Two large shapes bound toward us on four legs. As they draw closer, I shiver. They’re beautiful and horrible at the same time. Powerful legs drive their large, low-slung torsos forward, tufted tails lash the air, and their ferocious yet noble faces are framed by flowing red-brown manes. Lions!
The three cyborgs stop walking, and don’t move so much as a biomechanical finger. My mother also stands stock-still, and I freeze-tag myself.
“Are they real?” I ask her, watching their flowing manes and flashing teeth as they gallop toward us and growl deep-throated warnings.
“Of course not,” she answers. “The last real lions went extinct in the middle of the twenty-first century, with all the other big cats. These are clones made from stored DNA, engineered to follow commands and report back to overseers inside the fortress.”
Her answer saddens me, and also makes me feel personally responsible. So the King of the Beasts died out in my own century. Some of the cubs I saw in zoos on family trips must have ended up among the last members of their species.
I read somewhere that 10,000 years ago the two large land mammals most widely spread on earth were lions and humans. Lions were in Africa, Asia, India, and all through the Middle East. How strange that man should have taken over and destroyed the earth, while the lions—far stronger in every way—were hunted down, herded onto game reserves and into zoos, and driven out of existence.
The lion guards reach us. They have handsome, leonine faces with red eyes that glow unnaturally, lit from inside. As they stand sniffing and growling, their bloodred eyes flash over the cyborg travelers, scanning them.
My mother and I wait motionless a few paces back. The lions are enormous—they must each weigh five hundred pounds. But they’re also keenly sensitive—I can see their noses and ears twitching. Something tells me that they would not hesitate to charge an invisible foe, and that being pinned down by those enormous paws and torn apart by those jaws would not be a pleasant way to die.
I guess the three travelers check out okay, because the lion sentries bound away as quickly as they came, and we all proceed down the road toward the castle.
As we draw close to it, I inhale an acrid smell that creeps inside my throat and nostrils and makes me cough and gag.
“That’s the acid in the moat,” my mother cautions me, hearing me struggle for breath. “Be very careful.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?” I try to ask, but I can’t get the words out. The acid is setting fire to my lungs! The air enhancers we’re using don’t seem able to filter out the noxious stench. Mom, help! I shout out to her telepathically. I can’t breathe!
Try to hold your breath! she suggests. We just have to make it across the bridge.
It’s hard to hold your breath when you don’t have much breath to hold. I lock my lips together, clamp my nostrils shut with my fingers, and follow the three cyborgs out onto the bridge. They don’t seem affected by the fumes—I guess their lungs are more robotic than human.
The bridge is wide and dark—a great iron plank. As we start across, I have the strange feeling that the river of acid beneath is alive and aware of us. It bubbles up higher and hisses suspiciously.
The moat can’t be more than fifty feet wide, but the trek across the bridge seems endless. I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer, so I rip a bead off the necklace that Eko gave me long ago when we went diving on the Outer Banks, and open my mouth to swallow it. As soon as my lips part, the acid fumes force their way in.
One whiff of the bubbling brew nearly knocks me off my feet. I cough and feel faint but just before I topple over, the condensed oxygen from Eko’s bead kicks in and I’m suddenly okay again.
I glance at my mother. The Queen of Dann is too proud to complain, but she looks like she’s about to asphyxiate. I offer her a bead. Mom, this will help you breathe.
She swallows the bead and nods gratefully. And then she sends me an urgent message: Don’t let the vapors touch you!
Up ahead, I see that the crimson and black tongues licking upward from the acid river have geysered high above the bridge and completely encircled the cyborgs. It looks like they’re captive inside a living, probing mist. The miasma shifts and billows, and its grasping tentacle-like edges come within inches of me. I jerk away, but there’s not much room to dodge.
What’s happening? I ask my mother.
They’re being checked one last time before being granted admission to the fortress.
Checked how?
Validated as Dark Army down to the cellular level. When they were created, I.D. markers were planted in their DNA. If the vapors brush you, all is lost.
Easy advice to give, but nearly impossible to follow, as bright tongues from the river flick around us.
My mother and I bob and weave, duck and jump, like two shadowboxers in the fight of our lives. Somehow we keep from being touched.
The vapors finally recede back into the moat, and the cyborgs walk forward again. The bridge appears to lead smack into the metal wall of the castle, but as we get close a spider crack appears on the metallic facade. I see that it’s the outline of a semicircular door.
The cyborgs are now five feet from the metal wall, and we’re right behind them. The spider crack thickens and darkens, and suddenly the portal slides open. The cyborgs hurry inside, and my mother and I dash forward and just make it in before the doorway seals back up.
We’re in a small, dark transitional space—not inside the fortress yet but no longer outside. A strong wind blows so hard that it almost knocks me over. Then I realize it’s not blowing but rather air is being sucked out with such force that I feel my skin stretching off my face and my hair is yanked straight up. What’s going on? I ask my mom as an orange light flashes across the tiny chamber.
Re-oxygenation and sterilization. They’re just making sure no unwanted pathogens get in.
The wind blows again, more gently, as new air is pumped in, and then the other side of the air lock opens and we step out into the Fortress of Aighar.