by Kai Meyer
“We can show you the way there,” she said. “But in return, you have to do something for us.”
“And that is?” asked Thanassis.
“I want you to rescue someone.”
STORMING THE BUNKER
EVENING TWILIGHT FELL AROUND Isola Luna in hues of gloomy purple. The cone of the volcano rose black against the horizon, as if a scrap had been torn out of the panorama of the last of the daylight, revealing the darkness behind it.
The Stabat Mater was approaching the island from the east. She came in over the sea with the dark showing no lights, with engines throttled, a steel monster on a furtive voyage.
Rosa stood at the large window on the bridge, letting her eyes wander over a row of monitors. Indistinct images flashed across them. They came from cameras operated by a detachment of hybrids preparing down below for the assault on the island. Mirella was a member of that troop, and so was the dog-man. Metallic voices all talked at once; final orders were issued. There was frequent loud crackling as someone adjusted a microphone, or knocked into it while setting up the equipment.
The crew on the bridge didn’t seem bothered by this background noise. Presumably raids to rescue hybrids from the secret TABULA laboratories followed a similar pattern. All these men and women might well have taken part in such operations before.
At a top speed of twenty-five knots—less than fifteen miles per hour—it had taken the Stabat Mater over half a day to reach Isola Luna, which lay off the north coast of Sicily, an isolated chunk of lava rock with only two buildings on it.
One of them was the villa Alessandro’s mother used to go to for solitude. It stood on a small plateau near the top of the slope, a higgledy-piggledy flat-roofed building with whitewashed walls and many large windows. It had been built in the 1970s and had the psychedelic aura of an artist’s home—an impression reinforced by Gaia’s eccentric furnishings.
The second building was the old World War II bunker not far from the landing platform on the north shore of the island, a colossus of gray concrete. From the outside, no one would guess how far it extended back inside the rock. Iole and the two women had been hiding there for several days now, assuming that the Alcantara and Carnevare men who had come to attack the island hadn’t found them there in the last few hours.
“Look at that,” said Danai.
A satellite picture of the island came up on the largest screen at the center of the wall of monitors. It was white on black, like an old photographic negative. Tall structures showed up as gray shading. The outlines flickered, as if made of lightning flashes. In addition, there were several red dots, concentrated on two parts of the island in particular.
Almost playfully, Danai was manipulating a kind of joystick that regulated sections of the screen. Alessandro stood between her and Rosa, his arms folded, a worry line between his eyes. In the background, the crew on the bridge were busy with technical equipment.
Thanassis had returned to his sickroom quarters. Orders up here came from the captain, a lean man of around sixty. He did not wear a uniform, only a white shirt and dark pants. His manner was authoritarian, and his glance seemed to say: I’ve seen enough of the world not to let a few hundred human and animal crossbreeds bother me.
No doubt the truth was more complicated. There was likely an unusual story behind every one of these men and women on the Stabat Mater, and they were not all hybrids; there were normal human beings among them. Rosa felt curiously close to them. They were all outcasts.
“How many are there?” Alessandro asked, as Danai enlarged the section of the picture shown on the screen. The joystick zoomed in on the northeast part of the island. The red dots dissolved into glowing orange and yellow sparks.
“Five in and outside the villa,” said Danai, “and another four outside the bunker to the north. Five more are patrolling the island. That’s to say, they’re not actually moving at all most of the time, probably sitting on a rock somewhere or sleeping. They don’t seem to expect any more problems.” She smiled with satisfaction. Absorbed in her task, she had lost much of her ethereal appearance. “No helicopter anywhere in sight; they’ve probably called it back. But there are two speedboats at the landing stage, and we’ve found a third in a bay on the southern shore of the island.”
The beach. That was where Rosa had first set foot on Isola Luna with Alessandro last October.
“The boats themselves seem to have been abandoned.”
“Three boats for just fourteen men?” asked Alessandro.
“Those are only the men we can see. These thermal imaging systems aren’t particularly precise. Someone might point that out to the Americans the next time they go blowing some nest of terrorists sky-high. In reality, a whole series of factors can impair pictures taken at such a distance.”
“How about the bunker?” asked Rosa. “We can’t see anyone under the rock, right?”
Danai shook her head. “No, your three friends won’t be visible unless someone drags them out into the open. They almost certainly haven’t been found yet, or they’d have been brought out.”
There was another alternative, but she didn’t voice it. Maybe all three were dead. Corpses generated no warmth, and they would have been as invisible as rocks on the screen.
“What’s that?” Rosa pointed to two marks outside the entrance of the bunker, standing out like dense drops from the white outline of the building. They were darker than the other marks, and they also seemed to take up more space.
“Oh,” said Danai.
Rosa and Alessandro exchanged an anxious glance.
“Arachnida,” said the hybrid. “That’s not good. People like to station them on impassable terrain, especially in darkness.”
Rosa’s short fingernails dug into the palms of her hands. “Meaning that they’re large, fast, and they can see in the dark?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And they’ve just come out of the bunker,” said Alessandro. “So they’re looking for something. Or someone. They know that Iole and the others are hiding down there.”
Rosa imagined the girl being hunted by man-size scorpions and giant spiders down the dark corridors of the bunker.
“What are they waiting for?” She pointed to the trembling pictures being transmitted from the helmet cameras of the assault detachment to the other monitors.
“We’re almost close enough,” said the captain from behind her. “Then the boats will put out. Only a few minutes to go now.”
Danai let go of the joystick and turned to Rosa. “And you’re sure that Mori’s papers are in that bunker?”
“Absolutely,” she said, lying through her teeth.
“This is not just a trick to get us to set your friends free?”
“They’ve found mountains of documents down here.” That, at least, was the truth; Iole had mentioned it more than once. “Could be that the Carnevares stored all kinds of stuff there, any number of papers that they wanted to clear away but not destroy.”
Alessandro came to her aid. “I knew nothing at all about it until Iole came upon the papers. Whatever they are, Cesare and my father were very keen to keep them secret. Over the last few months I’ve found out everything about my family’s business deals. There are hardly any gaps. But all the same, no one ever said anything about archives in the bunker. I don’t know what else they can be, if not Mori’s papers.”
There was still a trace of suspicion left in Danai’s eyes. Rosa found it difficult to understand her opaque character. Sometimes she was the abstracted, other-worldly creature from the Dream Room, at others she was her father’s determined right-hand woman.
“Here we go,” said the captain.
Danai looked back at the screens. The satellite image with the dots of heat was at the center, with the helmet camera pictures filmed by the hybrids arranged around it in a rectangle.
“Captain?” asked Alessandro.
“Yes?”
“Please tell your people that there’s a dog down there,
and we’d like them to make sure nothing happens to him.”
“A Hunding?”
“A mongrel,” said Rosa. “His name is Sarcasmo.”
A smile flitted over Danai’s features. “I like mongrels.”
Ten minutes later they heard the first shot.
Rosa stared at the wall of monitors and wondered exactly what she was looking at. Unsteady pictures from the night-vision camera, reminiscent of a glance into a washing machine tossing clothes around. Coded numbers and letters that meant nothing to her. Distorted voices, whispered progress reports, then heavy breathing again. Now and then animal sounds, yowls and growling. The moist smacking of the muzzles of beasts of prey.
Once she saw one of the insect hybrids, a swift outline chasing across the courtyard of the villa. She had already given up trying to work out which hybrid was transmitting pictures to which monitor. The best she could do was identify Mirella’s voice now and then.
More shots rang out, a total barrage. The pictures on two monitors froze, one soon followed by the other. The hybrids wearing them had collapsed and no longer moved.
Most of the pictures flickered in front of Rosa like a series of images showing interference. If she looked at any one of the monitors for too long, her sense of vertigo was almost overpowering. If she switched too quickly from one to another, to gather all the information she could, she also felt ill. All the same, there was something she found fascinating about the fading, pixelated filming.
Now and then her conscience pricked her, because what was going on didn’t move her more strongly—humans and hybrids were dying on the island, but for some reason that and all its logical implications never quite penetrated. It was like wartime pictures on TV, taken by cameras mounted on remote-controlled drones or warheads on rockets. You knew that the clouds of dust and smoke onscreen meant the death of human beings, but ultimately it didn’t affect you.
If it hadn’t been for the certainty that the skirmish on the island was for the lives of Iole, Cristina di Santis, and Raffaela Falchi, she would probably have wandered off at her leisure to the coffee machine out in the corridor to make herself an espresso. And that frightened her almost more than anything she saw on the wall of monitors.
Alessandro still had his arm around her, and she thought she could feel his skin moving under his shirt. Panther fur appeared as fine down under the fabric and disappeared again. Unlike her, he seemed to wish he could join in the fighting. She had inherited the cool, distant attitude of the snake, he the hot-blooded instincts of the panther.
One of the monitors showed something indistinct, distorted, but it was large and had many legs. One hybrid ventured close, and, for several seconds, rigid with fright, directed its camera on something that looked like a string of black beads—the wreath of eyes above a spider’s face. Then the Arachnid’s jaws seized the hybrid. From a second monitor, showing film taken from the viewpoint of another hybrid, you could get an idea of what was happening to the poor creature. Finally everything dissolved in a white inferno of pixels. Uninterrupted muzzle flashes were superimposed on all the pictures. When the shots died away, a naked man was lying motionless among the remains of the hybrid that had been torn to pieces. Breathlessly, Mirella gasped out her report of a death.
Soon after that came the final confrontation with the occupiers of the island. It was not the quivering images that told the viewers what was going on at the scene, but indefinable noise that turned out to be the breaking of large glass panes. Several hybrids had met with resistance inside the villa.
The defenders did not hold out for long. When the windows broke, and hybrids streamed into the villa, the men in the building were overrun. Shots were still whipping through the air, and Rosa feared that the prisoners were being executed. She tried to find some feeling in herself that went beyond superficial horror and moral condemnation—but then she recalled that these men had spent days on end hunting for a girl of fifteen who had to hide from them in a cold, dark bunker. And yet the disturbing certainty remained that all this fitted her image of the secure life on board the Stabat Mater only conditionally. More and more, she was realizing that Evangelos Thanassis was as uncompromising as his enemies in his methods.
After all the shots had died away, the cameras worn by the dead were switched off, numbers of casualties had been announced, and yet the talk was of victory, Rosa asked, “How about Iole?”
Danai, who had just finished a low-voiced conversation with the captain, counted the points of heat on the screen. “Your friends won’t come out of the bunker. They’re probably not sure exactly what’s been going on up above.”
“Someone had better go down and talk to them,” said the captain. “Someone they trust.”
Alessandro nodded. “I’ll go.”
“We’ll go,” said Rosa.
Then, with a crackle, Mirella’s voice came over the loudspeakers. “There’s one of the other side missing,” she reported. “One of the Arachnida has disappeared inside the bunker.”
ARACHNID
ROSA LOWERED THE MEGAPHONE, suppressing a sigh. Since she and the others had entered the bunker, she had called out several warnings through the darkness to Iole and the two women. Even after she stopped, her voice still echoed back from the concrete walls of the underground complex, dying away as a whisper deep in the rock.
“Are you sure that the Arachnid is down here?” she asked Mirella, who was walking to Rosa’s left with a submachine gun leveled at the ready. The wiry hybrid wore a close-fitting black jumpsuit. Anyone who didn’t look at her pock-marked face, where the structure of scales had only half developed, could have taken her and Rosa for the same age.
“If he’d escaped among the rocks, the thermal-imaging camera would probably have picked him up.” Mirella didn’t look at Rosa as she spoke; her eyes remained forward the whole time. “I don’t know how long he’s been searching for your friends down here, but we can be more or less certain that he knows his way around better than we do.”
Rosa had no idea how large the bunker was. Until a few months ago, the concrete building above ground, through which the passageway to the underground complex was built, had been the enclosure where the Carnevares kept their beasts of prey. Cesare had let lions, tigers, and other big cats roam free on the island before Alessandro put an end to it. The wild animals had been captured and given to zoos on the mainland. Since then, the cages in the enclosure had been empty, but the smell of the big cats still filled the entire building. Even here, a floor lower down, it had settled into the shafts.
“Iole!” she called through the megaphone again. “If you can hear me—lock yourselves in somewhere, and don’t come out until I say so. There’s an Arachnid hiding in the bunker. Wait until we’ve found him.”
“If we drive him into a corner, he’ll attack,” said Mirella. “So stay very close to me.”
Ahead of them went three armed hybrids, one of them the Hunding. Behind those three came five more men at different stages of metamorphosis. One of the insect hybrids was running along under the roof on all fours. Curved bony spurs with points as sharp as a knife on the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet gave him a secure grip on the porous concrete surface.
Farther forward, even ahead of the Hunding and his two companions, Alessandro was prowling through the darkness in his panther form. He saw in the dark better than any of the others with his cat eyes, and his black coat made him a shadow. Now and then he was caught in one of the flickering beams from a flashlight, but he was out of it again at once.
The group was moving down a long corridor with open doorways on both sides. Beyond the doorways, they saw rooms with rusty camp beds, folding chairs, and metal lockers.
The complex was supposed to have been empty for over sixty years. But the farther in they went, the more Rosa doubted whether the Carnevares had left such a place unused. For decades, Alessandro’s family had charged a fee for disposing of the victims of the other clans, and this bunker was ideal for that
purpose. If there were really no corpses here, that was probably because the space had been used to store something else. Something that would not be polluted by the stench of decomposition. Rosa’s conviction that Iole had discovered Leonardo Mori’s archives grew with every untouched room they passed, every dusty storeroom.
“He could have scurried away anywhere,” said Mirella after they had passed yet another.
The Hunding muttered impatiently to himself. Under the roof of the corridor, the insect hybrid made clicking noises that sounded like crazy giggling. Rosa never looked straight up at him, but she was aware of him clinging upside down there. Whenever she caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, a cold shiver ran down her spine.
They reached the end of the main corridor and were at the top of the steps down to the second underground floor. Alessandro must have run down them silently on his cat’s paws already. Her concern for him almost persuaded her to shift shape herself, particularly as her reptilian vision would register sources of heat that other eyes couldn’t see. However, she would then have lost her voice, and with it the opportunity to warn Iole and the two women of danger.
The handheld lights cut bright paths through the stone dust in the air. They climbed down the steps in a bewildering confusion of intersecting beams. The insect hybrid brought up the rear. Rosa heard him first scraping the wall as he climbed down it, and then behind her on the steps.
They entered a corridor with broad pipes running along the left wall, and among them skeins of tubes and supply cables. The hybrids shone the beams of their lights on this tangle, but they would have had to climb along the back of it to make sure no one was hiding there. The insect hybrid did just that: He slipped in between two pipes, and scurried on invisibly behind forests of cables and rusty wiring.
