Shadow Born

Brigid looked up from her notes. “Interview Thurpa or, rather, Durga?”

“If the man’s inside that head,” Grant said, “we’ll find out just how much.”

“There’s one small stumbling block in that,” Brigid said. “Durga utilized Thurpa’s mind as a means of sharing the psychic load of Neekra’s assault on him. What is to prevent Durga from blocking my attempts at hypnosis? Indeed, what if Thurpa were already set up with a preprogrammed response to hypnotic interference?”

“Preprogrammed response,” Grant repeated. He looked to Kane. “That sounds like ‘go psycho and kill people,’ doesn’t it?”

“Even unarmed, he has his fangs and his venom,” Kane agreed. “Tying him up wouldn’t do much because he can spit his venom, as well.”

“We do have environmental faceplates, which we’ve been utilizing for their optic properties,” Brigid said. “But we’re not certain he’d cause harm to himself, or actually become a time bomb, with a delayed violence response.”

“Delayed violence response,” Kane echoed. “I’m surprised we’re not dead just for talking to the poor guy.”

“As am I,” Brigid returned. “I’m uncertain of the extent of Durga’s mental control over Thurpa, but if we try to find Durga through him, the very least of our problems would be alerting him that we know of their psychic relationship.”

Kane’s lip curled in disgust.

“I thought about hypnotizing Thurpa and unfortunately came to this conclusion before you did,” Brigid explained. “Even so, that was the two of you being proactive and insightful.”

“Thanks,” Kane said. “Not that it makes anything easier.”

Brigid shook her head. “But we’re thinking. And when the three of us put our minds to something, we’re generally successful.”

Kane nodded. “The key word is ‘generally.’ We can make all the plans we want, but life is what happens when plans go to shit.”

Grant clapped Kane on the shoulder in support. “Don’t worry. We’re good at surviving when things go to shit, too.”

Chapter 4 (#ulink_47b345ca-e8a7-5d3c-b437-dc4ec1ce75a8)

It didn’t take Brigid much longer into the night to determine the location of the tomb—the city known as Negari for the entity imprisoned within. She was asleep after noting its whereabouts on her map and managed to get several hours of good rest until sunrise. Kane and Grant traded watch shifts and were surprised to see Brigid poring over her figures after first light.

“Not sure?” Kane asked.

Brigid looked up from her map work. “I don’t want to have us looking and running around in circles while Durga and Neekra get there ahead of us.”

“Neekra’s still a threat,” Kane said. “We destroyed a body she took over, but she’s still a free-roaming psychic entity.”

Kane lowered his eyes to the ground. She’d spent most of a day inside of his skull, and due to her command over his perceptions, the witch goddess made him feel as if he were wandering the multiverse for months, making his concern over the friends he was separated from even deeper. His struggle to return to his body was made even more desperate by the danger of Grant and Brigid in front of both Gamal’s militia and a horde of winged monstrosities without him. That urgency overwhelmed him, and all he could imagine was the horrible tortures and destruction they faced without him to assist them. Being separated from them also meant that he was alone, without someone to act as a beacon to return him to his body.

That anxiety ate at him, concern grown out of love and friendship that was deep and enduring, that had lasted across other universes, across several incarnations throughout the history of humanity. That loyalty had brought earlier incarnations of himself to death for the defense of those others.

It was an emotional layer of scar tissue that Neekra had exacerbated when she had the necropolis “erupt,” separating him once more from Brigid and Grant and leaving them at the mercy of the dark goddess and her corpse-stealing, bloblike spawn. Kane’s nerves were scraped raw, tender to the slightest thought of either of them in peril.

That threat from Neekra, forever lost from his beloved friends, sat freshly in his mind and threatened to drive him to distraction. And then he’d seen, more and more, like the petals peeling from a flowering bud, what the evil entity could do. The latest nightmare, dredged up from the depths of his genetic memory, was simply the icing on a cake of evil. Neekra, separated from her body, had left her “mortal” form as an insane, terrifying force, a beast armed with natural weaponry that it used to rend healthy, fighting men limb from limb.

That body, combined with her intellect and cruelty, would be menace enough across a heavily depopulated, technologically impaired planet. With the addition of Neekra’s ability to produce corpse-reanimating soldiers, the combination was a global scale threat.

Nothing new there, he thought grimly. We’ve been dealing with that since we got out of Cobaltville that first day.

Sooner or later, he realized, their luck was going to run out. Adding to the sudden jolt of harsh realization was that he knew that Neekra was not simply the goal. No. Her body had been left in that tomb as a sentry, one capable of slaughtering almost anyone, human or Annunaki.

Whatever she guarded was something so terrifying that not even Enlil dared leave it unguarded by anything less than a living juggernaut.

“You’ve got us pinpointed?” Kane asked her.

Brigid nodded. “Within a radius of five hundred yards.”

“Pretty good,” Grant said with approval. “We’ll make an adventurer out of you yet.”

Brigid snorted. “The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in time.”

Kane and Grant pored over the map, crowding her a little bit, but she didn’t mind. The three of them had been shoulder to shoulder for years, in much more confining conditions. She ran her finger across the map. “We have two days of travel ahead of us, barring interference or further attack.”

“Two days,” Kane murmured. “No shortcuts?”

Brigid pointed toward one sector of the map. “This was part of my recalculations. This area seems fairly empty, but I had Bry run some cameras over the region.”

“Radioactive?” Kane asked.

“Seismic wasteland,” Brigid replied. “Put on your faceplates and I’ll give you two some visual data.”

Kane and Grant tugged their hoods over their skulls, then affixed their shadow suits’ faceplates. Almost immediately, the same map that had been a mere flat image a moment ago was now a relief sculpture, wrought in first a wire mesh frame following the contours of the broken land, then filling in, showing off rivers of whitish-yellow lava trickling back and forth through the uneven terrain.

“No radioactivity is present, but ever since the earthshakers went off on skydark, they broke the continent,” Brigid said. “You can see this is an accelerated animation of last night. It’s still in dynamic flux.”

Kane looked at the undulations, tilting his head as it allowed him to see around the area. “Can we get a real-time feed?”

“For what?” Brigid asked.

“We could cut our trip time down to half a day,” Kane answered.

“Driving through the streams of molten rock and constantly opening and closing chasms?” Grant asked. “So we have the equal opportunity to be either burnt to a crisp or flattened like rotten fruit?”

Kane nodded.

Grant smirked. “Sounds like fun.”

“We should ask our compatriots if they wish to endanger themselves in that manner,” Brigid offered. “We can arrive for certain...”

“Or we can get there in time to stop my father and his bitch,” a voice cut into the three people’s discussion. They turned and saw Thurpa, standing alongside Nathan and Lyta, forming a strange mirror image to their own group. They were younger, not that Kane, Brigid and Grant were among the elderly by a long shot. However, for the “locals,” they didn’t quite have the half decade of experience that the Cerberus expedition possessed, though Nathan and Lyta both had grown up in the harsh, often unforgiving frontier of the twin city-states straddling their common border of the Zambezi River, and though likely only a year old chronologically, Thurpa had the memories of Durga as a young officer, fighting alongside his father against an expedition sent by the barons into India.

“The three of you weighed in on this?” Brigid inquired.

Thurpa glanced to Nathan to his left, who clapped the young Nagah clone’s shoulder in support. He turned toward Lyta, who laced her fingers with his and squeezed for support. “Yup.”

“I could end up wrecking our truck,” Grant offered. “And then we’d be running on foot through a volcanic wonderland.”

“Better than dying of boredom or getting taken over by a psychotic blob woman,” Nathan countered.