Shadow Born

The Cerberus adventurers and their companions had discovered Thurpa’s clone nature. He looked absolutely normal, but during Durga’s struggle against Neekra, Thurpa suffered the same pain from physical injuries and psychic trauma. When the young man gripped Nehushtan, the ancient walking staff of kings and prophets, its healing power transmitted through him to Durga.

Even now, Kane could see the numb shock on the young man’s features, realizing that any memories since before the day he met Kane and the others had been a lie, a fabrication implanted by a renegade prince whose rampage slew even his mother, the old matron of Garuda. Thurpa had thought that he could return home, but he’d never set his own eyes upon it. Rather, they had been echoes of another’s mind; most likely, it was Durga’s.

“How are you feeling?” Kane asked him.

“Like I should stay down here when you press the detonator,” Thurpa replied.

Kane shook his head. “No. We won’t do that.”

“I’d been worried that I was maybe hypnotized or brainwashed,” Thurpa said. “Now, I find that I’m his clone. Worse, I’m the son he always wanted.”

“We don’t judge our friends on the sins of their fathers,” Kane told him. He rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’ve done so much good alongside us.”

Thurpa’s amber eyes glistened in the backwash of light from his torch. The boy was in tears. “I’ve killed pretty well.”

“Killed to protect, killed to liberate,” Kane corrected. “And you risked yourself jumping on the back of a superhumanly strong creature to stop her.”

Thurpa frowned. “I attacked her because I realized, I’m not real. I’d be no...”

Kane gave him a light tap on the shoulder. “You feel real enough to me. And you would be a loss. Nathan would feel alone, and Lyta looks interested in you.”

“A freak in a land he was not born to,” Thurpa replied.

“Her first look at her rescuers,” Kane said. “If anything can make you feel good and real...”

Thurpa shook himself free from Kane’s comforting grip.

“And spread his seed?” Thurpa asked, glaring at Kane in disbelief.

“It’s not genetic structure that makes you good or bad,” Kane returned.

Thurpa’s glare dimmed in fire, his anger draining. Kane had seen emotional defeat on faces before. This was a crushing blow to him, and such despondence could easily lead the young man to reckless risks or an act of desperation, if not direct suicide.

Thurpa had easily earned Kane’s respect for courage and tenacity. He’d also shown himself in other ways. As a Magistrate, Kane had developed a quick sense not only for danger, but also for the content of a person’s character. All this time he’d spent with the young Nagah had informed him that this cobra-hooded stranger was someone he could trust, someone with compassion, despite the origin of his chromosomes.

“Come on, there’s nothing down here except for corpses,” Kane told him. “We’ll go some place you’ll feel better.”

“I thought we had been chasing my father and Neekra to her tomb,” Thurpa asked.

“It’s got to be better than this. And spending time in the sun and the air will do wonders for your spirit,” Kane told him.

Thurpa nodded.

The two men walked up the corkscrew ramp, returning to the surface, where the others waited.

* * *

THE FIRST SIGN that their detonation worked was a slight rumble that actually tickled the soles of Lyta’s feet. The ground throbbed as a shock wave grew, and she found herself backing away from the epicenter. Ripples in the dirt rose, and then it seemed to telescope inward, rocks crashing downward. She knew that she was dozens of yards from ground zero of the blast and that the caverns below would absorb most of the concussive force of the detonation, but even so, the earth surged and heaved.

Jets of rancid air and dust blew out from cracks burst between solid rock by the shattering explosion. Clouds rose into the midmorning sky, thick and roiling, turning a sunny day to darkness. The roar of crushing rock from below fooled her, for an instant, into believing that the mother of all thunderstorms slashed down on the six people.

“Grant doesn’t fool around when it comes time to blow shit up,” Lyta said softly.

Nathan shook his head. “Considering what they did to the Kongamato, I’m not surprised.”

Lyta glanced to one side. Thurpa stood alone, looking down into the dirt. His interest had been momentarily snagged by the explosion, but now he withdrew back into himself and stared at the ground.

The cobra-like young man, who had shown her such care and concern a few days before, no longer let himself feel like one of the group. She walked over to him.

“Thurpa?”

Amber eyes opened, turned toward her.

“Come on, let’s get going before we’re wearing an inch of cemetery dust,” she said, leaning toward him, bumping her shoulder against his.

Thurpa turned up one corner of his mouth. “I’ll join you guys in the truck.”

Lyta reached up, lacing her fingers with his. She could feel the hardness of the scales on the inner pads of his fingers and across his palm. At first, he seemed reluctant to give her a squeeze, but she pressed harder. The scale pads had been stiffer than normal skin but not sharp edged; they obviously were worn down by day-to-day operation, or maybe it was just a case of natural evolution. Pointy, jagged edges on a palm got in the way of everyday life. With too tough a set of skin on the bits that needed tactile feedback, they’d be effectively crippled, not as if it had been the scales on the soles of his feet.

He was warm, and his scales were soft and smooth. When he squeezed her fingers, managing a little bit of a smile, he was gentle. “Kane mentioned that you might be interested in me...”

“That man may be jumping the gun. I just lost my fiancé,” she whispered.

Lyta quickly stood on her tiptoes, bringing her full lips close to his ear hole. “But he ain’t barking up the wrong tree.”

Thurpa leaned away, looking her over. “I wish that I could...”

Lyta cut him off and elbowed him in the ribs, pointing to the sky. “Looks like we’re gonna get...”

“Come on!” Brigid Baptiste shouted from their pickup truck, untouched for days since the Cerberus group hid it to the side in order to ambush the militia group who had her in a slave queue.

The two ran for the truck. Nathan was in the bed, holding up a tarp. Thurpa lifted Lyta up and under the canvas, then bowed his head as dust, sand and tiny pebbles came raining down. Lyta reached out and took his forearm, pulling with all the strength of her legs to bring him up and into the truck bed. Kane also was under the canvas, helping Nathan hold up the protective tarp, while Grant and Brigid settled into the cab.

The sound of tiny objects rattled off the roof of the cap, snapping and popping on the canvas that Nathan and Kane used as an improvised umbrella.

Grant fired up the engine once most of the debris settled around them, turning on headlights and windshield wipers to see through the remaining cloud of airborne particles and to scrape layers of dirt from the glass. He looked through the back sliding window into the cab as Kane pushed the tarp back, letting the gravel spill out through the netting and the lowered tailgate. As the pickup gained speed, the gravel and dust poured as a trail behind them, kicking up a swirling cloud.

The four people in the bed of the truck immediately got to work making certain the dust was swept out. The last thing they needed was an easy way for someone to track them. Without the dust fully expunged, there’d always be something kicking off the truck, leaving a smoky trail showing recent passage and making them much more visible from the air.

So far, except for the Kongamato, Durga and Neekra hadn’t shown means of aerial surveillance, but then, Durga himself had kept an Annunaki skimmer in his employ back in Garuda. If the Nagah prince had the wherewithal to find cloning facilities, a means of pumping out mutant soldiers like the not-so-bright “brothers” of Thurpa or the aforementioned Kongamato, aerial surveillance wasn’t out of the question at all.

Lyta had been lucky enough not to have seen the beasts and their wing-arms with musculature and power akin to a bull-gorilla’s. Blobs reanimating corpses, making them like legendary vampires in strength and agility, were bad enough. The Kongamato themselves, with their bat-wings, had been a pure nightmare.

A nightmare that she, and her three companions in the bed of the truck, kept an eye out for by scanning the skies. While Grant set up the explosives in the underground cavern, Lyta and Nathan went to work gathering ammunition and extra firearms and loading them into storage lockers on the truck. It was hard work, but preparation was necessary. They had been going up against the tomb that Neekra sought and didn’t have an idea of what they could expect there.

They had picked up rocket launchers among the arsenal, though Lyta had been present when the others opened fire on Neekra’s latest avatar and wasn’t convinced that rockets would be enough. That feminine body, composed of no more than human flesh, ignored entire magazines of automatic gunfire and close-range blasts of hand grenades. Maybe an antitank rocket could have done some damage to that incarnation of her.

What were they going to find at Neekra’s home?