Truth Engine. James Axler
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hands in a gesture of defeat, the Detonics Combat Master still clutched in her right fist. “They did—that’s all I know. It was so quick, Brigid. You wouldn’t believe.”
“They must have planned it, then,” Grant growled from where he was checking on one of the rooms that led off from the main artery. The room was empty, but the thin pool of blood was spreading across the floor even here.
Kane turned to Domi as the foursome continued hurrying along the wide corridor, he and Grant checking the side rooms with brutal efficiency in a standard Magistrate sweep pattern. “They must have got to the generator,” he surmised. “That’s why the lights are on the fritz. But I don’t get it—why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“We tried, Kane,” Domi told him hotly. “There are dead people all about—you notice that?”
Kane stopped, looking about him as if for the first time. The blood, the bodies, the ruin of familiar places. It seemed faintly unreal.
“Kane,” Grant called, standing in the doorway of one of the rooms. “You need to see…”
Kane had hurried over to join his partner, Brigid and Domi just a step behind him. Grant was standing at the door to a closet used for storing cleaning supplies. The light inside the cupboard was flashing on and off, making a tinkling note each time it winked on. Inside, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was crouched on the floor, pulling her knees in close to her face. She was sobbing in silence, her shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle each cry.
“Reba?” Kane asked. “DeFore, it’s me. It’s Kane.”
The medic looked up, her brown eyes rimmed with red as she peered through the untidy mess of her blonde hair. DeFore had always taken special care with her hair, forming elaborate creations with the ash blonde tresses, different every day. Kane had never seen her like this.
“Reba?” Kane said again, his voice gentle. “Come on, it’s okay. What happened here? What happened to you?”
As he stepped forward, Kane felt the liquid under his heel, and realized that Reba DeFore was sitting in a pool of blood. She continued to shake as he approached her.
“He’s here,” DeFore said, her voice breathless with fear. “I saw him.”
Brigid was standing in the doorway, listening to their companion’s words. “He who?” she asked.
“The stone man,” DeFore explained.
Brigid could still remember the chilling sense of dread in DeFore’s tone, as if a part of her sanity had been stripped away.
BACK IN THE CAVE, there was movement in the mirror. Brigid shifted in her seat, feeling her tension rise as she warily watched the huge stone figure appear from the shadows. It was Ullikummis, the glowing strands of lava glittering across his charcoal flesh.
Brigid tried to turn, but couldn’t shift her head far enough, and was forced to watch the reflection of the great stone god striding toward her in the dim light. He stopped directly behind her, peering over her head at his own reflection in the mirror.
“You see the mirror?” Ullikummis asked.
Brigid studied the reflection of his craggy stone face looming out of the darkness above her own. He looked damaged, the stonework more ruined than she remembered, as if hit with buckshot, or a dead thing eaten by worms.
“Yes.” She nodded, the word little more than a breath.
She saw the stone colossus move his hands then, reaching behind her until she felt his hard, cool fingers pressing against the nape of her neck.
“What are you doing?” she blurted, unable to keep the fear out of her voice.
“Watch the mirror, Brigid,” Ullikummis replied, “for in it is contained your future.”
Brigid felt something drag along the nape of her neck, bumping over the vertebrae there where it pressed against her skin. It felt like needles, or the feet of an insect playing along her spine.
“Please,” she said, cursing herself for showing weakness in front of her enemy.
Then she felt something jab at her skin, and she stifled a cry of pain. Something was pressing into her, pushing against the flesh at the back of her neck.
“Please stop,” Brigid cried. “Please tell me what—”
Ullikummis met her eyes in the mirror as he worked something at the top of her spine. “You have fought with the Annunaki for the longest time as apekin measure,” he stated, as Brigid felt the hidden thing burrowing into her flesh. “Have you never wondered what it is like to be one of us?”
Brigid screamed as something clawed beneath her flesh, plucking at the ganglion of nerves that wrapped around her spine.
“Are you aware of casements, Brigid?” Ullikummis asked.
She couldn’t answer. Her mouth was frozen open in silent agony as the sharp thing, whatever it was, continued to pull at her beneath her skin.
“Other worlds,” Ullikummis continued, “a theory of alternatives where futures may be played out differently.”
Brigid had heard of the theory, had been privy to it on occasion, where a future with Kane as her lover had been foreseen. She tried to focus her mind on the words Ullikummis was saying in his gravelly tones, tried to reach past the pain as her body struggled against its ties.
“I was taught by a wise Annunaki named Upelluri,” Ullikummis told her, his voice like the grinding of stone. “Upelluri once explained to me how the Annunaki differ from humans by explaining their simple-minded concept of the casements. He said that naive and short-sighted philosophers had misinterpreted them, treating the different vibrational frequencies as one would the rooms of a house. Instead, Upelluri had compared it to looking in a mirror.”
Brigid rocked in place, wailing in pain as the thing burrowed through her spine, seeming to tear at her very being. “Please,” she howled. “Please stop.” Her breath was coming faster and faster, a runaway steam locomotive hurrying to disaster.
Ullikummis reached forward with one hand, clasping her head by the crown, holding it rigidly in place as she tried to squirm, forcing her to look into the mirrored glass.
“You see your reflection,” Ullikummis explained, “and behind it you see the reflection of the cavern beyond, and the cavern in the mirror appears to have depth. But in reality, the whole thing is but a picture on a flat, reflective surface, with no more depth than the surface of a blade of grass.”
Brigid stared at her reflection, at the thing that loomed behind her, even as pain surged across her back like fire.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis instructed.
She tried to shake her head, to tell this nightmarish thing that walked like a man no.
“Close your eyes,” Ullikummis repeated, “and the pain will pass.”
Her breathing was coming so fast now, the steam engine jumping the tracks and hurtling off the cliff. The pain was oblique, an impossible thing to calculate, to comprehend. She closed her eyes, praying it wasn’t a trick, praying that Ullikummis was not toying with her as a cat toys with a mouse.
“This world,” she heard Ullikummis intone, “this galaxy with all its depth and color and difference—this is but the image on the surface of the mirror to the Annunaki. That was how Upelluri explained your ways to me.”
Brigid waited, eyes closed, feeling the thing rummaging beneath her spine, like a rapist’s hand tugging at the hair at the nape of her neck, plunging her down, down, down. She whined, a gasp coming through clenched teeth.
“Don’t fight,” Ullikummis instructed placidly. “Relax, Brigid.”
Brigid struggled to hold herself still as the burning continued, trying the whole while to pretend it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t