Pete looked to Heath, then back to Zac.
“Did we make it?” Zac wanted to know.
Maybe he’d just blacked out. “Looks like we’re going to make it, yeah.”
Heath took his hand from Zac.
“You good?” he confirmed. “Everything okay?”
Zac nodded. “I’m good.” His gaze clouded over, something troubling passed behind those clear, youthful eyes. “I’m fine.”
CHAPTER 34: FINDERS KEEPERS
Hansel stood off to the side, as far away as he could, knowing he was about to be called upon and there was absolutely nowhere far enough away that he could be.
His time had come.
“Impossible.” Cee stood beside the body of Lorenzo, sprawled on the floor, the same place the girl left him after running him through. The Kel queen had been standing there what, to Hansel, felt like an incredibly long time, just … looking down, on the dead form of the Bok leader, the disbelief on her face nearly mirroring the final reaction of stunned denial flash-frozen on Lorenzo’s own expression.
The Kel Queen turned to him and Hansel could almost hear the click of the spotlight, her scrutiny finally brought to bear, now locked firmly where it had been headed all along.
On him.
She raised her translation wand directly to her mouth. “You expect me to believe the girl did this?” She looked around the whole room, at the carnage, the destruction. “All this?”
Hansel found his voice. “She did.”
To him it seemed as if the queen did believe it, yet was afraid to admit it, even to herself. Cee feared the girl. Hansel could see that easily enough.
Hansel feared her too, in his own way. Jessica. After showing her the way out he made his way back into the building, shaken badly by what she’d done, but deciding he would face up to what came next. No sense trying to run, there would’ve been no point, and so he went to the lobby, reported in and waited, talking to no one else yet having a hunch the queen would be along in short order. He hadn’t been wrong. She and her entourage of freaks blew in soon after and dragged him with them up to the penthouse. Hansel noted, at the time, as they entered the lofty room and the results of that impossible night came into view, even the brusque, indestructible Kang, force of nature, showed signs of surprise. In witness of the sheer volume and brutality of death and destruction in that gilded space, even the monster was amazed.
“One girl could not have done this.” The queen turned fully to him. She came closer. Looked hard at him.
“You lie.”
Why would I lie? Hansel wanted to ask, but feared even a hint of defiance would not be well received. It was unlikely he would live through this day, but he was in no hurry to accelerate that end.
“It was only her,” he said. “I was there,” he pointed to the corner where he stood through the entire event, “and I was as shocked to see it happen as you are to see the results.”
Cee held his gaze; those keen, yellow eyes reminding him of Jessica’s, and with a flash of what felt like insight he saw the alien Kel in her visage. A frightening transposition of the memory of her face with that of the queen, and it shook him.
There was no doubt Jessica was something far beyond what she appeared. Inhuman? Maybe. Hansel had seen proof enough of that.
“With nothing but a sword?” Cee repeated his earlier assertion.
He nodded.
“Impossible,” she repeated, turned and strode around the room, pointing to the results of the battle. “This?” she wanted to know. “A sword?” It was an exploded head. “And this?” A torso, ruptured from within. Then she pointed to the most glaring thing in the room, “And how about this?” The one thing that most definitely had nothing to do with swords or guns or fists or even explosives:
The massive conference table.
Cracked in half. A ton of wood at each end, toppled like a toy, laying as if smashed across someone’s knee and thrown. The result of an action for which there was not even a reasonable speculation.
Cee looked at him from behind the translation wand. “That, my dear Hansel, was not done with a sword.”
It wasn’t. Not even close.
But he saw no point in saying anything more about what the girl truly did. He wasn’t going to lie, but neither was he going to mention the full details of what he saw. Hansel knew Lorenzo made it a point to keep the Bok’s “powers” from the Kel queen. She knew nothing of what things they could do. If Hansel had his way she would never know the girl could do them either. At this bitter end he found himself with an unexpected, yet sincere, determination to protect her. To shield Jessica from what he could. Having seen her, having seen what she did, after escorting her out … after being in her presence …
He knew better.
Jessica was there to do good.
Perhaps this was his chance to redeem himself.
Cee was staring at him.
She wanted an answer.
There was none.
Across the room the queen’s pet, Kang, paced steadily, unable ever to be still. Never had Hansel seen the thing just stand there, and if Kang did stand still he was twitching, or shifting, always filled with barely contained energy. Like a living bomb. Ranged around the room the tigers stayed at the ends of their chains or slunk at the edges, all but ignoring the Kel and everything else, senses strained with wary alarm on the yellow abomination, attention fixed exclusively on Kang. Wrinkled noses and bared fangs, ears pinned. Like giant, hissing house cats.
Hansel had no doubt they would be far less than that, should they make any attempt at an attack.
But the great cats were too wise to leap. They held. Everything and everyone held, and in the face of Hansel’s silence Cee gave the order, instructing the other Kel in the room to take him away. Two guards came for him.
Time to pay his dues. For all the wrong he’d done. For the part he’d played in this.
And as they took him he felt, to his mild satisfaction, serenity. Glad he knew nothing of use to the Kel. Glad that no matter what devious techniques they employed there was nothing he could say. Yes, he might give up what he’d seen, that the girl could crack a table in half with a thought; that she could explode a man’s head with nothing more than the same. But what good did that do them? Nothing, really. The only thing that mattered to the Kel was information, and whatever Lorenzo knew, whatever the girl had been after, only Lorenzo held that knowledge, and now, only the girl did. Lorenzo was dead, the girl was gone.
There was nothing at all the Kel could discover.
Firm in the grip of his executioners Hansel was yet free. And he found himself hoping the girl got what she was after. He hoped, in some small way, he’d helped her achieve that end.
More than anything he hoped she turned out to be everything the Kel queen feared.
**
It was all in Kel. Jess had expected that to be the case, but the more intriguing thing was that it was hand-written. Ancient Kel handwriting. Her handwriting. Only a handful of items, diaries of a sort, but they were written in a flowing script, her own, she was positive, from a thousand years ago, and it drove a strange feeling of disconnect to be looking at her own penmanship from that distant past. The diaries were kept with a box of trinkets and talismans, locked away in that musty tome beneath the modern city of Hong Kong, clean white pages like linen, though surely something far more advanced, used at that time to record what she now saw was everything from musings to important information, even little doodles and diagrams, things she’d not yet reviewed but which were significant in their promise, all of it written or drawn in that beautiful script. The writings of Aesha, Kel priestess.
Her writings.
It was like finding a treasure map she left for herself—which was more or less exactly what it was—and she recalled something similar from when she was younger. A similar revelation. Back then it was a crayon map, one she drew when she was six, with great detail, folding and sticking it somewhere and forgetting it, for years
, then finding it unexpectedly one day while looking for something else. By then she was fourteen. She remembered how surprised she was to discover it, how the details came flooding back when she saw it, completely forgotten until that moment. Holding the colored map in hand all those old memories were suddenly hers again …
This was the same thing. Here was something she’d known the Bok would hide, her personal effects, believing the notes of their priestess might one day be exploited for their own gain; she knowing that if she found them again it would spark her memory. And so she died, the Bok came forward, they hid this most precious treasure, knowing nothing of anything to do with it, as she intended, and now it was back in her hands. Proving, as she expected way back then, to be an effective trigger for her recall.
The room was small, not much to it, most of it empty save the sealed bookshelf containing the dozen or so small diaries, each with the same white spine and binding, each in fantastic shape despite the ages, convincing her they were definitely made of advanced materials. From the headings and dates she got the idea that she began keeping these toward the end, knowing what was coming. Quite possibly sensing her own demise. Of course she’d foreseen the fantastic things that would happen to her now, as Jessica, and so it wasn’t a stretch to imagine she’d foreseen her own death back then. These things before her in this little room were preparation a thousand years ago for Now. This moment. And as she stood there, feeling kind of like uncovering her own time capsule, the thread between those two existences grew stronger. And she wondered, more than she yet had, at the other lives that came between, the existences that must surely lie in the interim of Aesha and Jess. Had she simply been … absent? Whatever those existences were—if they were—any and all things led to now and, in their own ways, each existence was as significant as the next. Whatever she’d been up to in the intervening millennia, she made it.
She had arrived.
She put the book she was holding back on the shelf and turned her attention to the talismans. Organized carefully in their small box, nine circular sigils set in advanced metal slots, three by three. Each in its own distinct square, set carefully as if on display. The cover of the box was clear and felt tough, like Plexiglas. She lifted it and looked the talismans over. Their purpose confused her. Were they more keys? Each was about the size of a large coin, made of metal and inscribed with a Kel glyph. The glyphs were like the Kel version of hieroglyphics, single characters that stood for whole words, and she had the feeling they were a component of the Kel language that was ancient even at the time of the inscriptions. Perhaps even predating that last Kel civilization. And as she studied them closely, taking out and concentrating on one sigil in particular, she had the humorous thought of telling someone to be patient, that her ancient Kel was a bit rusty.
Give me a moment, ladies and gentlemen, she heard herself telling an imaginary audience of history buffs (in a stiff British accent, of course), eyeing the coins with a monocle as they eagerly awaited her assessment of this monumental find. My Kel is a bit rusty.
She was glad she could amuse herself.
But the realization confirmed, suddenly and quite clearly, that the purpose of the sigils was, like the rest, to remind her. Perhaps specifically for that purpose and no other. To remind her, and beyond that they had no use. They were left by her, for her, part of this little collection of things meant to spark her memory, and they were the centerpiece of the ruse.
This was it.
Symbols. A tangible thing, each bearing a word meant to jog loose what recollections resisted. Meant to point her on the path to other clues she’d left behind.
And as she realized this she remembered the meaning of one of the coins. A symbol she’d seen here and there already, on things belonging to the Bok, used by them almost like a crest, embossed into a few key items and she imagined the Bok probably had no real idea what it even meant. Only that it was their symbol and so they used it.
Defender. That was the single-word glyph inscribed on this dull metal coin, what the Esehta Bok were supposed to have been at their inception; the Defenders of the Secret. They were to have worn this sigil proudly, mark of their greater purpose.
She knew even then that they would fall.
Of course she left them with all sorts of significance for the symbolism of these coins. She remembered it now. Intending to obfuscate as much meaning as possible, so they didn’t discover the real secret. The very thing they were, jokingly, to defend. And as she thought of this several new epiphanies crowded in.
First, how much she really feared the Bok at the time all this went down. Until now she thought she’d only mistrusted them, expecting them to betray her but not certain they would. Now she saw—with as much effort as had been put into keeping these clues hidden—that, even then, she knew. Somehow the Bok outgrew her ability to control and, not being able to put that genie back in the bottle she had, instead, looked for ways to mislead them. Which probably, in part, explained the strength of the emotions she held toward the Bok. Feelings that had been unleashed in the penthouse that night. And she wondered, all at once and on that same cascading chain of epiphanies, if the Bok actually did have a hand in her death a thousand years ago. Had they sold her out? The deeper she dug, the further along this winding road she traveled, filled with signs of her own, careful subterfuge, efforts to conceal, she confirmed for herself the idea that she made the secrets in this room so interesting, so promising, that the Bok, who had already secretly aligned themselves against her, would never reveal them once they eliminated her. This they would hide well.
Only they never did anything with it. And it struck her, again, how incredible that the Bok hadn’t found the Codes in all this time. When they were right there on Earth. The degree to which she’d seen to their long-term failure …
But maybe it wasn’t all her. Maybe a bit of fortune was involved. Maybe back then, when the Kel language was understood, the Bok could’ve divined her clues, however carefully concealed. Going forward, driven by whatever reason, whatever circumstances, the Bok lost the language of the Kel. Maybe they got sloppy, maybe they failed to prepare themselves for the long game, maybe a hundred things, but the modern Bok were utterly lost as to what to make of any of this. More than that, Lorenzo himself had kept it secret from the rest. Secrets within secrets. Jess was pretty sure Lorenzo saw opportunity with the arrival of the Kel, and not just in his most obvious desire to rule the world. He’d no doubt been planning to use what he learned of the modern Kel language, probably figuring he’d be able to read these diaries himself. And Jess was pretty sure he suspected they held information that would lead to the location of the Codes.
Funny, in that, as with most things comprising Lorenzo’s twisted ambitions, he’d been right.
They most definitely did.
She recognized a few more of the sigils, taking them in and out. One for the word Harmony, one for Strength. The most important one was at the center, though, and as she found herself staring at it, eyes fixed on it without even realizing it … its meaning snapped to mind all at once.
Keeper.
The Kel word was Matok. The English word was Keeper.
She set the box aside and pulled one of the white diaries. Thumbed pages and turned to an entry that was key. She ran her finger down the flowing text, pausing on the line:
The Esehta Matok will know me as the Star Angel. Written in her handwriting, from a thousand years ago. They will know me as this. That will remind them. And they will release their secret.
And it hit her.
There was another group.
I formed another group.
That one for one purpose only: keeping the secret. Not knowing it, not defending it, not having any other bit of information that could corrupt or entice or otherwise lead them off into ambitions of their own. Purity, they would be.
The Esehta Matok.
Keepers of the Secret.
More recalls; a rush of clarity. “Secret” was the Bok interpr
etation of the word. Esehta. The one the Project uncovered and the one she’d known until then. In the modern Kel it almost meant that. However that wasn’t the purest translation. The distinction in the ancient Kel was more subtle.
It meant Way.
The Esehta Bok were, in truth, meant to be the Defenders of the Way. And the Esehta Matok …
Yes, she kept staring between the pages of the book and the shiny metal sigil, symbol of the Matok, the rune for Keeper centered within what looked to be a sun or a star, inscribed with the finest etched lines.
The Keepers of the Way.
The other group.
But who were they?
And where were they?
The Bok came with her from the human worlds of the Kel Combine. Way back then they’d traveled with her to the then-unknown Earth. Most likely from Hamonhept, where all this started. The Bok were advanced humans back then, aliens from another world, fully aware of the Kel and the Wars and the Codes and everything those things both promised and threatened. The Bok, in a sense, were already corrupt, in that they’d been eating of the tree of knowledge. No matter if they wanted to do good or not, the seeds of greed were with them. Would have had to been resisted. Obviously they’d given in to temptation.
So Aesha needed someone pure. Uncorrupt. A group to replace the Bok who would see her as something great, something beyond them, someone to be believed and listened to without question. Someone for whom they would keep a secret.
They will know me as the Star Angel.
Natives.
Images began to take shape. Recalls. Things she’d done.
Places she’d been.
Eagerly she turned to other entries in the diaries, writings that would surely not have made sense taken in pieces or even as a whole, but to one who knew what they were looking for …
Clues.
She’d given the Codes to Earth natives. Humans, right there on Earth, a thousand years ago, uncorrupted, pure, having no knowledge of any of this. People who would safeguard the Amkradus as a holy relic in its purest form. Considering the magnitude of what the Codes promised it seemed an incredibly dangerous proposition.
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 42
