by Jenn Stark
At that moment, a whirr of electronics sounded, and I flattened myself on the ground. As I did so, the carts slid forward, positioning an empty cart directly in front of me. The wall on the other side of the cart slid back with another whoosh of clean, crisp pneumatics, and a robotic arm extended, neatly packing brick upon brick of pot into the pallet with blinding speed. Within a minute, the top layer was complete, and the machine paused, dipped, and the bottom layer was stacked. Over the top of the machine, I could see smooth metal panels of the room beyond, everything crisp and gleaming…for all that we were in a cave system under a two-thousand-year-old pyramid.
The doors snicked shut.
I sat there, stunned, for another minute more, then crawled forward quickly. I pulled a switchblade free of another pocket and worked it into the nearest brick of pot, slicing it longwise along the side and—sure enough, the metal of my knife hit something hard. The pot was a decoy, the medical insignia stamped on them clearly fake. It’d work to get them through the first layers of security wherever they were going, I suspected. Then they’d be redirected to places like the arcane black market in La Merced…and into the hands of dealers like Mercault.
I couldn’t think of Mercault right now, though.
The doors snicked open again, and the same routine unspooled before me. There appeared to be no humans on the other side of the door, and I watched the loading procedure two more times before I worked out a plan. I’d wait until the machine had dipped down to load the bottom tray of the cart, then I’d scramble out and over the top of it, banking on the idea that no one had thought to put security on a low-level drone loading product that had already been thoroughly processed.
The doors snicked shut.
I drew in a long breath, steadying my heart rate. I’d have plenty of time—easily thirty seconds to bound up and onto the cart, scrambling over the machine. But I had no idea what was waiting for me on the other side. Still, I didn’t have much choice. Here was the lab, or at least the very tip of it, that Ma-Singh was expecting us to find at some other location. It was just in no way where he thought it would be.
The doors slid open again. I crouched, counting the bricks as they were layered on the top shelf, then rose to a half-standing position as the long thick pole retracted. When it pushed forward again, I leapt. Landing briefly on the bricks of pot, I kept as low as possible and ran, dashing up the length of the mechanical arm and hurtling myself over to the other side—before crashing in a roll on a polished stone floor.
Instantly, I whipped around, trying to get my bearings. As I’d suspected, I was alone here. There was nothing but the robot loading drugs, and it was loading a lot of them. With the benefit of full light, I took an extra precious moment to knife through another brick, this time from the top, exposing the contents within. Six tiny metal vials gleamed up at me, filled with a viscous mixture. I thought of the spray Brody had been nailed with back in Las Vegas—was that what these were destined for? If so, no Connected was safe.
Mashing the brick back together and flipping it over, I reinserted it into the pile. The machine no doubt scanned the bricks for integrity before placing them on the pallets, but that was the least of my problems. I turned quickly to the curved ramp leading out of the room, following the trail of drugs as they were shipped down from above. That proved a rapid dead end, as the bricks were dropped via a sliding chute, not unlike the hole I’d fallen down. The place must be riddled with them, holdover passageways from the ancient civilizations who’d built these sacred spaces.
Continuing on, I darted up the corridor as it curved, all the while noting the slight upward trajectory. I was returning closer to the surface, though judging how long I’d fallen, I wouldn’t get there anytime soon. I’d need to—
Voices sounded down the hallway, and I froze, then pressed myself against the thick rock walls. There was nowhere to hide here, but the sounds dropped almost as soon as they’d started, as if people had simply crossed through the corridor in between soundproof rooms. I crept forward more carefully now, noting the floors, the walls—both of them hammered stone, but not metal plated like the loading room and the corridor beyond the chute. Contamination wasn’t a concern here. Hopefully, security wasn’t either.
Another burst of voices. I moved forward this time to try to catch sight of who was talking. I couldn’t understand them, but they were definitely speaking Spanish, and the voices were both male. The corridor turned sharply around a bend, and I hesitated, waiting for the echoes to die. Then I peeked.
The long stone corridor was fronted on both sides with a series of steel-framed windows set into the stone. There appeared to be only one set of doors, however, facing each other on either side of the corridor. Lights shone out from the rooms, those on the left a dull red, those on the right an operating-room white, too bright for comfort even all the way back where I was standing.
Seeking desperately to know more, I opened my third eye, but for once, the extra layer of sensory input proved unhelpful. If anything it obscured my vision—the sheer ugliness and pain of everything in this place proving to be an impenetrable fog.
Reluctantly, I switched back to normal vision. I waited for easily five minutes, but no one else crossed between any of the doors, so I slid along the wall, keeping well below the bottoms of the windows. When I finally reached the last of them, I inched up to peer inside.
It was a state-of-the-art drug lab, filled with centrifuges and mass spectrometers, but on a size and scale I’d never seen before. The room had to be at least thirty feet long and half again as wide, and it was bustling with techs in long white jackets. As I watched, men and women wearing masks and latex gloves worked with near machinelike speed filling and labeling vials, scanning barcodes with a wand-like device, then inserting vials into the spectrometer and sliding the trays home. By my quick count, nearly a hundred vials were shoved into the machine in the few moments that I watched, and I dropped back down, trying to process the information. How were they getting so much product, so quickly? Why were they still testing—and testing was what those machines were for, I was nearly certain. This wasn’t the final packaging place where the end-unit drugs were slotted into their hemp containers. This was still…research.
I gazed over to the other side of the corridor, where the dim red light showed. That light bothered me. It flickered and danced like a fire, but with a curious wavelike quality, as if there was some sort of pool in the room. None of that felt as solid and reassuring as the laboratory on my right, but I remembered Martine’s eerie poem when he’d met me, referencing water. There was definitely water in that second chamber.
I moved carefully over to the last of the red-hued windows, then slowly, carefully, lifted myself up on my toes.
And went stock-still.
The scene on the other side of the window was surreal. The room was several feet below the windows, requiring a long, narrow ramp of stone to reach its main floor—but as a result, I could see nearly everything in one glance. There was a pool, a moat, actually, ringed with small torches that helped give off the wavering reflected light. Inside the moat was a platform of stone, linked to the main floor of the room by a small bridge. On the platform stood a stone table that looked more than six feet across, perfectly round, deeply carved and rutted. I didn’t have to look for more than a few seconds to recognize the pattern. I didn’t know a lot about Aztec artifacts, but I was familiar with that one. It looked exactly like the Sun Stone—down to its ring of jaguars, faces with gaping mouths, and arcane symbols—just smaller.
But the Sun Stone had been found in the heart of what was now Mexico City, not all the way out here in the ’burbs. And it was in a museum, a treasure of the Mexican people. What was this smaller version doing here?
Something shifted behind the table, and I stiffened further as I saw three people emerge. Two of them were masked and hooded in what looked like honest-to-god animal skins, the woman in between them dressed in a short, plain shift. Her hands were manac
led and her feet might as well have been, the way she shuffled forward. Her captors led her forward toward the table, and my eyes widened in horror.
Voices sounded from the lab, getting louder, and I jerked away from the window, darting back around the corner as the door from the lab snicked open.
My heart thundering, I shrank down against the wall, and peeked out as two white-suited figures—a male and female—stepped quickly from the bright white lab through the hallway and into the chamber of horrors. Between them, they pushed a cart filled with vials. Empty vials.
The moment the second door closed, I crossed the hallway again and inched up until I was level with the window, pressing my face against the glass. The white-jacketed pair pushed the cart down the ramp, paying no attention to the scene in the middle of the room. There, in the intervening few seconds when I hadn’t been watching, the woman had already been lifted and secured atop the table, her arms and legs spread wide. All that remained on her body was a bolt of cloth over her hips, and she stared upward, clearly drugged out of her mind but not dead…definitely not dead. Her chest rose and fell, her mouth worked, though I couldn’t tell whether she was praying or pleading. The figure standing at her head lifted a blade, and I flinched, ready to bolt for the door—to rescue the poor woman—to do something—
Only to feel the cool, steady imprint of steel against my temple.
“You’re just in time for the show,” came a low, guttural, but undeniably female voice.
Gamon.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gamon wasn’t alone, of course. Three beefy guards flowed up and around us, two of them holding my arms, one of them zip-tying my hands.
All the while, Gamon watched me with an expression half of curiosity, half surprise. She was a tall, hard, powerful-looking woman, with angular features that marked her as Middle Eastern—Israeli, I was nearly certain. One of the rumors about her had been that she’d been former Mossad. I could believe it, looking at her now. The last time I’d seen her up close, she’d been driving a blade into Annika Soo’s body, draining the life force out of the head of the House of Swords.
Now she led a House as well. And a one-woman crusade to obliterate the Connecteds of the earth.
With her gun, she gestured me to move up the corridor, and within moments, we were entering the red-lit room, taking the same stone ramp that the lab techs had. That pair stood silently to the side as we descended, their eyes averted.
The inside of the sacrifice room was larger than it seemed through the windows. It was practically a cavern, which was no doubt why the light was reflected so strangely, but the effect was exacerbated by the blood-red pool that surrounded the sacrificial altar, and the large glass bowls situated around the altar’s base. I saw those bowls up close and personal now, as Gamon pushed me forward across the small stone bridge that separated the island from the main section of the room.
The priest remained in position, with his assistant now standing back, having situated the bowls. Gamon shoved me to my knees. A guard dropped to one knee behind me, holding me fast in his meaty paws, but otherwise, I hadn’t been harmed, yet. And I didn’t know enough to act. Yet.
“When I was given the charge to bring you here, I had my choice of methods,” Gamon said now. “You needed to be alive, though, your blood still flowing, your mind still intact. Mercault had learned of the existence of the Gods’ Nails and wanted them. Promised, in fact, to bring you to me, bound. I let him try. Meanwhile, there was the boy—one of the successful test subjects before his heart weakened like all the rest.” She said the words with disgust, and I blanched.
“How many were there?” I asked.
“I couldn’t kill him, not outright,” she said, ignoring my question. “He endured the tests better than so many of the children. Then, later, he screamed so loud and long in his sleep, racked with visions, clearly touched by the sorcerer god, that he seemed a symbol of all that would come. Afterwards, when he drew what he dreamed—and it was you—I had a second option. I could place the directions back here in his mind, and he would draw you to me. It was the consummate plan, the perfect game.”
A game with children as the disposable pieces. Monster.
Gamon sighed with what sounded like genuine pleasure. “And now you are here at last. I have done all that I have been asked, and I will be rewarded.”
Asked?
Who, in any frame of their right mind, would ask Gamon to do anything but roll over and die?
“Who’d you kill to become the head of the House of Cups?” I asked flatly, not shifting my gaze from the altar.
She ignored that too. I imagined Martine down here, or maybe somewhere close, screaming in his sleep, frail and frightened, then used for his abilities. I’d been used as a child too, the woman I thought of as my mother angling for me to be some sort of child star, visions of “Psychic Teen Sariah” dancing in her head. But not like this. Never like this.
I fixed on the young woman on the altar, who’d not uttered a word. She was still alive, I thought. But she wasn’t with us anymore. Her face was set, her eyes unfocused.
“Don’t kill her,” I murmured, surprised I’d said the words aloud.
That, of course, generated a response.
“Her? She’s already dead,” Gamon said dismissively. “Though her cells are perfect—perfect! Her mind was not strong, however. She’s merely a host, a husk for that perfection. Not someone who can enjoy the gifts to the fullest, and so her blood will go to the inferior drug. The bait, but not the reward.”
My stomach clenched, my heart shriveling another fraction in my chest.
“It has been our biggest challenge. To find the people who can actually survive the thing they crave most of all.” Gamon sighed, sounding legitimately perplexed. “We despaired of ever finding the link, in fact. Until you were given to us.”
“Don’t kill her,” I said again. I could spend an eternity parsing Gamon’s crazy. Right now, I needed to save the woman on the table.
“She’s already dead, I told you. Her brain died before you entered this room, her body simply hasn’t realized it yet. It’s how we’re able to harvest so effectively.” Gamon gestured beside me, and the man in the jaguar skin finally moved.
The knife came down with a savage thrust so violent that I jumped in the grasp of Gamon’s guard, but he held me fast, keeping me from crumpling as the knife continued its slashing, curving arcs, the movements mesmerizing in their speed and brutality. Within moments, the surface of the table was slicked with blood, and seconds after that, the blood gushed through the spigots in the base of the alter to pool in the glass bowls around its base. The second ritually dressed assistant rushed forward and expedited the process—lifting the young woman’s limbs, bending and palpating body parts. I wanted to shrink away, not to look, but this was a human being in front of me, a woman barely more than a child herself, certainly no older than me, her essence rent from her with a breathless brutality.
And the ongoing gush of blood was shocking—there was so much. I stared in fascination as it filled the bowls, horrified and curious at once.
“It was a process that took us far too long to perfect. Even now it isn’t quite right, I’ll admit,” Gamon said, her voice dripping with false modesty. “The Sun Stone that was found south of here at the central temple is larger, but it is actually the first stone, the rough draft, if you will. Not the final. It had been used in sacrifices, yes, but sacrifices only to benefit the gods, not those who served them. This stone…is something different.”
“It’s still sacrificial,” I gritted out, forcing my tone to remain even while inside I vacillated between quailing and helpless horror.
“Yes, and if you were to study the surface, you would see a marked similarity to the great Sun Stone.” She spoke as though she were some Ivy League professor pontificating before his adoring students. “But unlike that stone, this one is thicker, and it is hollow, meant to take the flow of blood along its surfaces, to cleanse
and purify that blood, empower it with the god of sorcery’s fire and strength. If you were to look even more closely, you would see the true power of the stone. It’s not in its design, but in the negative space between the carvings. That’s what holds the mysteries the ancients knew and we subsequently lost. That’s where the true magic is. And a supplicant’s blood, once passed through this stone, becomes magical as well.”
She drew in a deep, satisfied breath. “Introduce such purified blood into the bodily system of a mere mortal—Connected or non-Connected alike—and they would experience the same surge, the same lightness as that of a god…for a time.” Gamon exhaled with a disappointed sigh. “All too quickly, however, the effect evaporates or, if the dosage is too high, the subject succumbs to one of any number of reactions. Heart attack, asphyxiation, brain death. As you can imagine, that’s halted our marketing process entirely. We’re completely R&D right now.” She paused, and I watched more blood drain through the open mouths in the base of the altar, feeding the bowls with its life force.
Who was this girl who had died, I wondered. Where had she lived? How had she loved? And who would benefit from the blood she gave unwillingly?
A low, angry thrum awoke within me, shifting along my own blood vessels, building in strength.
Gamon continued, oblivious to my growing rage. “Quite recently, and by accident, we trapped a rogue Revenant in our snare. That was a find. No reaction to the drug, no side effects. Further testing revealed, of course, that the Revenant subspecies has no need of this drug, at least not for its life-giving properties.” She gave a scoffing laugh. “They already have that in spades.”
“You are a Revenant, Gamon,” I reminded her. “You didn’t need to steal the hearts of your own race’s children. You could’ve saved this operation a lot of time and effort by testing on yourself.”
