The underground complex was an immense maze of corridors and rooms. With painted white walls, floors, and ceilings, it was almost like they were in an ice cave rather than in something man-made. Here and there they passed men and women on their way to indiscernible tasks.
Ethan was installed in a single room with a bed, television, and bathroom. He checked the television and saw that it was some local cable company. Everything was in a language he didn’t understand, even a popular rerun of The Big Bang Theory.
He turned off the television and checked under the bed. Then he walked around the room, searching for any signs of surveillance. A blinking light in a circular device on the ceiling might be a camera, or it could be just a smoke detector. He couldn’t be sure.
Ethan was in the bathroom washing his face and hands when they came for him. Two men again, this time different. They didn’t speak, using hand gestures to get the point across that they wanted him to follow. This was it. He was going to be reunited with Shanny. They took Ethan on a route he knew he couldn’t remember, eventually ending up in some kind of control booth. The observation window was so heavily tinted that he couldn’t see through it.
Standing in the room was a woman whose face was crisscrossed with wrinkles. Her head was buzz cut like a man’s, showing a snowy hint of hair. She wore a white lab coat over a tweed jacket, tie, and slacks. Behind her were two men who were monitoring some of the equipment.
“Greetings, Mr. McCloud,” she said, in a British accent. “I’m Dr. Eleanor Bernstein, very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
She stepped forward with a slight limp and shook Ethan’s hand. Up close Ethan saw that the wrinkles on her face weren’t wrinkles but scars—mutilations like the contours of a map. He shuddered on the inside, thinking of how much pain she had to have endured. Had it been intentional or accidental?
“Ah, yes, my face. One of the favorite interrogation techniques of my adversaries is to wrap faces in barbed wire, then peel it off.” Bernstein shook her head. “Not something you want to have done twice, mind you. They did it to me three times.”
Her face didn’t move normally with the scarring. It seemed as if she were wearing someone else’s disfigurement.
Ethan grimaced but got down to business. “Where’s Shanny?”
Eleanor frowned. “I don’t know why they lied to you. We don’t have her. We never did.” Seeing the disbelief on Ethan’s face, she added, “I swear to you.”
All the anticipation, all the buildup of excitement crashed, leaving Ethan breathless. His heart clenched. The world spun. He’d come halfway around the world for what? Certainly not Shanny. When he was finally able to speak again, he asked, “Why would they tell me you had her if you didn’t?”
“I have no idea. I’ve almost given up trying to find out why they do the things they do. They’re so enthralled by their giants that I think they don’t realize humanity is more important.”
Horace and Edna Johansson didn’t fit that profile. Or did they? How much of what they’d said was made up of some kind of disinformation campaign? For now, he had no way of knowing.
“Then where is she?” Ethan asked.
“We don’t know. But if those two have any idea, we’ll get it out of them. We intend to add the question to our interrogation-question queue.”
Ethan stared for a long minute, waiting for this strange, scarred woman to begin laughing and say it was all a joke. Only it wasn’t. It was clear Shanny wasn’t here. Whatever game the Johanssons were playing, he might never know. In fact, Shanny might not even be alive at all. He swallowed hard. The best thing Ethan could do now was try to stay alive for as long as he could.
“Then why am I here?” he asked, his voice rough.
“My men didn’t know what to do with you, so they brought you along. It’s not often we get a chance to interrogate an adversary, much less two. And never in the history of bone chasing has a bone chaser turned in members of the Six-Fingered Man’s evil cabal.”
“Glad to be the first one,” Ethan said, beginning to see where he had some play. He looked around. “What is this place?”
Eleanor smiled. “There’s a story to that. You see, the people of Lapland used to believe in trolls—Stallo they called them. There’ve been legends for thousands of years of these Stallo haunting the northern reaches and hyperborean forests. The fact is, most of the giants have been locked up and secured by the cabal. But there are still some in the wild, some who want to be left alone and not imprisoned by the Six Fingers of Death cabal.”
She said something in a language Ethan didn’t understand, and one of the men pressed a button. The tinting on the observation window disappeared. Eleanor stepped forward and gestured for Ethan to look down.
What he saw made him freeze. His knees weakened and threatened to buckle. He was forced to grab the window for support because what he was seeing was absolutely impossible.
The interior of the observation space was the size of a basketball stadium. Workers in white lab coats moved back and forth around the central figure. He only saw these men and women peripherally, much like one would see gnats when staring at something else. In this case, manacled to the floor of the room was the most immense being he’d ever seen.
“The Stallo you see here is a little over twelve meters tall, or forty feet in American measurements. We found it living in a cave a hundred miles north of here with several of its offspring. None of them survived our extraction. They were also all less than half his size.” She shook her head. “It’s what they do. The occurrence of female giants is exceedingly rare, so in order to have a cohort to serve them, they are forced to capture human women and impregnate them. The women don’t survive the births. The babies are much too large. The birth is such a horrible affair.”
Ethan heard the words but they had little effect. He was still too stunned by the sight. The giant beneath him was absolutely mammoth. Each hand was the size of half a man. The feet were easily the size of a normal person. Its head seemed impossibly huge. But what grabbed Ethan by the throat and held him, what made him unable to look away, was the utter and total emaciation of the giant. Ribs pressed sharply through the skin. Cheekbones seemed on the verge of punching through its face. The eyes were sunken, and the lips were pulled back. The pelvic area and stomach were sunken as well. Its skin had a wretched gray hue.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s impossibly strong. We can’t feed it much, or else it would tear this place down.”
“So you’re starving it to death?”
Eleanor waved her hand. “Oh, nothing like that. Just keeping it on a tight diet.”
The being manacled to the floor of the observation room reminded Ethan of the old black-and-white photos of Nazi concentration camp survivors, only on a gargantuan scale.
“How did you capture it?”
“If you have enough ketamine you can bring anything down.”
The giant suddenly roared, cursing in several languages, its words rebounding off the walls and rattling the glass of the observation room.
“What is it saying?” Ethan asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard.
“It’s calling for its father to come save it. It’s speaking in Aramaic, a very old form of German, and Saamic. It uses one other Laplandian language, Kemi we believe, but it’s been dead for a thousand years and no one can understand it, not even our computers.”
“How old is he?”
Eleanor leveled her gaze at Ethan. “It. We use the pronoun it to refer to the giant. Do not make the mistake and anthropomorphize the creature. Although its DNA is similar enough for interbreeding, it is not human. Humans have forty-six chromosomes. This rough beast has forty-two.”
Ethan nodded slowly. “Okay. How old is it?”
Eleanor turned back to observe the giant. “We examined the otoliths and gauge that it was created eighteen thousand years ago.”
The age was staggering. Ethan was barely able to comprehend such a number. Eighteen thousand years old. This made it five times older than recorded human history. The being before him had lived through the rise of the Egyptians, the building of the pyramids, the rise and fall of empires, including the Roman and Ottoman, and everything else in human history… only to retreat to a home on the edge of nowhere, hoping to be left alone.
“By its age, we believe that its parent was one of the originals. Its father would be seventy feet tall if still alive.”
Ethan felt his awe turn into a mix of reverence and fear. That these beings truly existed was astonishing. There was a certain veneration he’d always ascribed for older people. He’d felt it with the Johanssons especially. But what Ethan was beginning to feel now was so far beyond that it felt as if a hole was opening inside of him.
Eleanor said a few words in an unknown language, and the windows once became opaque.
“What you are feeling now is called giant awe. It’s part of our makeup to revere such things. We can’t help but become enthralled. It’s taken years of indoctrination for the staff here to be able to work around a giant such as this. Even now, they have hourly group checks to make sure no one is falling under its spell.”
Ethan shook his head and expelled his breath. “It’s powerful.”
“Can you imagine if dozens of giants appeared and started broadcasting on television? The earth would be theirs. Humanity would be enslaved.”
“What are you doing to it?”
“Experimentation. Mainly longevity science. We want to figure out how it lives so long. Some postulate that if we’re able to find out how it manages this we’ll be able to cure every known disease on the planet.” Eleanor smiled, making the scars go white on her face. “That alone grants us the moral permission to do what we’re doing.”
“But it looks so sick.”
Eleanor shrugged. “It’s fine. You’d be amazed at the healing properties it possesses.”
Ethan felt sick to his stomach. To treat anything the way the giant was being treated was a disgrace to everything it meant to be human. Still, he had to keep that to himself, so he changed the subject. “What’s going to happen to the Johanssons?”
“They’ll be interrogated and then killed.”
Ethan jerked back.
Eleanor smiled beatifically. “This is a war for the survival of humankind, Mr. McCloud. Make no mistake about it. Those two might look like a nice elderly couple, but they’ve left a trail of our dead a mile long. This is a war, and they are soldiers. Just as I am. Just as you are.” Eleanor paused, her smile falling. “You just need to find out whose side you’re going to fight on. The side of the giants or the side of humanity.”