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  “But once I let go, the pain was gone, right?”

  Durga nodded. “Which means we have to inflict agony upon each other. You’d have thought that our opponent would have come up with a far more clever fate.”

  “You think? There’s no guarantee that the trauma we’ll inflict upon each other would be survivable,” Kane said. “And there’s no guarantee that we’d sit still to have someone else inflict torture on us.”

  “Oh, but I’d be so willing to bite through this umbilicus to hear your screams,” Durga declared. “Especially if the result is my freedom.”

  “What would keep us here if we were to cut the tie for the other?” Kane wondered, then paused in thought.

  “So...we can’t enjoy the suffering of our foes,” Durga concluded.

  He nodded. “Maybe.”

  Durga’s eyes narrowed.

  “Like I said, this is supposition, but it’s not as if we have a lot of time to experiment. We’d have to sever each other’s tethers at the same instant,” Kane said. “And there’s nothing we can use as tools.”

  The Nagah prince frowned. “Except ourselves. We’ll really have to bite through each other’s umbilicus.”

  Kane nodded again.

  “That’s if our teeth actually work,” Durga added. “Remember, our physical selves seem real here, but that could still be an illusion.”

  “I know,” Kane returned. “But what choice have we got?”

  Durga grimaced. “I should never have let Enlil into my head,” he muttered.

  Kane drew a breath. “Things would have been much easier, but that’s the past. It’s immutable. The only thing we can do now is keep moving forward.”

  Durga nodded. He grasped the silver thread holding him. This time, it didn’t fade away. He kept it still and floated closer to Kane, who had similarly wrangled his tether. Both paused, knowing full well that they were placing their lives in each others’ hands.

  The psychic terrain around them shifted suddenly. The voidlike being that had enveloped North in their initial shared telepathic contact was suddenly present, and grasped both of the silvery umbilical cords attached to the disembodied men.

  “You’ve grown far too clever,” that distorted voice said. It hadn’t come from the null-creature’s “body,” but reverberated all about them, a thunderous proclamation by an omnipresent god. With a sudden surge, the gigantic void being tugged on their silver threads, and it was as if Kane and Durga were toys, hurled about by a fitful child.

  Kane grunted, feeling as if his bones crunched as his form crashed into Durga’s, the violent impact bringing the taste of blood to his mouth.

  “You must learn your places, children.” The entity spoke again, while the two of them dangled, hanging by their psychic leashes, both looking battered after their brutal treatment by the giant who had trapped them here.

  “Learn my place?” Kane asked. He was surprised at how difficult it was to speak. Again he tasted blood, could feel his lips split from where he’d smashed face-first into Durga. Kane tried to reach up, but his left shoulder refused to move any higher than halfway before injured ligaments barked a warning and his limb froze.

  He was lifted until he was face-to-face with an ebon image, a mouse hung by its tail before the world’s largest black cat. Kane sensed the purr of self-satisfaction from the entity.

  “Yes, Kane. You must learn your place in my world order.” The booming, everywhere-present voice assaulted him again. His eardrums twisted and groaned at the thunderous sound, the pressure of each syllable like the shock wave of an implosion grenade, even through his old black polycarbonate magistrate armor.

  “What the hell are you?” Kane sputtered. His throat was raw, raspy. Given the control that this entity had over him, he now knew what a marionette felt like. The tether wasn’t a link to his body; it wasn’t the path back to reality. It was a noose, and this unknown foe gripped him tortuously. Each shake sent racking, body-twisting pain through him. Kane found himself wishing that he could die, even as a cosmic heartbeat pulsed between his ears.

  “I am now your god. You have denied me for so long....”

  “Gods aren’t bullies,” Kane spit.

  “You’ve been hanging around with the wrong crowd,” the entity answered with a chuckle.

  With a flick, Kane was once more hanging at Durga’s level, except he felt the tether draw taut with a whip crack sound. The momentum he’d generated folded him physically in half, and breath exploded from his lungs. What had once been his lifeline was now a hook, and a cruel fisherman was bouncing him up and down on it, driving pain deeper and deeper into his flesh.

  “The crowd...” he began, then didn’t have much more strength than to breath in and out.

  “Yes. The crowd that you’ve encountered has informed you of the behavior of want-to-be gods. Enlil and his ilk, pathetic pretenders to my throne,” the entity said.

  Kane gulped down another breath. This thing sounded familiar, not in terms of the voice itself, but the type of statements it was making.

  Another had voiced similar feelings, he assumed. But was this real, or just another of those epiphanies that come to you in a dream, and with the cold light of logic are revealed to be the garbage math of a subconscious mind babbling out a mirror to the known world?

  The tether yanked again, and he gagged.

  “Kane...stop fighting!” Durga hissed. “The more you piss it off, the more it hurts the both of us!”

  The Cerberus explorer was about to say something, but his will finally failed him.

  A man can dance on the end of a noose for only so long before his strength gives out....

  Chapter 18

  Brigid Baptiste was distracted from her efforts at breaking the conundrum about Kane and Durga by the sudden activation of her Commtact.

  “Domi and Edwards spotted the kongamato in the tunnels beneath the redoubt,” Grant’s voice announced. “Everyone to battle stations.”

  The general signal cut off, and now Grant sounded much more intimate over the jaw plate communicator. “Brigid, any news on Kane or Durga?”

  “They both still appear to be comatose,” she answered. “Where do you need me?”

  “Protecting them,” Grant responded. “Two more men may or may not give us an edge, but right now we’ve got a lot of fighters, so you get your brains on what our problems are stemming from.”

  Brigid grimaced. “I’ve been contemplating for too long, and justfeel as if I’m spinning my wheels.”

  “It may not feel as if you’re doing something, but we’re stretching things thin up here with the Zambians, the remains of Durga’s group and Sinclair and I,” Grant said.

  “Stretching it?” Brigid asked.

  “We’re three different forces, with different tactics and training,” he answered. “I can anticipate where you and Kane would be in a wild melee, but right now, the differences of our groups means we have to keep separate so we don’t accidentally stumble into each other’s lines of fire.”

  “Unit integrity,” Brigid responded. “The theory that a piecemeal force is less efficient than a small group who know each other’s strategies and tactics intimately.”

  “Bingo,” Grant said. “I’m keeping North and Nathan close.”

  “North? You’re trusting him now?” Brigid asked.

  “Just as far as I can reach, but he already knows that,” Grant explained.

  “Do you need Nathan?” Brigid asked.

  “You want him, or just the staff?”

  “Both,” Brigid responded. “You haven’t...”

  “No,” Grant said. “I’m sending him to you now.”

  Brigid heard the Commtact break off, and she looked at Kane. He’d gone from an emotionless mannequin to being in distress. His brow was wrin
kled and his breathing belabored.

  “Sure, now you start acting up, once we’re under attack,” Brigid muttered. She gave him a gentle shake, hoping to stir him from his stupor, but his response to stimulus seemed to be merely internal.

  “Come on, anam chara, wake up. We need your help,” she whispered.

  Kane remained still, not even his eyeballs moving beneath their lids to show he was dreaming. Brigid feared that he might truly be lost, but she fought that off.

  He had battled against nearly impossible odds before. Though he might be trapped now, he was still a warrior, a man driven to make the world a better place. The only thing that would keep Kane from coming back would be death itself.

  * * *

  THE ALERT SOUNDED by Domi and Edwards had put all the defenders in the Zambian redoubt on full alert. Nathan Longa, holding both Nehushtan and a borrowed rifle, felt out of his depth in all of this. What had been a small, intimate group had suddenly become a full-fledged military operation, but Nathan didn’t begrudge the Zambian soldiers their professionalism and rough readiness.

  He’d seen what the kongamato could do, and realized, after watching how Brigid Baptiste had rushed to his aid, that had it not been for the serpent-adorned staff, he would have been among the dead, as well. Even with all their guns, their training and their teamwork, the Zambian defenders had come through the deadly horde, battered, two-thirds of their number dead, and running in full retreat from the fearsome predators. Nathan wished he knew better how to wield the power of Nehushtan, wished that he could simply wave it as a wand and direct thunderbolts and lightning to shatter the savage mutates, but such dramatics seemed out of his reach.

  And so Grant sent him to assist Brigid Baptiste in raising the long-limbed, wolf-muscled warrior, Kane. The man had utilized Nehushtan to bring Nathan back from the verge of death, and now he had a chance to return the favor, if only he could figure out how to activate the staff’s healing abilities.

  If I could figure it out, he thought. That was the staff’s whim, not his own. Nehushtan had provided for Nathan. It had guided him across the countryside with dreams. It had boosted his strength and speed in hand-to-hand combat against the kongamato. It had repaired his deep lung laceration, mending severed blood vessels and restoring 100 percent function to his brachial passages.

  Nehushtan made the decisions, not Nathan.

  He squeezed the damned stick tighter.

  Listen, Nehushtan. You need to stop jerking me around like a puppet and start healing Kane, and perhaps kicking mutant ass.

  Nathan wondered if he “sounded” too tough in his thoughts, but realized it stemmed from pure frustration. The staff was a powerful artifact. His father and grandfather had told stories of how it had laid demons low and imprisoned the dark, old gods in tombs beneath Africa, entities that had shuffled upon the Earth’s surface long before the squirming little hairless apes were even long-tailed rodent-sized puffballs. Then came Brigid Baptiste with her tales of the Annunaki, and enemies that even they had feared, or deemed potentially useful as future slaves—something that Nathan suspected the kongamato truly were.

  Those “future slaves” were more like an invading army, relentless and as cruel as the siafu ants that he’d leaped over in sheer terror...was it really only two days ago? Nathan realized how out of his element he was.

  And yet he’d survived for this long, met up with heroes, fought alongside them, earned their trust.

  He just didn’t relish the idea that he was going to have to fight against the entity who’d created the monsters.

  Nathan kept going and found the small conference room where Brigid watched over Kane and their once-enemy, Durga. That the newcomers had risked so much for an opponent was a sign of their basic human goodness. They could have simply allowed the man to remain a cripple, a prisoner in his own whithered body, especially for his past murders.

  Durga was a criminal, a killer who’d brought suffering on many for nothing more than his own political expediency. He’d already had all the benefits of royalty, including the admiration and love of his people, and yet he’d pushed for more, making deals with devils, both human and monstrous. Hell, the bastard had unleashed the very mutants who were terrorizing the frontier between Zambia and Harare, causing the deaths of dozens of Zambian soldiers and inspiring terror in smaller outskirt towns. Nathan didn’t doubt that Kane and his people would have stood idly by when a healthy Durga was dragged away to be lynched by an angry force of people mourning and displaced.

  Maybe that was why they’d offered to help him. The execution of a helpless man wouldn’t have sat well with them, no matter what the crimes committed.

  Again, that basic “human decency,” even toward those who barely looked human, and had rarely shown any decency to others in the past.

  He entered the room, and saw that Brigid was paying close attention to Kane, who seemed in a state of distress. Nathan immediately rushed to her side, and she jerked upright at the sudden intrusion.

  “I brought the staff,” he said. “How is Kane?”

  “He seems to be engaged in some sort of conflict,” Brigid responded. “There’s some stimuli causing his autonomic systems to react, which means that he’s in there somewhere. But he’s unable to reach all the way out here.”

  “What?” Nathan asked.

  “It’s the only logical explanation,” she explained. “If Kane’s essence were somehow severed from his body, he wouldn’t be experiencing spikes in heartbeat and respiration, as well as body temperature.”

  “So he isn’t an empty shell,” Nathan surmised. “But Durga doesn’t look distressed.”

  Brigid turned and looked toward the immobile Nagah prince.

  “Keep an eye on Kane,” she ordered Nathan. She moved over to the cobra man and took his pulse, probing both his throat and his wrist.

  Even as she did, she paused, looking down the length of his body. She remained silent, but her widened eyes told a story of surprise. Nathan reached out and touched her shoulder, and she turned away.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “I certainly didn’t need to know that about Durga’s anatomy,” the woman responded. “He’s all right?”

  Nathan looked back and noticed that Durga seemed to have a serpent writhing in his pants. After a moment, Nathan realized what he was looking at, and turned away, blushing.

  “Alien sex,” he muttered.

  “Something I didn’t need to know about, like I said,” Brigid returned. “And in my case, ‘what has been seen cannot be unseen’ is the gospel truth.” Her face reddened.

  “Kane’s being distressed and Durga’s...being romanced?” Nathan asked.

  “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it does,” she murmured.

  Nathan’s eyes went wide. “Durga is psychically raping Kane? Would he do that?”

  “Hannah, Kane’s bride-to-be, had described Durga as a sexual predator and an abuser,” Brigid said. “If he’s in a position to commit violence against someone else, it’s not below, or above him, to inflict violence on Kane. And it’s not a sexual action. It’s an infliction of his will, his anger and revenge.”

  “Killing a man doesn’t make him suffer,” Nathan mused. “But this doesn’t seem right. Not that I think Durga would be homophobic enough to not engage in a psychic rape, but I just don’t see a link. They’ve been kept together, and then separated. Whatever is happening is independent of each other. There’s no link, no stray signals.”

  “Nothing that could be picked up on radio,” Brigid corrected. She looked from the fallen Durga to the comatose Kane. Her brow wrinkled with concentration as she ran permutations through her mind. “You’re right, these look very different in the light of logic. Durga is in sexual release, and rape is not about arousal, it’s about punishment. And Durga wouldn’t get all erect o
ver damaging Kane.”

  She looked at her friend again, worry on her face. “You’re right,” she repeated.

  She gave Kane’s matted hair a quick brush with her fingers, then turned to the staff. “I’m going to need Nehushtan.”

  Nathan nodded and handed it to her.

  Even as she grasped the haft, her flame-gold hair began to float, to rise as if a sudden wind had whipped through the underground room.

  The light released by the artifact forced Nathan to squeeze his eyes shut and turn away from her.

  When he looked back, she was gone, and the staff lay on the floor.

  An electric buzz of fear cut through the conference room as Kane’s breath quickened.

  * * *

  BRIGID BAPTISTE FELT herself torn asunder, a sensation not unlike the stimuli she recalled when she was hurtled through time and space by either the mat trans or the Threshold. Nehushtan was gone, and suddenly the Cerberus archivist was in the middle of a forest, alone. The sky was dark, and the hair on her neck stood on end.

  She realized that she’d left her Copperhead behind, but was glad that she’d remembered to keep her pistol in its holster on her thigh. She gritted her teeth and immediately turned on her Commtact.

  “Grant,” she whispered.

  “What?” asked the big man.

  “I’m outside of the redoubt,” she answered. “I picked up Nehushtan, and suddenly I was gone.”

  “What?” he exclaimed. “Do you know where you are?”

  “Looks like jungle,” Brigid responded, keeping her voice low. There was a sudden rush of movement in the air, and she whirled toward it. It was a flock of birds quickly taking flight. Something bounded through the forest, and she recognized the long, slender limbs of an antelope. It wasn’t alone, and was in full run, dark eyes wide with fear.

  She heard the distant shriek of a kongamato, its very un-batlike howl piercing the darkness.

  “Scratch that. I’m between the mutants and the redoubt,” Brigid amended. “I’m on my way.”