THEY WERE TEENAGERS. Boys and girls. But they moved with practiced ease and grace as they went among the dead, gathering their weapons, sliding clips and bullets from the guns and tossing them into a pile at the center of the room.
No matter what they looked like, they were warriors. Shako’s secret weapons.
“These are . . . our children?” Simon asked, incredulous.
“No,” Shako corrected him. “They are my children.”
“I never knew.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
Simon couldn’t answer that. She turned away.
Shako went to David and held him. She tried to kiss him, but he kept her at arm’s length.
“You might have told me,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Shako told him. “I couldn’t risk them knowing about this. There was no way to explain. But you see? They would have been able to take care of themselves. It’s what I raised them for.”
“I understand now, I get it,” David said. He looked very pale now. “I just really wish you’d told me.”
Then he collapsed, a fresh red spatter of blood appearing on his lips as he began coughing.
A second later, Max, Peter, and Sebastian all hit the floor as well.
DAVID’S FORMULA, WHEN IT worked properly, introduced synthetic DNA that replaced the repair-and-excision sequences that kept errors out of the genome. Put simply, it cut-and-pasted new DNA that was flawless in place of the DNA that was old or damaged.
But that same process could be used to simply slice the DNA to ribbons, without replacing anything. It could, in theory, unwind the double helix and break down the DNA itself, causing cell disintegration on a massive scale.
Eventually, organs would fail. Tissues would break down. The human body would not know how to repair itself from the billion small tears and cracks that arose every minute of every day.
David figured it would take thirty minutes to an hour for the effects of a process like that to become apparent.
He was off by about ten minutes. He must have misplaced a decimal point somewhere back in Colombia, but it was a moot point now.
He and the others were all dying, falling apart at the fundamental level.
IT UNDID THE WORK of the Water. It was, in a way, a cure for immortality.
The men of the Council suddenly got very old, very fast.
Their skin withered and shrank and folded in on itself like a peach rotting in time-lapse photography.
Max screamed in pain.
Simon thrashed against the cuffs holding him, tried to stand up with the chair still attached. One of the boys shoved him back down.
“Please,” he yelled at Shako. “Let me—please. If you ever felt anything for me. Don’t let him die alone.”
Shako thought about it for a long moment.
In that time, the men on the floor shriveled before their eyes. It was not a quiet process. They all screamed now, as their muscles shrank and bones popped audibly from tendons. Their skin cracked and wept and bled.
Their eyes clouded over, years of macular degeneration blinding them in seconds. Their teeth fell out of their gums.
Simon could smell them, a rank foulness rising as their bodies rotted from the cells up.
“Please,” he said to Shako again. “Let me go to him.”
Shako eyed him coldly, then looked at Max, who was curling up into a ball now, his fine suit soiled with blood and fluids, hanging on him loosely as he boiled away to nothing.
Centuries of damage and disease and injury, all concentrated into a few brief minutes, all falling down on him at once.
“You want to comfort him?” Shako asked. “Give him some solace in his last moments? Ease his pain? Hold his hand?”
Simon was prepared to beg. “Yes. Please. I owe him that,” Simon said.
Shako took a step closer to Simon, blocking his view of all three of them.
“No.”
That was all. One word.
Their bones cracked under their own weight. Max screamed once more.
And the three immortal conquistadors died, leaving Simon alone in the world, the last of his kind.
Shako stepped away, and Simon could see them again. One last spasm had turned Max’s head. His skin was wrapped tight around a skull. It looked as if his jaw was open in an eternal scream of agony.
Simon looked at this for a long time before he realized that tears were running down his face.
No one cared. They were doing their best to save David.
One of the children—one of his descendants, Simon realized with the same shock as before—had a paramedic’s kit. He was trying to inject something into David’s arm. He couldn’t find a vein.
Useless, Simon knew. There was only one thing that could save David now. Shako had to know it, too. So why was she hesitating?
“There is another source of the Water,” Simon said.
“Yes,” Shako said.
David had lapsed into unconsciousness. He was younger than the others, but he would not last much longer. It was obvious.
“Then what are you waiting for?” Simon said. “Take him there. Save him.”
She looked at him. “And start all this over again?”
Simon sat for a moment. Then he spoke again. “Whatever I did to you, that was my fault. Not his. We brought him into this. First me, then you. All he has ever tried to do is the right thing. You can’t let him die for that.”
“You’re wrong,” she said.
But then she spoke to the two Seminole youths and had them pick David up.
“I can’t let him die, but that’s not the reason.”
She told one of the others to bring around a car. They needed to move quickly.
“We’re going to the cave,” she said. She pointed at Simon. “And he’s coming with us. I want him to see this.”