O inundation of the Nile, offerings are made unto you, men are immolated to you, great festivals are instituted for you.Birds are sacrificed to you, gazelles are taken for you in the mountain, pure flames are prepared for you. Sacrifice is made to every god as it is made to the Nile. The Nile has made its retreats in Southern Egypt, its name is not known beyond the Tuau. The god manifests not his forms, He baffles all conception.
—the Hymn to the Nile, circa 2100 BC
The Ancient Egyptians had considered the Nile River a god: the source of abundance, of soil and water for crops. For millions of years, it had been swum by crocodiles and hippopotamuses, monitor lizards, and perches over six feet long and weighing over four hundred pounds. For thousands of years, human watercraft had traversed its surface, from the canoes and papyrus rafts of the Stone Age to Egyptian and Roman barges, and later still steamships and vessels burning gas and diesel.
Now Godzilla entered the storied river and plowed upstream, one god swimming within another.
Hampton watched his progress, trying not to pick her nails.
“Kong’s just waiting there,” she muttered. “What the hell is he up to?”
The downtime they’d had while Godzilla made his way across the Mediterranean to where Kong was stomping around Cairo had now officially been frittered away. All attempts to reach Dr. Andrews had met with failure. Whatever was going on down there was still generating a massive amount of communications disruption. She was reluctantly considering the possibility that Andrews and the others might be in need of rescue—or worse, might be beyond rescue entirely. She had ordered another H.E.A.V prepped, but it would be at least a couple of hours before it was ready, and even then, readings suggested the vortex was less stable than usual.
Her only, very small victory in the last few hours had been in talking the Egyptian military down from unleashing hell on Kong, who was currently just sort of hanging out—or worse, trying to somehow prevent Godzilla from entering Egypt. Whatever was going on, she argued, it was between the two Titans, and if they didn’t somehow attract the Titans into a major city, like Cairo, maybe they would be content to work out their aggressions in the desert.
* * *
Kong had known Godzilla would come. He was counting on it.
It was taking longer than he’d thought it would.
He had always had a sense that Godzilla was out there, even when he was younger on Skull Island. He had sensed the Titan near the island many times, without ever knowing exactly what he was. He hadn’t cared. There were plenty of enemies to face as it was. Whatever he sensed out there past the storm didn’t concern him if it never came ashore. And it never did.
Godzilla apparently felt the same way, because as soon as Kong left the island, Godzilla came for him, determined to kill him. They fought on the open sea, which did not go well for Kong. He wasn’t much of a swimmer—and Godzilla was a very good swimmer.
Later, they fought again, and they fought together against the weird thing that looked like Godzilla, but smelled like the machines of the little ones.
Godzilla couldn’t talk. He couldn’t do hand-talking. He could only make scratchy-mean-nothing noises. But he and Godzilla had understood each other. Below was for Kong. Above was for Godzilla. That was how it had to be.
That had been fine with him. It was still fine with him. He did not want to live up here, especially in this place, where the bright light was so sharp in the sky, the air so dry, with sand in all directions and no jungle anywhere.
Since their agreement, he could feel where bad-breath-lizard was even more strongly than before. It was an itch in his head, usually easy to ignore. He had chosen the hole in the sky where he felt Godzilla strongest, but when he arrived, Godzilla wasn’t there. So Kong waited by the hole. They would need that to go back below, to fight the Skar King and his army. Godzilla would understand that.
He had helped Godzilla fight the Machine. Godzilla would help him fight Red Ape.
Now he felt Godzilla was close, and soon, in the long water, he saw his spines. They looked different. Brighter. A different color. But it was the same Godzilla. He could tell that much.
He waited. When Godzilla burst from the water and slapped his scaly feet on the dry ground, Kong forced down his instinct to reply with a threat by beating his chest or vocalizing. He would show Godzilla that he hadn’t come to fight.
But Godzilla charged at him. The Titan wasn’t slowing down. He wasn’t here to find out what was wrong. He was here to fight.
Kong held out one hand, signaling for Godzilla to stop. With the other, he gestured to the hole.
This is why I’m here, he was trying to say. We have to go down there.
Godzilla wasn’t paying attention. Still resisting a threat-call, Kong threw both arms up as Godzilla crashed into him, knocking him back into the little four-sided mountain behind him. It collapsed under his weight and he went right through it. He skidded across the sand and his back hit another of the little mountains.
He was just getting to his feet when the Titan came at him again. Kong hadn’t even hit him yet, but he wanted to. Why wouldn’t Godzilla pay attention?
Still trying to avoid a fight, Kong threw a handful of sand into Godzilla’s eyes and dodged aside. The Titan missed him and careened into another of the hills, breaking it with his little head.
Godzilla shook it off and charged him again, his mouth gaping open to bite. Kong shoved his new machine arm between his jaws. It was his first time using the arm in a fight, and it felt good. Strong. The Titan’s teeth didn’t cut through it. He didn’t have his axe, but this arm was good, too. And he couldn’t drop it, like he’d dropped the axe.
Godzilla was heavy. Very heavy. Kong tried to dig in his feet, but the sand slid beneath them, and Godzilla drove him back against a four-sided hill. Then Godzilla lifted him up off the ground and fell over backward, so Kong went way up in the air—and then slammed back to earth. It hurt the breath inside of him. For a moment he didn’t see anything, and when he did, it was to see Godzilla lifting his foot to bring it down on his neck, like last time.
No.
Kong rolled aside, felt the impact ripple through the sand.
Enough. Enough of this.
Godzilla snapped at him again, but this time Kong didn’t try to resist the urge to fight. He unleashed it. He hit the Titan under the chin with his yellow arm and was gratified when it sent his antagonist staggering back.
You want to fight? Kong roared. He punched Godzilla again: Godzilla stumbled and landed on his back. Kong came down on him, pummeling him with both fists. His opponent tried to bite him, but Kong caught his mouth with his new arm once more, driving the Titan into the sand. Kong heard a hum and felt the crackle; Godzilla opened his mouth, and it was glowing. He knew what this was. If he didn’t stop it…
Kong drove his yellow-arm fist straight into Godzilla’s mouth.
The lizard pitched back into the dirt. Kong expected him to get right back up, but instead he lay still. Not dead.
He glanced at the hole. This was his chance.
Kong chuffed, heaved himself to his feet, and took Godzilla by the tail. He started dragging him toward the hole. Maybe he would figure it out when they were down there.
He had almost reached the hole when he realized Godzilla’s tail spines were glowing again. He looked back and saw the Titan’s eyes were shining and his mouth was opening.
Kong dropped the tail and ran, trying to get behind one of the little mountains before the bad breath found him.
The bad breath came after him. It cut through the mountain, chasing him so he had to throw himself forward and roll as it singed by. He came back up and thumped both fists on the ground, ready to spring in any direction.
But he didn’t see Godzilla. He couldn’t see anything. The dry sand filled the air, and everything was dull yellow. His gaze flicked around, searching…
There. Godzilla was right on him. He tried to meet the attack but didn’t have time. Godzilla head-butted him in the chest and his feet lost purchase; he fell back to the dusty ground.
The Titan slammed his feet down again, and this time Kong didn’t have time to move. The clawed foot smashed into his chest. Before Kong could move, the foot went up and down, stomping on him repeatedly. Then Godzilla pressed down on Kong with all his weight and reared up to his full height. His spines flashed like purple lightning. Kong raised his yellow arm defensively, hoping it might help, wishing now more than ever that he had his axe. He squirmed, but Godzilla had him pinned. He would never get free before—
Something happened. A sound, a burst of light. The air itself became hard, harder than any wind, banging everything around.
It pushed Godzilla off him, knocked him over as if he weighed nothing. A strange song filled the dry air.
Still on his back, Kong saw wings above him. He had seen many things with wings, fought many of them. But this was something he had never seen before. It reminded him of the dim light of the night, it reminded him of a flower opening. It was huge, strong enough to knock Godzilla down, and yet Kong somehow did not feel threatened.
Godzilla was standing back up. But he was not looking at Kong. He was looking at the new thing with wings. It had landed on a hill of stone that had a sort-of face on it. It reminded Kong of some kind of cat. The winged one was clearer now; it had many legs, and he now realized it looked like a very small night flier, the kind that was drawn to light. Something was drifting from the sky—ash, or winged seeds or tufts of grass.
He looked over at Godzilla and saw… something. Kong did not know this giant flying bug. But Godzilla did. Kong could tell. It felt like they had known each other for a long time. Like family, even though they looked nothing alike.
And then he noticed something else, a little one, standing on the stone-hill-head. Jia. She smiled at him, but her attention was on Godzilla. She did not move her hands, but Kong thought that she was telling him something.
Godzilla leaned toward Jia, but he did not open his mouth. Then he lifted his gaze to the winged one.
Godzilla pointed his face to the sky and screamed. He knew now. He understood.
Kong roared. The winged one flapped her immense wings and rose between them.
Hampton sat back in her chair. She tried to take a deep breath and let it go slowly. What was it? Draw in green air, release red air. The tension was supposed to go out with red air, or something like that.
I need to try yoga again, she thought. Or tai chi. Or more realistically, maybe a whisky sour.
“Well,” she said, to no one in particular. “That got very weird very quickly.” She looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes.
“That was Mothra, right? Someone tell me I haven’t lost it. That was Mothra. Of course, Mothra is dead, right? Turned into little starlight sprinkles? We all remember that, too, right?”
“I’m checking bioacoustic and bioelectric data,” Laurier said.
“Yeah. Do that,” Hampton said. “Meanwhile, play that last part back. To where the bug shows up. About half speed.”
Laurier obliged.
The cameras had been focused on Kong and Godzilla, but the playback made it clear that Mothra had come up out of the same vortex as Kong. That meant she had come from Hollow Earth.
“Stop it,” she said. “Move that back about six seconds and make it still.”
“It’s a match,” Laurier announced. “The same signatures as Mothra, with an error range of three percent.”
“Maybe just the same species?” Hampton muttered.
“It’s impossible to say, with a sample size of two,” Laurier said. “But if we compare any two members of well documented species—Skullcrawlers, for instance—the error range would be much bigger. More on the order of fifteen or twenty.”
“Sure,” Hampton said. “So it’s somehow Mothra. Fine, why not?” She pointed to the screen. “Enlarge that.”
They were looking at the Sphinx of Giza, one of the few monuments still unscathed by Titan brawling. Someone was standing on its head. A person.
“Can you get better resolution on that?” she asked.
“That’s as good as it gets. We may get some other footage that’s better.”
But Hampton was pretty sure she knew who it was. Jia.
“What the holy hell is going on down there?” she wondered.
“Put all Monarch locations and participating governments on high alert,” she said. “I have a feeling things are about to get even weirder.”
The Iwi queen led them into the temple pyramid. Inside, it was mostly hollow, its surfaces intricately carved. Reflected light shimmered from what Ilene thought at first was a vast pool of water, but something about it didn’t look right: the way it rippled. It seemed more… viscous than water. Columns stuck out of the pool at regular intervals and climbed up toward the dark upper reaches of the structure. They didn’t go all the way up, though. They weren’t supporting anything, which led her to wonder what they were for. Were they merely decorative? It seemed unlikely.
Trapper had gone after whatever mysterious allies he had in mind. The Iwi warriors were tracking the approaching army of monsters. Word was that they were very close indeed. Jia had flown off on Mothra. And she was here, wondering what their part in all of this was.
She glanced over at Bernie, who had been mumbling something about gravity for a while.
“All right,” she said. “We’re underneath the pyramids. Now what?”
“Gravity,” Bernie said. “Iwi technology. We’ve known for years that ancient temples like Teotihuacan in Mexico were built over lakes of mercury,” he said. “But no one has ever understood why.” He smiled. “Iwi technology. Yeah.”
That’s mercury, she realized. As Bernie spoke, the queen approached the drop down to the pool and made a circular gesture. Several other Iwi carrying a wide metal bowl with long handles came up as well. They tilted the bowl, and a red fluid began pouring into the lake of liquid metal.
“It’s a fail-safe,” Bernie went on. “A defense mechanism. If anything ever breaks the veil, they can trigger an overload explosion that can knock the invaders off course using gravity. Through a chemical reaction this liquid metal becomes an engineering mechanism forcing the two electromagnetic pyramids together, causing an antigravity shockwave, but only for a few minutes. After that everything that goes up will come crashing down.”
The queen regarded Bernie and nodded. Yes.
“It may buy us some time to stop this Skar King,” Bernie concluded.
Flickers of electricity like miniature lightning began playing upon the columns. Ilene could feel the charge on her skin, smell the sharp tang of ozone.
The columns began to rise out of the mercury, reaching ever higher.
“It’s working,” Ilene said.
“Yes,” Bernie agreed.
The expression on the face of the queen changed suddenly. She gestured toward the entrance, and everyone started running outside. Ilene and Bernie followed. Ilene had the distinct feeling that it was bad news.
The veil over the Iwi territory was glowing, forming a bright blue dome. But even as she watched, it faltered and flickered. And in the distance it shattered, melting into nothing as it collapsed.
And in that gap stood pure horror.
She hadn’t had a firm picture of the Skar King fixed in her mind. She had been imagining something a lot like Kong. And he was that, in the broadest outline—another Great Ape. But he was thinner than Kong, with longer arms and legs, reddish in color. Kong was an ape that had no precise analogue among smaller, surface-dwelling apes. He resembled a gorilla, but that was superficial. In fact, the way his body was put together, the way he was able to carry himself comfortably bipedal, was more like a human or an early human ancestor. The Skar King more closely resembled an orangutan. But she had known orangutans, worked with them. They were peaceful, kind, extraordinarily thoughtful creatures, usually slow moving, very deeply intelligent, and probably the most solitary of the surface-dwelling Great Apes.
The Skar King, even at first glance, was none of these. Cruelty sat on every angle of his body, showed in every gesture. His gaze was pure malice, as if anger and grievance had burned every other emotion out of him, if he had ever had them at all. Even at this distance, the mere sight of him chilled her to the marrow.
We can’t win, she thought. We can’t beat that.
So terrifying was the Skar King that at first she didn’t notice the mass of apes following him. Dozens, at least. All Titans nearly as big as Kong and Godzilla.
And then there was what stood next to the Skar King. The biggest Titan she had ever seen. The biggest Titan anyone had ever seen, dwarfing even Godzilla and Monster Zero.
It was the color of polar ice, a quadruped supported by massive pillars of legs, her forelegs longer than her rear. She looked reptilian, like Godzilla, but from a very different lineage. Her thick, broad shape and beaked mouth made Ilene think of some prehistoric turtle, a dinosaur like an ankylosaurus, or a a species of dicynodont, the beaked therapsids of the Permian period. Shimo was probably none of those things, but like the other Titans the result of convergent evolution so convoluted that taxonomists were still trying to work out what exactly any of them were.
But Ilene knew, just looking at the monster, that it was the Titan the Iwi spoke of. The World Ender. The bringer of Ice Ages; the ice dragon who had somehow frozen Greenland over, not in years or months, but in minutes or hours.
Shimo.
Above, the tops of the pyramids were drawing nearer.
“This looks pretty bad,” Bernie observed.
“You still think the gravity thing will buy us time?” she asked.
“I… hope so,” he said. “Because. Wow.”
“Glad you came down here to save the world again?” she asked him.
“Let me get back to you on that,” he said. He nodded at the army of Titans. “Come on,” he said. “Come a little closer.” He looked back up at the pyramids. “Any time now,” he said.
But the Skar King paused. He cast his terrible gaze across the Iwi territory, and then his eyes turned up to where the pyramids were converging. Then he swung himself up on Shimo’s back, riding her like an elephant. He pointed at the pyramids and Shimo roared, opening her beak, and a beam shot from it—not unlike Godzilla’s breath, but purest white. It struck the closing gap between the pyramids. The air around the beam shimmered with cold, and a chill settled over everything, like a cold front arriving, even though Shimo’s breath was high above them. The wave propagated much more quickly through the air than it should.
Ice condensed instantly from the humid atmosphere, bridging the gap that still existed between the two pyramids.
Stopping them from touching.
The Skar King either knew about the Iwi gravity weapon or he was suspicious of the moving buildings. Either way, Bernie’s gravity wave—the thing that was supposed to hold off the monsters until Godzilla, Kong, and Mothra returned—wasn’t going to happen at all. Or at least not soon enough.
“We’re not going to make it,” Ilene said. “There’s not enough time. We need something to slow them down.”
“Well, what else can we do?” Bernie snapped.
The answer came from the sky-tearing sound of the H.E.A.V arriving, along with a screeching horde of…
Vertacines.
Trapper’s very weird idea. He had disguised the H.E.A.V as a vertacine again, but rather than blending in with the flock, he had used the aircraft to lead it here. Now he dove toward the Skar King’s army, and his aerial escort followed close behind.
Trapper’s voice crackled over her earbud. “It’s vertacine mating season!” he shouted.
Each one of them had a lightning bolt’s worth of electricity, she remembered. Now she saw it was true. As the flying creatures blew through the apes and Shimo like a wind, the Titan army responded by attacking them, triggering the vertacines’ survival instincts. The distance suddenly lit up with blue arcs of electricity. Shimo roared and stopped blasting the pyramids with cold, instead sweeping her ray through the hundreds of winged tormenters. Where her breath touched, wings seized up instantly, and the frozen fliers plummeted to the ground—but there were so many vertacines it hardly affected their numbers. Apes howled and swiped at the flying beasts with about as much effect as taking a bat to a swarm of bees.
Way to go, Trapper, she thought. Now and then he really did come through. But although the apes appeared hurt by the voltage, and a few even dropped, most seemed merely annoyed by the attack. The vertacines didn’t want to be in this fight. They were just passing through, but at least they were wreaking havoc, creating the pause they needed.
But the yellow-and-black-striped creatures were already turning upward, away from the valley, which meant their respite was at an end.
Above, the newly formed ice cracked and shattered without the continued pressure of Shimo’s breath. The tops of the pyramids drew closer together. Ilene already thought she felt lighter, as gravity held less sway. Higher, in the land-sky, one of the vortices suddenly shimmered, and something shot from it, like a comet or a meteor streaking through the atmosphere. It vanished from view but a few seconds later Ilene heard the impact. Her ears popped, and all the trees bent; loose rocks on the ground jumped into the air and almost seemed to pause before falling back down. The shockwave spread across the valley in a widening circle, carrying leaves, branches, and dust along its bow-wave. It swept through the Skar King’s army.
A brief hush followed, as if the world was taking a breath.
Then the ground began quaking in pulses—one, two, one, two, followed by the ear-splitting jet-engine screech that could only be Godzilla. But his wasn’t the only familiar war-cry, because on top of it was the enraged roar of an angry Kong—possibly the strangest and most awesome two-part harmony she’d ever heard.
Kong had done it—he’d brought help. And although the fight was now two against many, she couldn’t help but feel more hopeful.
The Skar King and his apes charged forward, the King still riding Shimo, and now dozens of monstrous battle-cries filled the winds.
Godzilla and Kong broke through the cloud caused by their descent, charging side-by-side, straight for the Skar King.
The Skar King kicked Shimo, spurring her on.
The H.E.A.V came screaming around and dropped to the ground just in front of them. No longer marked like a vertacine, Ilene was glad to see it. The ground on which they were standing was about to becomes the front line on the battleground of gods and monsters, and absolutely not a safe place for tiny mortals like her or even the Iwi queen.
The back hatch of the H.E.A.V popped open, revealing a smiling Trapper.
“Your carriage awaits,” he said.
Bernie shouted something, but Ilene wasn’t paying attention. Instead she ushered the Iwi queen and her bodyguards into the H.E.A.V.
“Get in, buckle in, you beautiful people,” Trapper said.
Trying to show the queen how to do that, Ilene checked to make sure everyone was in. When she was certain they were, she swept her gaze toward the other side of the world and the vortices there. Where were Mothra and Jia? Why hadn’t they come back with Kong and Godzilla?
Focus, she thought. Trapper was waiting on her mark.
“Three, two, one—” she said.
The invisible hand of acceleration pushed her back as the craft shot into the air. Trapper pulled the H.E.A.V’s nose up hard, and instants later they were nearly at the altitude of the pyramid summits. There was almost no gap between them now.
Below, the charging Titans were closing the space between them, as well.
Things were about to go tremendously nonlinear, to say the least.