boulders followed, extending the sound like a thunderclap and throwing up a cloud of haze around the point of impact. A good thing, too, for the toll on the subhumans Skyler knew would be gut-wrenching to look at.
“Oops,” Ana said, when the sound died out.
“Indeed.”
A new sound grew as those subs not near the point of impact began to swarm, still thinking there was some entity there they could fight. Dozens poured out of the corner entrances to the building and converged on the cloud of debris, disappearing into its murk.
Skyler remembered the mortar then. It took only two seconds to adjust the aim. He almost felt guilty as he dropped the high-explosive round into the tube and pulled his arm quickly back. He’d felt the same thing when he’d fired an RPG into a church tower what seemed like a lifetime ago. There was no pleasure in killing the defenseless. No honor. It was just … business.
The launch tube emitted a soft voomp sound. A few seconds of strange silence followed before the explosion came.
His aim was uncannily perfect.
A yellow flash right in the center of that dust cloud flung rock and limbs outward in equal quantity. The pressure wave hit Skyler a heartbeat later, a single deep pounding noise that overloaded his eardrums and left them ringing. It was a small explosive as such things went but produced exactly the desired effect. Subhumans poured from all sides of the facility now, tripping over one another to reach the supposed conflagration.
Skyler saw one being stumble out of the fiery cloud only to be mistaken as an intruder and tackled by two of the new arrivals. Others actually tried to pull them apart. He’d never seen behavior like that before.
“Time to go,” Skyler said. “Are you ready?”
Ana had been busy while he sat there and stared at the riot below. As instructed she’d set aside the sniper rifle and readied her machine gun. He saw in her eyes a look he knew well by now. First from Samantha, now from this young lady. Bloodlust. “Ready,” she stated flatly.
“Stay close,” he muttered, picking up his own rifle.
As the last of the subhuman “guards” trickled out of the entrance below their position, Skyler hoisted himself over the rim of the artificial crater and jogged down the steep side in a barely controlled fall. Each step produced a small avalanche of sand and pebbles. Ten meters below he hit the narrow road that spiraled along the mine’s walls. He tucked and rolled, came up running, and went over the edge again. This process repeated six times before he cleared the last bit of road. At the bottom of the next piece of sloped wall was the Builder facility, ten meters away now. He’d been angling toward the nearest corner entrance on the way down, but it was still a good twenty meters off to the right.
The small avalanches created by his and Ana’s descent reached the building first. Rocks and pebbles clattered harmlessly against the side. The sand just pooled, adding a millimeter to an accumulation that Skyler assumed would be many meters deep by now, if this place had truly been here since SUBS began. He tried to slow himself before hitting the wall, with only a little success. In the end he did the only thing he could: turn his shoulder and wince. He smacked into the side of the building and felt a tingle rush up and down his arm from the elbow.
Ana came to a stop with much more grace, using an outstretched hand to blunt her impact and then twirling so her back hit next, leaving her in a tactically sound position, rifle raised. He felt a mixture of pride and, oddly enough, competition, whenever she did something better than him.
She jerked her head at the elbow he was frantically rubbing the numbness from. He waved off her concern and turned toward the opening. A dirty yellow light spilled out from somewhere inside. He saw no movement but thought he could hear some coming from within.
A few subhumans lay just outside. Dead, or maybe just too weak to move. That worried him until he recalled Ana’s observation about the lack of food or water here. They’d come here, called by this place perhaps, or simply drawn to it by some migratory instinct. Smart enough to get here, too far gone to survive. And the building, he thought, didn’t care. The Builders didn’t care.
He felt heat pulsing off the alien structure, as if it had a heart within. A ripple of fresh fear cascaded down his spine. The rhythm of that pulse reminded him of the chanting subhumans he’d found in the rainforest near Belém. That unsettled him somehow more than the swarm of creatures in the pit with them. Despite the anxiety that now gripped his own heart like a fist, he felt his feet moving toward the opening. He went slow, gun aimed directly ahead. With every step he glanced back at Ana to convince himself she was still with him, still okay. She was, of course. Her face had become the very picture of a warrior. Serious, focused, and deadly. He hoped she couldn’t see the fear in his eyes. If she looked she might have, but her gaze was like a searchlight now, sweeping in rapid bursts—behind, above, in front, behind—with her gun matching in perfect synchronicity.
A dancer’s perfection.
In his mind’s eye he saw her as he first had, twirling in a white dress. He saw the fabric flare out, her bare feet on the courtyard tiles, and his anxiety melted away.
At the corner Skyler paused and took a deep breath. This time when he looked back Ana’s eyes did meet his. There were beads of sweat on her brow. She gave him a single, confident nod that served to remind him of the urgency. The diversion they’d created was like a countdown timer, ticking rapidly away to zero.
So he turned the corner, raised his rifle, and went inside.